From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 1 19:31:17 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2004 15:31:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Independent: When the Sun lost its heat Message-ID: When the Sun lost its heat http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=566685&host=3&dir=505 Locked away in fossils is evidence of a sudden solar cooling. Kate Ravilious meets the experts who say it could explain a 3,000-year-old mass migration - and today's global warming 29 September 2004 Just under 3,000 years ago, a group of horse-riding nomads, known as the Scythians, started to venture east and west across the Russian steppes. At about the same time, African farmers began to explore their continent, and Dutch farmers abandoned their land and moved east. All over the world people became restless and started to move - but why? Archaeologists have never found a clear answer, but now one scientist thinks the explanation may lie on the surface of the Sun. Bas van Geel, a biologist from the University of Amsterdam, believes that the Earth's climate took a dramatic turn about 2,800 years ago, due to a quiet period in the Sun's activity, making the tropics drier and the mid-latitudes colder and wetter. Previously damp areas, like parts of the Netherlands, became flooded and uninhabitable, while very dry, desert-like areas, such as southern Siberia, became viable places to live. Meanwhile, in the tropics, land dried out and created savannahs where lush forests had grown before. "People living where the changes were most dramatic were forced to move," he explains. Until now, climate scientists haven't taken too much notice of the changes in the activity of the Sun, believing them to be small fry compared with the effects of greenhouse gases and wobbles in the Earth's orbit. But now a growing number of scientists are convinced that fluctuations in the activity on the Sun's surface (such as flares, sunspots and gas boiling off) may be amplified, causing significant changes to the Earth's climate. Van Geel has gathered evidence that supports the idea that such solar activity is an important influence on our climate, and he has also shown how people are affected when the Sun decides to have a snooze. Over the past 10 years, van Geel and his colleagues have been studying fossil plants in peats and muds from all over the world. They have been measuring carbon 14, the heaviest isotope of carbon, which is used to date things. Carbon 14 is created in the atmosphere when high-energy cosmic rays smash into nitrogen atoms. Carbon 14 atoms then team up with oxygen and become radioactive carbon dioxide, which is then absorbed by all living things. Once the plant or animal dies it stops interchanging its carbon with the atmosphere and, over time, the carbon 14 decays. Because scientists know approximately how quickly carbon 14 decays they can work out how old an object is. But this isn't the whole story. The level of carbon 14 in the atmosphere varies according to how many cosmic rays are bombarding the Earth. When the Sun is very active, cosmic rays are deflected by the strong solar wind. This means that as well as indicating how old something is, carbon 14 can give scientists an idea of how intense the cosmic ray flux was. And this is just what van Geel has been using carbon 14 for. By measuring the detailed variations of the isotope of carbon at different levels in peat deposits, he can estimate the ups and downs in the intensity of the cosmic rays hitting the Earth at the particular time that the peat was formed from dead plant matter in wetlands. "I use the carbon 14 as an indicator of solar activity because an increase in it means an increase in the cosmic ray flux and, therefore, a decrease in solar activity," he explains. He has shown that, about 2,800 years ago, there was an abrupt, worldwide, increase in carbon 14 levels, which occurred at the same time as climate change. He believes the increase in carbon 14 means that solar activity suddenly declined. But how can little blips on the Sun's surface have such a drastic effect on the Earth's climate? Proponents of the solar activity theory have come up with two possible mechanisms that might be transmitting the effects of fluctuations in activity on the Sun's surface. The first is that changes in solar activity alter the level of cosmic rays hitting the Earth, which influences cloud formation. Clouds affect climate by altering the amount of sunlight reflected back into space, and by varying the level of rainfall. Alternatively, changes in solar activity affect the amount of ultra-violet radiation leaving the Sun, which may have an impact on the amount of ozone created in the higher levels of the atmosphere. Ozone influences how much solar energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, and, indirectly, affects atmospheric circulation and associated weather. Teaming up with archaeologists has enabled van Geel to back up his theory by showing that many people were migrating at this time. Along with Dutch specialists, he has found that farming communities in west Friesland suffered increasing rainfall about 2,800 years ago. They resorted to building homes on artificial mounds, but eventually they were washed out of their farms and had to move to drier places. Meanwhile, work in Cameroon has shown that there was an arid crisis that started at about the same time. This dry patch caused some of the forest to die and savannahs to open up. These openings in the forest made it easier for people to move. Archaeological remains show that farming communities began to migrate inland. Most recently he has worked with Russian archaeologists to show that, also about 2,800 years ago, the Scythian people took advantage of a wetter climate to explore east and west across the steppe landscapes that lie north of Mongolia. Prior to this, the land had been hostile semi-desert, but the extra moisture turned it into green, grassy steppes, enabling these nomadic tribes to travel towards both China and south-east Europe. Without a doubt there was a change in climate about 2,800 years ago, and it seems that this encouraged, or even forced, many groups of people to move. But was this a one-off change, or has solar activity played havoc with the climate at other times, too? "Carbon 14 records show a major decrease in solar activity roughly every 2,300 years," says van Geel. "The most recent time this happened was during the 'little ice age', which peaked around 1650." At this time frost fairs were held on the Thames, harvests were poor all over Europe and glaciers marched down mountains. Taking a look at the Sun right now reveals that we are in a period of high activity, with many sunspots, solar flares and an increasing magnetic field of the corona (the Sun's outer atmosphere). Van Geel and other proponents of the solar activity theory believe this high solar activity could be behind the global warming we have experienced over the last 50 years. "My impression is that there is an over-estimation of the greenhouse effect," says van Geel. It is controversial, but if he is right, then there is little we can do to control the Earth's climate. Instead, we can make the most of the sunshine and, perhaps, start preparing for the next chill in western Europe - due to peak about AD3950. From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 2 03:43:08 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2004 20:43:08 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The debate Message-ID: <01C4A7F7.42FE2890.shovland@mindspring.com> The true state of Bush's brain was on display last night. Was it a healthy brain or a "wet" brain? http://alcoholism.about.com/od/dementia/ Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From howlbloom at aol.com Sat Oct 2 13:52:18 2004 From: howlbloom at aol.com (howlbloom at aol.com) Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 21:52:18 +0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Mail Delivery (failure paleopsych@paleopsych.org) Message-ID: <200410021352.i92DqH011076@tick.javien.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: audio/x-wav Size: 29568 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dsmith06 at maine.rr.com Sat Oct 2 13:56:18 2004 From: dsmith06 at maine.rr.com (David Smith) Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 09:56:18 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Mail Delivery (failure paleopsych@paleopsych.org) References: <200410021352.i92DqH011076@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <005d01c4a887$97f120b0$0200a8c0@dad> This email evidently contains a virus. David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D. Director, New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology University of New England 11 Hills Beach Road Biddeford, ME 04005 USA www.une.edu/nei "Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho." ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Saturday, October 02, 2004 9:52 AM Subject: [Paleopsych] Mail Delivery (failure paleopsych at paleopsych.org) > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 2 16:46:58 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve) Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 09:46:58 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Kerry stumps the mass mind Message-ID: <01C4A865.89A52000.shovland@mindspring.com> Is the war in Iraq a mistake? "Yes" Are soldiers dying for a mistake? "No" This makes no sense. If the war is a mistake, then people are dying for a mistake. If it's not a mistake, then people are dying for a great cause. Was this an accident? Perhaps. Was this deliberate? Perhaps. It's like a zen koan. It stops logic. It may force you to make up your own mind. It may have been a trap for Bush. One assumes that both camps have groups of mind scientists working to identify and exploit the mental vulnerabilities of the opposition. Have the Democrats done this better than the Reptilians? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sun Oct 3 01:33:39 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sat, 02 Oct 2004 21:33:39 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Kerry stumps the mass mind In-Reply-To: <01C4A865.89A52000.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20041002211819.0486af08@incoming.verizon.net> At 09:46 AM 10/2/2004 -0700, Steve wrote: >Is the war in Iraq a mistake? "Yes" >Are soldiers dying for a mistake? "No" > >This makes no sense. ... >One assumes that both camps have groups of >mind scientists working to identify and exploit >the mental vulnerabilities of the opposition. I doubt that either side has any real mind scientists at that kind of level. And I don't think people really saw such contradictions in Kerry's position as Bush tried to pretend, in the debates. Both came across as politicians -- but Bush much more so than Kerry, working much harder to twist things around and play insincere games. After those debates, what is most surprising, in a way, is that Bush's ratings did not fall faster and deeper than they did. It was all predictable, really -- that a new test was coming after the Swift Boat episode (as we discussed) and that Bush was on track to muffing it. He had a choice, but it was not so surprising how he chose. Why did it not fall further and faster? A couple of reasons, in my view. One is that folks like Zarqawi is working hard to project an image of being a downright vampire. (His licking his chops as he cuts off heads and then making statements about how good the blood of Shia tastes to him... could almost make you wonder if Wolfowitz paid him or something...) Anyone sensible realizes that Bush has problems in diplomacy with Europe, but people may feel that Bush could do better in a dance with the Middle East because his way of thinking is closer to theirs, so that he can empathize and understand better... and of course Cheney has come out very clearly with the view that there is no hope for sensitivity, reason or dialogue in dealings with the Middle East. If any side could be accused of using effective mind science on a professional basis.. I'm afraid it's more likely to be folks in the Middle East itself, the ones who would see life in apocalyptic terms... and project the mindset which is now most supportive of Bush's position. I am reminded of a John Campbell ("Myths") tape my wife just showed me, where he cites a song.. "Give me that old time religion... Let us worship Zarathustra just like we always used to..." Lots of that in the "noosphere" lately, and it is a very serious question how to deal with that. All for now. Best of luck to us all, Paul From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 3 04:19:45 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (shovland at mindspring.com) Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 21:19:45 -0700 (GMT-07:00) Subject: [Paleopsych] Kerry stumps the mass mind Message-ID: <16768550.1096777185864.JavaMail.root@wamui10.slb.atl.earthlink.net> I'm afraid that the dark gods will have their gouts of blood. What will we tell the masses when they wake up and find themselves living a nightmare? -----Original Message----- From: "Werbos, Dr. Paul J." Sent: Oct 2, 2004 6:33 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list , "paleopsych at paleopsych. org (E-mail)" Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Kerry stumps the mass mind At 09:46 AM 10/2/2004 -0700, Steve wrote: >Is the war in Iraq a mistake? "Yes" >Are soldiers dying for a mistake? "No" > >This makes no sense. ... >One assumes that both camps have groups of >mind scientists working to identify and exploit >the mental vulnerabilities of the opposition. I doubt that either side has any real mind scientists at that kind of level. And I don't think people really saw such contradictions in Kerry's position as Bush tried to pretend, in the debates. Both came across as politicians -- but Bush much more so than Kerry, working much harder to twist things around and play insincere games. After those debates, what is most surprising, in a way, is that Bush's ratings did not fall faster and deeper than they did. It was all predictable, really -- that a new test was coming after the Swift Boat episode (as we discussed) and that Bush was on track to muffing it. He had a choice, but it was not so surprising how he chose. Why did it not fall further and faster? A couple of reasons, in my view. One is that folks like Zarqawi is working hard to project an image of being a downright vampire. (His licking his chops as he cuts off heads and then making statements about how good the blood of Shia tastes to him... could almost make you wonder if Wolfowitz paid him or something...) Anyone sensible realizes that Bush has problems in diplomacy with Europe, but people may feel that Bush could do better in a dance with the Middle East because his way of thinking is closer to theirs, so that he can empathize and understand better... and of course Cheney has come out very clearly with the view that there is no hope for sensitivity, reason or dialogue in dealings with the Middle East. If any side could be accused of using effective mind science on a professional basis.. I'm afraid it's more likely to be folks in the Middle East itself, the ones who would see life in apocalyptic terms... and project the mindset which is now most supportive of Bush's position. I am reminded of a John Campbell ("Myths") tape my wife just showed me, where he cites a song.. "Give me that old time religion... Let us worship Zarathustra just like we always used to..." Lots of that in the "noosphere" lately, and it is a very serious question how to deal with that. All for now. Best of luck to us all, Paul _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From HowlBloom at aol.com Sun Oct 3 05:25:18 2004 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2004 01:25:18 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Mail Delivery (failure paleopsych@paleopsych.org) Message-ID: re: virus. all thanks for the heads up. i'm doing a virus scan. Onward--Howard ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 3 17:01:06 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2004 13:01:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Thou Shalt Not Increase G.D.P. Message-ID: Thou Shalt Not Increase G.D.P. NYT October 3, 2004 By DANIEL GROSS CAN belief in heaven or hell be a competitive advantage for nations? It's not the sort of question that many economists ask. After all, with exceptions like Adam Smith, the giants of economic theory have had little to say on matters of faith. And economists have tended to accept the secularization thesis advanced by Max Weber in "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," the Western Civ staple: as economies become more advanced and as technology progresses, religion will decline as a force. What's more, many economists - with their penchant for data and bedrock faith in the rationality of humans - may be temperamentally unsuited to take religion seriously. Some people, though, have tried to study both economics and religion. "Religious activity is very hard to quantify," said Eli Berman, an economist at the University of California at San Diego who has used economic principles to study radical religious militias. "And religious groups tend to do a whole bunch of things that look pretty darn irrational, at least at first glance." But the wall separating church and economics is being breached. "In the past 5 to 20 years, more and more scholars have been using conventional economic methods to understand the way in which religion relates to the rest of society, and to the economy in particular," said Laurence R. Iannaccone, the Koch professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. The scholars now include Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary, a husband-and-wife team based at Harvard. Professor Barro is a prolific economist who has long been interested in studying how and why economic growth rates differ among countries. Professor McCleary, who directs the Project on Religion, Political Economy, and Society at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, gained an appreciation of the importance of religion in economic life while studying in Guatemala. In a paper published last year in the American Sociological Review, the couple set out to investigate the correlation between variables like church attendance and belief in heaven and hell and comparative economic growth rates from 1965 to 1995. "We thought there might be a positive relationship between certain religious beliefs and economic performance," Professor Barro said. Investigating such a hypothesis can be difficult, in part because different religious systems have starkly different practices when it comes to their mode of participation and belief in the afterlife. But over all, the study confirmed the assumption that greater economic development is associated with less religiosity. In their results, which Dr. McCleary notes are preliminary and need further investigation, the two also reached some counterintuitive conclusions. First, in two countries where religious service attendance is essentially the same, the one whose people have a greater belief in heaven and hell would experience faster economic growth. Second, in two countries where the populations have similar rates of belief in heaven and hell, the one in which church attendance is greater would have slower growth. Why? This "quantitative approach to the study of religion," as Professor McCleary calls it, rests on the assumption that religion can affect economics by fostering beliefs that influence productivity-enhancing traits like thrift, hard work and honesty. A widespread feeling that such behavior may ultimately be rewarded (a belief in heaven), or that a lack of such behavior may be punished (a belief in hell) may therefore spur economic growth. And if more people and resources are devoted to holding religious services without producing the desired output (a higher level of belief), that would tend to lessen productivity in an economy. In other words, countries' economies may perform best when people have relatively higher levels of religious belief than religious participation. Among the nations falling into this category are Japan, South Korea, Singapore and some Scandinavian countries - all of which performed well economically in the period studied. Countries in which belief was low compared with religious participation included India and many in Latin America. Another finding was that belief in hell proved to be a more significant economic factor than belief in heaven. "The stick of punishment may be more powerful compared with the carrot," Professor Barro said. While noting that "we need a lot more and better data before we can be confident about the results" of such studies, Professor Iannaccone says economists should pay more attention to the intersection of religion and economics. "It's almost impossible to live in the 21st century and look around and say that religion has no impact anymore," he said. INDEED, while Adam Smith's "Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" has been the bible for generations of economists, signs indicate that some older sacred texts matter to them as well. In December 2002, when Vernon L. Smith, a pioneer in experimental economics, accepted the Nobel in economic science, he paid tribute to many intellectual influences beyond his mentors and colleagues. He cited Benjamin Franklin, the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume and several of the Ten Commandments. The strictures against stealing or coveting a neighbor's possessions, he noted, "provide the property-right foundations for markets." And the prohibition against murder, adultery and bearing false witness "provide the foundations for cohesive social exchange." Daniel Gross writes the "Moneybox" column for Slate.com. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/business/yourmoney/03view.html From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Oct 3 17:31:29 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2004 10:31:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] dying for a mistake In-Reply-To: <200410021800.i92I0O005578@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041003173129.20049.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> >>Is the war in Iraq a mistake? "Yes" Are soldiers dying for a mistake? "No" This makes no sense.<< --Actually, since cleaning up a mistake is a worthy goal, it IS possible for soldiers to die as a CONSEQUENCE of a mistake, but for a good purpose. No matter who gets the US out of Iraq will have to sacrifice lives, either American or Iraqi, in the process. Whatever action minimizes that loss of life and provides the greatest chance for stability in the Middle East will be the right one, and there is no certainty that Bush or Kerry will make the best choice possible. Kerry's selling point is that he's able to adapt to changing conditions that Bush avoids recognizing. The danger in being too adaptable is that one ends up being wagged by one's tail. The danger in being too resolute is that one can drive off a cliff in defiance of reality. What's needed is something in the middle, and Kerry may be establishing himself as the "realist" rather than the "flip-flopper", a significant upgrade in his image. Not good for Bush's sense of security. It is, of course, possible that Kerry winning the election would be a bad thing, in that it would lead to Democrats and liberals taking the blame for the consequences of Bush decisions. I honestly can't say which candidate would result in the US becoming a better or safer nation. As much as I dislike Bush's tendency to fall into groupthink and tunnel vision, there's a part of me that wants to see the consequences of current policy fall on those who are responsible for it. At that point, a change of leadership would offer a fresh start, rather than a guarantee of more partisan blamestorming. But is a positive shift in the balance of liberal/conservative thinking worth the risk of four more Bush years? Or would Kerry possibly be respected by Conservatives once he's in office? If there were any hint of bipartisan support for Kerry, it would be an easy decision, but I worry that he'll win and get the blame for a mess he didn't create, leading to an even more strident and uncompromising anti-liberal regime in 2008. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 3 18:55:57 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2004 11:55:57 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] dying for a mistake References: <20041003173129.20049.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <001701c4a97b$0d094780$210110ac@steve> I think that what Kerry cannot say, even though it's true, is that we have lost, just as we did in Vietnam. We lost because of strategic errors: bad intelligence, a hostile climate, long supply lines, and inadequate forces. (If you read Sun Tzu it's all in there. "The outcome of a battle is decided before it starts." "To win without fighting is best.") Success in this situation now means cutting our losses. In the end the people of Iraq will determine what stability means. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Christopher" To: Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2004 10:31 AM Subject: [Paleopsych] dying for a mistake > > >>Is the war in Iraq a mistake? "Yes" > Are soldiers dying for a mistake? "No" > This makes no sense.<< > > --Actually, since cleaning up a mistake is a worthy > goal, it IS possible for soldiers to die as a > CONSEQUENCE of a mistake, but for a good purpose. No > matter who gets the US out of Iraq will have to > sacrifice lives, either American or Iraqi, in the > process. Whatever action minimizes that loss of life > and provides the greatest chance for stability in the > Middle East will be the right one, and there is no > certainty that Bush or Kerry will make the best choice > possible. Kerry's selling point is that he's able to > adapt to changing conditions that Bush avoids > recognizing. The danger in being too adaptable is that > one ends up being wagged by one's tail. The danger in > being too resolute is that one can drive off a cliff > in defiance of reality. What's needed is something in > the middle, and Kerry may be establishing himself as > the "realist" rather than the "flip-flopper", a > significant upgrade in his image. Not good for Bush's > sense of security. > > It is, of course, possible that Kerry winning the > election would be a bad thing, in that it would lead > to Democrats and liberals taking the blame for the > consequences of Bush decisions. I honestly can't say > which candidate would result in the US becoming a > better or safer nation. As much as I dislike Bush's > tendency to fall into groupthink and tunnel vision, > there's a part of me that wants to see the > consequences of current policy fall on those who are > responsible for it. At that point, a change of > leadership would offer a fresh start, rather than a > guarantee of more partisan blamestorming. But is a > positive shift in the balance of liberal/conservative > thinking worth the risk of four more Bush years? Or > would Kerry possibly be respected by Conservatives > once he's in office? If there were any hint of > bipartisan support for Kerry, it would be an easy > decision, but I worry that he'll win and get the blame > for a mess he didn't create, leading to an even more > strident and uncompromising anti-liberal regime in > 2008. > > Michael > > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! > http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Oct 4 02:17:52 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2004 19:17:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] debates In-Reply-To: <200410031800.i93I0S030750@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041004021752.74915.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> >>After those debates, what is most surprising, in a way, is that Bush's ratings did not fall faster and deeper than they did.<< --That was to be expected. People like to think of themselves as consistent (as opposed to "flip-floppers"). Those who initially believed the GOP spin about Kerry and then found him more "presidential" than expected will take a little while to adjust their opinion, to avoid seeing themselves as wavering. Michael _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 4 09:19:45 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 4 Oct 2004 02:19:45 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Primary Perception Message-ID: <01C4A9B8.9E4F4BD0.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.primaryperception.com/index1.html Review of Primary Perception by Cleve Backster By Brian O'Leary Cleve Backster is no ordinary scientist. His path to discovery, so well described in his autobiographical book Primary Perception, brings together both the human and objective elements into a gripping detective story, leading to insights many scientists would not want to touch because the implications are so profound and in some respects contradictory to the materialistic world view that grips contemporary science. The subtitle well expresses his breakthroughs: Biocommunication with plants, living foods and human cells. Backster's courage and humility in breaking out of the traditional box of Western science provides an inspiration for the rest of us. As a physics faculty member at Princeton University during the 1970s, I began to have some experiences that shattered my own materialistic paradigm. I became hungry for experiments which would reveal the mysteries of consciousness, of measuring communications of intent with other living beings as a force that transcends ordinary physics and biology. When Backster's experiments came to my attention, I spent time in his laboratory verifying the extraordinary phenomena on the influence of human intent on the electrical activity of target cells. I was so inspired, I used Backster's work in the lead to my book, Exploring Inner and Outer Space. The process of Backster's discoveries revealed in Primary Perception is required reading for anyone interested in how science could be done in a better world. Ironically, the humility with which he took on the task made him better qualified to do the work than prestigious scientists at leading universities who have vested interests in traditional science and have avoided this kind of research for fear of being ostrasized by their peers. It takes great courage to break out of the old, comfortable modes of research (I call it the box of materialism) and go for the truth for what it is, rather than for more limited truths inside the box. Backster's independence is a key to his success, because he is not trying to impress anybody or placate funding sources; he's an authentic truth-seeker, intelligent, honest, transparent, generous with his time, childlike in his sense of awe and wonder with the phenomena, and willing to take the path of discovery wherever it leads. This book can be easily understood by almost anyone. It's a great read and an essential addition to any library on new science. Brian O'Leary, Ph.D. former astronaut and professor of astronomy Co-founder, International Association of New Science Founding president, New Energy Movement From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 4 14:55:13 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 4 Oct 2004 10:55:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Ichthyology Meets Ignominy at Awards Ceremony for the Ig Nobel Prizes Message-ID: Ichthyology Meets Ignominy at Awards Ceremony for the Ig Nobel Prizes News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.10.1 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2004/10/2004100105n.htm [45]By DANIEL ENGBER When Ben Wilson, a research associate at the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia, learned that he would be a co-recipient of this year's Ig Nobel Prize for Biology, he was thrilled. As the lead author of a study suggesting that herring communicate by flatulating, Mr. Wilson was clearly on the short list. But in a scientific coincidence that calls to mind Leibniz's and Newton's simultaneous work on calculus, researchers in Denmark had just identified the very same phenomenon. To the surprise of many seasoned prize-watchers, the Ig Nobel Board of Governors ("a shadowy organization," according to its coordinator, Marc A. Abrahams) elected to split the award between the two groups. The prize was one of many presented on Thursday night at Harvard University. Dating the actual discovery is of course very difficult, but the Danish researchers -- led by Magnus Wahlberg -- published their results in the summer of 2003, while Mr. Wilson's paper didn't appear in print until early November. "I'm very pleased to share the prize," said Mr. Wilson. "The more people who are excited about herring the better." The Ig Nobel board has negotiated tricky nominations in the past, Mr. Abrahams said of the group, which was founded in 1991 to honor research that "cannot or should not be reproduced." Last year's prize for engineering, for instance, was split among three creators of Murphy's Law -- Edwin A. Murphy Jr. and two colleagues who had contributed meaningfully to the work ([59]The Chronicle, October 3). "There's intense lobbying on the part of people who want to win prizes," said Mr. Abrahams, "or on the part of people who want to win prizes for their enemies. Or their friends." This year marked the first time that even universities stepped in to lobby on behalf of their candidates. Another split prize this year (for medicine) went to a pair of researchers who had worked to uncover the link between listening to country music and committing suicide. James H. Gundlach and Steven Stack reported in a paper in 1992 that suicide rates among white people correlated strongly with the air time given to country songs across major urban areas. Mr. Stack, now a professor of criminal justice at Wayne State University and one of the top suicide researchers in the country, appeared as the first author, even though the idea and initial data emerged from a graduate statistics class taught by Mr. Gundlach, a professor of sociology at Auburn University. "He's a stronger researcher than I am," said Mr. Gundlach, who accepted the award for both of them. "If he wasn't shy, he would be doing this. ... I guess I'm a bit more of a showoff. "This event -- it's not my style," explained Mr. Stack, whose subsequent work has looked at the links between opera and suicide, blues and suicide, and heavy metal and suicide. Eight other prizes were awarded from the more than 5,000 nominations received by the Board of Governors. The prize for literature went to the American Nudist Research Library, in Kissimmee, Fla., while the prize for engineering was awarded to two resourceful gentlemen from Orlando who patented the comb-over. Other honored work included a rigorous investigation of the "five-second rule" for eating food that's been dropped on the floor (which took the prize in public health) and a study in the dynamics of hula-hooping (which won for physics). The Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Daisuke Inoue, the inventor of karaoke. Mr. Abrahams, who also edits the Annals of Improbable Research, a science-humor journal, described a very straightforward selection process for the Ig Nobels: "We use one simple criterion: Is it something that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think?" More information on the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize winners will be posted on the awards' [60]Web site. References 45. mailto:daniel.engber at chronicle.com 60. http://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2004 From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Oct 4 18:48:19 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 4 Oct 2004 11:48:19 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq In-Reply-To: <200410041800.i94I0M008456@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041004184819.94364.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> >>I think that what Kerry cannot say, even though it's true, is that we have lost, just as we did in Vietnam.<< --It won't really help to say "we lost, sorry" and leave Iraq to deal with its own problems. In a vacuum, a fundamentalist, anti-American regime is almost sure to rule, with civil war and terrorism making life hell for Iraqis. There isn't much choice but to bring the world to agreement on a plan and implement it, with the US pulling out troops as an alternate force is brought in to stabilize the cities. The US should focus on precision strikes against terrorists, since its credibility is near zero when it comes to policing Arab neighborhoods. Whatever the best possible outcome, the US can't just pull out and let Iraqis deal with it, because they don't have the ability to prevent civil war on their own. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 4 20:41:23 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 4 Oct 2004 13:41:23 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq Message-ID: <01C4AA17.D7049CF0.shovland@mindspring.com> I forget the exact time and place, but there was an time during the British rule in India when they decided to withdraw from some area. The Indians killed them all as they tried to escape. We need to avoid getting into that kind of situation in Iraq. And we need to remember the chaotic last days of our presence in Nam. Right now we have thousands of troops tied up in Samarra, who will be there until the Iraqi's can replace them. Until then, our troops are embedded in a sea of hostiles. The same would hold true if we "retake" other cities. What price will the world pay to keep this unnatural state together? If in the end we can't prevent a civil war, or least a partition, why not let it happen sooner rather than later? -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 11:48 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq >>I think that what Kerry cannot say, even though it's true, is that we have lost, just as we did in Vietnam.<< --It won't really help to say "we lost, sorry" and leave Iraq to deal with its own problems. In a vacuum, a fundamentalist, anti-American regime is almost sure to rule, with civil war and terrorism making life hell for Iraqis. There isn't much choice but to bring the world to agreement on a plan and implement it, with the US pulling out troops as an alternate force is brought in to stabilize the cities. The US should focus on precision strikes against terrorists, since its credibility is near zero when it comes to policing Arab neighborhoods. Whatever the best possible outcome, the US can't just pull out and let Iraqis deal with it, because they don't have the ability to prevent civil war on their own. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From jrende at sbcglobal.net Mon Oct 4 21:05:28 2004 From: jrende at sbcglobal.net (jrende) Date: Mon, 4 Oct 2004 16:05:28 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq In-Reply-To: <01C4AA17.D7049CF0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <004d01c4aa55$e11a3630$6401a8c0@rende1> I wonder if there is another dynamic at play which makes the idea of troop withdrawal a moot point. When I spoke with a Former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia this past May, he indicated that we will know within the next 3 years whether Saudi Arabia will become a failed state. The 7000 current Saudi Princes have already done a nice job draining the state treasury with their lavish life style. By the end of the decade, there will be nearly 30,000 such princes on the pay roll. According to the Energy Economist at the Fed in Dallas, if the Saudi Regime falls, the price of a barrel of oil shoots to over $100 and sends the US into a devastating recession...unless the US secures access to another comparably large reserve of oil...like Iraq. Forget the rationale of weapons of mass destruction. We are in Iraq to secure the second largest oil reserve in the world for our economic stability. We just did not figure on the pesky insurgency. With the halfway point of total estimated recoverable oil approaching between 2007 and 2013, and with China and India increasing their demand for oil, our appetite for the stuff will become painfully constrained as prices steadily rise. Our special forces are operating in over 100 countries...in addition to executing the war on terrorism, they are either guarding oil pipelines or training other forces to do so. I fear that as long as we are addicted to oil and don't make dramatic progress in creating alternative energy sources to power our nation, we will be in Iraq until the twilight of the fossil fuel age. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf Of Steve Hovland Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 3:41 PM To: 'The new improved paleopsych list' Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Iraq I forget the exact time and place, but there was an time during the British rule in India when they decided to withdraw from some area. The Indians killed them all as they tried to escape. We need to avoid getting into that kind of situation in Iraq. And we need to remember the chaotic last days of our presence in Nam. Right now we have thousands of troops tied up in Samarra, who will be there until the Iraqi's can replace them. Until then, our troops are embedded in a sea of hostiles. The same would hold true if we "retake" other cities. What price will the world pay to keep this unnatural state together? If in the end we can't prevent a civil war, or least a partition, why not let it happen sooner rather than later? -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 11:48 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq >>I think that what Kerry cannot say, even though it's true, is that we have lost, just as we did in Vietnam.<< --It won't really help to say "we lost, sorry" and leave Iraq to deal with its own problems. In a vacuum, a fundamentalist, anti-American regime is almost sure to rule, with civil war and terrorism making life hell for Iraqis. There isn't much choice but to bring the world to agreement on a plan and implement it, with the US pulling out troops as an alternate force is brought in to stabilize the cities. The US should focus on precision strikes against terrorists, since its credibility is near zero when it comes to policing Arab neighborhoods. Whatever the best possible outcome, the US can't just pull out and let Iraqis deal with it, because they don't have the ability to prevent civil war on their own. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 4 22:33:14 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 4 Oct 2004 15:33:14 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq Message-ID: <01C4AA27.778D1E40.shovland@mindspring.com> I have heard that when the oil executives met with Cheney, they looked at maps of Iraq which only showed the oil reserves. No indications of human life whatsoever. That tells the tale. The Iraqi's are at a global crunch point, and they may be sacrificed for the greater good of someone other than themselves. -----Original Message----- From: jrende [SMTP:jrende at sbcglobal.net] Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 2:05 PM To: 'The new improved paleopsych list' Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Iraq I wonder if there is another dynamic at play which makes the idea of troop withdrawal a moot point. When I spoke with a Former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia this past May, he indicated that we will know within the next 3 years whether Saudi Arabia will become a failed state. The 7000 current Saudi Princes have already done a nice job draining the state treasury with their lavish life style. By the end of the decade, there will be nearly 30,000 such princes on the pay roll. According to the Energy Economist at the Fed in Dallas, if the Saudi Regime falls, the price of a barrel of oil shoots to over $100 and sends the US into a devastating recession...unless the US secures access to another comparably large reserve of oil...like Iraq. Forget the rationale of weapons of mass destruction. We are in Iraq to secure the second largest oil reserve in the world for our economic stability. We just did not figure on the pesky insurgency. With the halfway point of total estimated recoverable oil approaching between 2007 and 2013, and with China and India increasing their demand for oil, our appetite for the stuff will become painfully constrained as prices steadily rise. Our special forces are operating in over 100 countries...in addition to executing the war on terrorism, they are either guarding oil pipelines or training other forces to do so. I fear that as long as we are addicted to oil and don't make dramatic progress in creating alternative energy sources to power our nation, we will be in Iraq until the twilight of the fossil fuel age. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf Of Steve Hovland Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 3:41 PM To: 'The new improved paleopsych list' Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Iraq I forget the exact time and place, but there was an time during the British rule in India when they decided to withdraw from some area. The Indians killed them all as they tried to escape. We need to avoid getting into that kind of situation in Iraq. And we need to remember the chaotic last days of our presence in Nam. Right now we have thousands of troops tied up in Samarra, who will be there until the Iraqi's can replace them. Until then, our troops are embedded in a sea of hostiles. The same would hold true if we "retake" other cities. What price will the world pay to keep this unnatural state together? If in the end we can't prevent a civil war, or least a partition, why not let it happen sooner rather than later? -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 11:48 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq >>I think that what Kerry cannot say, even though it's true, is that we have lost, just as we did in Vietnam.<< --It won't really help to say "we lost, sorry" and leave Iraq to deal with its own problems. In a vacuum, a fundamentalist, anti-American regime is almost sure to rule, with civil war and terrorism making life hell for Iraqis. There isn't much choice but to bring the world to agreement on a plan and implement it, with the US pulling out troops as an alternate force is brought in to stabilize the cities. The US should focus on precision strikes against terrorists, since its credibility is near zero when it comes to policing Arab neighborhoods. Whatever the best possible outcome, the US can't just pull out and let Iraqis deal with it, because they don't have the ability to prevent civil war on their own. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 5 14:02:36 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 10:02:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: On a Matter of Life or Death, a Patient Is Overruled Message-ID: On a Matter of Life or Death, a Patient Is Overruled NYT October 5, 2004 By SANDEEP JAUHAR, M.D. Mr. Smith could not breathe. Bright-red blood, filling up the air spaces in his lungs, was spewing from his mouth whenever he coughed. "So what are you waiting for?" I asked the cardiology fellow on the phone, trying to rub the sleep out of my eyes. "Intubate him." "He says he doesn't want a breathing tube," the fellow replied. "He's going to die without it," I hollered. "I know," the fellow said matter-of-factly. "And I think he knows, too. But he still doesn't want it." I sank onto my living room sofa. What to do? Mr. Smith had come so far since his heart attack. Cardiac catheterization. A drug-coated stent to open up a blocked coronary artery. Intravenous blood thinners to keep the stent from clotting. Was it going to end like this? "This is a reversible complication," I told the fellow. I had seen it before with aggressive blood thinning. With a few days of ventilatory support, the bleeding should stop, we would be able to pull out the tube, and he would walk out of the hospital. "What do you want me to do?" the fellow replied. "He's refusing." He said that he had already tried the usual measures short of intubation: supplemental oxygen, diuretics, a pressurized face mask. "Do you think he has decision-making capacity?" I asked. If not, we could make the decision for him. "I think so," the fellow replied, his voice thick from lack of sleep. "He apparently told the residents several days ago that he never wanted to be intubated." "He can't do this to himself," I said. "Try to talk to him again. I'm coming in." Outside, the sun was rising. Speeding to the hospital on a lonely stretch of freeway, I mulled over the options. As far as I could tell, there were only two: we could continue the current treatments and watch him die. Or we could intubate him against his wishes. >From my car, I called the cardiologist who had performed the catheterization. "Intubate him," he said immediately. I explained that Mr. Smith did not want a breathing tube. "Who cares?" he cried. "He's going to die! He's not thinking straight." Perhaps he's right, I thought. After all, who in his right mind wants to die? Were we not asking too much of Mr. Smith? Patients have a hard time properly weighing their options under the best of circumstances. In an emergency like this, how could we expect him to make the right choice? As an experienced doctor, wasn't I in a better position to make Mr. Smith's decision than Mr. Smith? When I got to the cardiac care unit, a crowd of doctors and nurses was at the patient's bedside and an anesthesiologist was preparing to insert a breathing tube. The cardiologist I had just spoken with took me aside. "He's breathing at 40 times a minute and his oxygen saturation is dropping, so I made the decision to intubate him." I nodded quietly. I had made the same decision in the car. Once the breathing tube was in, blood started rising in it like a red column. Nurses had to scramble for face shields and yellow gowns to protect themselves from the red spray. Pretty soon, someone was pouring brown antiseptic soap onto Mr. Smith's groin in preparation for a central intravenous line. As needles started piercing his skin, Mr. Smith started swinging wildly. In intensive care units, the steamroller of technology starts moving quickly, flattening all ambivalence. Eventually, with sedation, Mr. Smith settled down, and the critical care unit staff settled in for a long period of observation. If we had gambled right, he would recover within a few days. "If you get through this," I whispered to Mr. Smith, "I hope you can forgive me." I have never been able to balance satisfactorily in my own mind the twin pillars of modern medical ethics: patient autonomy and the physician's obligation to do the best for his patient. As a doctor, when do you let your patient make a bad decision? When, if ever, do you draw the line? What if a decision could cost your patient's life? How hard do you push him to change his mind? At the same time, it is his life. Who are you to tell him how to live it? Mr. Smith had an unusually rocky hospital course. The bleeding in his lungs continued for several days, requiring large blood transfusions, but it eventually stopped. His blood pressure was too low, then too high. He had protracted, unexplained fevers. After a few days, I ended my service as the attending physician in the critical care unit. A week later, I heard that Mr. Smith's condition had improved. A week after that, a fellow stopped me in the hall to tell me that the breathing tube was out. When I went to see him, I realized that I had never really looked at him as a person. He was a tall, muscular man in late middle age, with a broad forehead, a flat nose and high, handsome cheekbones. I went to his bedside and introduced myself. He didn't recognize me. "When you were really sick, I was one of the doctors who made the decision to put in the breathing tube," I said. He nodded, eyeing me curiously. "I know you didn't want the tube," I went on, "but if we didn't put it in, you would have died." He nodded again. "I've been through a lot," he finally said, his voice still hoarse from two weeks of intubation. "I know," I replied. "But thank you," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/health/05case.html From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 5 14:19:46 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 10:19:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Nature: (Ig Nobel) Laughter in the lab Message-ID: Laughter in the lab http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040927/pf/040927-20_pf.html 4.10.1 [4]Helen Pilcher This year's Ig Nobel awards celebrated a glittering cornucopia of silly science. As the laughter fades, Helen Pilcher explains why science shouldn't take itself so seriously. The Ig Nobel awards are arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar. The prizes, which are the wayward son of the more righteous Nobels, are supposed to reward research that makes people laugh, then think. They are a welcome antidote to the everyday seriousness and stuffiness of life in the lab, providing a run down of mildly amusing, and sometimes frankly ridiculous, science. This year's awards, which were doled out on Thursday 30 September, were no exception. The Medicine gong recognized the relationship between country music and suicide^[5]1, and the Biology prize rewarded the discovery of fish who use farts to communicate^[6]2. Some people may raise their eyebrows at such seemingly pointless science. But I would argue that we need research like this to lighten our lives. Science has become something of a black hole for comedy, a fun-free singularity where absurdities vanish like grant money. Gags are frowned upon, and the closest a scientist can get to humour is naming a dinosaur after an ageing rock star (Masiakasaurus knopfleri), or a gene after a computer game (sonic hedgehog). The Ig Nobels help redress the balance. By recognizing researchers who examine complicated ideas in everyday situations, they make science entertaining, understandable and accessible. Take this year's award for Physics. The paper says, "The Karhunen-Lo?ve decomposition was applied to the kinematics of the lower limbs in three experiments in which oscillation amplitude and frequency were manipulated." This translates to: people hula-hooped fast, they hula-hooped slow, scientists videoed their legs and then did some sums. Their conclusion: if you want to become hula-hoop champion, move your knees up and down, and your ankles and hips from side to side^[7]3. The abstract of the paper may be indecipherable, but the message is delightful. At face value, the Ig Nobels offer good clean family fun (well, apart from the 2002 award for work on scrotal asymmetry in ancient sculpture^[8]4). But they also serve a more worthy purpose. The awards help to stimulate a natural curiosity in the world around us, and reach audiences that the authors of conventional research papers can only dream of: those who think that science is dull, complicated and of no relevance to their lives. They are much undervalued in the arsenal of science communication tools, which too often embrace worthy concepts such as 'public dialogue' and 'engagement' at the expense of fun. Winners of the prizes don't take themselves too seriously either, which helps make scientists seem human. Gone is the stereotype of the corduroy-wearing recluse, slaving over a hot Bunsen burner. Embrace instead the amusing eccentric who pursues worthy science and has a laugh. Like any discipline, science shouldn't be exempt from satire. Just as politicians lay themselves bare to the irreverent lampooning of the media, so too should scientists receive a gentle dig in the ribs from time to time. And sometimes they deserve it. After all, who can fail to be tickled by the 1998 winner and Lancet paper: A Man Who Pricked his Finger and Smelled Putrid for 5 Years^[9]5? References 1. Stack S. & Gundlach J. Social Forces, 71:1. 211 - 218 (1992). 2. Wilson B., Batty R. S. & Dill L. Biology Letters, 271. S95 - S97 (2003). | [11]Article | 3. Balasubramaniam R. & Turvey M. Biological Cybernetics, 90:3. 176 - 190 (2004). | [12]Article | 4. McManus I. C., Nature, 259. 426 (1976). | [13]PubMed | [14]ISI | [15]ChemPort | 5. Mills C. M., Llewelyn M. B., Kelly D. R. & Holt P. Lancet, 348. 1282 (1996). | [16]Article | [17]PubMed | [18]ISI | [19]ChemPort | References 5. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040927/pf/040927-20_pf.html#B1 6. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040927/pf/040927-20_pf.html#B2 7. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040927/pf/040927-20_pf.html#B3 8. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040927/pf/040927-20_pf.html#B4 9. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040927/pf/040927-20_pf.html#B5 10. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040927/pf/040927-20_pf.html#top 11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098%2Frsbl.2003.0107 12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2Fs00422-003-0460-4 13. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=npg&cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=765841&dopt=Abstract 14. http://links.isiglobalnet2.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?&GWVersion=2&SrcAuth=Nature&SrcApp=Nature&DestLinkType=FullRecord&KeyUT=A1976BE20500057&DestApp=WOS_CPL 15. http://chemport.cas.org/cgi-bin/sdcgi?APP=ftslink&action=reflink&origin=npg&version=1.0&coi=1:STN:280:CSmC38nitl0%3D&pissn=&pyear=2004&md5=b59edcb3838bdd90707f49174bb98fb7 16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2FS0140-6736%2896%2906408-2 17. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=npg&cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8909382&dopt=Abstract 18. http://links.isiglobalnet2.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?&GWVersion=2&SrcAuth=Nature&SrcApp=Nature&DestLinkType=FullRecord&KeyUT=A1996VR55500012&DestApp=WOS_CPL 19. http://chemport.cas.org/cgi-bin/sdcgi?APP=ftslink&action=reflink&origin=npg&version=1.0&coi=1:STN:280:ByiD28rptVU%3D&pissn=&pyear=2004&md5=d97769c0165549407dc54dc00c25679b From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 5 15:38:13 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 08:38:13 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: On a Matter of Life or Death, a Patient Is Overruled Message-ID: <01C4AAB6.A7C21220.shovland@mindspring.com> And how do you feel about this? Was death the worst option for this man? What if our culture believed in reincarnation? -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2004 7:03 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; World Transhumanist Ass. Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: On a Matter of Life or Death, a Patient Is Overruled On a Matter of Life or Death, a Patient Is Overruled NYT October 5, 2004 By SANDEEP JAUHAR, M.D. Mr. Smith could not breathe. Bright-red blood, filling up the air spaces in his lungs, was spewing from his mouth whenever he coughed. "So what are you waiting for?" I asked the cardiology fellow on the phone, trying to rub the sleep out of my eyes. "Intubate him." "He says he doesn't want a breathing tube," the fellow replied. "He's going to die without it," I hollered. "I know," the fellow said matter-of-factly. "And I think he knows, too. But he still doesn't want it." I sank onto my living room sofa. What to do? Mr. Smith had come so far since his heart attack. Cardiac catheterization. A drug-coated stent to open up a blocked coronary artery. Intravenous blood thinners to keep the stent from clotting. Was it going to end like this? "This is a reversible complication," I told the fellow. I had seen it before with aggressive blood thinning. With a few days of ventilatory support, the bleeding should stop, we would be able to pull out the tube, and he would walk out of the hospital. "What do you want me to do?" the fellow replied. "He's refusing." He said that he had already tried the usual measures short of intubation: supplemental oxygen, diuretics, a pressurized face mask. "Do you think he has decision-making capacity?" I asked. If not, we could make the decision for him. "I think so," the fellow replied, his voice thick from lack of sleep. "He apparently told the residents several days ago that he never wanted to be intubated." "He can't do this to himself," I said. "Try to talk to him again. I'm coming in." Outside, the sun was rising. Speeding to the hospital on a lonely stretch of freeway, I mulled over the options. As far as I could tell, there were only two: we could continue the current treatments and watch him die. Or we could intubate him against his wishes. >From my car, I called the cardiologist who had performed the catheterization. "Intubate him," he said immediately. I explained that Mr. Smith did not want a breathing tube. "Who cares?" he cried. "He's going to die! He's not thinking straight." Perhaps he's right, I thought. After all, who in his right mind wants to die? Were we not asking too much of Mr. Smith? Patients have a hard time properly weighing their options under the best of circumstances. In an emergency like this, how could we expect him to make the right choice? As an experienced doctor, wasn't I in a better position to make Mr. Smith's decision than Mr. Smith? When I got to the cardiac care unit, a crowd of doctors and nurses was at the patient's bedside and an anesthesiologist was preparing to insert a breathing tube. The cardiologist I had just spoken with took me aside. "He's breathing at 40 times a minute and his oxygen saturation is dropping, so I made the decision to intubate him." I nodded quietly. I had made the same decision in the car. Once the breathing tube was in, blood started rising in it like a red column. Nurses had to scramble for face shields and yellow gowns to protect themselves from the red spray. Pretty soon, someone was pouring brown antiseptic soap onto Mr. Smith's groin in preparation for a central intravenous line. As needles started piercing his skin, Mr. Smith started swinging wildly. In intensive care units, the steamroller of technology starts moving quickly, flattening all ambivalence. Eventually, with sedation, Mr. Smith settled down, and the critical care unit staff settled in for a long period of observation. If we had gambled right, he would recover within a few days. "If you get through this," I whispered to Mr. Smith, "I hope you can forgive me." I have never been able to balance satisfactorily in my own mind the twin pillars of modern medical ethics: patient autonomy and the physician's obligation to do the best for his patient. As a doctor, when do you let your patient make a bad decision? When, if ever, do you draw the line? What if a decision could cost your patient's life? How hard do you push him to change his mind? At the same time, it is his life. Who are you to tell him how to live it? Mr. Smith had an unusually rocky hospital course. The bleeding in his lungs continued for several days, requiring large blood transfusions, but it eventually stopped. His blood pressure was too low, then too high. He had protracted, unexplained fevers. After a few days, I ended my service as the attending physician in the critical care unit. A week later, I heard that Mr. Smith's condition had improved. A week after that, a fellow stopped me in the hall to tell me that the breathing tube was out. When I went to see him, I realized that I had never really looked at him as a person. He was a tall, muscular man in late middle age, with a broad forehead, a flat nose and high, handsome cheekbones. I went to his bedside and introduced myself. He didn't recognize me. "When you were really sick, I was one of the doctors who made the decision to put in the breathing tube," I said. He nodded, eyeing me curiously. "I know you didn't want the tube," I went on, "but if we didn't put it in, you would have died." He nodded again. "I've been through a lot," he finally said, his voice still hoarse from two weeks of intubation. "I know," I replied. "But thank you," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/health/05case.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 5 19:43:51 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 15:43:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 32: AI Magazine: What are intelligence? And why? Message-ID: Meme 32: AI Magazine: What are intelligence? And why? sent 4.10.5 [This article doesn't say much about artificial intelligence as such, but it's the best piece I've seen on theories of the evolution of human intelligence (though the article was written before Geoffrey Miller's idea that Darwin's other mechanism, sexual selection, came along. Also discussed is intelligence in other animals.] What are intelligence? And why? - Innovative Applications of AI AI Magazine 19(1) (1998 Spring): 91 ff. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2483/is_n1_v19/ai_20452454/print by Randall Davis Relax, there's no mistake in the title. I've indulged a bit of British-English that I've always found intriguing: the use of the plural verb with collective nouns (as in "Oxford have won the themes regatta"). The selection of verb sense is purposeful and captures one of the main themes of the article: I want to consider intelligence as a collective noun. I want to see what we in Al have thought of it and review the multiple ways in which we've conceived of it. My intention is to make explicit the assumptions, metaphors, and models that underlie our multiple conceptions. I intend to go back to basics here, as a way of reminding us of the things that we, individually, and collectively, have taken as given, in part because we have taken multiple different, and sometimes consistent, things for granted. I believe it will prove useful to expose the tacit assumptions, models, and metaphors that we carry around, as a way of understanding both what we're about and why we sometimes seem to be at odds with one another. That's the first part of the article. In the second part of the article, I'll ask you to come along on a natural history tour -- I'm going to take you away, back to a time around 4 million years ago when the first hominids arose and consider how intelligence came to be. We'll take an evolutionary view, consider intelligence as a natural phenomenon, and ask why it arose. The vague answer -- that it provided enhanced survival -- turns out not to be very informative; so, we'll ask, why is intelligence, and more important, what does that tell us about how we might proceed in AI? The third part of the article is concerned with what we might call inhuman problem solving; it explores to what degree intelligence is a human monopoly. In this part of the article, AI learns about the birds and the bees: What kinds of animal intelligence are there, and does that, too, inform our search for human intelligence? I'll end by considering how we might expand our view, expand our exploration of intelligence by exploring aspects of it that have received too little attention. AI has been doing some amount of consolidation over the past few years, so it may well be time to speculate where the next interesting and provocative leaps might be made. Fundamental Elements If AI is centrally concerned with intelligence, we ought to start by considering what behaviors lie at its core. Four behaviors are commonly used to distinguish intelligent behavior from instinct and stimulus-response associations: (1) prediction, (2) response to change, (3) intentional action, and (4) reasoning. One core capability is our ability to predict the future, that is, to imagine how things might turn out rather than have to try them. The essential issue here is imagining, that is, the disconnection of thought and action. That disconnection gives us the ability to imagine the consequences of an action before, or instead of, experiencing it, the ability, as Popper and Raimund (1985) put it, to have our hypotheses die in our stead. The second element -- response to change -- is an essential characteristic that distinguishes intelligent action from inalterable instinct or conditioned reflexes. Intentional action refers to having a goal and selecting actions appropriate to achieving the goal. Finally, by reasoning, I mean starting with some collection of facts and adding to it by any inference method. Five Views of Reasoning AI has of course explored all these in a variety of ways. Yet even if we focus in on just one of them -- intelligent reasoning -- it soon becomes clear that there have been a multitude of answers explored within AI as to what we mean by that, that is, what we mean when we say intelligent reasoning. Given the relative youth of our field, the answers have often come from work in other fields. Five fields in particular -- (1) mathematical logic, (2) psychology, (3) biology, (4) statistics, and (5) economics -- have provided the inspiration for five distinguishable notions of what constitutes intelligent reasoning (table 1).(1) [TABULAR DATA 1 NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] One view, historically derived from mathematical logic, makes the assumption that intelligent reasoning is some variety of formal calculation, typically, deduction; the modern exemplars of this view in AI are the logicists. A second view, rooted in work in psychology, sees reasoning as a characteristic human behavior and has given rise to both the extensive work on human problem solving and the large collection of knowledge-based systems. A third approach, loosely rooted in biology, takes the view that the key to reasoning is the architecture of the machinery that accomplishes it; hence, reasoning is a characteristic stimulus-response behavior that emerges from parallel interconnection of a large collection of very, simple processors. Researchers working on several varieties of connectionism are descendants of this line of work; work on artificial life also has roots in the biologically inspired view. A fourth approach, derived from probability theory, adds to logic the notion of uncertainty, yielding a view in which reasoning intelligently means obeying the axioms of probability theory. A fifth view, from economics, adds the further ingredients of values and preferences, leading to a view of intelligent reasoning defined by adherence to the tenets of utility theory. Briefly exploring the historical development of the first two of these views will illustrate the different conceptions they have of the fundamental nature of intelligent reasoning and will demonstrate the deep-seated differences in mind set that arise -- even within our own field -- as a consequence. The Logical View: Reasoning as Formal Calculation Consider first the tradition that uses mathematical logic as a view of intelligent reasoning. This view has its historical origins in Aristotle's efforts to accumulate and catalog the syllogisms, in an attempt to determine what should be taken as a convincing argument. (Note that even at the outset, there is a hint of the idea that the desired form of reasoning might be describable in a set of formal rules.) The line continues with Descartes, whose analytic geometry showed that Euclid's work, apparently concerned with the stuff of pure thought (lines of zero width, perfect circles of the sorts only the gods could make), could in fact be married to algebra, a form of calculation, something mere mortals could do. By the time of Leibnitz, the agenda is quite specific and telling: He sought nothing less than a calculus of thought, one that would permit the resolution of all human disagreement with the simple invocation "let us compute." By this time, there is a clear and concrete belief that as Euclid's once godlike and unreachable geometry could be captured with algebra, so some (or perhaps any) variety of that ephemeral stuff called thought might be captured in calculation, specifically logical deduction. In the nineteenth century, Boole provided the basis for propositional calculus in his Laws or Thought; later work by Frege and Peano provided additional foundation for the modern form of predicate calculus. Work by Davis, Putnam, and Robinson in the twentieth century provided the final steps in mechanizing deduction sufficiently to enable the first automated theorem provers. The modern offspring of this line of intellectual development include the many efforts that use first-order logic as a representation and some variety of deduction as the reasoning engine, as well as the large body of work with the explicit agenda of making logical reasoning computational, exemplified by Prolog. Note we have here the underlying premise that reasoning intelligently means reasoning logically; anything else is a mistake or an aberration. Allied with this is the belief that logically, in turn, means first-order logic, typically sound deduction (although other models have of course been explored). By simple transitivity, these two collapse into one key part of the view of intelligent reasoning underlying logic: Reasoning intelligently means reasoning in the fashion defined by first-order logic. A second important part of the view is the allied belief that intelligent reasoning is a process that can be captured in a formal description, particularly a formal description that is both precise and concise. The Psychological View: Reasoning as Human Behavior But very different views of the nature of intelligent reasoning are also possible. One distinctly different view is embedded in the part of AI influenced by the psychological tradition. That tradition, rooted in the work of Hebb, Bruner, Miller, and Newell and Simon, broke through the stimulus-response view demanded by behaviorism and suggested instead that human problem-solving behavior could usefully be viewed in terms of goals, plans, and other complex mental structures. Modern manifestations include work on SOAR (Rosenbloom, Laird, and Newell 1993) as a general mechanism for producing intelligent reasoning and knowledge-based systems as a means of capturing human expert reasoning. Where the logicist tradition takes intelligent reasoning to be a form of calculation, typically deduction in first-order logic, the tradition based in psychology takes as the defining characteristic of intelligent reasoning that it is a particular variety of human behavior. In the logicist view, the object of interest is thus a construct definable in formal terms via mathematics, while for those influenced by the psychological tradition, it is an empirical phenomenon from the natural world. There are thus two very different assumptions here about the essential nature of the fundamental phenomenon to be captured. One of them makes Al a part of mathematics; the other makes it a part of natural science. A second contrast arises in considering the character of the answers each seeks. The logicist view has traditionally sought compact and precise characterizations of intelligence, looking for the kind of characterizations encountered in mathematics (and at times in physics). The psychological tradition by contrast suggests that intelligence is not only a natural phenomenon, it is an inherently complex natural phenomenon: as human anatomy and physiology are inherently complex systems resulting from a long process of evolution, so perhaps is intelligence. As such, intelligence may be a large and fundamentally ad hoc collection of mechanisms and phenomena, one for which complete and concise descriptions may not be possible. The point here is that there are a number of different views of what intelligent reasoning is, even within AI, and it matters which view you take because it shapes almost everything, from research methodology to your notion of success. The Societal View: Reasoning as Emergent Behavior AI's view of intelligent reasoning has varied in another dimension as well. We started out with the straightforward, introspection-driven view that intelligence resided in, and resulted from, an individual mind. After all, there seems at first glance to be only one mind inside each of us. But this, too, has evolved over time, as AI has considered how intelligent reasoning can arise from groups of (more or less) intelligent entities, ranging from the simple units that make up connectionist networks, to the more complex units in Minsky's (1986) society of mind, to the intelligent agents involved in collaborative work. Evolutions like this in our concept of intelligence have as corollaries a corresponding evolution in our beliefs about where sources of power are to be found. One of the things I take Minsky to be arguing in his society of mind theory is that power is going to arise not from the individual components and their (individual) capabilities, but from the principles of organization -- how you put things (even relatively simple things) together in ways that will cause their interaction to produce intelligence. This leads to the view of intelligence as an emergent phenomenon -- something that arises (often in a nonobvious fashion) from the interaction of individual behaviors. If this is so, we face yet another challenge: If intelligence arises in unexpected ways from aggregations, then how will we ever engineer intelligent behavior, that is, purposefully create any particular variety of it? Consider then the wide variety of views we in AI have taken of intelligent reasoning: logical and psychological, statistical and economic, individual and collaborative. The issue here is not one of selecting one of these over another (although we all may have our individual reasons for doing so). The issue is instead the significance of acknowledging and being aware of the different conceptions that are being explored and the fundamentally different assumptions they make. AI has been and will continue to be all these things; it can embrace all of them simultaneously without fear of contradiction. AI: Exploring the Design Space of Intelligences. The temptation remains, of course, to try to unify them. I believe this can in fact be done, using a view I first heard articulated by Aaron Sloman (1994), who suggested conceiving of AI as the exploration of the design space of intelligences. I believe this is a useful view of what we're about for several reasons: First, it's more general than the usual conjunction that defines us as a field interested in both human intelligence and machine intelligence. Second, the plural -- intelligences -- emphasizes the multiple possibilities of what intelligence is (or are, as my title suggests). Finally, conceiving of it in terms of a design space suggests exploring broadly and deeply, thinking about what kinds of intelligences there are, for there may be many. This view also helps address the at-times debated issue of the character of our field: Are we science or engineering, analytic or synthetic, empirical or theoretical? The answer of course is, "yes." Different niches of our field have different characters. Where we are concerned with human intelligence, our work is likely to be more in the spirit of scientific, analytical, and empirical undertakings. Where the concern is more one of machine intelligence, the work will be more engineering, synthetic, and theoretical. But the space is roughly continuous, it is large, and all these have their place. Why Is Intelligence? Next I'd like to turn to the question, "Why is intelligence?" That is, can we learn from an explicitly evolutionary view? Is there, or could there be, a paleocognitive science? If so, what would it tell us? We had best begin by recognizing the difficulty of such an undertaking. It's challenging for several reasons: First, few of the relevant things fossilize. I've checked the ancient bits of amber, and sadly, there are no Jurassic ontologies to be found embedded there; there are no Paleolithic rule-based systems still available for study; and although there is speculation that the cave paintings at Lascaux were the earliest implementation of JAVA, this is, of course, speculation. The examples may be whimsical, but the point is real -- few of the elements of our intellectual life from prehistoric times are preserved and available for study. There are even those who suggest the entire undertaking is doomed from the start. Richard Lewontin (1990), who has written extensively on evolution, suggests that "if it were our purpose in this chapter to say what is actually known about the evolution of human cognition, we would stop at the end of this sentence" (p. 229). Luckily, he goes on: "That is not to say that a good deal has not been written on the subject. Indeed whole books have been devoted to discussions of the evolution of human cognition and its social manifestations, but these works are nothing more than a mixture of pure speculation and inventive stories. Some of these stories might even be true, but we do not know, nor is it clear ... how we would go about finding out" (p. 229). Hence, we had better be modest in our expectations and claims. A second difficulty lies in the data that are available. Most attempts to date phenomena are good only to something like a factor of two or four. The taming of fire, for example, probably occurred around 100,000 years ago, but it might have been 200,000 or even 400,000. Then there is the profusion of theories about why intelligence arose (more on those in a moment). Luckily for our purposes, we don't actually have to know which, if any, of these many theories are correct. I suggest you attend not to the details of each but to the overall character of each and what it may tell us about how the mind might have arisen. Presumably the mind evolved and should as a consequence have some of the hallmarks of anything produced by that process. Let's set the stage then by asking what's known about the nature of evolution, the process that was presumably in charge of, and at the root of, all this. The Nature of Evolution The first thing to remember about evolution is that it is engaging in a pastime that's quite familiar to us: blind search. This is sometimes forgotten when we see the remarkable results -- apparently elegant and complex systems -- that come from a few million years' worth of search. The issue is put well in the title of one article -- "The Good Enough Calculi of Evolving Control Systems: Evolution Is Not Engineering" (Partridge 1982). The article goes on to contrast evolution and engineering problem solving: In engineering, we have a defined problem in the form of design requirements and a library of design elements available for the solution. But "biology provides no definition of a problem until it has been revealed by the advantage of a solution. Without a predefined problem, there is no prerequisite domain, range, form for a solution, or coordinates for its evaluation, except that it provides a statistically improved survival function. This filter selects `good enough' new solutions and thereby identifies solved problems" (p. R173). Consider in particular the claim that "biology provides no definition of a problem until it has been revealed by the advantage of a solution." The warning here is to be wary of interpreting the results of evolution as nature's cleverness in solving a problem. It had no problem to solve; it was just trying out variations. The consequences of blind search are familiar to us; so, in some ways what follows seems obvious, but the consequences are nevertheless worth attending to.(2) One consequence of random search is that evolution wanders about, populating niches wherever it finds them in the design space and the environment. Evolution is not a process of ascent or descent; it's a branching search space being explored in parallel. A second consequence is that nature is sometimes a lousy engineer. There are, for example, futile metabolic cycles in our cells -- apparently circular chemical reactions that go back and forth producing and unproducing the same molecules and depleting energy stores for no apparent purpose (Katz 1985). Third, despite the size of the design space, blind search sometimes doubles back on itself, and evolution rediscovers the same mechanisms. One widely cited example is the eye of the mammal and the eye of the octopus. They are quite similar but for one quite striking fact: The human eye is backward compared with the octopus (Katz 1985). In the mammalian eye, the photoreceptors are in the retinal layer nearest the rear of the eye; as a consequence, light has to go through the retinal "back plane" before it encounters the photoreceptors. A second striking example arises in the evolution of lungs in mammals and birds. Both appear to have arisen from the swim bladders that fish use to control buoyancy, but birds' lungs are unidirectionally ventilated, unlike the tidal, bidirectional flow in other vertebrates. (As a consequence, avian lungs are much more efficient than ours: Himalayan geese have been observed not only to fly over human climbers struggling with their oxygen tanks to reach the top of Mt. Everest but to honk as they do so (Encyclopedia Brittannica 1994-1997); presumably this is nature's way of reminding us of our place in the scheme of things.) The differences in end results suggest the different Paths that were taken to these results, yet the remaining similarities in eyes and lungs show that evolution can rediscover the same basic mechanisms despite its random search. Fourth, there are numerous examples of how nature-is a satisficer, not an optimizer. For instance, one of the reasons cuckoos can get away with dropping off their eggs in the nests of other birds is that birds have only a very crude algorithm for recognizing their eggs and their chicks (Calvin 1991). The algorithm is good enough, most of the time, but the cuckoo takes advantage of its only adequate (manifestly nonoptimal) performance. The control of human respiration provides another example. Respiration is, for the most part, controlled by the level of [CO.sub.2] in the blood. There appear to be a variety of reasons for this (for example, controlling [CO.sub.2] is one way to control pH levels in the blood), but it's still only an adequate system. Its limits are well known to mountain climbers and divers. Mountain climbers know that they have to be conscious of the need to breathe at altitude because the thin air leaves [CO.sub.2] levels in the blood low, eliminating the normal physiological cues to breathe, even through blood-oxygen levels are also low. Divers need to understand that hyperventilation is dangerous: It can drive the [CO.sub.2] level in the blood near zero, but it cannot increase blood-oxygen saturation past the blood's normal limits. As a result, the [CO.sub.2] level can stay abnormally low past the time that oxygen levels have significantly decreased, and the diver will feel no need to breathe even though blood-oxygen levels are low enough to lead to blackout. Fifth, evolution sometimes proceeds by functional conversion, that is, the adoption of an organ or system serving one purpose to serve another. The premier example here is bird wings: The structures were originally developed for thermal regulation (as they are still used in insects) and, at some point, were coopted for use in flight. Finally, evolution is conservative: It adds new layers of solutions to old ones rather than redesigning. This in part accounts for and produces vestigal organs and systems, and the result is not necessarily pretty from an engineering viewpoint. As one author put it, "The human brain is wall-to-wall add-ons, a maze of dinguses and gizmos patched into the original pattern of a primitive fish brain. No wonder it isn't easy to understand how it works" (Bickerton 1995, p. 36). Evolution then is doing random search, and the process is manifest in the product. As one author put it, In the natural realm, organisms are not built by engineers who, with an overall plan in mind, use only the most appropriate materials, the most effective design, and the most reliable construction techniques. Instead, organisms are patchworks containing appendixes, uvulas, earlobes, dewclaws, adenoids, warts, eyebrows, underarm hair, wisdom teeth, and toe-nails. They are a meld of ancestral parts integrated step by step during their development through a set of tried and true ontogenetic mechanisms. These mechanisms ensure matching between disparate elements such as nerves and muscles, but they have no overall vision. Natural ontogenies and natural phylogenies are not limited by principles of parsimony, and they have no teleology. Possible organisms can be overdetermined, unnecessarily complex, or inefficiently designed (Katz 1985, p. 28). The important point here for our purposes is that what's manifestly true of our anatomy may also be true of our cognitive architecture. Natural intelligence is unlikely to have an overall vision and unlikely to be limited by principles of parsimony; like our bodies, it is likely to be overdetermined, unnecessarily complex, and inefficiently designed. In the face of that, searching for the minimalism and elegance beloved by engineers may be a diversion, for it simply may not be there. Somewhat more crudely put: The human mind is a 400,000-year-old legacy application. . .and you expected to find structured programming? All that in turn gives us all the more reason to explore deeply into the design space of intelligence, for the human solution, and its sources of power, may be extraordinarily quirky. The Available Evidence If we can't rely on the fossil record for preserved bits of cognition, can it supply other useful information? One observation from the record of particular relevance is the striking increase in what's called the encephalization quotient -- the ratio of brain size to body size. Fossil records give clear evidence that the encephalization quotient of human ancestors increased by a factor of three to four over about four million years (Donald 1991). In evolutionary terms, this is an enormous change over a short period of time. Simply put, our brains got very big very fast. This is interesting in part because brains are metabolically very expensive. In the adult, about 20 percent of our metabolism goes into maintaining our brains; in children, the brain consumes about 50 percent of metabolic output (Bickerton 1995). This makes the question all the more pressing: Considering how expensive large brains are, why do we have them? Why is intelligence? What benefit arose from it? A second clear piece of evidence, this time from current studies of the brain, is lateralization: The standard examples are language (found in the left hemisphere in approximately 93 percent of us) and the rapid sequencing of voluntary muscles for things such as throwing (found on the left in 89 percent) (Calvin 1983). This is striking in part because the human brain has very few anatomical asymmetries; the observed asymmetries are almost entirely functional (Eccles 1989). It is also striking because the asymmetry arose with the hominids (Homo and our ancestors) and appears unique to them; the brains of our closest living relatives -- apes and monkeys -- are symmetrical both anatomically and functionally (Eccles 1989). The interesting question here of course is why, in a world of symmetry, is the human brain lateralized, even in part? One useful way to set the stage for the various suggested answers is to consider the sequence of events that lead to Homo (H.) sapiens. Figure 1 gives an overview of the last four million years, indicating the evolutionary span of several of our immediate ancestors and their average cranial capacity. [FIGURE 1 GRAPH OMITTED] If we zoom in on the last 200,000 years, we see a few additional events of note (figure 2). Speech arrives quite recently, around 200,000 to 400,000 years ago; fire doesn't get tamed until around 100,000 years ago, which is when more advanced tools also begin to appear. The conversion from hunter-gatherers to a settled society dependent on the use of agriculture happens roughly 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, about the same time as the cave paintings at Lascaux. One question to ask about all this is, What changed between four million years ago and now? Four million years ago, there was (presumably) nothing we would recognize as human-level intelligence; now there is. What changed in between? Theories of the Origin of Intelligence A variety of theories have been suggested. Early Man, the Primal Tool Maker One theory is wrapped up in the notion that man is a tool maker. The construction of increasingly elaborate tools both gave early man a survival advantage and produced evolutionary pressure for yet more elaborate tools and the brains to build them. Unfortunately, another look at our time scale provides some disquieting data. The earliest tools show up around 2.5 million years ago and stay largely unchanged until about 300,000 years ago (Calvin 1991). Yet during all that time our brains are growing quickly. The tool theory thus seems unlikely. Early Man and the Killer Frisbee A second theory (Calvin 1991, 1983) is centered on hunting methods and involves passing a device that is sometimes whimsically referred to as the killer frisbee (figure 3). It's one of the earliest tools and is more properly called a hand ax because it was believed to be a handheld ax. The curious thing about it is that if you look closely, you'll see that all its edges are sharp -- not a very good idea for something designed to be held in the hand. [FIGURE 3 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One researcher built replicas of these and discovered that if thrown like a discus, it flies like a frisbee at first but soon turns on edge and lands with its sharp edge embedded in the earth. Now add to this the fact that many of these artifacts have been found in the mud near ancient waterholes. This led to the theory that the artifacts were thrown by our ancestors at herds of animals gathered at waterholes, with the intent of wounding one of them or knocking it down. But why should throwing things be interesting -- because throwing accurately requires precise time control of motor neurons. For example, if you want to throw accurately at a target the size of a rabbit that's 30 feet away (figure 4), the motor-control problem is substantial: the time window for release of the projectile is less than 1 microsecond. But individual neurons are not in general that accurate temporally. How do we manage? [FIGURE 4 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One way to get the needed accuracy is to recruit populations of neurons and synchronize them: Enright (1980) shows how precise timing can be produced from mutual coupling of heterogeneous, inaccurate oscillators (that is, those with differing intrinsic average frequencies and that are individually unreliable on a cycle-to-cycle basis). With this arrangement, the standard deviation of cycle length between successive firings is proportional to [MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] so quadrupling the number of elements cuts the standard deviation in half. This might account for the ability of our brains to control muscle action to within fractions of a millisecond, when individual neurons are an order of magnitude less precise. The theory then is that our brains grew larger because more neurons produced an increase in throwing accuracy (or an increase in projectile speed with no reduction in accuracy), and that in turn offered a major selective advantage: the ability to take advantage of a food source -- small mammals -- that was previously untapped by hominids. A new food source in turn means a new ecological niche ripe for inhabiting. The advantage resulting from even a limited ability to make use of a new source of food also provides a stronger and more immediate selective pressure than is likely to have arisen from other advantages of a slightly enlarged brain (for example, some limited protolanguage ability). The theory has a number of appealing corollaries. It suggests one source of lateralization because throwing is fundamentally asymmetric: One-armed throwing is far more accurate and effective than two armed for any reasonable-sized projectile (imagine baseball pitchers or outfielders propelling the ball overhead with both arms). As a result, only the neurons on one side of the brain need be specialized for the operation (for why this turns out, in nearly 90 percent of us, to be the left side of the brain, see Calvin [1983]).(3) That lateralization, which more generally involves precise sequential muscle control, may in turn have been a key predecessor to language, which also requires fast and accurate control of musculature. Thus, the brain may have gotten larger to allow us to hunt better. The interesting punchline for our purposes is that thinking may be an extra use of all those neurons that evolved for another purpose. Early Man and the Killer Climate A third theory suggests that climate plays a central role (Calvin 1991). The last few hundred thousand years of our history have been marked by a series of ice ages. A being used to surviving in a temperate climate would face a considerable collection of challenges as the weather worsened and winters arrived. In order to survive the winter, it would have had to be good enough at hunting to accumulate extra food beyond the day-to-day needs (hence the related utility of being able to throw accurately), and then it would have had to develop both the foresight to put aside some of that for the winter and the "technology" for doing so. There is, of course, a stiff Darwinian penalty for failure to be that smart. Early Man, the Primal Frugivore A fourth theory suggests that the crucial element was the evolution of early man into a frugivore, or fruit eater. Why should this matter -- because you need to be smart to be a frugivore. Fruit comes in relatively small pieces, so you need to collect a lot of it, and it must be collected within a relatively narrow time window. As a consequence, frugivores need good spatial maps of their environments (so they know where the sources of fruit are) and good temporal maps (so they know when to show up). Perhaps this need for good spatial and temporal maps was a force for the evolution of larger brains. Early Man, the Primal Psychologist Yet another theory suggests that our primary use of intelligence is not for making tools, hunting, or surviving the winter; it's to get along with one another (Humphrey 1976; also see Byrne and Whiten [1988]). This theory is sometimes called Machiavellian intelligence. In this view, the primary function of intelligence is the maintenance of social relationships. The evidence for this comes from several sources, among them the behavior of monkey troops that have been studied extensively. They are seen to spend a good proportion of their time servicing and maintaining their relationships within their groups, tending to issues of rank and hierarchy and what appear to be allegiances. A second source of evidence comes from a study (Dunbar 1992) that plotted group size against neocortex ratio (ratio of neocortex size to the size of the rest of the brain) for a variety of animals: a nearly linear relationship emerged. Perhaps this held true for early man as well: As early group size grew, along with the advantages of larger groups came increasing demands to be able to understand, predict, and perhaps even control the behavior of others. We saw earlier that prediction was a key component of intelligent behavior; what more complex, fascinating, and useful thing could there be to predict than the behavior of then other humans? Early Man, the Primal Linguist Finally, Bickerton (1995) has suggested that language was the crucial driving force behind the evolution of our brains. He starts with the interesting observation that if we look back at the historical time line, we notice that although brain size grows roughly steadily for about three million years, progress in the development of modern culture was not nearly so gradual. In fact, "instead of a steady ascent ... we find, for 95% of that period, a monotonous, almost flat line" (Bickerton 1995, p. 47). Almost nothing happens. It is well after the appearance of H. sapiens, and well after the leveling off of brain size, that we see the appearance of language and all the other elements of what we have come to call civilization. Bickerton calls these the two most shocking facts of human evolution: (1) our ancestors stagnated so long despite their ever-growing brains and (2) human culture grew exponentially only after the brain had ceased to grow. It appears that we showed our most obvious evidence of intelligence only after our brains stopped growing. What was it that happened to produce that evidence? He suggests that the crucial event was some sort of reorganization within the brain, a reorganization that happened well after size stopped increasing. That reorganization made possible two essential things: first, a generative syntax, that is, a true language, and second, thought, that is, the ability to think about something (like a leopard) without having to experience the thing perceptually, and equally important, without having to react to it in the way one would on meeting one. This leads to what appears to be a crucial distinction between animal intelligence and human intelligence. Animal intelligence has a here and now character: With animal calls, for example, there is an immediate link from the perception to the mind state to the action. If a monkey sees a leopard, a certain mind state ensues, and a certain behavior (giving the appropriate call) immediately follows.(4) Human thought, by contrast, has an unlimited spatiotemporal reference, by virtue of several important disconnections. Human thought involves the ability to imagine, the ability to think about something in the absence of perceptual input, and the ability to imagine without reacting. In human thought we have the ability, the luxury, of "re-presentation." The pun is intentional and probably educational: Representations allow us to re-present things to ourselves in the absence of the thing, so that we can think about it, not just react to it. Enormous things change when we have both thought and language. Thought and its useful disconnection from immediate stimuli and immediate action is clearly a great boon -- it's the origin of our ability to have our hypotheses die in our stead. But what about language? For our purposes, the interesting thing about language is that it makes knowledge immortal and makes society, not the individual, the accumulator and repository of knowledge. No longer is an individual's knowledge limited to what can be experienced and learned in a lifetime. Language not only allows us to think, it allows us to share and accumulate the fruits of that thought. But what then caused our brains to grow over the three million or so years during which neither language nor thought (as we know them) was present? What was the evolutionary pressure? The theory suggests that the life of a successful hunter-gatherer is fact rich and practice rich. In order to survive as a hunter-gatherer, you need to know a lot of facts about your world and need to know a fair number of skills. This then is the hypothesized source of pressure: the increasing accumulation of survival-relevant information communicated through a form of protolanguage. Early man needed to store "the vast amount of lore ... in the collective memories of traditional societies: the uses of herbs, the habits of animals, aphorisms about human behavior, detailed knowledge of the spatial environment, anecdotes, old wives' tales, legends and myths" (Bickerton 1995, p. 63).(5) Where does this collection of theories (figure 5) leave us? One obvious caution is that they are unlikely to be either independent or mutually exclusive. They may be mutually supportive and all true to some extent, with each of them contributing some amount of the evolutionary pressure toward larger brains and intelligence. Figure 5. Theories of the Evolution of Intelligence. Early man, the primal tool maker Early man and the killer frisbee Early man and the killer climate Early man, the primal frugivore Early man, the primal psychologist Early man, the protolinguist A second point to note is that human intelligence is a natural phenomenon, born of evolution, and as suggested earlier, the end product likely shows evidence of the process that created it. Intelligence is likely to be a layered, multifaceted, and probably messy collection of phenomena, much like the other products of evolution. It also may be rather indirect. Here's Lewontin (1990) again: "There may have been no direct natural selection for cognitive ability at all. Human cognition may have developed as the purely epiphenomenal consequence of the major increase in brain size, which, in turn, may have been selected for quite other reasons" (p. 244), for example, any of the reasons in figure 5. This, too, suggests a certain amount of caution in our approach to understanding intelligence, at least of the human variety: The human mind is not only a 400,000-year-old legacy application, it may have been written for another purpose and adopted for current usage only after the fact. In light of that, we should not be too surprised if we fail to find elegance and simplicity in the workings of intelligence. Inhuman Problem Solving As we explore the design space of intelligences, it's interesting to consider some of the other varieties of intelligence that are out there, particularly the animal sort. With that, let me turn to the third part of my article, in which it's time for AI to learn about the birds and the bees. What do animals know, and (how) do they think? Clever Hans and Clever Hands Before we get too far into this, it would we wise to consider a couple of cautionary tales to ensure the appropriate degree of skepticism about this difficult subject. The classic cautionary tale concerns a horse named Clever Hans, raised in Germany around 1900, that gave every appearance of being able to do arithmetic, tapping out his answers with his feet (Boakes 1984) (figure 6). He was able to give the correct answers even without his trainer in the room and became a focus of a considerable amount of attention and something of a celebrity. [FIGURE 6 PHOTO OMITTED] In the end, it turned out that Hans was not mathematically gifted; his gift was perceptual. The key clue came when he was asked questions to which no one in the room knew the answer; in that case, neither did he. Hans had been attending carefully to his audience and reacting to the slight changes in posture that occurred when he had given the correct number of taps.(6) The clever hands belong to a chimpanzee named Washoe who had been trained in American Sign Language (Gardner et al. 1989). One day Washoe, seeing a swan in a pond, gave the sign for water and then bird. This seemed quite remarkable, as Washoe seemed to be forming compound nouns -- water bird -- that he had not previously known (Mithen 1996). But perhaps he had seen the pond and given the sign for water, then noticed the swan and given the sign for bird. Had he done so in the opposite order -- bird water -- little excitement would have followed. The standard caution from both of these tales is always to consider the simpler explanation -- trainer effects, wishful interpretation of data, and so on -- before being willing to consider that animals are indeed capable of thought. Narrow Intelligence: Birds and Bees Given that, we can proceed to explore some of the varieties of animal intelligence that do exist. Several types of rather narrowly defined intelligence are supported by strong evidence. Among the birds and the bees, for example, bees are well known to "dance" for their hive mates to indicate the direction of food sources they have found. Some birds have a remarkable ability to construct a spatial map. The Clark's nutcracker, as one example, stores away on the order of 30,000 seeds in 6,000 sites over the course of the spring and summer and is able to find about half of those during the winter (Balda and Kamil 1992). This is a narrowly restricted kind of intelligence but, at 6000 locations, nonetheless impressive. Broader Intelligence: Primates Broader forms of intelligence are displayed by some primates. One particular variety -- the vervet monkey -- has been studied widely in the wild and has displayed a range of intelligent-seeming behaviors (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990). One of the important elements in the life of a monkey group is status -- your place in the dominance hierarchy. Vervet monkeys give every sign of understanding and being able to reason using relations such as higher-status-than and lower-status-than. They can, for example, do simple transitive inference to establish the place of others in the hierarchy: If A can beat up B, and B can beat up C, there's no need for A and C to fight; the result can be inferred (allowing our hypotheses to get battered in our stead). The monkeys also appear capable of classifying relationships as same or different, understanding, for example, that mother-of is a different relation from sibling-of. This can matter because if you fight with Junior, you had better avoid mother-of(Junior) (who might be tempted to retaliate), but sibling-of(Junior) presents no such threat. They also seem to have a vocabulary with semantic content -- different calls that correspond to the notion of leopard, eagle, and python, the three main monkey predators. That the calls are truly referential is suggested by the facts that they are given only when appropriate, they are learned by trial and error by the young monkeys, and the troop takes appropriate action on hearing one of the calls. Hearing the eagle call, for instance, all the troop members will look up, searching for the eagle, then take cover in the bushes. Note that we have referred to this as a vocabulary, not a language, because it appears that there is no syntax permitting the construction of phrases. Lies -- Do Monkeys Cry Leopard? There is also some anecdotal evidence that the monkeys lie to one another. They have been observed to lie by omission when it concerns food: When happening on a modest-sized store of food, a monkey may fail to give the standard call ordinarily given when finding food. Instead, the lone monkey may simply consume it. A more intriguing form of misrepresentation has been observed to occur when two neighboring monkey troops get into battles over territory. Some of these battles have ended when one of the monkeys gives the leopard call -- all the combatants scatter, climbing into trees to escape the predator, but there is in fact no leopard to be found. The monkeys may be lying to one another as a way of breaking up the fight (Cheney and Seyfarth 1991).(7) Psittacine Intelligence: Bird Brains No Longer One final example of animal intelligence concerns an African Grey Parrot named Alex who has been trained for quite a few years by Dr. Irene Pepperberg of the University of Arizona. Alex seems capable of grasping abstract concepts such as same, different, color, shape, and numbers (Pepperberg 1991). A videotape of Alex in action (WNET 1995) is particularly compelling; even a transcript of the conversation will give you a sense of what's been accomplished. Pay particular attention to Alex's ability to deal with, and reason about, abstract concepts and relations. Narrator. For 17 years, Alex and Dr. Irene Pepperberg have been working on the mental powers of parrots. Their efforts at the University of Arizona have produced some remarkable results. Dr. Pepperberg. What shape (holding up a red square)? Alex: Corners. Dr. Pepperberg: Yeah, how many corners? Say the whole thing. Alex: Four ... corners. Dr. Pepperberg: That's right, four corners. Good birdie. Alex: Wanna nut. Dr. Pepperberg: You can't have another nut. OK, what shape? (holding up a green triangle). Alex: Three ... corners. Dr. Pepperberg: That's right, three corners; that's a good boy. Now tell me, what color (holding the same green triangle)? Alex: Green. Dr. Pepperberg: Green, ok; here's a nut. OK, and what toy (holding up a toy truck)? Alex: Truck. Dr. Pepperberg: Truck; you're a good boy. OK, let's see if we can do something more difficult (holding two keys, one green plastic, one red metal; the green is slightly larger). Tell, me, how many? Alex: Two. Dr. Pepperberg: You're right, good parrot. Alex: Wanna nut. Dr. Pepperberg: Yes, you can have a nut. Alright, now look, tell me, what's different (same keys)? Alex: Color. Dr. Pepperberg: Good parrot. You're right, different color. Alright, now look, tell me, what color bigger? What color bigger (same keys)? Alex: Green. Dr. Pepperberg: Green; good boy. Green bigger. Good parrot. Oh you're a good boy today. Yes, three different questions on the same objects. Good parrot. Dr. Pepperberg: What we've found out is that a bird with a brain that is so different from mammals and primates can perform at the same level as chimpanzees and dolphins on all the tests that we've used and performs about at the level of a young, say, kindergarten-age child. This is an interesting bit of animal intelligence, in part because of the careful training and testing that's been done, suggesting that, unlike Hans, Alex really does understand certain concepts. This is all the more remarkable given the significant differences between bird and mammalian brains: Parrot brains are quite primitive by comparison, with a far smaller cerebral cortex. Consequences These varieties of animal intelligence illustrate two important points: First, they illuminate for us a number of other distinguishable points in the design space of intelligences. The narrow intelligences of birds and bees, clearly more limited than our own, still offer impressive evidence of understanding and reasoning about space. Primate intelligence provides evidence of symbolic reasoning that, although primitive, has some of the character of what seems central to our own intelligence. Clearly distinguishable from our own variety of intelligence, yet impressive on their own terms, these phenomena begin to suggest the depth and breadth of the natural intelligences that have evolved. Second, the fact that even some part of that intelligence appears similar to our own suggests the continuity of the design space. Human intelligence may be distinct, but it does not sit alone and unapproachable in the space. There is a large continuum of possibilities in that space; understanding some of our nearest neighbors may help us understand our own intelligence. Even admitting that there can be near neighbors offers a useful perspective. Primate Celebrities I can't leave the topic of animal intelligence without paying homage to one of the true unsung heroes of early AI research. Everyone in AI knows the monkey and bananas problem of course. But what's shocking, truly shocking, is that so many of us (myself included) don't know the real origins of this problem. Thus, for the generations of AI students (and faculty) who have struggled with the monkey and bananas problem without knowing its origins, I give you, the monkey (figure 7):(8) [FIGURE 7 PHOTO OMITTED] This one is named Rana; he and several other chimps were the subjects in an experiment done by gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler (1925) in 1918. Kohler was studying the intelligence of animals, with particular attention to the phenomenon of insight, and gave his subjects a number of problems to solve. Here's Grande, another of the chimps, hard at work on the most famous of them (figure 8). [FIGURE 8 PHOTO OMITTED] Thus, there really was a monkey and a stalk of bananas, and it all happened back in 1918. just to give you a feeling of how long ago that was, in 1918, Herb Simon had not yet won the Nobel Prize. Searching Design Space In this last segment of the article, I'd like to consider what parts of the design space of intelligence we might usefully explore more thoroughly. None of these are unpopulated; people are doing some forms of the work I'll propose. My suggestion is that there's plenty of room for others to join them and good reason to want to. Thinking Is Reliving One exploration is inspired by looking at alternatives to the usual view that thinking is a form of internal verbalization. We also seem to be able to visualize internally and do some of our thinking visually; we seem to "see" things internally. As one common example, if I were to ask whether an adult elephant could fit through your bedroom door, you would most likely attempt to answer it by reference to some mental image of the doorway and an elephant. There is more than anecdotal evidence to support the proposition that mental imaging is closely related to perception; a variety of experimental and clinical data also support the notion. As one example, patients who had suffered a loss of their left visual field as a consequence of a stroke showed an interesting form of mental imagery loss (Bisiach and Luzzatti 1978). These patients were asked to imagine themselves standing at the northern end of a town square that they knew well and asked to report the buildings that they could "see" in their mental image when looking south. Interestingly, they report what they would in fact be able to see out of the right half of their visual field; that is, they report buildings to the south and west but none to the east. Even more remarkably, if they are then asked to imagine themselves on the south end of the square looking north and asked to report on what they "see" in their mental image, they describe the buildings in what is now the right half of their visual field (that is, buildings to the north and east) and fail completely to report those on the west side of the square, even though they had mentioned them only moments earlier. The process going on in using the mind's eye to "see" is thus remarkably similar in some ways to what happens in using the anatomical eye to see. A second source of support for this view comes from the observation of like-modality interference. If I ask you to hold a visual image in your mind while you try to detect either a visual or an auditory stimulus, the ability to detect the visual stimulus is degraded, but detection of the auditory stimulus remains the same (Segal and Fusella 1970). A third source of evidence comes from experiments done in the 1970s that explored the nature of visual thinking. One well-known experiment involved showing subjects images that looked like figure 9 and then asking whether the two images were two views of the same structure, albeit rotated (Shepard and Metzler 1971). [FIGURE 9 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One interesting result of this work was that people seem to do a form of mental rotation on these images. The primary evidence for this is that response time is directly proportional to the amount of rotation necessary to get the figures in alignment. A second experiment in the same vein involved mental folding (Shepard and Feng 1972). The task here is to decide whether the two arrows will meet when each of the pieces of paper shown in figure 10 is folded into a cube. [FIGURE 10 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If you introspect as you do this task, I think you'll find that you are recreating in your mind the sequence of actions you would take were you to pick up the paper and fold it by hand. What are we to make of these experiments? I suggest two things: First, it may be time to take seriously (once again) the notion of visual reasoning, that is, reasoning with diagrams as things that we look at, whose visual nature is a central part of the representation. Second is the suggestion that thinking is a form of reliving. The usual interpretation of the data from the rotation and folding experiments is that we think visually. But consider some additional questions about the experiments: Why does it take time to do the rotation, and why does the paper get mentally folded one piece at a time? In the rotation experiment, why don't our eyes simply look at each block, compute a transform, then do the transformation in one step? I speculate that the reason is because our thought processes mimic real life: In solving the problem mentally, we're re-acting out what we would experience in the physical world. That's my second suggestion: Take seriously the notion of thinking as a form of reliving our perceptual and motor experiences. That is, thinking is not simply the decontextualized manipulation of abstract symbols (powerful though that may be). Some significant part of our thinking may be the reuse, or simulation, of our experiences in the environment. In this sense, vision and language are not simply input-output channels into a mind where the thinking gets done; they are instead a significant part of the thought process itself. The same may be true for our proprioreceptive and motor systems: In mentally folding the paper, we simulate the experience as it would be were we to have the paper in hand. There is, by the way, a plausible evolutionary rationale for this speculation that thinking is a form of reliving. It's another instance of functional conversion: Machinery developed for perception turns out to be useful for thinking. Put differently, visual thinking is the offline use of our ability to see. We're making use of machinery that happened to be there for another purpose, as has happened many times before in evolution.(9) One further, ambitious speculation concerns the neural machinery that might support such reliving: Ullman (1996) describes counterstreams, a pair of complementary, interconnected pathways traveling in opposite directions between the high-level and low-level visual areas. Roughly speaking, the pathway from the low-level area does data-driven processing, but the opposite pathway does model-driven processing. One possible mechanism for thinking as reliving is the dominant use of the model-driven pathway to recreate the sorts of excitation patterns that would result from the actual experience. One last speculation I'd like to make concerns the power of visual reasoning and diagrams. The suggestion here is that diagrams are powerful because they are, among other things, a form of what Johnson-Laird (1983) called reasoning in the model. Roughly speaking, that's the idea that some of the reasoning we do is not carried out in the formal abstract terms of predicate calculus but is instead done by creating for ourselves a concrete miniworld where we carry out mental actions and then examine the results. One familiar example is the use of diagrams when proving theorems in geometry. The intent is to get a proof of a perfectly general statement, yet it's much easier to do with a concrete, specific model, one that we can manipulate and then examine to read off the answers. Consider, for example, the hypothesis that any triangle can be shown to be the union of two right triangles. We might start by drawing a triangle (figure 11a). The proof of course calls for any triangle, but we find it much easier with a concrete one in front of us. [FIGURE 11A ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] We might then play with it a bit and eventually hit on the idea of dropping a perpendicular figure 11b). [FIGURE 11B ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Wary of a of, from a single concrete example, we might try a number of other triangles and eventually come up with a formal abstract proof. But it's often a lot easier to have a concrete example to work with, manipulate, and then examine the results of our manipulations. What works for something as plainly visual as geometric theorems also seems to work for things that are not nearly so visual, such as syllogisms. Consider these sentences describing a group of people (Johnson-Laird 1983, p. 5): Some of the children have balloons. Everyone with a balloon has a party hat. There's evidence that when asked to determine the logical consequences of these statements, people imagine a concrete instance of a room and some finite collection of people, then examine it to determine the answer. The good news about any concrete example is its concreteness; the bad news is its concreteness, that is, its lack of generality -- as many a high school geometry student has discovered when he/she drew an insufficiently general diagram. For diagrams in particular, the problem is compelling: There's no such thing as an approximate diagram. Every line drawn has a precise length, every angle a precise measure. The good news is that diagrams make everything explicit; the bad news is that they can't possibly avoid it. Yet there are times when we'd like to marry the virtues of reasoning in a concrete diagram with the generality that would allow us to draw a line that was about three inches long or long enough to reach this other line. That's my last speculation: There may be ways to marry the concreteness of reasoning in the model with the power and generality of abstraction. One early step in this direction is discussed in Stahov, Davis, and Shrobe (1996), who discuss how a specific diagram can automatically be annotated with constraints that capture the appropriate general relationships among its parts, but there is plainly much more to be done. Summary With that, let me summarize. I want to suggest that intelligence are many things, and this is true in several senses. Even within AI, and even with the subfield of inference, intelligence has been conceived of in a variety of ways, including the logical perspective, which considers it a part of mathematical logic, and the psychological perspective, which considers it an empirical phenomenon from the natural world. One way to get a synthesis of these numerous views is to conceive of AI as the study of the design space of intelligences. I find this an inspiring way to conceive of our field, in part because of its inherent plurality of views and in part because it encourages us to explore broadly and deeply about all the full range of that space. We have also explored how human intelligence is a natural artifact, the result of the process of evolution and its parallel, opportunistic exploration of niches in the design space. As a result, it is likely to bear all the hallmarks of any product of that process -- it is likely to be layered, multifaceted, burdened with vestigal components, and rather messy. This is a second sense in which intelligence are many things -- it is composed of the many elements that have been thrown together over evolutionary timescales. Because of the origins of intelligence and its resulting character, AI as a discipline is likely to have more in common with biology and anatomy than it does with mathematics or physics. We may be a long time collecting a wide variety of mechanisms rather than coming upon a few minimalist principles. In exploring inhuman problem solving, we saw that animal intelligence seems to fit in some narrowly constrained niches, particularly for the birds and bees, but for primates (and perhaps parrots), there are some broader varieties of animal intelligence. These other varieties of intelligence illustrate a number of other distinguishable points in the design space of intelligences, suggesting the depth and breadth of the natural intelligences that have evolved and indicating the continuity of that design space. Finally, I tried to suggest that there are some niches in the design space of intelligences that are currently underexplored. There is, for example, the speculation that thinking is in part visual, and if so, it might prove very useful to develop representations and reasoning mechanisms that reason with diagrams (not just about them) and that take seriously their visual nature. I speculated that thinking may be a form of reliving, that re-acting out what we have experienced is one powerful way to think about, and solve problems in, the world. And finally, I suggested that it may prove useful to marry the concreteness of reasoning in a model with the power that arises from reasoning abstractly and generally. Notes (1.) Table 1 and some of the text following is from Davis, Shrobe, and Szolovits (1993). (2.) For a detailed exploration of the consequences and their potentially disquieting implications, see Dennett (1995). (3.) In brief, he suggests that it arises from the near-universal habit of women carrying babies in their left arms, probably because the maternal heartbeat is easier for the baby to hear on that side. This kept their right arms free for throwing. Hence the first major league hunter-pitcher may have been what he calls the throwing madonna (not incidentally, the title of his book). (4.) That's why the possibility of monkeys "lying" to one another (see later discussion) is so intriguing -- precisely because it's a break in the perception-action link. (5.) Humphrey (1976) also touches on this idea. (6.) Oskar Phungst, who determined the real nature of Hans's skill, was able to mimic it so successfully that he could pretend to be a mentalist, "reading the mind" of someone thinking of a number: Pfungst simply tapped until he saw the subtle changes in posture that were unconscious to the subject (Rosenthal 1966). (7.) For a countervailing view on the question of animal lying, see the chapter by Nicholas Mackintosh in Khalfa (1994). (8.) A true-life anecdote concerning life in Cambridge: When I went to a photographer to have this photo turned into a slide, the man behind the counter (probably an underpaid psychology graduate student) looked at the old book with some interest, then laughed at the photo I wanted reproduced. I pretended to chide him, pointing out that the photo was of a famous contributor to psychological theory. "A famous contributor to psychology?" he said. "Then I know who it is." "Who?" I asked. "Why that's Noam Chimpsky, of course," he replied. Yes, it really happened, just that way. (9.) There has been significant controversy concerning the exact nature and status of mental images; see, for example, Farah (1988), who reviews some of the alternative theories as well as neuropsychological evidence for the reality of mental images. 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The Good Enuf Calculi of Evolving Control Systems: Evolution Is Not Engineering. American Journal of Physiology 242:R173-R177. Pepperberg, I. R. 1991. A Communicative Approach to Animal Cognition: A Study of Conceptual Abilities of an African Grey Parrot. In Cognitive Ethology, ed. C. Ristau, 153-186. Hillsdale, Nj.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Popper, K. R. 1985. Evolutionary Epistemology. In Popper Selections, ed. D. Miller, 78-86. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Rosenbloom, P.; Laird, J.; Newell, A., eds. 1993. The SOAR Papers: Research on Integrated Intelligence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Rosenthal, R. 1966. Experimenter Effects in Behavioral Research. New York: Meredith. Segal S., and Fusella, V. 1970. Influence of Imaged Pictures and Sounds on Detection of Visual and Auditory Signals. Joumal of Experimental Psychology 83:458-464. Shepard, R. N., and Feng, C. 1972. A Chronometric Study of Mental Paper Folding. Cognitive Psychology 3:228-243. Shepard, R. N., and Metzler, J. 1971. Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects. Science 171:701-703. Sloman, A. 1994. Explorations in Design Space. In Proceedings of the Eleventh European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ed. A. G. Cohn, 578-582. New York: Wiley. Stahovich T.; Davis, R.; and Shrobe, H. 1996. Generating Multiple New Designs from a Sketch. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1022-1029. Menlo Park, Calif.: American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Swisher, C. C., III; Rink, W. J.; Anton, S. C.; Schwarcz, H. P.; Curtis, G. H.; Suprijo, A.; and Widiasmoro. Latest Homo Erectus of JAVA: Potential Contemporaneity with Homo Sapiens in Southeast Asia. Science 274(5294): 1870. Ullman, S. 1996. High-Level Vision. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. WNET. 1995. Parrots: Look Who's Talking. New York: Nature Video Library. Videocassette. Randall Davis is a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he works on model-based reasoning systems for engineering design, problem solving, and troubleshooting. He has also been active in the area of intellectual property and software, serving on a number of government studies and as an adviser to the court in legal cases. He received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He serves on several editorial boards, including those for Artificial Intelligence and AI in Engineering. In 1990, he was named a founding fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and served as president of the association from 1995-1997. His e-mail address is davis at ai.mit.edu. [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and spread them.] From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 5 19:45:16 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 15:45:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: How Stress Causes Violence, and Vice Versa Message-ID: How Stress Causes Violence, and Vice Versa http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2004-10-04-1 Identification of positive feedback loop could lead to better drug treatments for aggression By Gabe Romain Betterhumans Staff 10/4/2004 3:25 PM A positive feedback loop for stress and aggression has been identified that helps explain such behaviors as road rage and may allow new drug interventions for violent behavior. A new study on rats has found that there seems to be a positive feedback loop between stress hormones called [3]glucocorticoids and the [4]hypothalamus--a brain area associated with a variety of emotions including aggression. The findings, by researchers from the Netherlands and Hungary, shed new light on the biological underpinnings of aggression and could lead to novel drug-based treatments for pathological violence. "The high stress levels of glucocorticoids, rapidly produced by the challenge-induced activation of brain mechanisms controlling aggression, may in turn produce a fast facilitation of the very same brain mechanisms," say the researchers. "Such mutual facilitation could constitute a vicious circle, which would explain why aggressive behavior escalates so easily, and why it is so difficult to stop once it has started." Vicious circle Glucocorticoids are a class of [5]steroid hormones. The most abundant glucocorticoid found in most organisms is [6]corticosterone, which is involved in regulating metabolism, immune reactions and stress responses. For their study, the researchers hooked up electrodes to the brains of rats and then stimulated the region of the hypothalamus that is involved in aggression. The stimulation caused the rats to release corticosterone, which in turn caused the rats to display behaviors associated with aggression, such as teeth chattering. The results of the study indicate a fast-acting feedback loop--the mechanism works in both directions--and suggests that stress and aggression may be mutually reinforcing. "It is well known that these stress hormones, in part by mobilizing energy reserves, prepare the physiology of the body to fight or flee during stress," says lead researcher Menno Kruk, at the [7]Leiden/Amsterdam Center for Drug Research. "Now it appears that the very same hormones 'talk back' to the brain in order to facilitate fighting." Primed for aggression The researchers say that their findings suggest that rapid increases in corticosterone caused by stressors unrelated to fighting may precipitate violent behavior by lowering thresholds for attack. Therefore, a person could be "primed" for violent behavior if they were previously exposed to stressful situations. A bad day at work, for example, could prime someone for violence towards other drivers while heading home. Further, an anticipatory increase in corticosterone in environments previously associated with aggression could lead to place-dependent violent tendencies in people who are nonviolent in other settings, say the researchers. Treatments for pathological violence and poor impulse control have proven ineffective, possibly because the stress response that accompanies stressful situations may cancel out any beneficial effects of therapies aimed at reducing violent behavior. Although more studies are needed, the researchers speculate that stress-regulating drugs that help to lower acute stress-precipitated violence could be a viable treatment option. The research is reported in the journal [8]Behavioral Neuroscience ([9]read full text). References 3. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucocorticoid 4. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothalamus 5. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid_hormone 6. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corticosterone 7. http://www.lacdr.nl/ 8. http://www.apa.org/journals/bne.html 9. http://www.apa.org/journals/bne/press_releases/october_2004/bne11851062.pdf From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 6 14:20:06 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 10:20:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WT: (Homeland Security Pork) Veronique de Rugy: What's Kerry's plan? Message-ID: Veronique de Rugy: What's Kerry's plan? http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20041005-095953-7690r Published October 6, 2004 [Mr. Mencken would be very pleased at the predictable pork barrell. Predictably, too, very little security money is being on cyberterrorism. Does anyone know where one can get a summary of the various opinions on this issue. *Can* the Internet be crippled, for example, by massive denial of service attacks?] On the rare occasions that presidential candidate John Kerry talks about homeland security, he criticizes President Bush for not spending enough money on it. This is surprising because proposed funding of homeland security for fiscal year 2005 is $47 billion, a staggering 180 percent increase since 2001. Mr. Kerry's knee-jerk instinct to spend more is hardly unusual. Too many politicians in Washington focus on the level of spending and very few bother considering the quality of spending. Homeland security should be different. The nation is not endangered when politicians misallocate highway funds, but there will be deadly consequences if cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment take a back seat to pork barrel antics when anti-terrorism funds are allocated. Fortunately, some lawmakers are beginning to focus on quality over quantity. House leaders, for instance, want to overhaul the way the federal government distributes anti-terrorism funds. The Senate, meanwhile, stopped Democrats from adding $20 billion to the $33 billion fiscal year 2005 homeland security spending bill. Cost-benefit analysis is difficult because homeland security spending continues to be an elusive figure. A large portion of homeland security spending -- $20 billion -- takes place outside of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), much of it through agencies known for chronic wasteful spending. Moreover, only $27 billion of the DHS's $40 billion budget will go to homeland security activities. The remaining $13 billion will finance non-homeland security activities like the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) food and shelter program. This haphazard budget system is useful to politicians. Spending initiatives that Congress did not approve when they were outside of DHS are likely to sail through because of their DHS affiliation. For instance, the Senate recently attached $2.9 billion to the fiscal year 2005 homeland security bill in disaster aid for farm states. Thankfully, Republicans blocked Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat from New Jersey, from adding another $100 million for fishing enforcement and Coast Guard boater assistance. More worrisome, much of homeland security money is spent on grants to state and local governments that won't have any impact on terrorism. The formula used by DHS to spread federal funds provides every state with a guaranteed minimum amount regardless of risk or need. So, states in rural areas receive a disproportionate amount of grant money. Incredibly, among the top 10 money-receiving states, only the District of Columbia also appears on a list of the top 10 most at-risk places. And while state officials are fighting over who will get the biggest share of the security money, reports demonstrate that they are spending these grants on pet projects that have little to do with homeland security. The District used the region's first wave of DHS aid to fund leather jackets for its police force, a computerized car towing system from the mayor's wish list and summer jobs programs. While Democrats seem content with the status quo, even hoping to increase the cash flows allocated in this manner, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Chris Cox, a Republican from California, is fighting to change the criteria used to allocate these funds so that they are based on the risk of terrorist attacks and the magnitude of potential damages. But, Democrats like Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, treat these funds like another entitlement program and vehemently oppose this reform. Finally, large amounts are directed to addressing risks that are obsolete, which is unlikely the most efficient use of federal resources. After September 11, Congress rushed to federalize security screeners at almost all U.S. airports by creating the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Three years after the federal takeover, the 45,000-employee bureaucracy has been inundated with complaints about its performance including a DHS audit that showed that passenger screening by the TSA doesn't keep explosives and weapons off commercial aircraft. This is not trivial since the bureaucracy will cost $5.3 billion in fiscal year 2005. Pointing out TSA's failures, House Aviation Subcommittee Chairman John Mica, Republican of Florida, advocates the return of all airport security screener jobs to the private sector. By law, this November airport managers will be allowed to ask for private screeners under federal supervision. Yet Democrats, who have been aggressively trying to create as many new unionized federal employees as they could, already announced that they will stop airports from booting TSA's workers. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, even introduced a bill to repeal the opt-out provision. Spreading pork, opposing rational cost-benefit analysis and creating unionized federal employees won't make us safer. Is it too much to ask that homeland security spending actually have some connection with policies that reduce the threat of terrorism? Is creating union jobs more important than having the best screeners possible? Let's hope Mr. Kerry is forced to answer these questions during the second presidential debate. Veronique de Rugy is a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 6 14:35:01 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 10:35:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wired 12.10: The Crusade Against Evolution Message-ID: The Crusade Against Evolution http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution_pr.html [The Discovery Institute is where Phil Gold works or used to work. There's a reply by George Gilder, another Conservative, at the end.] In the beginning there was Darwin. And then there was intelligent design. How the next generation of "creation science" is invading America's classrooms. By Evan Ratliff On a spring day two years ago, in a downtown Columbus auditorium, the Ohio State Board of Education took up the question of how to teach the theory of evolution in public schools. A panel of four experts - two who believe in evolution, two who question it - debated whether an antievolution theory known as intelligent design should be allowed into the classroom. This is an issue, of course, that was supposed to have been settled long ago. But 140 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 75 years after John Scopes taught natural selection to a biology class in Tennessee, and 15 years after the US Supreme Court ruled against a Louisiana law mandating equal time for creationism, the question of how to teach the theory of evolution was being reopened here in Ohio. The two-hour forum drew chanting protesters and a police escort for the school board members. Two scientists, biologist Ken Miller from Brown University and physicist Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University two hours north in Cleveland, defended evolution. On the other side of the dais were two representatives from the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the main sponsor and promoter of intelligent design: Stephen Meyer, a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University's School of Ministry and director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and Jonathan Wells, a biologist, Discovery fellow, and author of Icons of Evolution, a 2000 book castigating textbook treatments of evolution. Krauss and Miller methodically presented their case against ID. "By no definition of any modern scientist is intelligent design science," Krauss concluded, "and it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it." Meyer and Wells took the typical intelligent design line: Biological life contains elements so complex - the mammalian blood-clotting mechanism, the bacterial flagellum - that they cannot be explained by natural selection. And so, the theory goes, we must be products of an intelligent designer. Creationists call that creator God, but proponents of intelligent design studiously avoid the G-word - and never point to the Bible for answers. Instead, ID believers speak the language of science to argue that Darwinian evolution is crumbling. The debate's two-on-two format, with its appearance of equal sides, played right into the ID strategy - create the impression that this very complicated issue could be seen from two entirely rational yet opposing views. "This is a controversial subject," Meyer told the audience. "When two groups of experts disagree about a controversial subject that intersects with the public-school science curriculum, the students should be permitted to learn about both perspectives. We call this the 'teach the controversy' approach." Since the debate, "teach the controversy" has become the rallying cry of the national intelligent-design movement, and Ohio has become the leading battleground. Several months after the debate, the Ohio school board voted to change state science standards, mandating that biology teachers "critically analyze" evolutionary theory. This fall, teachers will adjust their lesson plans and begin doing just that. In some cases, that means introducing the basic tenets of intelligent design. One of the state's sample lessons looks as though it were lifted from an ID textbook. It's the biggest victory so far for the Discovery Institute. "Our opponents would say that these are a bunch of know-nothing people on a state board," says Meyer. "We think it shows that our Darwinist colleagues have a real problem now." But scientists aren't buying it. What Meyer calls "biology for the information age," they call creationism in a lab coat. ID's core scientific principles - laid out in the mid-1990s by a biochemist and a mathematician - have been thoroughly dismissed on the grounds that Darwin's theories can account for complexity, that ID relies on misunderstandings of evolution and flimsy probability calculations, and that it proposes no testable explanations. As the Ohio debate revealed, however, the Discovery Institute doesn't need the favor of the scientific establishment to prevail in the public arena. Over the past decade, Discovery has gained ground in schools, op-ed pages, talk radio, and congressional resolutions as a "legitimate" alternative to evolution. ID is playing a central role in biology curricula and textbook controversies around the country. The institute and its supporters have taken the "teach the controversy" message to Alabama, Arizona, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, and Texas. The ID movement's rhetorical strategy - better to appear scientific than holy - has turned the evolution debate upside down. ID proponents quote Darwin, cite the Scopes monkey trial, talk of "scientific objectivity," then in the same breath declare that extraterrestrials might have designed life on Earth. It may seem counterintuitive, but the strategy is meticulously premeditated, and it's working as planned. The debate over Darwin is back, and coming to a 10th-grade biology class near you. At its heart, intelligent design is a revival of an argument made by British philosopher William Paley in 1802. In Natural Theology, the Anglican archdeacon suggested that the complexity of biological structures defied any explanation but a designer: God. Paley imagined finding a stone and a watch in a field. The watch, unlike the stone, appears to have been purposely assembled and wouldn't function without its precise combination of parts. "The inference," he wrote, "is inevitable, that the watch must have a maker." The same logic, he concluded, applied to biological structures like the vertebrate eye. Its complexity implied design. Fifty years later, Darwin directly answered Paley's "argument to complexity." Evolution by natural selection, he argued in Origin of Species, could create the appearance of design. Darwin - and 100-plus years of evolutionary science after him - seemed to knock Paley into the dustbin of history. In the American public arena, Paley's design argument has long been supplanted by biblical creationism. In the 1970s and 1980s, that movement recast the Bible version in the language of scientific inquiry - as "creation science" - and won legislative victories requiring "equal time" in some states. That is, until 1987, when the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's law. Because creation science relies on biblical texts, the court reasoned, it "lacked a clear secular purpose" and violated the First Amendment clause prohibiting the establishment of religion. Since then, evolution has been the law of the land in US schools - if not always the local choice. Paley re-emerged in the mid-1990s, however, when a pair of scientists reconstituted his ideas in an area beyond Darwin's ken: molecular biology. In his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe contended that natural selection can't explain the "irreducible complexity" of molecular mechanisms like the bacterial flagellum, because its integrated parts offer no selective advantages on their own. Two years later, in The Design Inference, William Dembski, a philosopher and mathematician at Baylor University, proposed that any biological system exhibiting "information" that is both "complex" (highly improbable) and "specified" (serving a particular function) cannot be a product of chance or natural law. The only remaining option is an intelligent designer - whether God or an alien life force. These ideas became the cornerstones of ID, and Behe proclaimed the evidence for design to be "one of the greatest achievements in the history of science." The scientific rationale behind intelligent design was being developed just as antievolution sentiment seemed to be bubbling up. In 1991, UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson published Darwin On Trial, an influential antievolution book that dispensed with biblical creation accounts while uniting antievolutionists under a single, secular-sounding banner: intelligent design. In subsequent books, Johnson presents not just antievolution arguments but a broader opposition to the "philosophy of scientific materialism" - the assumption (known to scientists as "methodological materialism") that all events have material, rather than supernatural, explanations. To defeat it, he offers a strategy that would be familiar in the divisive world of politics, called "the wedge." Like a wedge inserted into a tree trunk, cracks in Darwinian theory can be used to "split the trunk," eventually overturning scientific materialism itself. That's where Discovery comes in. The institute was founded as a conservative think tank in 1990 by longtime friends and former Harvard roommates Bruce Chapman - director of the census bureau during the Reagan administration - and technofuturist author George Gilder. "The institute is futurist and rebellious, and it's prophetic," says Gilder. "It has a science and technology orientation in a contrarian spirit" (see "Biocosm," facing page). In 1994, Discovery added ID to its list of contrarian causes, which included everything from transportation to bioethics. Chapman hired Meyer, who studied origin-of-life issues at Cambridge University, and the institute signed Johnson - whom Chapman calls "the real godfather of the intelligent design movement - as an adviser and adopted the wedge. For Discovery, the "thin end" of the wedge - according to a fundraising document leaked on the Web in 1999 - is the scientific work of Johnson, Behe, Dembski, and others. The next step involves "publicity and opinion-making." The final goals: "a direct confrontation with the advocates of material science" and "possible legal assistance in response to integration of design theory into public school science curricula." Step one has made almost no headway with evolutionists - the near-universal majority of scientists with an opinion on the matter. But that, say Discovery's critics, is not the goal. "Ultimately, they have an evangelical Christian message that they want to push," says Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at Florida State. "Intelligent design is the hook." It's a lot easier to skip straight to steps two and three, and sound scientific in a public forum, than to deal with the rigor of the scientific community. "It starts with education," Johnson told me, referring to high school curricula. "That's where the public can have a voice. The universities and the scientific world do not recognize freedom of expression on this issue." Meanwhile, like any champion of a heretical scientific idea, ID's supporters see themselves as renegades, storming the gates of orthodoxy. "We all have a deep sense of indignation," says Meyer, "that the wool is being pulled over the public's eyes." The buzz phrase most often heard in the institute's offices is academic freedom. "My hackles go up on the academic freedom issue," Chapman says. "You should be allowed in the sciences to ask questions and posit alternative theories." None of this impresses the majority of the science world. "They have not been able to convince even a tiny amount of the scientific community," says Ken Miller. "They have not been able to win the marketplace of ideas." And yet, the Discovery Institute's appeals to academic freedom create a kind of catch-22. If scientists ignore the ID movement, their silence is offered as further evidence of a conspiracy. If they join in, they risk reinforcing the perception of a battle between equal sides. Most scientists choose to remain silent. "Where the scientific community has been at fault," says Krauss, "is in assuming that these people are harmless, like flat-earthers. They don't realize that they are well organized, and that they have a political agenda." Taped to the wall of Eugenie Scott's windowless office at the National Center for Science Education on the outskirts of Oakland, California, is a chart titled "Current Flare-Ups." It's a list of places where the teaching of evolution is under attack, from California to Georgia to Rio de Janeiro. As director of the center, which defends evolution in teaching controversies around the country, Scott has watched creationism up close for 30 years. ID, in her view, is the most highly evolved form of creationism to date. "They've been enormously effective compared to the more traditional creationists, who have greater numbers and much larger budgets," she says. Scott credits the blueprint laid out by Johnson, who realized that to win in the court of public opinion, ID needed only to cast reasonable doubt on evolution. "He said, 'Don't get involved in details, don't get involved in fact claims,'" says Scott. "'Forget about the age of Earth, forget about the flood, don't mention the Bible.'" The goal, she says, is "to focus on the big idea that evolution is inadequate. Intelligent design doesn't really explain anything. It says that evolution can't explain things. Everything else is hand-waving." The movement's first test of Johnson's strategies began in 1999, when the Kansas Board of Education voted to remove evolution from the state's science standards. The decision, backed by traditional creationists, touched off a fiery debate, and the board eventually reversed itself after several antievolution members lost reelection bids. ID proponents used the melee as cover to launch their own initiative. A Kansas group called IDNet nearly pushed through its own textbook in a local school district. Two years later, the Discovery Institute earned its first major political victory when US senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) inserted language written by Johnson into the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The clause, eventually cut from the bill and placed in a nonbinding report, called for school curricula to "help students understand the full range of scientific views" on topics "that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution)." As the institute was demonstrating its Beltway clout, a pro-ID group called Science Excellence for All Ohioans fueled a brewing local controversy. SEAO - consisting of a few part-time activists, a Web site, and a mailing list - began agitating to have ID inserted into Ohio's 10th-grade-biology standards. In the process, they attracted the attention of a few receptive school board members. When the board proposed the two-on-two debate and invited Discovery, Meyer and company jumped at the opportunity. Meyer, whom Gilder calls the institute's resident "polymath," came armed with the Santorum amendment, which he read aloud for the school board. He was bringing a message from Washington: Teach the controversy. "We framed the issue quite differently than our supporters," says Meyer. The approach put pro-ID Ohioans on firmer rhetorical ground: Evolution should of course be taught, but "objectively." Hearing Meyer's suggestion, says Doug Rudy, a software engineer and SEAO's director, "we all sat back and said, Yeah, that's the way to go." Back in Seattle, around the corner from the Discovery Institute, Meyer offers some peer-reviewed evidence that there truly is a controversy that must be taught. "The Darwinists are bluffing," he says over a plate of oysters at a downtown seafood restaurant. "They have the science of the steam engine era, and it's not keeping up with the biology of the information age." Meyer hands me a recent issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews with an article by Carl Woese, an eminent microbiologist at the University of Illinois. In it, Woese decries the failure of reductionist biology - the tendency to look at systems as merely the sum of their parts - to keep up with the developments of molecular biology. Meyer says the conclusion of Woese's argument is that the Darwinian emperor has no clothes. It's a page out of the antievolution playbook: using evolutionary biology's own literature against it, selectively quoting from the likes of Stephen Jay Gould to illustrate natural selection's downfalls. The institute marshals journal articles discussing evolution to provide policymakers with evidence of the raging controversy surrounding the issue. Woese scoffs at Meyer's claim when I call to ask him about the paper. "To say that my criticism of Darwinists says that evolutionists have no clothes," Woese says, "is like saying that Einstein is criticizing Newton, therefore Newtonian physics is wrong." Debates about evolution's mechanisms, he continues, don't amount to challenges to the theory. And intelligent design "is not science. It makes no predictions and doesn't offer any explanation whatsoever, except for 'God did it.'" Of course Meyer happily acknowledges that Woese is an ardent evolutionist. The institute doesn't need to impress Woese or his peers; it can simply co-opt the vocabulary of science - "academic freedom," "scientific objectivity," "teach the controversy" - and redirect it to a public trying to reconcile what appear to be two contradictory scientific views. By appealing to a sense of fairness, ID finds a place at the political table, and by merely entering the debate it can claim victory. "We don't need to win every argument to be a success," Meyer says. "We're trying to validate a discussion that's been long suppressed." This is precisely what happened in Ohio. "I'm not a PhD in biology," says board member Michael Cochran. "But when I have X number of PhD experts telling me this, and X number telling me the opposite, the answer is probably somewhere between the two." An exasperated Krauss claims that a truly representative debate would have had 10,000 pro-evolution scientists against two Discovery executives. "What these people want is for there to be a debate," says Krauss. "People in the audience say, Hey, these people sound reasonable. They argue, 'People have different opinions, we should present those opinions in school.' That is nonsense. Some people have opinions that the Holocaust never happened, but we don't teach that in history." Eventually, the Ohio board approved a standard mandating that students learn to "describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." Proclaiming victory, Johnson barnstormed Ohio churches soon after notifying congregations of a new, ID-friendly standard. In response, anxious board members added a clause stating that the standard "does not mandate the teaching or testing of intelligent design." Both sides claimed victory. A press release from IDNet trumpeted the mere inclusion of the phrase intelligent design, saying that "the implication of the statement is that the 'teaching or testing of intelligent design' is permitted." Some pro-evolution scientists, meanwhile, say there's nothing wrong with teaching students how to scrutinize theory. "I don't have a problem with that," says Patricia Princehouse, a professor at Case Western Reserve and an outspoken opponent of ID. "Critical analysis is exactly what scientists do." The good feelings didn't last long. Early this year, a board-appointed committee unveiled sample lessons that laid out the kind of evolution questions students should debate. The models appeared to lift their examples from Wells' book Icons of Evolution. "When I first saw it, I was speechless," says Princehouse. With a PhD in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley, Wells has the kind of cred that intelligent design proponents love to cite. But, as ID opponents enjoy pointing out, he's also a follower of Sun Myung Moon and once declared that Moon's prayers "convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism." Icons attempts to discredit commonly used examples of evolution, like Darwin's finches and peppered moths. Writing in Nature, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne called Icons stealth creationism that "strives to debunk Darwinism using the familiar rhetoric of biblical creationists, including scientific quotations out of context, incomplete summaries of research, and muddled arguments." After months of uproar, the most obvious Icons-inspired lessons were removed. But scientists remain furious. "The ones they left in are still arguments for special creation - but you'd have to know the literature to understand what they are saying. They've used so much technical jargon that anybody who doesn't know a whole lot of evolutionary biology looks at it and says 'It sounds scientific to me, what's the matter with it?'" says Princehouse. "As a friend of mine said, it takes a half a second for a baby to throw up all over your sweater. It takes hours to get it clean." As Ohio teachers prepare their lessons for the coming year, the question must be asked: Why the fuss over an optional lesson plan or two? After all, both sides agree that the new biology standards - in which 10 evolution lessons replace standards that failed to mention evolution at all - are a vast improvement. The answer: In an era when the government is pouring billions into biology, and when stem cells and genetically modified food are front-page news, spending even a small part of the curriculum on bogus criticisms of evolution is arguably more detrimental now than any time in history. Ironically, says Ohio State University biology professor Steve Rissing, the education debate coincides with Ohio's efforts to lure biotech companies. "How can we do that when our high school biology is failing us?" he says. "Our cornfields are gleaming with GMO corn. There's a fundamental disconnect there." Intelligent design advocates say that teaching students to "critically analyze" evolution will help give them the skills to "see both sides" of all scientific issues. And if the Discovery Institute execs have their way, those skills will be used to reconsider the philosophy of modern science itself - which they blame for everything from divorce to abortion to the insanity defense. "Our culture has been deeply influenced by materialist thought," says Meyer. "We think it's deeply destructive, and we think it's false. And we mean to overturn it." It's mid-July, and the Ohio school board is about to hold its final meeting before classes start this year. There's nothing about intelligent design on the agenda. The debate was settled months ago. And yet, Princehouse, Rissing, and two other scientists rise to speak during the "non-agenda" public testimony portion. One by one, the scientists recite their litany of objections: The model lesson plan is still based on concepts from ID literature; the ACLU is considering to sue to stop it; the National Academy of Sciences opposes it as unscientific. "This is my last time," says Rissing, "as someone who has studied science and the process of evolution for 25 years, to say I perceive that my children and I are suffering injuries based on a flawed lesson plan that this board has passed." During a heated question-and-answer session, one board member accuses the scientists of posturing for me, the only reporter in the audience. Michael Cochran challenges the scientists to cite any testimony that the board hadn't already heard "ad infinitum." Another board member, Deborah Owens-Fink, declares the issue already closed. "We've listened to experts on both sides of this for three years," she says. "Ultimately, the question of what students should learn "is decided in a democracy, not by any one group of experts." The notion is noble enough: In a democracy, every idea gets heard. But in science, not all theories are equal. Those that survive decades - centuries - of scientific scrutiny end up in classrooms, and those that don't are discarded. The intelligent design movement is using scientific rhetoric to bypass scientific scrutiny. And when science education is decided by charm and stage presence, the Discovery Institute wins. ------ The technogeek guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and explains why he is a believer. By George Gilder Our high schools are among the worst performers per dollar in the world - especially in math and science. Our biology classes, in particular, espouse anti-industrial propaganda about global warming and the impact of DDT on the eggshells of eagles while telling just-so stories about the random progression from primordial soup to Britney Spears. In a self-refuting materialist superstition, teachers deny the role of ideas and purposes in evolution and hence implicitly in their own thought. The Darwinist materialist paradigm, however, is about to face the same revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago. Just as physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed, but a baffling quantum arena accessible only through mathematics, so too are biologists coming to understand that the cell is not a simple lump of protoplasm, as Charles Darwin believed. It's a complex information-processing machine comprising tens of thousands of proteins arranged in fabulously intricate algorithms of communication and synthesis. The human body contains some 60 trillion cells. Each one stores information in DNA codes, processes and replicates it in three forms of RNA and thousands of supporting enzymes, exquisitely supplies the system with energy, and seals it in semipermeable phospholipid membranes. It is a process subject to the mathematical theory of information, which shows that even mutations occurring in cells at the gigahertz pace of a Pentium 4 and selected at the rate of a Google search couldn't beget the intricate interwoven fabric of structure and function of a human being in such a short amount of time. Natural selection should be taught for its important role in the adaption of species, but Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science. What is the alternative? Intelligent design at least asks the right questions. In a world of science that still falls short of a rigorous theory of human consciousness or of the big bang, intelligent design theory begins by recognizing that everywhere in nature, information is hierarchical and precedes its embodiment. The concept precedes the concrete. The contrary notion that the world of mind, including science itself, bubbled up randomly from a prebiotic brew has inspired all the reductionist futilities of the 20th century, from Marx's obtuse materialism to environmental weather panic to zero-sum Malthusian fears over population. In biology classes, our students are not learning the largely mathematical facts of 21st-century science; they're imbibing the consolations of a faith-driven 19th-century materialist myth. George Gilder publishes the Gilder Technology Report and is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Contributing editor Evan Ratliff (eratliff at atavistic.org) wrote about sugar substitutes in Wired 11.11. He is the coauthor of Safe, a book on the science and technology of antiterrorism, to be published next year. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 6 16:46:33 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 12:46:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Is Bush Wired?: The Voice in Bush's Ear Message-ID: The Voice in Bush's Ear http://www.isbushwired.com/ Is he prompted through an earpiece? Tuesday, October 05, 2004 This site is a clearinghouse for discussion of whether President Bush uses an earpiece through which he's fed lines and cues by offstage advisers. His speech rhythms suggest this, as do some of his word choices and interjections, and his constantly shifting eye movements while speaking. And there's another form of evidence: Television viewers have sometimes heard another voice speaking Bush's words before he says them. When Bush spoke at D-Day ceremonies in France last June, for example, [2]viewers watching on CNN, Fox and MSNBC, including mediachannel.org's Danny Schechter, [3]were startled to hear another voice speaking Bush's words as if to prompt him. Some said this [4]continued into a q & a. And on the night of 9/11, when Bush appeared on television to address the nation, viewers of one television station in Quincy, Massachusetts heard another voice speaking, slowly and carefully, a few words at a time -- words which were then recited by the president. The voice was nondescript, male, definitely not the president's voice, says Quincy resident Robyn Miller. This went on for at least four sentences, she says, and then the "extra" feed was cut off. Reporters should have looked into this long ago. But for the past four years through Bush's first debate last week with John Kerry -- and even in the days after the debate -- the press has ignored the evidence of its eyes and ears, and failed to ask whether the president secretly relies on unseen handlers for some public events, including press conferences. [5]If Bush wore a hidden earpiece to cheat in this way during his first debate with John Kerry (however unsuccessfully), it is urgent that the fraud be exposed before the election. [6]The agreement set by the debate commission barred shots of the candidates from the rear of the stage. The networks refused to comply with the camera angle rules, broadcasting occasional shots of the candidates from behind. Many viewers thus saw a squarish bulge the size of a large battery pack under the back of Bush's suit jacket, with an S-shaped cord appearing to snake up the right side of his back. Several blogs have carried speculation that it was an audio receiver. A poster to NYCIndymedia says, "Think 'passive transducer' earpiece." He writes, "The bulges under his jacket are likely receiver/repeaters that pick up the transmitter (and encrypted?) signals from his handlers and transmit them, at very low power, to the earpiece." "Sure, Bush uses an earpiece sometimes," a top Washington editor for Reuters said to me last spring. "State of the Union -- he had an earpiece for that. Everybody knows it," he said, or assumes it. But everybody doesn't know it, I said. Why hadn't Reuters investigated? The editor shrugged and said it wasn't so different from using a teleprompter. Except that a teleprompter isn't a secret. And Americans have the right to know if the president can't or won't speak in public without covert assistance. Television hosts and news anchors wear earpieces, called IFBs (for internal foldback, or feedback) which fit in the ear canal and are almost invisibly small, to receive cues from their producers. (Language scientists say that "shadowing," repeating the words someone else is speaking, is not at all difficult, but it is difficult not to move your eyes when listening.) Television journalists would be likely to spot the use of an IFB or at least to suspect it. So, why haven't they raised the question? I suspect it's untouchable in part because asking the question now points up all the years they let go by without asking it. But these are the questions that must be asked now, by the Commission on Presidential Debates, and journalists: Does the president use an earpiece in his meetings with the public and with journalists? Did he wear one in last week's debate? How can members of the public who suspect he wore an earpiece be assured that he will not do so in the next debate? What was the object underneath his jacket? --Ed. Email tips and information to [7]isbushwired at gmail.com MORE LINKS: * [8]Meet the Press executive producer Betsy Fischer does not explain how she can be certain that Bush wore no earpiece on his February 2004 interview with Tim Russert. * [9]A documentary maker explains why he thinks Bush is wired for sound. * [10]Discussion of audio "shadowing" here. A news photograph from July 7 shows Bush with [11]another odd bulge at the back of his jacket. The suspicions of Veritas were aroused by a moment in Bush's December 2003 news conference. Here is an excerpt from [12]his post : Q I know you said there will be a time for politics. But you've also said you wanted to change the tone in Washington. Howard Dean recently seemed to muse aloud whether you had advance knowledge of 9/11. Do you agree or disagree with the RNC that this kind of rhetoric borders on political hate speech? THE PRESIDENT: There's time for politics. There's time for politics, and I -- it's an absurd insinuation. - White House Press Conference, Dec. 15 A funny thing happened at the December 15th presidential press conference. Asked to comment on an earlier statement by Howard Dean regarding his alleged foreknowledge of 9/11, Bush stumbles about the stage, clearly caught off guard by the question, then delivers the line: "It's an absurd asinuation." ...it could not be more clear that Bush was provided the words with which to answer. At first, Bush stumbles about, repeating his previous line that "there's a time for politics." During this time, he's avoiding eye contact, shrugging, and delaying. Then, the answer is given to him, presumably through a wireless ear piece. Bush then suddenly delivers his line that "it's an absurd asinuation." The suddenness of his reply, after having been speechless, the smile in his eyes when he's given the correct answer, and his incorrect pronunciation of the word "insinuation" all lead to [the] conclusion that he was prompted to provide this answer. More images: posted by is bush wired? at [13]8:50 AM [14]30 comments About Me Name:is bush wired? [15]View my complete profile Previous Posts * [16]The Voice in Bush's Ear Archives * [17]October 2004 [18]Powered by Blogger _________________________________________________________________ References 1. http://www.isbushwired.com/atom.xml 2. http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:vE7YazWx99QJ:www.democrats.org/blog/comment/0001010707.html++%22+bush+chirac+earpiece+&hl=en&start=6&ie=UTF-8 3. http://www.newsdissector.org/weblog/print.cfm?ID=BAD85AF3%2D4E96%2D4229%2DABD218C92C51577B 4. http://theleftist.blog-city.com/read/652304.htm 5. http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/125456/index.php 6. http://news.findlaw.com/wp/docs/election2004/debates2004mou.html 7. mailto:isbushwired at gmail.com 8. http://radiofreeusa.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2123 9. http://www.rense.com/general35/voices.htm 10. http://www.filmbitch.com/ 11. http://www.lies.com/wp/2004/07/11/the-smallness-of-george-w-bush 12. http://www.circa75.com/showArticle.php?article=89 13. http://isbushwired.com/2004/10/voice-in-bushs-ear.html 14. http://isbushwired.com/2004/10/voice-in-bushs-ear.html#comments 15. http://www.blogger.com/profile/4837043 16. http://isbushwired.com/2004/10/voice-in-bushs-ear.html 17. http://isbushwired.com/2004_10_01_ 18. http://www.blogger.com/ From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Oct 6 17:14:43 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 10:14:43 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Is Bush Wired?: The Voice in Bush's Ear Message-ID: <01C4AB8D.4D0F6710.shovland@mindspring.com> I watched Bush's speech this morning. It may be that it drove home that the point that someone else speaks through him. -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2004 9:47 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Is Bush Wired?: The Voice in Bush's Ear The Voice in Bush's Ear http://www.isbushwired.com/ Is he prompted through an earpiece? Tuesday, October 05, 2004 This site is a clearinghouse for discussion of whether President Bush uses an earpiece through which he's fed lines and cues by offstage advisers. His speech rhythms suggest this, as do some of his word choices and interjections, and his constantly shifting eye movements while speaking. And there's another form of evidence: Television viewers have sometimes heard another voice speaking Bush's words before he says them. When Bush spoke at D-Day ceremonies in France last June, for example, [2]viewers watching on CNN, Fox and MSNBC, including mediachannel.org's Danny Schechter, [3]were startled to hear another voice speaking Bush's words as if to prompt him. Some said this [4]continued into a q & a. And on the night of 9/11, when Bush appeared on television to address the nation, viewers of one television station in Quincy, Massachusetts heard another voice speaking, slowly and carefully, a few words at a time -- words which were then recited by the president. The voice was nondescript, male, definitely not the president's voice, says Quincy resident Robyn Miller. This went on for at least four sentences, she says, and then the "extra" feed was cut off. Reporters should have looked into this long ago. But for the past four years through Bush's first debate last week with John Kerry -- and even in the days after the debate -- the press has ignored the evidence of its eyes and ears, and failed to ask whether the president secretly relies on unseen handlers for some public events, including press conferences. [5]If Bush wore a hidden earpiece to cheat in this way during his first debate with John Kerry (however unsuccessfully), it is urgent that the fraud be exposed before the election. [6]The agreement set by the debate commission barred shots of the candidates from the rear of the stage. The networks refused to comply with the camera angle rules, broadcasting occasional shots of the candidates from behind. Many viewers thus saw a squarish bulge the size of a large battery pack under the back of Bush's suit jacket, with an S-shaped cord appearing to snake up the right side of his back. Several blogs have carried speculation that it was an audio receiver. A poster to NYCIndymedia says, "Think 'passive transducer' earpiece." He writes, "The bulges under his jacket are likely receiver/repeaters that pick up the transmitter (and encrypted?) signals from his handlers and transmit them, at very low power, to the earpiece." "Sure, Bush uses an earpiece sometimes," a top Washington editor for Reuters said to me last spring. "State of the Union -- he had an earpiece for that. Everybody knows it," he said, or assumes it. But everybody doesn't know it, I said. Why hadn't Reuters investigated? The editor shrugged and said it wasn't so different from using a teleprompter. Except that a teleprompter isn't a secret. And Americans have the right to know if the president can't or won't speak in public without covert assistance. Television hosts and news anchors wear earpieces, called IFBs (for internal foldback, or feedback) which fit in the ear canal and are almost invisibly small, to receive cues from their producers. (Language scientists say that "shadowing," repeating the words someone else is speaking, is not at all difficult, but it is difficult not to move your eyes when listening.) Television journalists would be likely to spot the use of an IFB or at least to suspect it. So, why haven't they raised the question? I suspect it's untouchable in part because asking the question now points up all the years they let go by without asking it. But these are the questions that must be asked now, by the Commission on Presidential Debates, and journalists: Does the president use an earpiece in his meetings with the public and with journalists? Did he wear one in last week's debate? How can members of the public who suspect he wore an earpiece be assured that he will not do so in the next debate? What was the object underneath his jacket? --Ed. Email tips and information to [7]isbushwired at gmail.com MORE LINKS: * [8]Meet the Press executive producer Betsy Fischer does not explain how she can be certain that Bush wore no earpiece on his February 2004 interview with Tim Russert. * [9]A documentary maker explains why he thinks Bush is wired for sound. * [10]Discussion of audio "shadowing" here. A news photograph from July 7 shows Bush with [11]another odd bulge at the back of his jacket. The suspicions of Veritas were aroused by a moment in Bush's December 2003 news conference. Here is an excerpt from [12]his post : Q I know you said there will be a time for politics. But you've also said you wanted to change the tone in Washington. Howard Dean recently seemed to muse aloud whether you had advance knowledge of 9/11. Do you agree or disagree with the RNC that this kind of rhetoric borders on political hate speech? THE PRESIDENT: There's time for politics. There's time for politics, and I -- it's an absurd insinuation. - White House Press Conference, Dec. 15 A funny thing happened at the December 15th presidential press conference. Asked to comment on an earlier statement by Howard Dean regarding his alleged foreknowledge of 9/11, Bush stumbles about the stage, clearly caught off guard by the question, then delivers the line: "It's an absurd asinuation." ...it could not be more clear that Bush was provided the words with which to answer. At first, Bush stumbles about, repeating his previous line that "there's a time for politics." During this time, he's avoiding eye contact, shrugging, and delaying. Then, the answer is given to him, presumably through a wireless ear piece. Bush then suddenly delivers his line that "it's an absurd asinuation." The suddenness of his reply, after having been speechless, the smile in his eyes when he's given the correct answer, and his incorrect pronunciation of the word "insinuation" all lead to [the] conclusion that he was prompted to provide this answer. More images: posted by is bush wired? at [13]8:50 AM [14]30 comments About Me Name:is bush wired? [15]View my complete profile Previous Posts * [16]The Voice in Bush's Ear Archives * [17]October 2004 [18]Powered by Blogger _________________________________________________________________ References 1. http://www.isbushwired.com/atom.xml 2. http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:vE7YazWx99QJ:www.democrats.org/blog /comment/0001010707.html++%22+bush+chirac+earpiece+&hl=en&start=6&ie=UTF-8 3. http://www.newsdissector.org/weblog/print.cfm?ID=BAD85AF3%2D4E96%2D4229% 2DABD218C92C51577B 4. http://theleftist.blog-city.com/read/652304.htm 5. http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/125456/index.php 6. http://news.findlaw.com/wp/docs/election2004/debates2004mou.html 7. mailto:isbushwired at gmail.com 8. http://radiofreeusa.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&si d=2123 9. http://www.rense.com/general35/voices.htm 10. http://www.filmbitch.com/ 11. http://www.lies.com/wp/2004/07/11/the-smallness-of-george-w-bush 12. http://www.circa75.com/showArticle.php?article=89 13. http://isbushwired.com/2004/10/voice-in-bushs-ear.html 14. http://isbushwired.com/2004/10/voice-in-bushs-ear.html#comments 15. http://www.blogger.com/profile/4837043 16. http://isbushwired.com/2004/10/voice-in-bushs-ear.html 17. http://isbushwired.com/2004_10_01_ 18. http://www.blogger.com/ _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 7 19:34:10 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 15:34:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Hedgehog Review: The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture Message-ID: The Hedgehog Review: The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehog.html [I discovered this great journal from the Chronicle of Higher Education's daily briefing, Academe Today. The article summarized is not online, but I discovered that this journal, which eminates from my alma mater, has articles that touch transhuman, postmodern, artistic, religious, and other themes. I grabbed all that I could and will be doling them out bit by bit to all my lists. Something for everyone.] "There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilocus which says, 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.'"--Isaiah Berlin THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture Winner of The Best New Journal Award given by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, The Hedgehog Review is an interdisciplinary, academic journal that explores the most pressing issues and questions of our day. One of the hallmarks of our time is the fragmentation of academic inquiry, where the specialization of scholarly pursuit leads to ways of thinking and speaking that are increasingly technical, insular, and self-confirming. Against these tendencies the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture launched The Hedgehog Review in 1999. The journal brings together essays, interviews, bibliographies, and book reviews by scholars from throughout the humanities and social sciences. By focusing attention from many disciplines of study on one issue or question, the journal aims to be a unique resource for those concerned with making sense of the puzzles, perplexities, and promise of our time. Upcoming Issue: The Fate of the Arts (Summer 2004) Current Issue: [5]Religion and Violence Religion and Violence (Spring 2004) [8]Technology and the Human Person Technology and the Human Person (Fall 2002) [10]Pragmatism Pragmatism: What's the Use? (Fall 2001) [12]Evil Evil (Summer 2000)--sold out [14]Democracy Democracy (Spring 2000) [16]Identity Identity (Fall 1999) [18]Fear Itself Fear Itself (Fall 2003) [20]America in the World The Commodification of Everything (Summer 2003) [22]America in the World America in the World (Spring 2003) [24]Religion and Globalization Religion and Globalization (Summer 2002)--sold out [26]Individualism Individualism (Spring 2002) [28]The Body and Being Human The Body and Being Human (Summer 2001) [30]Living With Our Differences Living with Our Differences (Spring 2001) [32]What's the University For? What's the University for? (Fall 2000) References 5. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehogTOC.html#violence 8. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hh/THRtoc4-3.html 10. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hh/THRtoc3-3.html 12. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hh/THRtoc2-2.html 14. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hh/ThrTocsVol2-1.html 16. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hh/ThrTocsVol1.html 18. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehogTOC.html#fear 20. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehogTOC.html#commodification 22. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehogTOC.html#america 24. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehogTOC.html#religion 26. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehogTOC.html#individualism 28. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehogTOC.html#body 30. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehogTOC.html#diversity 32. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hedgehogTOC.html#university From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 7 19:38:03 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 15:38:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog Review: Lori B. Andrews: People as Products: The Conflict between Technology and Social Values Message-ID: Hedgehog Review: Lori B. Andrews: People as Products: The Conflict between Technology and Social Values http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=42013&textreg=1&id=AndConf4-3 Lori B. Andrews, J.D., is Distinguished Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law and the Director of the Institute of Science, Law and Technology at Illinois Institute of Technology. Her books include: Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age ( code 2001 /code , with Dorothy Nelkin); Future Perfect: Confronting Decisions about Genetics ( code 2001 /code ); The Clone Age: Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology (1999); and Between Strangers: Surrogate Mothers, Expectant Fathers, and Brave New Babies (1989). Twenty years ago, on a ranch in Escondido, California, Robert Klark Graham opened the Repository for Germinal Choice, offering the sperm of Nobel Laureates and other "genius" donors to couples who wanted to create more intelligent children. Over code 200 /code children were born via artificial insemination using sperm from the bank. In 1999, the doors to the repository closed. [3]^1 I'd like to be able to report that the sperm bank suspended operations because people realized the foolishness of trying to upgrade their children, but, in truth, the sperm bank had become quaintly obsolete. Even mainstream infertility clinics had begun to offer sperm and egg donors with favored traits. Dozens of websites and advertisements had appeared that marketed gamete donors with stellar SAT scores, athletic abilities, or fabulous looks. [4]^2 All three in the same donor now commands top dollar. We generally consider it a good thing when parents want to give their children advantages--such as a good education--that they themselves never had. We are comfortable with individual choices in this area. In fact, when the U.S. Supreme Court recently held that a program providing school vouchers to parents did not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, the court underscored the importance of parental choice in education. [5]^3 Yet at the same time, we have concerns about social justice. We don't just auction off places in the best universities based on sheer ability to pay. We establish scholarships so that meritorious but poor students can attend elite, expensive colleges. Yet this entire paradigm--individual choice coupled with a concern for social justice--may go out the window when it comes to the biological revolution that promises to let parents choose the very characteristics of their children. Moreover, the business of designing our children may turn reproduction into a form of production, profoundly changing the nature of families and of society. It is now possible for a child to have up to five parents--a sperm donor, an egg donor, the surrogate mother who carries the child, and the couple who raises him. Or--if the claims of Dr. Severino Antinori are to be believed and five women are pregnant with clones--a child might have just one parent. [6]^4 It is also possible to generate a genetic profile of a child before birth--or even of an embryo prior to implantation. Consequently, notions of family are being diversified and the concept of "normality" is being "upgraded." Twelve percent of potential parents, for example, say they would abort a fetus with a genetic propensity toward obesity. The Role of Prenatal Screening Every year, approximately 60% of pregnant women (roughly code 2.4 /code million) in the U.S. undergo prenatal screening to learn about the health of their babies-to-be. [7]^5 Seventy percent of pregnant women view their fetuses on ultrasound, checking to see if they are developing normally. [8]^6 A large percentage undergo a simple blood test that analyzes whether the baby will suffer from spina bifida or anencephaly. [9]^7 Some undergo chorionic villi sampling or amniocentesis. [10]^8 A few use the cutting-edge technology of preimplantation screening. [11]^9 With that procedure, the couple undergoes in vitro fertilization to create multiple embryos. Then each embryo is tested genetically, and the couple chooses to implant in the woman only those embryos that they consider appropriate. Forty years ago, when prenatal screening was first introduced, bioethicist Paul Ramsey observed that the "concept of `normality' sufficient to make life worth living is bound to be `upgraded.'" [12]^10 That indeed has been the case. More and more genes have been identified, and parents have begun to screen for less and less serious disorders. Now some parents use prenatal screening and abortion not just for serious, life-threatening disorders such as Tay-Sachs disease (which is painful for the child and generally fatal by age three), [13]^11 but for less serious traits, diseases that are treatable, and disorders that will not manifest until much later in life. This trend has been exacerbated by the development of preimplantation screening. It is likely that couples will make different choices with that technology than they did with amniocentesis. When a woman undergoes amniocentesis in the fourth month of pregnancy, she may have already felt the fetus move inside of her. She may have bonded with the fetus. If she aborts based on a characteristic of the baby (such as the fact that it is a girl), she will have no child at all. In contrast, with preimplantation screening, the woman often creates multiple embryos and chooses only two or three to implant. If she learns the genetic makeup of her ten in vitro embryos through preimplantation screening, she cannot safely implant them all. It would be too dangerous for her and for the babies to have a multiple pregnancy. Even if she underwent preimplantation screening to choose embryos that did not carry a particular serious disorder, there might be too many such embryos. So, she might choose to implant only the subset of embryos that have a particular desired trait. She might, for example, implant only the males. Already, preimplantation screening has gone beyond application to genetic disorders that are fatal in childhood. In a controversial application described in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a couple chose to screen their embryo for a gene mutation related to Alzheimer's disease. [14]^12 Some considered this use unethical. Even if the child later developed the disease, he or she would have had decades of healthy, normal life before the disease manifested. Perhaps a cure would even have been developed during that time. As more and more prenatal monitoring techniques become available, social expectations may increase the likelihood that women will use them. "Women are increasingly pressured to use prenatal testing by claims that undergoing these tests is the `responsible thing to do,'" says disability rights activist Marsha Saxton. "Strangers in the supermarket, even characters in TV sit-coms, readily ask a woman with a pregnant belly, `Did you get your amnio?'" [15]^13 A government agency, the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, exemplified this approach. After describing new genetic tests, an Office of Technology Assessment report stated "individuals have a paramount right to be born with a normal, adequate hereditary endowment." [16]^14 Similarly, the report of an NIH task force on prenatal diagnosis states: "There is something profoundly troubling about allowing the birth of an infant who is known in advance to suffer from some serious disease or defect." [17]^15 Saxton has pointed out the strange contradiction: just at the political moment when laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act are being enacted to protect people with disabilities, genetic technologies are aimed at preventing their birth. "It is ironic," says Saxton, "that just when disabled citizens have achieved so much, the new reproductive and genetic technologies are promising to eliminate their kind--people with Down Syndrome, spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, sickle cell anemia and hundreds of other conditions." [18]^16 "Prenatal screening seems to give women more power," says disability rights activist Laura Hershey, "but is it actually asking women to ratify social prejudice through their reproductive `choice'?" [19]^17 Along those lines, some couples have a desire to use technologies to predetermine a baby's sex. In India, China, Taiwan, and Bangladesh, technicians with portable ultrasound machines go from village to village scanning pregnant women who are desperate to learn whether they are carrying a boy. Many couples abort when they fail to see a penis on the tiny out-of-focus screen. In Bombay alone, code 258 /code clinics offered amniocentesis for sex selection. [20]^18 In one study of code 8,000 /code abortions in India, code 7,999 /code were female fetuses, [21]^19 leading human rights activists to protest this clear evidence of "gyne"cide. In China, when the one-child policy was strictly enforced, families so preferred males that the sex ratio changed to code 153 /code males for each code 100 /code females. [22]^20 Thirty-four percent of U.S. geneticists said they would perform a prenatal diagnosis for a family who wanted a son, and another 28% said they would refer the couple to another doctor who would perform such testing. [23]^21 Dorothy Wertz, the social scientist at the Shriver Center for Mental Retardation in Waltham, Massachusetts, who conducted the study, said the percentage of practitioners willing to respond to sex selection request increased 10% from code 1985 /code to 1995. "Autonomy just runs rampant over any other ethical principle in this country," Wertz says. "And it's only going to increase." [24]^22 The overwhelming tilt toward boys is not as pronounced yet in the United States as it is in other countries, but social psychologist Roberta Steinbacher of Cleveland State University worries about the effect on society if couples were able to predetermine their baby's sex. Twenty-one percent of people say they would use a sex selection technique, with code 74 /code percent of the women and code 88 /code percent of the men desiring to ensure their firstborn would be a boy. Since other research reveals firstborns are more successful in their education, income, and achievements than latterborns, Steinbacher worries that "second class citizenship of women would be institutionalized by determining that the firstborn would be a boy." [25]^23 Prenatal screening can screen out certain traits, but it cannot add genetic characteristics that are not inherent in the parents' genomes. Consequently, some potential parents are turning to the aid of third parties--egg donors, sperm donors, or, in the future, gene donors to "upgrade" the traits of their children. Donor Gametes The designing of children started subtly, as a result of individual choices in an open market. One couple offered $ code 50,000 /code for an egg donor who was a smart, tall, Ivy League student. A man seeking to sell his sperm for $ code 4,000 /code a vial established a website with his family tree, claiming to trace his genes back to six Catholic saints and several European royal families. Thousands of couples now turn to the Internet to find genetic parents for their future children. They view pictures of sperm and egg donors, listen to tapes of their voices, and review pages of descriptions of their physical features, their hobbies, their SAT scores, their philosophies of life. At the Ronsangels.com website, couples bid on the eggs of attractive models. "Why is it okay for people to choose the best house, the best schools, the best surgeon, the best car, but not try to have the best baby possible?" the parents of a child conceived with sperm from a high-IQ donor asked a Toronto Star reporter. [26]^24 "You look, and you eliminate things that just aren't interesting to you, such as, one of the profiles had on it that they had a Richard Nixon nose," said Jacqueline Teepen, who appeared on Good Morning America to discuss her use of smart sperm. "That wasn't an interest of ours. We wanted somebody with hazel or blue eyes, we wanted the Bachelor's degree to be finished, working into the Master's or even a Ph.D. program." "I think it's wonderful," she continued. "I think the ability to select characteristics is simply wonderful." [27]^25 Yet is it so wonderful? As with prenatal screening, will it be used according to social biases? Already, a black woman in England sought a white egg donor--to create a child who would be less likely to be discriminated against. [28]^26 Victoria Kowalski was the first child born using sperm from a sperm bank. After her birth in April code 1982 /code to Joyce and Jack Kowalski of Scottsdale, Arizona, her parents sold the story rights to the National Enquirer for $ code 20,000 /code . "The odds are very good that our little girl will turn out to be a genius," Mrs. Kowalski told the National Enquirer. "I imagine her as a child studying college textbooks." [29]^27 The news of this bundle of joy was received with horror by Joyce's two children from a previous marriage, Donna and Eric, who were being raised by their father. Joyce had lost custody of those children after she and her new husband, Jack, had abused them--in an effort to make them smarter. Young Donna had been forced by her mother and stepfather to wear a sign that said "Dummy" on her forehead. It was chilling to think about the life ahead for Victoria--certainly in light of the expectations her parents had for her. "We'll begin training Victoria on computers when she's three, and we'll teach her words and numbers before she can walk," Jack Kowalski told the National Enquirer. [30]^28 Similar enhanced expectations will come with reproductive cloning, where a child is created to mirror the favored genetic traits of another individual. Currently, human reproductive cloning is considered ethically unacceptable (and is banned in six states) [31]^29 in large measure because of the physical risks. One third of the cloned offspring in animal experiments die shortly before or shortly after birth. Even if cloning posed no physical risks, the emotional impact on the offspring could be devastating. If a cloned person's genetic progenitor is a famous musician or athlete, parents may exert an improper amount of coercion to get the child to develop those talents. True, the same thing may happen now--to a lesser degree--but the cloning scenario is more problematic. A parent might force a naturally-conceived child to practice the cello hours on end, but will probably give up eventually if the child seems uninterested or tone deaf. More fervent attempts to develop the child's musical ability will occur if the parents chose (or even paid for) genetic material from Yo-Yo Ma. And pity the poor child who is the clone of Michael Jordan. If he breaks his kneecap at age ten, will his parents consider him worthless? Will he consider himself a failure? A cloned child will be a child who is likely to be exposed to limited experiences and limited opportunities. Even if he or she is cloned from a person who has favored traits, the child may not get the benefit of that heritage. The child's environment might not provide him or her with the drive that made the original succeed. So many clones may be created from the favored original that their value and opportunities may be lessened. If the entire NBA consisted of Michael Jordan clones, then the game would be far less interesting and each individual less valuable. If the original Michael Jordan died young of an inheritable cardiac disorder, then his clones would find their futures restricted. They could be discriminated against by health insurers based on their predicted health risks. Reproductive cloning seems to violate what philosopher Joel Feinberg calls children's right to an "open future." [32]^30 Genetic Enhancement As technology evolves, parents-to-be will have even more control over the traits of their offspring. In a variety of animal species, [33]^31 scientists have genetically engineered the offspring by adding an additional gene of interest--such as an extra NR2B gene to enhance memory. [34]^32 Researchers, for example, have put a firefly gene in tobacco plants, causing them to glow in the dark, and human cancer genes in mice. Now genetic engineering is being proposed for human embryos. It has been suggested that people's vision be expanded from the near ultraviolet to the near infrared and that genes be added so that people's urine changes colors when they begin to get sick so that they can be diagnosed early. The demand for gene insertion in embryos is likely to be quite high. In a Louis Harris poll sponsored by the March of Dimes, 42% of potential parents surveyed said they would use genetic engineering on their children to make them smarter, 43% to upgrade them physically. Another survey found that over a third of people wanted to tweak their children genetically to make sure they had an appropriate sexual orientation. With around code 4 /code million births per year in the U.S., that's a market for pre-birth genetic enhancement almost as large as that for Prozac or Viagra. Some scientists suggest modifying people with the gene to photosynthesize so that we could get our energy from the sun like plants and not waste money or time getting food. Law review articles are already raising questions about how to treat these new creations. If an individual had half animal and half human genes, would he be protected by the U.S. Constitution? When I asked my law students that question, one replied, "If it walks like a man, quacks like a man, and photosynthesizes like a man, it's a man." Germline genetic intervention on people may increase cancer risks, sterility, or other problems in the next generation. [35]^33 Proponents of genetic engineering of animals and humans suggest that it is no different than selective breeding. But geneticist Jon Gordon points out that there are enormous differences when only a single gene is being introduced in a complex organism. Gordon notes that unlike selective breeding, where numerous favorable genes can be selected at one time, gene transfer selects only one gene and tries to improve a single trait in isolation. [36]^34 Gordon notes that this single-gene approach has, "despite more than code 10 /code years of effort, failed to yield even one unequivocal success." [37]^35 Instead it has produced disastrous results. When a gene shown to induce muscle hypertrophy in mice was inserted into a calf, the animal did exhibit the desired trait initially, but later exhibited muscle deterioration. [38]^36 The animal had to be shot. In a separate experiment, researchers genetically enhanced the wings of flies to be 300% stronger than average. Instead of creating a superfly, these flies couldn't even get off the ground because they were no longer able to move their wings fast enough. In another study, researchers enhanced mouse embryos with an extra NR2B gene linked to long-term memory and increased cognitive and mental abilities. The resulting animals (called "Doogie Howser" mice) seemed to move more quickly through mazes than the mice that had not been altered. [39]^37 Immediately, the question arose about whether such interventions should be undertaken on humans. Yet subsequent research, by other scientists, learned the genetic intervention had a downside. The Doogie Howser mice were more susceptible to long-term pain. [40]^38 Regulatory Abyss There is an astonishing lack of oversight for the technologies used to create children. Experimental procedures are introduced into clinical practices without sufficient protections for the subjects of these experiments. In other areas of medicine, research is initially funded by the federal government, and, by federal regulation, must be reviewed in advance by a neutral committee, the Institutional Review Board, before it can be tried on humans. Reproductive technologies have been held hostage to the abortion debate, and pro-life lobbyists have prevented federal funding of research on reproductive technology. Researchers can still submit their plans to hospital and university Institutional Review Boards, but they usually do not. In fact, according to IVF doctor Mark Sauer, IRB review of reproductive technology proposals is so rare as to be "remarkable." Even those rare studies that go before IRBs are not assessed for their social impact. The federal regulations covering IRBs specifically state that the reviewing committee should not address the social advisability of the project. The law says "the IRB should not consider possible long-range effects of applying knowledge gained in the research (for example, the possible effects of the research on public policy) as among those research risks that fall within the purview of its responsibility." [41]^39 In one instance, where a fertility doctor sought IRB approval, he had already started advertising the procedure before the IRB met. The IRB chairman said, "Our feeling was that if we approved his study, at least we could monitor his actions and collect meaningful data about the safety and efficacy of the procedure." [42]^40 Unlike new drugs and new medical equipment, which are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, no similar review of innovative reproductive technology procedures is required. Reproductive technologies also differ from other medical procedures because they are rarely covered by health insurance; only code 15 /code states' laws mandate infertility coverage. [43]^41 This means that clinics are in a fierce competition for wealthy patients. Some clinics report as "pregnancies" small hormonal shifts in a woman's body that show that an embryo has briefly implanted and then been reabsorbed by her body. Others implant as many as code 10 /code embryos or use infertility drugs indiscriminately to increase the number of babies the clinic creates, even though this increases the risk to the woman and the fetuses. Lack of insurance coverage also means that reproductive technology lacks an additional aspect of quality assurance. For other types of health services, health insurers, through managed care outcome studies and evaluation of services, have required certain proof of efficacy before medical services are reimbursed. [44]^42 Additionally, medical malpractice litigation, which serves as a quality control mechanism in other areas of health care, does not work as well in this field. The normal success rates for the procedures (25% for in vitro, for example) are so low that it makes it difficult to prove that the doctor was negligent. Risks to the children may not be discernable for many years, which may be past the period of time a statute of limitations on a legal suit has run. In "wrongful life" cases, courts have been reluctant to impose liability upon medical providers and labs for children born with birth defects where the child would not have been born if the negligent act had been avoided; only three states recognize such a cause of action. [45]^43 Consequently, experimental techniques are rapidly introduced in the more than code 300 /code high-tech infertility clinics in the United States without sufficient prior animal experimentation, randomized clinical trials, or the rigorous data collection that would occur in other types of medical experimentation. [46]^44 In vitro fertilization itself was applied to women years before it was applied to baboons, chimpanzees, or rhesus monkeys, leading some embryologists to observe that it seemed as if women had served as the model for the nonhuman primates. The Impact of the Market All of biology is now akin to a child's set of building blocks. Yet when genes go from metaphor to material, a fundamental change occurs. Unlike any other major medical dilemma in the past, however, we do not have a sufficient body of "neutral" scientists to advise us on these matters. A series of legal developments in the 1980s turned genetic science from a public interest activity into a commercial one. A landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in code 1980 /code granted a patent on a life form--a bacteria--setting the stage for the patenting of human genes. [47]^45 Initially, researchers assumed that peoples' genes were not patentable since patent law covers "inventions" and prohibits patenting the "products of nature." [48]^46 But by the mid-1980s, the patent office was granting an increasing number of patents for human genes, allowing the researcher who identifies a gene to earn royalties on any test or therapy created with that gene. [49]^47 A second radical change in the 1980s was a series of federal laws allowing university researchers and government researchers to reap the profits from their taxpayer-supported research. [50]^48 This encouraged collaborations between researchers and biotechnology companies--and a growing interest in the economic value of genetic technologies. [51]^49 The new ability of any molecular biologist to patent the gene he or she discovers and profit from it leads gene discoverers to encourage as much use of the gene as possible. This has led to premature adoption of diagnostic tests based on the genes. [52]^50 In the future, it is likely to lead to pressure on parents-to-be to use patented genes to enhance their embryos. The Dark Side of Designing Babies Society does not yet have an adequate framework to develop ethical and policy guidelines for the technologies of prenatal screening, gamete donation, and germline genetic intervention. Yet there are reasons why we as a society should care more about a couple's decision to pay for a genetic enhancement for intelligence than we would if they spent their money on an expensive car or private tutors for their children. The major reason for concern is that harm could be caused to the scores of children subjected to these interventions if the predictions of risks from the animal research hold true for humans. Moreover, these are not just "individual" choices in isolation. If wealthy individuals genetically enhance their children to be smarter or taller, others of us may feel pressured to do the same, just to allow our kids to keep up. "Normality" today may be "disability" tomorrow. Selecting traits also creates a notion, like previously-rejected caste systems or guilds, that people can be born into a particular job or purpose. As an example, researchers have suggested cloning legless individuals on the grounds that they would be better suited for space travel. [53]^51 But what if the legless individual does not wish to be an astronaut? Moreover, the fads that will be inherent in choices of favored clones or favored genes may narrow diversity in society. At one point, there was a run on a sperm bank thought to have Mick Jagger's sperm. I can imagine (not without some horror, I might add) a gaggle of Brittany Spears clones. Certain types of people may disappear due to market choices, just as certain plants have. On June 28, 2000, Seminis, the world's largest vegetable seed corporation, declared that it planned to eliminate 25%, or 2,000, of its varieties as part of its "global restructuring and optimization plan." Seminis considers its seeds to be intellectual property. Under this market-driven approach, Seminis prefers to sell seeds that are sterile, because farmers cannot replant them and must purchase seeds annually. [54]^52 The corporation with power over the seeds can retire certain types without public knowledge or oversight. The same might be done in the future by companies with patents on genes or patents on human embryos with particular genetic traits. Already, there has been a patent application in England for a process to genetically engineer mammals to produce pharmaceutical products in their milk. The application asks for the rights to patent genetically engineered human women as well. Brian Lucas, the British patent attorney for Baylor, said that although the focus of the current technology is cows, the desire to cover women was put in because "someone, somewhere may decide that humans are patentable" and Baylor wants to protect its intellectual property if that happens. [55]^53 People as Products The market is good for some things, but should it govern the type of people we create? Lee Silver predicts genetic enhancements by the wealthy might ultimately cause us to diverge into two species--the Genrich and the Naturals, who will not be able to procreate together. [56]^54 Creating a baby is beginning to resemble buying a car, with consumer choices about which features and extras to request. Yet children don't come with the same guarantees as cars or toasters do. The child of an attractive model could be downright homely. And Nobel Prizes tend to be awarded to people in the same laboratories rather than in the same families. William Shockley, a Nobel laureate sperm donor, once said that his own children were a "regrettable regression to the mean." How will parents feel if they pay for "smart" sperm, and "E=mc2" isn't the first thing out of their child's mouth? Already, one couple sued a sperm bank when the babies weren't as handsome as they had expected. [57]^55 Gazing Into the Future An art student said to me, "Conservative Republicans might want to give children the genes for citizenship or eliminate the genes of homosexuality. But I am an artist. I would want to give my child a blue triangular head." How should society judge such desires? Should certain genetic manipulations be allowed and others not? Should parents be able to buy height-enhancing genes for their embryos? Will that be viewed more like cheating in sports or more like signing your child up for private tennis lessons? Is giving a child a gene protective against a deadly disease appropriate but manipulating genes (or other physical traits) to create a blue triangular head not? What about cases that fall in the middle--genes to prevent baldness or assure taller stature? How will the long-term risks of inheritable changes be adequately assessed? And should we really exercise dominion over subsequent generations, changing their features at will? There is reason to be concerned that the individual choice/social justice model that society employs for parental decisions is not adequate for the decision to influence the genetic traits of our children. In this realm, individual choices have more impact than they do in other realms. It makes no difference if my neighbor uses in vitro fertilization, and I created my child the old-fashioned way. But if my neighbor decides to enhance her child genetically to be smarter or more athletic (and it actually works), my child will seem diminished as a result. The gaps between the genetic haves and have nots will widen since only the very rich will be able to afford the cost of genetic enhancement for their children. In one study, it cost $ code 300,000 /code to genetically enhance a single cow. [58]^56 In humans, the cost may be even greater. Expensive in vitro fertilization will need to be used, and the gene insertion process and implantation processes are inefficient and will require repeated attempts before a particular couple will succeed in producing a live child with the enhanced genetic trait. Philosopher Dan Brock points out how one of our important social values is equality of opportunity. [59]^57 This generally means that society is committed to removing arbitrary grounds for the selection of people for jobs and college admission, as well as the removal of social and environmental barriers to success. [60]^58 But if parents can purchase the traits of their children, equality of opportunity might have to be interpreted as equality of characteristic. This would imply that society would have to underwrite genetic enhancement for all children. But there is no way that will happen. The price tag is just too high. In the U.S. many people lack access to basic health care, let alone enhancements. The United States still has an infant and maternal mortality rate that is worse than that of countries such as Korea and the Czech Republic. [61]^59 In fact, the United States ranks 33rd in the world in infant mortality, tied with Cuba, with code 7 /code children out of code 1000 /code dying in the first year of life. [62]^60 Even if the cost of genetic enhancement were to drop substantially--to, say, $10,000--and only code 50 /code million Americans attempted to use it, the overall cost would be $ code 500 /code billion. [63]^61 Law professor Maxwell Mehlman points out that since society will be unwilling to pay that price, "genetic enhancement will not be available to all, but only to the few who can afford to purchase it out of their personal finances." [64]^62 Brock summarizes the situation: "The genetic knowledge and potential therapeutic capacities that the Human Genome Project will likely bring us will further strain our commitment to equality of opportunity and will force new decisions about the value of equality of opportunity relative to other social and political values and institutions." [65]^63 Making Policy for Making Babies The ethical and policy tasks ahead of us are enormous and daunting. This is the generation that will decide whether to embrace or reject these technologies. Will we watch sports played by genetically enhanced athletes? Live among cloned human beings? Mandate prenatal screening as admission standards for birth? The genetic choices are unlike other parental choices because they impact us all. Consequently, no individual couple, clinic, company, or nation should be able to decide to proceed without a full, informed, society-wide debate on these issues. Geneticists have given us the map to the genome, but it will be up to people like you and me to determine where that map will lead. ________________________ [66]^1 Constance Holden, "Tracking Genius Sperm," Science code 291 /code ( code 2001 /code ): 1893. ] [67]^2 See Lori B. Andrews, The Clone Age: Adventures in the New World of Reproductive Technology (New York: Holt, 1999). ] [68]^3 Zelman, Superintendent of Public Instruction of Ohio v. Simmons-Harris, code 2002 /code U.S. LEXIS 4885, code 70 /code U.S.L.W. code 4683 /code (2002). The Court's opinion stated that the program "provides benefits directly to a wide spectrum of individuals, defined only by financial need and residence in a particular school district. It permits such individuals to exercise genuine choice among options public and private, secular and religious. The program is therefore a program of true private choice." ] [69]^4 In 2002, the Italian infertility specialist Dr. Severino Antinori told the press that several of his female patients were pregnant with clones. See John Crewdson, "Gynecologist Claims Impending Births of code 5 /code Cloned Human Babies," Chicago Tribune ( code 23 /code June 2002): 1. ] [70]^5 "Dynacare, Intema Join Forces to Offer Advanced Prenatal Testing," PR Newswire ( code 16 /code April code 2001 /code ). ] [71]^6 See March of Dimes Factsheet, [72] (last visited code 10 /code July 2002). ] [73]^7 In code 1993 /code it was estimated that 50% of pregnancies in the U.S. are screened for evidence of neural tube defect in the fetus. See F. J. Meaney, S. M. Riggle, G. C. Cunningham, "Providers and Consumers of Prenatal Genetic Testing Services: What Do The National Data Tell Us?" Fetal Diagnostic Therapy code 8 /code (1993): 18-27. ] [74]^8 The March of Dimes reports that since code 1983 /code over code 200,000 /code women have undergone chorionic villi sampling. See March of Dimes Factsheet, [75] (last visited code 10 /code July 2002). They also report that millions of women have had prenatal diagnosis by amniocentesis. See March of Dimes Factsheet, [76] (last visited code 10 /code July 2002). ] [77]^9 Francis A. Flinter, "Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis: Needs to be Tightly Regulated," British Medical Journal code 322 /code ( code 2001 /code ): 1008. ] [78]^10 Paul Ramsey, "Screening: An Ethicist's View," Ethical Issues in Human Genetics: Genetic Counseling and the Use of Genetic Knowledge, ed. B. Hilton, D. Callahan, M. Harris, P. Condliffe, and B. Berkley (Fogarty International Proceedings No. 13, 1973) 159. ] [79]^11 Tay-Sachs disease is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder caused by a genetic mutation. It is very common among Ashkenazi Jews. See, for example, E. C. Landel, I. H. Ellis, A. H. Fensom, P. M. Green, and M. Bobrow, "Frequency of Tay-Sachs Disease Splice and Insertion Mutations in the UK Ashkenazi Jewish Population," Journal of Medical Genetics code 28 /code (1991): 177-80. ] [80]^12 Yury Verlinsky, Svetlana Rechitsky, Oleg Verlinsky, Christina Masciangelo, Kevin Lederer, Anver Kuliev, "Preimplantation Diagnosis for Early-Onset Alzheimer Disease Caused by V717L Mutation," JAMA code 287 /code ( code 27 /code February 2002): 1018-21. ] [81]^13 Marsha Saxton, "Disability Rights and Selective Abortion," Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950-2000, ed. Rickie Solinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 374-93. ] [82]^14 Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress, Mapping Our Genes (1988) 84. ] [83]^15 Eric Juengst, "Prenatal Diagnosis and the Ethics of Uncertainty," Health Care Ethics: Cultural Issues for the 21^st Century, ed. J. Monagle and D. Thomasma (Rockville: Aspen, 1997) 19, citing National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Antenatal Diagnosis: Report of a Consensus Development Conference code 1-192 /code NIH Publication code 79-1973 /code (Bethesda: NIH, 1979). ] [84]^16 Saxton 374-93. ] [85]^17 Laura Hershey, "Choosing Disability," Ms. (July/August 1994): 29. ] [86]^18 Owen D. Jones, "Sex Selection: Regulating Technology Enabling the Predetermination of a Child's Gender," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology code 6 /code (Fall 1992): 1, 12. ] [87]^19 Jones 1, 12. ] [88]^20 Susan Greenholgh, "Engendering Reproductive Policy and Practice in Peasant China: For a Feminist Demography of Reproduction," Signs code 20 /code (1995): 601, 627. ] [89]^21 Dorothy Wertz and John C. Fletcher, "Fatal Knowledge? Prenatal Diagnosis and Sex Selection," Hastings Center Report code 19 /code (May 1989): 21. ] [90]^22 Jeffrey Obser, "Drawing the Line," Newsday ( code 16 /code June 1998): CO8. ] [91]^23 Roberta Steinbacher, Faith D. Gilroy, and Doreen Swetkis, "Firstborn Preference and Attitudes Toward Using Sex Selection Technology," Journal of Genetic Psychology, code 163.2 /code (June 2002): 235. ] [92]^24 Katharine Lowry, "The `Genius' Babies: `Nobel Prize' Sperm Bank's First Generation of Designer Babies," Toronto Star ( code 12 /code December 1987): J1. ] [93]^25 Andrews 136. ] [94]^26 Nick Nuttall and Emma Wilkins, "Watchdog to Report on Designer Baby," The Times (London) ( code 1 /code January 1994): 1. ] [95]^27 Andrews 137. ] [96]^28 Andrews 137-8. ] [97]^29 California, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Virginia. ] [98]^30 Joel Feinberg, "The Child's Right to an Open Future," Whose Child? Children's Rights, Parental Authority, and State Power, ed. William Aiken and Hugh LaFollete (Totoya: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980) as cited in "Cloning Human Beings," Volume I: Report and Recommendations of the National Bioethics Advisory Board (June 1997): 63. ] [99]^31 Anthony C. F. Perry, Teruhiko Wakayama, Hidefumi Kishikawa, Tsuyoshi Kasai, Masaru Okabe, Yutaka Toyoda, Ryuzo Yanagimachi, "Mammalian Transgenesis by Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection," Science code 284 /code ( code 14 /code May 1999): 1180-3. See also "Fertility Therapy May Aid Gene Transfer," Science code 284 /code ( code 14 /code May 1999): 1097-8; A. W. S. Chang, K. Y. Chong. C. Martinovich, C. Simerly, G. Schatten, "Transgenic Monkeys Produced by Retroviral Gene Transfer into Mature Oocytes," Science code 291 /code ( code 12 /code January code 2001 /code ): 309-12; Carlos Lois, Elizabeth J. Hong, Shirley Pease, Eric J. Brown, David Baltimore, "Germline Transmission and Tissue-Specific Expression of Transgenes Delivered by Lentiviral Vectors," Science code 295 /code ( code 1 /code February 2002): 868-71; A. J. Griffith, W. Ji, M. E. Prince, R. A. Altschuler, and M. H. Meisler, "Optic, Olfactory, and Vestibular Dysmorphogenesis in the Homozygous Mouse Insertional Mutant Tg9257," Journal of Craniofacial Genetic Developmental Biology code 19 /code (1999): 157-63; K.L. Rudolph, et al., "Longevity, Stress Response, and Cancer in Aging Telomerase-deficient Mice," Cell code 96 /code (1999): 701-12. ] [100]^32 Joe Tsien, "Building a Brainier Mouse," Scientific American (April 2000). ] [101]^33 Stuart Newman, "Don't Try to Engineer Human Embryos," St. Louis Post-Dispatch ( code 25 /code July 2000). ] [102]^34 Jon. W. Gordon, "Genetic Enhancement in Humans," Science code 283 /code (1994): 2023-4. ] [103]^35 Gordon 2023-4. ] [104]^36 Gordon 2023-4. ] [105]^37 Ya-Ping Tang, Eiji Shimizu, Gilles R. Dube, Claire Rampon, Geoffrey A. Kerchner, Min Zhuo, Guosong Liu, and Joe Z. Tsien, "Genetic Enhancement of Learning and Memory in Mice," Nature code 401 /code (1999): 63-9. ] [106]^38 Feng Wei, Guo-Du Wang, Geoffrey A. Kerchner, Susan J. Kim, Hai-Ming Xu, Zhou-Feng Chen, and Min Zhuo, "Genetic Enhancement of Inflammatory Pain by Forebrain NR2B Overexpression," Nature Neuroscience code 4 /code ( code 2001 /code ): 164-9. See, also, Rick Weiss, "Study: Rodents' Higher IQ May Come At Painful Price," The Washington Post ( code 29 /code January code 2001 /code ): A2. ] [107]^39 code 45 /code C.F.R. ? 46.111. ] [108]^40 Peter J. Paganussi, "Fertility Frontier," letter, The Washington Post ( code 23 /code February 1998): A18. ] [109]^41 These states are Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, and West Virginia. See [110]. ] [111]^42 Peter Kendall and William Neikirk, "Cloning Breakthrough: A Large Step on Much Longer Road," Chicago Tribune ( code 25 /code February 1997): 1. ] [112]^43 See, for example, Curlender v. Bioscience Laboratories, code 165 /code Cal. Rptr. code 477 /code (Cal. App. Ct. 1980). ] [113]^44 E. R. te Veld, A. L. van Baar, and R. J. van Kooij, "Concerns about Assisted Reproduction," Lancet code 351 /code (1998): 1524-5. ] [114]^45 Diamond v. Chakrabarty, code 447 /code U.S. code 303 /code (1980). ] [115]^46 Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kalo Inoculant Co., code 333 /code U.S. code 127 /code (1948). ] [116]^47 See, for example, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, "Patenting the Human Genome," Emory Law Journal code 39 /code (1990): 721. ] [117]^48 code 15 /code U.S.C.S. ? code 3701 /code et seq.; code 35 /code U.S.C. ? code 200 /code et seq. See also Sheldon Krimsky, Biotechnics and Society (New York: Praeger, 1991). ] [118]^49 In the context of advances in biotechnology, the 1980s' legislation led to important changes in the goals and practices of science and medicine. Leon Rosenberg, when he was Dean of the Yale University School of Medicine, described the influence of the biotechnology revolution on scientific research: "It has moved us, literally or figuratively, from the class room to the board room and from the New England Journal to the Wall Street Journal." See Leon Rosenberg, "Using Patient Materials for Production Development: A Dean's Perspective," Clinical Research code 33 /code (October 1985): 412-54. This means that at the same time that genetic technologies are being increasingly marketed, there are fewer and fewer neutral geneticists to serve as advisors to society on the merits and impacts of these technologies. ] [119]^50 See Lori B. Andrews, Future Perfect: Confronting Decisions About Genetics (New York: Columbia University Press, code 2001 /code ) 168. ] [120]^51 J. B. S. Haldane, "Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next Thousand Years," Man and His Future, ed. G. Wolstenholme, as cited in F .C. Pizzulli, "Asexual Reproduction and Genetic Engineering: A Constitutional Assessment of the Technology of Cloning," Southern California Law Review code 47 /code (1974): 520, n.235. ] [121]^52 "Genotypes: Earmarked for Extinction?" [122]. The use of hybrid seeds to prevent saving seeds for replanting by farmers is similar to intellectual property protection efforts aimed at requiring farmers to repurchase seeds each year. ] [123]^53 Steve Connor, "Patent Plan for Breasts Set to Stir Passions," The Independent (London) ( code 19 /code February 1992): 3. ] [124]^54 Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World (New York: Avon, 1997) 72. ] [125]^55 Harnicher v. University of Utah Medical Center, code 962 /code P.2d code 67 /code (Utah 1998). ] [126]^56 Michael Hagman, "Fertility Therapy May Aid Gene Transfer," Science code 284 /code (1999): 1097. ] [127]^57 Dan W. Brock, "The Human Genome Project and Human Identify," Houston Law Review code 29 /code (1992): 7. ] [128]^58 Brock 10. ] [129]^59 UNICEF Statistics, [130] (last visited code 9 /code July 2002). ] [131]^60 [132]. ] [133]^61 Maxwell J. Mehlman, "How Will We Regulate Genetic Enhancement?" Wake Forest Law Review code 34 /code (1999): 686. ] [134]^62 Mehlman 687. ] [135]^63 Brock 12. ] References 72. http://www.modimes.org/HealthLibrary/334_580.htm 75. http://www.modimes.org/HealthLibrary/334_578.htm 76. http://www.modimes.org/HealthLibrary/334_577.htm 110. http://www.resolve.org/advocacy/facts/stateinsurance.shtml 122. http://www.gene.ch/gentech/2000/Jul/msg00066.html 130. http://www.childinfo.org/cmr/revis/db1.htm 132. http://www.childinfo.org/cmr/revis/db1.htm From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 7 19:39:46 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 15:39:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] =?iso-8859-1?q?Hedgehog_Review=3A_Linda_Mart=EDn_Al?= =?iso-8859-1?q?coff=3A_Reclaiming_Truth_Talk=3A_Between_the_Absolute_and_?= =?iso-8859-1?q?the_Arbitrary?= Message-ID: Linda Mart?n Alcoff: Reclaiming Truth Talk: Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1&textreg=1&id=AlcAbso3-3 Linda Mart?n Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy, Political Science, and Women's Studies at Syracuse University. Her books include Feminist Epistemologies, co-edited with Elizabeth Potter; Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory of Knowledge; Epistemology: The Big Questions; and Thinking From the Underside of History, co-edited with Eduardo Mendieta. Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Catherine Elgin has usefully diagnosed a "bipolar disorder" that continues to incapacitate philosophy and much of contemporary social theory. Its unwitting sufferers oscillate between equally unhappy alternatives: the absolute and the arbitrary. Following Elgin, I will define the absolute position as one committed to the belief in determinate or absolute truths, as opposed to relative or pluralist ones, and committed to the possibility of discerning truth in a way that is agent-neutral, or better, agent-transcendent--that is, not dependent on the position or perspective of the person discerning it. Both those espousing absolutism and those espousing arbitrariness share this conceptualization of truth as absolute, but differ in whether or not they are fatalistic or optimistic in regard to its attainability. Those at the absolute end of the spectrum believe that absolute truth is attainable, while those at the arbitrary end of the spectrum believe it is unattainable. Many who want to cure philosophy and contemporary social theory of this pathology and transcend the dualism of the absolute and the arbitrary argue that we need to leave behind truth talk altogether. [4]^2 They say that it unnecessarily creates absolutist requirements and makes everything non-absolute look like it can have nothing to do with truth and must therefore be arbitrary. Many who take this line of argument see themselves as following in the pragmatist tradition. I will argue in this paper that the attempt to transcend the bipolar disorder of the absolute and the arbitrary is not served well by dispensing with truth talk. By truth talk I mean here not simply the use of the word "true" but the idea that truth is substantive, that it is not collapsible to or a mere extrapolation from procedures and concepts of justification. In short, truth talk brings in the world. This is a large conversation with many participants. To make my project manageable, I will look at just two of those involved in this discussion: Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, who are today surely the main competitors for the title of head pragmatist. Both Rorty and Putnam repudiate absolutism. Thus both have adopted some of the main premises on which the repudiation of truth relies, but they have come to different conclusions about the viability of truth and representation. To compare their positions, I will take up a specific example of a recent feminist argument in the discipline of history, in order to consider just how plausible, or relevant, the arguments for and against truth talk appear in relation to this example. The example comes from Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse's excellent, recent study of personal life and the emergence of the English middle class in The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Philosophers too often pick relatively easy cases, such as simple perception or claims in the natural sciences that have a lot of empirical evidence and appear neutral, such as the existence of atoms or electrons. The question of truth is much more difficult in complex, multi-variable, explanatory accounts or theories in the social sciences. In cases where empirical evidence is at least a part of the argument, but the grounds for justification are highly interpretive, can we ever claim truth? Even if we think we can't, it is not so easy to dispense with this arena of inquiry as inappropriate to truth talk, since it spans received knowledge from evolutionary biology to Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. Moreover, there is much at stake in these debates in the social sciences, much more than in how to characterize electrons ontologically. I chose the particular example I will discuss for two main reasons. First, it is explicitly feminist and thus useful because some will be suspicious about its truth status just on those grounds: how can a claim be both objective and politically motivated? Yet every large claim in the social sciences necessarily begins with some assumptions, and the choice of assumptions almost always reflects some broad political values. It has become especially clear in the domain of historical narrative that political values inform the choice of narrative, as between, for example, a story of "discovery," an "encounter," or an "invasion." Nor can we simply add such various accounts together to achieve the truth; they often directly conflict. Thus, arguably, feminist arguments simply make explicit what is there all the time. My second reason for choosing this particular example is that the feminist historians I will discuss are on the side of dispensing with truth talk. Inspired by deconstruction, Armstrong and Tennenhouse refuse to describe their claims as more truthful or likely to be true than other claims about the actual historical past. They approve of Foucault's approach, whose "histories no more presume to say what things, people, words, thoughts, or feelings are now than they do to say what these things used to be" and therefore want simply "to demonstrate how they were written into existence in one way rather than some other." [5]^3 In other words, the truth claims made by historians can be only about representations, without shedding any reliable light on the actual content of what is being represented. [6]^4 Thus, their retreat from truth is motivated precisely by the view that in the absence of the absolute, truth claims about the actual historical past have to be let go in toto. [7]^5 Armstrong and Tennenhouse unnecessarily belittle their argument, I will argue, by retreating from truth talk; they are in fact arguing over the historical truth. Let me turn now to what will have to be a brief and truncated rendition of the example. In a series of powerful critiques, Armstrong and Tennenhouse have analyzed two apparently contradictory historical accounts of the formation of the family in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Britain. Though the two accounts under analysis offer different histories of the family, they both privilege a normative rendition of the nuclear family with a fairly traditional gendered division of labor, one in which children "need their mothers" and "obey their fathers." Both assume that such families are both natural and good because "a small number of individuals who are together for a long time without outside interference tend to care for one another as for themselves." [8]^6 In other words, both of these accounts take the affective ties that emerge from that sort of family as "exempt from history," [9]^7 that is, the way things naturally are. The first account that Armstrong and Tennenhouse analyze is Peter Laslett's highly influential history of the British family in his The World We Have Lost (which began in the 1950s as radio broadcasts, was published as a book in 1965, and went on to become "one of the most frequently cited books written on the topic"). [10]^8 According to Laslett, "Time was...when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever." [11]^9 Laslett's thesis is that in the pre-industrial family of early modern England, in which work and family were combined in one unit and one location, there were fewer people interacting regularly together, they spent more time together, and as a result "enjoyed a closer emotional bonding than was the case during the modern period." [12]^10 Moreover, "Englishmen...felt they were parts integrated into an organic whole," [13]^11 with the result that neither modern alienation nor class antagonism existed. Armstrong and Tennenhouse explain: By an almost invisible logic of internalization, [Laslett] reasons that even "the head of the poorest family was at least the head of something." That each of them was on top of some little heap of humanity apparently made it possible for heads of households to identify with people higher up on the social scale in a way that became impossible once the workplace was detached from the home. [14]^12 Laslett goes so far as to characterize pre-modern England as a "one-class society." [15]^13 One of the most important implications of his claim, and what came under much debate later, is that the political upheavals in England of the 1640s and `50s had no impact on the basic way most people lived or understood themselves; only the destruction of the nuclear family through industrialization could bring significant change, and the changes it brought about for people's emotional and personal life were, for Laslett, all to the bad. Armstrong and Tennenhouse also look at Lawrence Stone's equally influential history of personal life in his book The Family, Sex and Marriage, 1500-1800, which argues, against Laslett, that family ties that were volitional rather than founded as economic units made for a much happier life. Stone also argues that privacy and size made an enormous difference in the capacity to develop happy relationships, and it was only after the "Open Lineage Family"--Laslett's ideal type--was replaced by the "Closed Domesticated Nuclear Family"--Stone's ideal type--that the household became the site of personal happiness. In regard to the Open Lineage Family, prevalent in the sixteenth century, Stone bemoans the fact that "[r]elations within the nuclear family, between husband and wife and parents and children, were not much closer than those with neighbors, with relatives, or with `friends.'" [16]^14 The Closed Domesticated Nuclear Family, by contrast, was the product of what he calls "Affective Individualism," in which the privacy surrounding the family somehow constituted privacy for individuals within the family, wherein each could develop personal autonomy. Stone also takes issue with Laslett's preferred family because of its treatment of children. In the early modern period, the use of wet nurses and the widespread tendency to hire children out ("about two out of every three boys and three out of every four girls were living away from home" from just before puberty until their marriage) made it virtually impossible to have a "single mothering and nurturing figure." [17]^15 Stone sees this as the "denial" of maternal affection, and he uses this fact to explain both the passionate religious enthusiasms of the period, as well as its high degree of casual violence and antagonism, on the grounds that the natural emotion rightfully found in mother-child relations had to be deflected into other channels. [18]^16 Where Laslett paints a regressivist story in which we have lost a world of happiness and equality, Stone offers a progressivist history in which the chances for personal happiness have been enhanced. They differ in the value they confer on privacy and in the optimism or suspicion by which they regard families based on economic relationships. But Armstrong and Tennenhouse argue that, despite these important differences, both Laslett and Stone make naturalistic assumptions about the impact of family structure on affective life and privilege traditional gender roles within the family, including especially the role of the mother as almost the exclusive nurturing figure. [19]^17 Thus, Armstrong and Tennenhouse charge Laslett and Stone with romanticizing and revering the traditional family and neglecting to acknowledge the ways in which their own beliefs and preferences about personal life have shaped their analysis. This cultural terrain, that is, the family, is, as Armstrong and Tennenhouse point out, "as close as one comes to sacred ground in a modern secular culture." [20]^18 Armstrong and Tennenhouse argue first and foremost that there is, to put it mildly, questionable evidence for Laslett's and Stone's various claims about the affective history of the family. They make some of the very traditional empirical charges that historians use to challenge each other's accounts--that their claims are based on generalizations from evidence that is insufficient, too limited in its scope, and too amenable to contrary interpretations. But the most interesting aspect of their critique for our purposes is that they charge Laslett and Stone with using history to offer support for contemporary ideological convictions espoused in present-day pop psychology, as well as embedded deeply into our collective common sense. They argue that historians cannot use their own emotional proclivities or current beliefs and practices in regard to personal life as any kind of ground to theorize the affective lives of people long since dead. They argue, in other words, that interior life itself needs to be historicized. I take it that what it would mean to historicize interior affective life is not just that one recognize that personal life has undergone changes and chart those changes--both Laslett and Stone do that--but that one recognize the possibility that our needs and wants, the conditions necessary for our personal happiness, and the texture of our emotional bonds, can change over time. And they change not just in the sense of shrinking and atrophying or developing and flourishing--which would presume a single, unified process and character to human life--but actually change in content and causal effect. If this is right, one might well be led to think that truth-claims about the historical interpretation of affect are simply impossible. While reading through their book, however, one cannot help but develop the firm conviction that Armstrong and Tennenhouse are also working with assumptions, and that these assumptions play a critical role in their ability to perceive the weaknesses in Laslett's and Stone's accounts. In other words, all of their criticisms cannot be put in the form of a Pyrrhonic skeptical question which takes an agnostic position equally to all claims. Some of their assumptions they make explicit, others they don't (and I think their argument would be more persuasive if they did). But the obvious question arises as to whether their arguments are any more legitimate than those they critique. If all historians must work with some assumptions when they try to make sense out of the din of history, and if at least some of these assumptions cannot be proven by uncontroversial empirical methods, then perhaps the deconstructionists are right and we need to read history exactly as we read literature. Let me explain why I do not think that we have to end up there. There are at least three assumptions made by Armstrong and Tennenhouse that we can gather just from their critique of Laslett and Stone. The first is that the traditional gendered division of labor in the family is not a manifestation of human nature. This is suggested in part by their demand that interior life be historicized, which of course assumes that interior life can be historicized. This is not a claim grounded in the actual existence of sufficient evidence, but a metaphysical claim about the flexibility of the human self, about the changing nature of interior life. Even if it is entered here just as a hypothesis that warrants investigation, it is a truth claim, or a claim that the hypothesis might well be true. Other assumptions have weaker relations to their argument, but still seem to play a guiding role in the path they take through this material. For example, one might reasonably suppose that Armstrong and Tennenhouse want to work with the assumption that women can have the same general wants and needs as men. This assumption would cast doubt on the claim that a patriarchal form of the family, in which the roles and power of father and mother are neither equal nor reciprocal, would be an optimal form of the family from the point of view of personal happiness. Laslett relates without comment that in the days of yore, England was an association between the male heads of wealthy families, and that the father ruled the family in more than name only. He does not consider this prima facie evidence for the possibility that the women in these families experienced unhappiness; Armstrong and Tennenhouse clearly do. A third assumption that Armstrong and Tennenhouse make is that the closed, domesticated, biologically related form of the family that Stone prefers is not necessarily the best form of family in terms of its effects on society. Stone argues that there are a number of social and political advantages to such a family, in creating the possibility of individual autonomy that will then find its way into anti-authoritarian political movements, for example. Armstrong and Tennenhouse remark that, in criticizing what he balefully calls the exchange of children, Stone "apparently cannot imagine...that the presence of other children in the family might have extended the sense of closeness to a community beyond the biological family." [21]^19 This is a possibility Armstrong and Tennenhouse clearly see as a potential social good. This is a truth claim. Some of these assumptions even look dangerously close to being generalizations, such as the assumption that women have the same basic wants and needs as men. Given their demand for the historicizing of everything, surely Armstrong and Tennenhouse cannot countenance a cross-historical generalization of this sort. But here it should be noted that the demand that we historicize everything does not entail that we will then find that absolutely everything changes; it is simply a demand that we not assume on the basis of current sentiment what can and cannot change. We should, in other words, hold nothing back from the cultural historians' examination. [22]^20 All of these historians, Armstrong and Tennenhouse no less than Laslett and Stone, are working with assumptions and even a political orientation. But not all assumptions have the same kind of epistemic impact. Thus, we can agree that all knowledge is mediated, without having then to agree that any given mediating influence is equal in its epistemic content to any other. One of the ways assumptions can operate in the production of historical narrative is to make some things appear and others disappear. Because Laslett privileges patriarchy, the particular points of view women may have had on the families he idealizes don't come into view, at least not fully or with prominence. In fact, he doesn't even mention them, nor is gender thematized in The World We Lost. Stone takes as a given that a central, nurturing, maternal figure--not paternal--is necessary for children's well-being. This assumption operates to preempt asking certain kinds of questions, from which other possibilities might have come into view. Armstrong and Tennenhouse clearly have women in mind when they offer some of their critical analyses about the way in which Laslett and Stone have naturalized a traditional gendered division of labor in the family. I am not making an argument for a prima facie privileging of any and all feminist assumptions, for one thing because feminists often disagree but also because feminists can simply be wrong. One such controversy relevant here is precisely over the sort of individualism that Stone champions. One might well think, at first blush, that individualism is in the interest of women, but many have rejected this claim. The individualist ideology of freedom and happiness assumes that all associations must be volitional for there to be just or happy relationships, which is a model of intersubjective relations based on public associations in voluntary organizations. Families are not like that; in fact, neither are communities. We are born into relations with specific others; we give birth to others and thus bear a necessary emotional relationship to them. These are never volitional--we may choose to become a parent but we cannot in general choose to whom we will become a parent. Traditional liberal individualist notions of human relationships have been unable effectively to evaluate and analyze such non-volitional relationships; thus they have tended to ignore them, following the Hegelian dogma that family relations belong to the sphere of nature, not the sphere of culture. That kind of claim is definitely not in the interest of women, since it exempts familial relationships from political critique and suggestions for change, but feminist ethicists also have argued persuasively that the kinds of non-volitional relationships born out of families and communities can enhance autonomy, and can also be subject to political and moral judgement. Early feminist theorists who made these very individualist assumptions--valorizing volitional relationships over non-volitional ones in all cases, for example--have been critiqued, quite persuasively. [23]^21 Thus I am not championing feminist assumptions in all cases. But at the very least, the assumption that women matter, that they may have an independent point of view on things, that they may have the same wants and needs as men, and that their optimal life situation is probably not to be found in a condition of life-long subordination, are assumptions proven useful in illuminating new aspects of the historical record unseen before the recent period. To argue for an epistemic equality between these assumptions and blatantly patriarchal ones--such that we can forego listening to what women say because they don't know their own needs, for example--is surely ludicrous. But what about truth? Armstrong and Tennenhouse retreat from truth. Although they make truth claims throughout the book, when asked about the implicit truth claims in their arguments, Armstrong vigorously denies the referential character of her claims. [24]^22 The book's arguments, she claims, are not about the world. She is just offering us a narrative to be judged by its effects in the present on discourses and practices. She will not claim anything approaching truth about the past. She is, in effect, a Rortyan. But a narrative can be true or false, and narratives tell a story about the world. Even fictional narratives offer true accounts about things indirectly: true ways in which human beings can respond to each other, be affected by a given experience, fall into trouble, or pull themselves out of trouble. Although we may compare narratives by what they each allow us to see or appreciate anew, and we may grant that multiple and even conflicting narratives can be informative about a given event, the value of a narrative generally rests on the quality and depth of its relation to the world. In this sense, a narrative is very different from a conversation, which does not require a relation to the world for it to be good or meaningful; conversations can resemble lovemaking, play, or chess matches (and philosophy conversations often resemble the last), with or without a relation to the world. Rorty has argued that truth talk merely gets in the way of conversation, posing a requirement that is as unnecessary to conversation as it is likely to lead the conversation off to a dead end. And Rorty, of course, portrays himself as carrying on the pragmatist tradition by this argument. To be accurate, Rorty does not argue against any use of the word "true" but against a specifically philosophical concern with the word or the concept. In itself, the elimination of a metaphysical project to understand the meaning of truth does not preclude us from calling some historical accounts true, depending, of course, on how one construes that metaphysical project. But the question does arise when Rorty eliminates talk of representation because then the world-content of a historical narrative would be dropped out. By his account, we can call Armstrong and Tennenhouse's account true but we cannot claim that it represents any truths about the way things really were in pre-modern Britain. We understand ourselves as participating in the contestations among historians over how to construct historical narratives, not as seeking to know the real nature of the past. In contrast to Rorty, Putnam does not dispense with truth talk in the sense of a relation with the world, nor even of realism. Though he shares with Rorty the view that a metaphysical project of elucidating the interface between thought and reality is nonsense, he does not go as far as Rorty in dispensing with all forms of metaphysical talk. The differences between Rorty and Putnam are especially interesting to look at because both are more Jamesian than Peircean, especially in their critique of scientism in philosophy and their tendency to psychologize philosophical quandaries. In his latest book, The Threefold Cord, Putnam takes us once again beyond his previous views, or rather, takes his earlier self to be his greatest foil. He argues now against metaphysical realism, internal realism, and pragmatic realism (all positions that he once held) and argues for a form of natural or direct realism. Direct realism is na?ve realism (what we believe to be true by our best lights is true about the world) but it has a second-order na?vet?, having rejected initial na?vet? and then moved back to the substance of the na?ve position after having tried, I suppose, sophistication. It's similar to Nietzsche's notion of the adult playing at playing like a child, thus retaining both the status of sophistication with the benefits of frivolous innocence. The difference between the adult playing like a child and the child playing is that the adult knows that s/he is playing like a child, knows the alternatives, and has made a choice. I don't think Putnam's second-order na?vet? works as na?vet?. One cannot, after all, return to carefree bliss in the Garden of Eden once one has seen what lies just beyond the gates. Putnam's realism and his notion of truth retain some level of their previous sophistication, and thus have a content. Let me explain what I mean. Putnam argues that direct or na?ve realism correctly holds that "the world is as it is independently of describers." [25]^23 One of his aims in this new book is to show how that realist commitment can be squared with the fact that perception is always mediated. He wants to counter the skeptical conclusions of those who, like Dummett, have realist commitments in their account of what is required for truth but acknowledge that neither human inquiry nor language can transcend its clay feet and thus meet the requirements. As I read it, Putnam's strategy has two stages: (1) to argue against, once again, one of the primary ways these clay feet have been conceptualized--in terms of the "interface" idea in which sense-impressions, qualia, mental representations, or some such are put between human beings and the external world; and (2) after having vanquished this idea, to retrieve the meaningfulness of the concept of representation without it being entangled in the assumption of an interface. [26]^24 Putnam argues, persuasively in my view, that the concept of representation must be retrieved if we are to retain the possibility of discourse that goes beyond conversation to make claims about the world that are in fact true. Putnam thinks that it is the "interface" idea that keeps mediated inquiry from plausibly achieving relations with the world; without the interface, representation is free to refer to the world rather than to our image of the world. And thus we can return to a na?ve realism. But it is not really a na?ve realism that he returns to, for according to Putnam, representations are not thing-like entities at the interface of human beings and the world, but rather practices. And it is because they are practices that we can understand the mediated nature of perception without becoming anti-realists. He uses Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit and Cora Diamond's discussion of two picture faces that have the same expression as examples of the way in which representations can be both real, or accurate as representations, and mediated. In Wittgenstein's example, a single picture can be seen equally well as a duck or a rabbit. In Diamond's example, two pictures of faces represent the same expression despite the fact that it is impossible to point to features of the faces that they have in common and that engender the expression. In each of these examples, one cannot point to anything different about the drawings themselves, anything materially different about them, to explain either the distinction we make on the one hand or the similarity we find on the other. Seeing an expression in the picture face is not just a matter of seeing the lines and the dots; rather, it is a matter of seeing something in the lines and the dots--but this is not to say that it is seeing something besides the lines and the dots. [27]^25 By this analogy, Putnam suggests, we can conceptualize the relation of human inquiry to the world. The world "by itself" does not cause us to see a duck or a rabbit, and yet the shapes are there in the world and not merely in our minds. We can affirm simultaneously the fact that the world does not force us to choose duck or rabbit and that our claim to see a duck represents a truth about the world, and not just about human perception or human practices, though it may also be about those things. This, however, is hardly a na?ve realism. In its substance, it is still the internal realism that Putnam developed in his middle period and has been denying ever since, in that it combines the aboutness claim of realism and the ontological relativity thesis of pragmatism. It works this out by making a claim about the world that can explain not how it is possible to have truth at all (which is the metaphysical project Putnam rejects along with Rorty), but how it is possible to have many truths. It is, then, a realism in its claim about the content of truth claims but an internal realism since it holds that human practices must be taken into account to understand which truths will be accepted, or how the world will be seen, at any given moment. The swing between the absolute and the arbitrary is the result of a conception of truth as absolute and objective. But truth is neither of these things. Even in regard to historical argument about the past, where extrapolations are large, complex, and always positional, we aim at the truth, and we can be more or less successful. The mistake is to think that in aiming at the truth we can hit it or miss it, as if truth is an "it." Thinking of truth as an "it" is what makes us think we cannot claim truth. But truth is as dense and multivalent as lived reality--and lived reality is, after all, what truth is about. ________________________ [28]^1 I am indebted to Marianne Janack for very helpful discussions about the arguments of this paper. I am also grateful to Nancy Armstrong for her feedback on an earlier version of it. ] [29]^2 Elgin herself argues against truth talk at times, as does Rorty, which should indicate that the repudiation of truth talk can be made for very different reasons. Rorty wishes to dispense with a metaphysical description of what we know in favor of an aesthetic one, while Elgin merely wishes to forego the application of representational models to every arena of inquiry. See Catherine Elgin, Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) 1. ] [30]^3 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) 4. In their introduction, Armstrong and Tennenhouse explain the epi-stemological assumptions of their study. They claim that "To overturn history, one simply has to demonstrate that words come chronologically as well as ontologically before the things they are presumed to represent and the differences that already exist among those things. Those of us who are willing to entertain this possibility have had little difficulty finding evidence to substantiate the inversion of traditional historical priorities"(4). ] [31]^4 They also agree with Geoff Bennington's view that "The claim to be able to discern the real continuities and thus to ground those fantasies at least partially in `truth' depends simply on the illusion of an intelligentsia as subject of science to stand outside and above that reality and those fantasies" (Armstrong and Tennenhouse 6-7, quoting from Geoff Bennington, "Demanding History," Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987] 25). They actually differ with Bennington's skepticism about the epistemic basis of historical narrative, but only because they want to redefine narrative as a process of discursive self-referring, a "function of the surface," indistinguishable from writing. Thus, rather than complain about history's groundlessness, they shift the historian's focus to the imaginary itself. Paradoxically, they then make the claim that they can give the history, in precise detail, of the emergence of this imaginary! ] [32]^5 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 6-7. ] [33]^6 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 84. ] [34]^7 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 71. ] [35]^8 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 71. ] [36]^9 As quoted in Armstrong and Tennenhouse 72. ] [37]^10 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 75. ] [38]^11 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 73. ] [39]^12 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 72. ] [40]^13 As quoted in Armstrong and Tennenhouse 73. ] [41]^14 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 76. ] [42]^15 As quoted in Armstrong and Tennenhouse 81. ] [43]^16 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 81-2. ] [44]^17 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 84. ] [45]^18 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 85. ] [46]^19 Armstrong and Tennenhouse 81. ] [47]^20 This is not to say that all of their feminist assumptions must be put to the test of history, since I am denying that this is possible. Some feminist claims, such as that women have the same wants and needs as men, can be challenged and debated through historical record, but others, such as that women's own views should always be consulted in assessing the past, cannot be coherently challenged. That is, one can accept it or reject it, and give reasons for doing so, but it is doubtful that the reasons given on one side will be intelligible to the other--such as that women simply don't know their own interests or cannot interpret the world around them. And it is the latter sort of feminist assumption--that women's own views should always be consulted in assessing the past--that I observe working in Armstrong and Tennenhouse's arguments. ] [48]^21 A clear overview of these issues can be found in Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). ] [49]^22 This occurred at a presentation of her work at the Pembroke Center, Brown University, February 2001. ] [50]^23 Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) 6. ] [51]^24 Putnam 59. ] [52]^25 Putnam 63. ] From HowlBloom at aol.com Fri Oct 8 03:35:10 2004 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 23:35:10 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War Message-ID: ?It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind: You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws.? Osama bin Laden explaining to Americans why they are Satanic, Message To the Ummah May 12, 2004 Western Civilization gives the right to do it your self, diy, the right to create?the right to create new movements, the right to create new artforms, the right to create our own constitutions, laws, theories, and beliefs. Osama wants to take all that away. Every pecking order battle between groups is a battle between hypotheses in the mass mind?guesses about the best way to do things. Osama?s guess, his hypothesis, has been tried out in Sudan and Afghanistan. Its result is a living nightmare. Margaret Mead said that every primitive, indigenous tribe in the early days of man forbade the murder of human beings. The problem was the definition of a human. The name of our tribe meant we were humans. Everyone from another tribe wasn?t human at all. he or she was fair game. In early tribes like these, said Mead, the number of ?humans? whose lives were sacred was only 50 to 75. The rest of the earth's population was a legitimate target for murder. But today, Mead pointed out, the number a single society says ?thou shalt not kill? is much, much greater. In India and China your fellow tribe members, your fellow human beings, your fellow Indians or Chinese, your brethren who you?re not supposed to kill, is 1.2 billion. Two anthropologists, William Divale and Marvin Harris, combed through data from 561 primi?tive tribes and discovered that 21% of the males were killed off violently before they ended adolescence. One out of every five men in these primitive, indigenous tribes died in skirmishes and war. The percentage of the slaughtered skyrockets if you include the women and children wiped out by indigenous peoples like the South American Taulipang, who burned dozens of families in their huts, loved the screams of pain inside, then marched home shouting a joyous "hei-hei-hei-hei-hei!"[i] If our techno-modern society killed at the old tribal rate, roughly 720 million modern humans would be blasted to smithereens in wars or homicides every generation. Compare this with the 55 million who died in WWII, and the bloodlettings of the last hundred years, are less than one-tenth of what they'd amount to under tribal or hunter-gatherer ways. Much as many of us hate Donald Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld tried to invent a new form of humanitarian war in Iraq. He tried to achieve it with smart bombs and with missiles that could jet down the street, turn a corner, and go directly into the room where a military group was hiding out. Total American deaths in Iraq now total 1,100. Civilian deaths come to a maximum of 13,603 . The total deaths in a regional conflict of this sort 150 years ago, the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, came to 615,378.[ii] For every 41 people killed in the Crimean War, the Iraq War has killed only one. The war in Iraq is grisly, ghastly, and deplorable. But for all practical purposes, the War In Iraq has saved 600,000 lives. That is a huge reduction in violence. Compare the deaths in the current Iraq War, revolting as it is, to deaths in the war that dragged on between Iraq and Iran from 1980 to 1988. That war lasted eight years and cost more than a million lives. Or compare this to a total of a million deaths every year worldwide in car accidents. Or compare it with the deaths worldwide each year caused by cigarette smoking, which total about 5 million[iii]. Every death is horrible and every war is deplorable. But thanks to industrialism, capitalism, technology, cultural advances, the spread of western values, and thanks to what some of us call cultural imperialism, we are making progress. There?s an unspoken moral imperative to capitalism. It says to those who practice it, ?save thy neighbor?. Save her with a delight. Save her with a moment of joy. Save her by taking her out of herself for a minute, an hour, or a day. Save her by giving her new powers. Save her by giving her new comforts and new consolations. Save one neighbor and you make a dollar. Save a thousand neighbors and you can make a thousand dollars. Save ten million folks you?ve never seen, folks who are your neighbors on this planet, and you can make ten million dollars. If you forget that your mission is to understand your neighbor?s needs and serve them, you will go home empty at the end of the day. You?ll wonder why you? re among the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation, why you?re among the hollow men, heads filled with straw, trudging without purpose through life. Save your fellow human beings with what we call products and services and you can go home knowing that someone needed you today. You can go home knowing that you were a part of something far, far greater than yourself?the advancement of others. And perhaps you were even a part of something that Osama deplores and we should celebrate-- the handmade evolution of the human race. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Oct 8 03:55:11 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 20:55:11 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War Message-ID: <01C4ACAF.F03F21A0.shovland@mindspring.com> How is it that the war in Iraq saved 600,000 lives? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: HowlBloom at aol.com [SMTP:HowlBloom at aol.com] Sent: Thursday, October 07, 2004 8:35 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Cc: bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com Subject: [Paleopsych] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War << File: ATT00000.txt; charset = UTF-8 >> << File: ATT00001.html; charset = UTF-8 >> << File: ATT00002.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Oct 8 04:19:12 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 21:19:12 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The fatal strategic errors of the Iraq war Message-ID: <01C4ACB3.4B748F30.shovland@mindspring.com> First and foremost, the errors of intelligence. In terms of the justification for war, bad information about the actual existence of WMD's. Today they are claiming that they made their decision on the best information available at the time. Not. The best information available just before the war was the results of the ongoing inspections, which were turning up nothing of importance. We all know about the mistake about our likely welcome: not flowers but bullets and bombs. Our piddling force (150,000 compared to 500,000 in Nam) is surrounded by a population that may smile at them in the day and shoot at them in the night, and which will certainly cooperate with the opposition with very little coercion. There is the error of logistics: Our supply lines, as in Viet Nam, are about 8,000 miles long. It is very costly to transport men and material over that distance. It consumes vast quantities of the petroleum which is now rapidly increasing in price. Choice of climate: in the hot season, 120 in the shade, and 20+ degrees hotter inside our uniforms. Sandstorms that raise havoc with all equipment. You can't fight a war by sitting in the shade, and you may die from the heat if you go out to fight. Alliances: No significant help from the other major powers in the world. Likelihood of covert assistance by some of them to "the enemy." Such alliances as we have are being successfully undermined by calculated acts of terror. There is, most important of all, the error in the size of the force, which is too small and which cannot be replenished or relieved without resorting to conscription, and all the political hubbub that will result from that. Can anything be done to "win" in Iraq? Probably not. That is the problem with making strategic mistakes: all you can do is to bring in fresh leadership to unwind the situation as fast as you can. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 8 13:58:32 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 09:58:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reason: Sexing Babies: Will sex selection create a violent world without women? Message-ID: Sexing Babies: Will sex selection create a violent world without women? http://www.reason.com/rb/rb100604.shtml 4.10.6 by Ronald Bailey Will sex selection create a violent world without women? ------------------------------------- "Sex selection will cause a severe imbalance of the sexes," predicted left-wing sociologist Amitai Etzioni way back in 1968. Etzioni further prophesied that the practice would "soon" condemn millions of men to rape, prostitution, homosexuality, or enforced celibacy. More recently, Brigham Young University political scientist Valerie M. Hudson and University of Kent research fellow Andrea M. den Boer argued in their book [11]Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population that growing [12]sex ratio imbalances resulting from sex selection in China will create a hoodlum army of 30 million single men that by 2020 will be a menace to world peace. Sex selection in India and China is achieved chiefly through ultrasound scans followed by the selective abortion of female fetuses. The natural sex ratio is about 105 boys per 100 girls, but in India it is now 113 boys per 100 girls and as high as 156 boys per 100 girls in some regions. In China the sex ratio now is just shy of 120 boys per 100 girls. Both China and India now ban the use of abortion for sex selection. Should those of us living in the developed world worry about skewed sex ratios in our own countries? After all, all sorts of nifty new biomedical technologies besides selective abortions are becoming available to make sex selection ever more feasible. For example, the [13]Genetics and IVF (GIVF) Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, is pioneering preconception sex selection by means of a system that segregates sperm that will produce girls from those that will produce boys. Joseph Schulman, the founder of GIVF, explained how his clinic's [14]MicroSort sperm-segregation system works at the [15]First International Conference on Ethics, Science and Moral Philosophy of Assisted Human Reproduction at the Royal Society in London last week. MicroSort technology tags sperm bearing X chromosomes (those which determine females) and sperm bearing Y chromosomes (those which determine males) with a fluorescent dye so that they can be segregated into different batches. The dye harmlessly attaches to the DNA molecules that make up genes. Female-determining X chromosomes are much bigger than male-determining Y chromosomes, which means that human sperm carrying X chromosomes have 2.8 percent more DNA than do sperm with Y chromosomes. Thus, X-sperm soak up more of the fluorescent dye and glow more brightly. This difference in brightness allows flow cytometry machines to detect and separate the X- from the Y-bearing sperm. The sperm-separating technique is not perfect: According to the latest data, batches of sperm intended to produce males typically contain 75 percent Y chromosome sperm. The female batches contain 91 percent X chromosome sperm. Once the sperm have been segregated, they may be used in either artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization to produce a child of the desired sex. Using sex-segregated sperm in artificial insemination sidesteps the contentious debate over the moral status of embryos, since fertilization takes place straight in the would-be mothers' wombs. The cost per cycle of MicroSort's service is about $3,000. For those worried about whether such sex selection technology will radically skew U.S. sex ratios, Schulman's clinical data should be soothing. Of the more than 3,000 sperm-sorting cycles requested by patients, 77 percent have been seeking to produce girls. Most parents want to use MicroSort to achieve "family balancing," that is, to have a child of the opposite sex to the first one, or to balance out families that now have all girls or all boys. Another reason to use sperm segregation is to avoid the 500 or so inheritable X-linked diseases, such as hemophilia, that afflict boys. Boys are more vulnerable to these diseases because they inherit only a single X chromosome from their mothers, whereas girls inherit two, one from each parent. If there is a faulty gene on one X chromosome, the undamaged one on the other X chromosome shields girls from its deleterious effects. But boys, who have only one X chromosome paired with a much smaller Y chromosome, will suffer from the disease if they inherit the X chromosome with the faulty gene. More evidence that the West was unlikely to go the way of China and India was presented at the Royal Society conference by German bioethicist [16]Edgar Dahl from the University of Giessen. He cited updated [17]surveys from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States that found no strong gender preferences. In Germany, 76 percent of respondents didn't care about the sex of their first child, while 14 percent would prefer a boy and 10 percent would prefer a girl. When asked if they might consider using MicroSort, 94 percent of Germans rejected it out of hand. When asked if they might consider using cost-free magic pills, a pink one for girls and a blue one for boys, to select their children's sex, 92 said no, they'd turn down those pills. Seventy-three percent of Britons had no preference about the sex of their first-born child. Sixty-eight percent of Britons would like to have equal numbers of girls and boys in their families, compared to only 30 percent of Germans. A majority of Americans did express a preference about the sex of their first-born: 39 percent would prefer a boy and 19 percent would prefer a girl. Forty-nine percent of Americans wanted an equal number of boys and girls in their families, and 18 percent could imagine taking advantage of MicroSort-type sex selection service. Dahl argued that the only valid justification for limiting parents' liberty to select their children's sex might be a clear and present threat that a society's sex ratio is about to become radically unbalanced. "In the West, there is no evidence at all that there is a threat to the sex ratio," Dahl concluded. So Etzioni's dire predictions have proven to be wrong; allowing parents in the West access to sex selection won't result in bands of violent horny young men whose only access to sex is rape, prostitution, or homosexuality. During the question-and-answer period at the Royal Society conference, a physician from India claimed that if MicroSort became widely available in his country, 90 percent of parents would choose to have only boys. Thus, he argued, sex selection should be banned there. However, the physician noted that skewed sex ratios seem to be a problem chiefly in the Hindu community. Indian Muslim and Christian sex ratios were close to the natural rate. He also noted that in families in which the women were literate, the sex ratios are also close to the natural rate. "That seems to me to make a strong case, not for banning sex selection, but for more and better education of women," replied Dahl. Seems about right to me too. ------------------------------------- Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His new book, Liberation Biology: A Moral and Scientific Defense of the Biotech Revolution will be published in early 2005. References 6. http://www.reason.com/rb/rb100604.shtml 7. http://www.reason.com/rb/rb090104.shtml 8. http://www.reason.com/rb/rb082504.shtml 9. http://reason.com/rb/bailey.shtml 10. mailto:rbailey at reason.com 11. http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=9963&ttype=2 12. http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i34/34a01401.htm 13. http://www.givf.com/ 14. http://www.microsort.com/ 15. http://www.humanreproethics.org/ 16. http://www.ihs.ox.ac.uk/perl/ethox/us160.pl?id=156 17. http://www3.oup.co.uk/eshre/press-release/oct203.pdf From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 8 14:00:33 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 10:00:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CBC: End of Life Message-ID: End of Life The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network http://www.thecbc.org/redesigned/research_display.php?id=155 Recent developments in the euthanasia debate in the Netherlands by Henk Jochemsen, Ph.D. Last summer three themes surfaced in the public discussion on end-of-life-decisions. These are: euthanasia in case of patients with (beginning) dementia, terminal sedation and euthanasia, and life termination of severely handicapped newborn babies. This article will briefly describe and comment on these discussions. 1. Euthanasia for patients with dementia. In the first month of 2004 it became known that the public prosecutor and the minister of justice had decided not to prosecute a physician who assisted a patient with beginning dementia in committing suicide. It concerned a patient who had experienced a long dementia process of his father and his mother, and for whom the prospect of going through such a process of - in his eyes - loss of dignity, caused "unbearable suffering without prospect". The physician accepted his claim of unbearable suffering and assisted in suicide. The public prosecutor considering the specific circumstances of this case, decided not to prosecute even though they opined that the physician should have fulfilled some additional requirements for careful procedure. After this decision became public, members of parliament asked questions of the minister of justice regarding this case. In the eyes of those MP's (Members of Parliament) this decision meant an extension of accepted practise and jurisprudence of euthanasia, since the suffering was caused by a future condition that the patient foresaw and feared. But when that condition would be a reality he would no longer be aware of it in the sense that it would then cause unbearable suffering. The minister referred to the Supreme Court decision in the Chabot case (1994) that determined that psychic suffering could provide a justification for euthanasia or physician assisted suicide. 2. Terminal sedation. This summer Van der Maas and Van der Wal et al published an article in Annals of Internal Medicine on the practice of terminal sedation. In fact the main data in this article was published before in the report on euthanasia practise in the Netherlands that came out in 2002. But the Dutch media apparently thought this data was new and reacted to it in the mass media. The main quantitative finding is that in between four and ten percent of all death cases physicians apply so called 'terminal sedation'. Terminal sedation is defined as the administration of drugs to keep the patient in deep sedation or coma until death, without giving artificial nutrition or hydration. This normally is maintained until the patient dies. A discussion point in this context is whether the patients should or should not receive tube feeding. In a terminal stage this normally will not be done. But when the terminal sedation is applied in non terminal stages, and no fluids are applied, the distinction between terminal sedation and euthanasia becomes very thin if real at all. This point gained weight by anecdotal evidence in the media reporting that very recently Dutch physicians were applying such terminal sedation as a way of fulfilling a euthanasia request but without reporting it as euthanasia. The law establishes that euthanasia should be reported to the Regional Euthanasia Review Committee, whereas pain treatment or sedation need not be reported, so an important question in the public debate was whether physicians are applying so called terminal sedation as a substitute for euthanasia since this would save them reporting and the possibility of further questions or an investigation by the Public Prosecutor. It is interesting to note that this discussion occurred just a few years after the debate on terminal sedation started in the Netherlands. The question for those rejecting euthanasia is whether it is an acceptable form of terminal care. For those accepting euthanasia under the established conditions, the question is whether terminal sedations is actually a concealed form of euthanasia that does not do justice to the request of the patient. Both sides agree that if terminal sedation is to be considered as a special form of terminal care it should be applied only in the very last stages of life (life expectancy of days, at most a week), in a very careful way since the titration of the doses of sedative is not so simple. Under those conditions terminal sedation should not be seen as a form of euthanasia. A point of discussion is whether it is recommendable that in a case of intended terminal sedation the attending physician should consult a colleague. On this topic members of parliament have also asked questions of the government. The under minister of health care has asked the Royal Dutch Medical Association to formulate a protocol for applying terminal sedation as distinct from a form of euthanasia. 3. Life termination of severely handicapped babies. During the second half of the 1980's and first half of the 1990's the debate on the regulation of euthanasia (that is voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands) went parallel with the discussion on life-ending actions of physicians on incompetent patients. A special group of these are severely ill or handicapped newborn babies. The first kind of regulation of life ending actions that resulted in a change of the law on the burial of the dead in 1994 deals with voluntary as well as non voluntary euthanasia. Voluntary and non voluntary euthanasia should be reported by different forms and be evaluated by justice. In fact, very few cases of non voluntary euthanasia were reported and brought to court. This did happen with two cases of the termination of life of a severely handicapped baby. Both cases were brought to a lower and a higher court and the physicians were aquitted by the four courts. In the further debate on the legislation of voluntary euthanasia in the second half of the nineties, voluntary euthanasia was distinguished from non voluntary euthanasia. However, in the course of the debate the cabinet expressed the intention to establish a national review committee for cases of euthanasia for incompetent patients. That committee would have the same function as their regional euthanasia review committees: to evaluate the reported cases before justice will decide whether it will further investigate a specific case of non voluntary euthanasia. The criteria would presumably be derived mainly from the four court decisions on the aformentioned babies. So far, however, the cabinet has not taken any steps to establish such a national review committee. Recently the academic hospital in Groningen announced that it has formulated a protocol for dealing with cases of severely handicapped newborn babies whose parents ask for euthanasia. This has caused a renewed discussion on ending the lives of newborn babies, and on the best way of regulating and controlling it. Those favouring a regulation point out that it does happen in between twenty and one hundred cases annually without any legal control. However, whether a further legal regulation will lead to the reporting of all such cases is a big question in light of the fact that even after several years of a formal legislation of euthanasia just over half the number of cases are reported. Furthermore, it should be realised that in fact there is a legal regulation of non voluntary euthanasia, namely the article in the law on the burial of the dead that establishes that in cases of non voluntary euthanasia the physician must report such cases to the legal authorities, using a specific form designed for such cases. Even though the court decisions on the two babies indicate that there is little risk for physicians to be prosecuted after ending the life of a severely handicapped baby under certain conditions, very few, if any, such cases have been officially reported since then. The experience with the legal regulation of euthanasia has taught that acceptance by the legal authorities of a protocol which describes the process of decision making and performance of life terminating actions will function as pseudo-legalisation. This psuedo-legalisation will not guarantee that all cases will be reported, and therefore merely creates a false idea of control, and is seperate from the ethical objection to such regulation. This topic has been discussed in parliament and the under minister of health has promised to present the cabinet position before the end of this year. 4. In conclusion Considering the three debates it can be concluded that the legislation of euthanasia in the penal code has not put to rest the discussions in society on life ending actions of physicians. The attempt to get the practise of euthanasia into the open and under legal control has failed. Though part of this practise is now open to legal scrutiny, a significant part of the formally legalised practise is not, and there continues to be considerable grey area in both the medical care for the dying and the intentional killing of patients. Of additional concern is the trend toward a continual broadening of the interpretation of the requirements for legal euthanasia. Currently this concerns patients with beginning dementia, and one of the most worrisome aspects is that just a few years after the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia the discussion on the presumed need for the regulation of non voluntary euthanasia has begun once again. From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 8 14:12:05 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 10:12:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Kurzweil's Quest For Eternal Youth Sets Group Abuzz Message-ID: Kurzweil's Quest For Eternal Youth Sets Group Abuzz http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11564-2004Oct6?language=printer By Leslie Walker Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page E01 CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Inventor Ray Kurzweil takes 250 nutritional supplements a day in his quest to live long enough to reap the benefits he expects from biotechnology. He says he's trying to reprogram his body, as he would his computer. "I really do believe it is feasible to slow down the aging process," Kurzweil told Technology Review magazine's Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here last week. "We call that a bridge to a bridge to a bridge -- to the full flowering of the biotechnology revolution." Kurzweil, a well-regarded scientist who invented the flatbed scanner and a reading machine for the blind, claimed his pills appear to be helping: Biological tests conducted at a clinic in Denver found his body resembles that of a man in his early forties, he claimed, rather than his true age of 56. The claim startled many in the audience because there is no medically accepted way to measure aging. Most biological markers simply measure health. And health is a theme Kurzweil returned to repeatedly; it is the subject of his latest book, "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever," co-authored with medical doctor Terry Grossman. But it was his broader vision of how biology, nanotechnology and information science are merging that set the backdrop for the conference, which brought together nearly 1,000 scientists and executives from various disciplines to peer into the future. Kurzweil has long contended technology is advancing exponentially, as each new breakthrough -- fire, the printing press, computers, the Internet -- is used to speed up development of the next. Debate at the two-day event ranged widely about just what is on the horizon. Presentations ranged across the frontiers of science, including robotics, nanotechnology, biometrics and geographical positioning systems. World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee described the second big phase of the global computer network, a "Semantic Web" project involving tagging or defining online content in a special language. The idea is to let computers accomplish work humans now do by making it possible for machines to read the Web. "Isn't that a bit old-fashioned, having a human being browse the Web?" mused Berners-Lee. DuPont's research chief, Uma Chowdhry, said her company is working on a long-range project for the Department of Energy involving a bio-refinery to create renewable energy resources. General Motors Corp. chief executive G. Richard Wagoner Jr. described the automaker's plans to expand the safety and security services it offers through its OnStar subsidiary. Yet no one got the crowd talking like Kurzweil, winner of the National Medal of Technology and author of "The Age of Spiritual Machines." He's known for making accurate predictions, including one about the emergence of a global network resembling the World Wide Web and another about when computers would beat humans at chess. At MIT last week, Kurzweil described a future in which he's convinced immortality -- or a drastically longer life span -- will be possible thanks to emerging technologies. His new book, which will hit stores in a few weeks, outlines a special "longevity program" of diet, exercise and nutritional supplements aimed at slowing the aging process. He and Grossman recommend simple starches and foods low in sugar and high in anti-inflammatory agents such as fish and nuts. They advise taking all sorts of substances such as phosphatidylcholine, a cell-membrane component that people tend to lose as they age, making their skin sag. In an interview, Kurzweil said he and Grossman also have developed their own line of products and will launch a Web site to sell them, including shake mixes and other meal-replacement products . Such dietary supplements tend to be controversial in the medical community. David Schardt, senior nutritionist at the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, said the only regimen that has shown real potential to slow aging to date is drastically reducing calorie intake. "We tell people to take these claims with a grain of salt because in many instances there is no evidence -- or the evidence is far from conclusive -- that these supplements will do anything," Schardt said. Kurzweil acknowledged that science today can't halt aging, but he said he believes science will develop age-defying or even age-reversing techniques within 10 to 20 years, thanks to advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology. He described three stages or "bridges" on the purported road to immortality. First is his healthy living program designed to correct "metabolic imbalances" and keep people alive long enough to benefit from the second stage. In stage two, a decade or so away, he contends biotechnology advances will block diseases and slow aging, because the decoding of our genome is already leading to tissue-engineering techniques for regrowing cells and organs, and to the creation of genetically targeted drugs and gene therapies. These techniques, he said, should help some people reach the third stage -- about 30 years away -- when nanotechnology will allow humans to radically rebuild and extend their bodies with help from "nanobots," itsy-bitsy robots smaller than human blood cells that will slip into our bloodstreams to fix DNA errors, fight pathogens and expand intelligence. At that point, he declared, humans may be able to live forever. Some are skeptical. S. Jay Olshansky, an epidemiology professor at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, called Kurzweil's vision "science fiction" in a phone interview. He said life expectancy isn't likely to change much even after the expected medical advances. "Life expectancy is inching up. It's not jumping up." At the MIT conference, not everyone seemed enamored with this idea. During lunch the next day, Daniel McCurdy, chief executive of consulting company ThinkFire Services USA Ltd., said immortality didn't strike him as all that appealing: "I'm already periodically bored, and I'm only 48. Why would you want to live forever?" Kurzweil later conceded that radically extending human life could lead to a "deep ennui" if nothing else changed, but he believes we will grow smarter and vastly improve our quality of life. Nanobots, if we let them swim around our brain capillaries, will boost our brainpower, he said, as they chatter with our biological neurons over a wireless local network and the Internet, creating a hybrid form of super-intelligence. "This scenario will enable us to expand our mental faculties through these massively distributed neural implants with no surgery required," he added. Kurzweil said he doesn't think such changes will detract from our humanity. "The emergence of artificial intelligence is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines coming from over the horizon to compete with us," he declared. "Rather, it is emerging from our human civilization." For baby boomers, though, it's a safe bet many will resist the idea of tinkering with Mother Nature. That's the thinking of McCurdy, who believes part of what makes life a great adventure is knowing it will end. "I would rather continue the adventure by dying and going into a different plane," he said, "instead of having nanobots running around my brain." Leslie Walker's e-mail address is [3]walkerl at washpost.com. From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 8 14:13:43 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 10:13:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog Review: Zygmunt Bauman: The Self in a Consumer Society Message-ID: Zygmunt Bauman: The Self in a Consumer Society http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=100937&textreg=1&id=BauSelf1-1 The economic engines of the postmodern society, Zygmunt Bauman argues, have powerful stratifying effects on social life, creating divisions that, at the extremes, lead to almost diametrically opposite individual experiences of time, distance, and place. "We are all on the move," he writes, but at the rich and affluent end of the hierarchy, individuals experience themselves participating and exulting in the movement characteristic of contemporary life, while those at the other, impoverished end are helplessly driven by it. Those at one end experience space as a freedom; those at the other end experience it as bondage. Here Bauman discusses in general terms the ceaseless drive toward change inherent in consumerism and the vast economic inequalities that it produces. Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw, is the author of many books, including Modernity and the Holocaust, Postmodern Ethics, and Globalization: The Human Consequences. Our postmodern society is a consumer society. When we call it a consumer society, we have in mind something more than the trivial and sedate circumstance that all members of that society are consumers--all human beings, and not just human beings, have been consumers since time immemorial. What we do have in mind is that ours is a "consumer society" in the similarly profound and fundamental sense in which the society of our predecessors, modern society in its industrial phase, used to be a "producer society." That older type of modern society once engaged its members primarily as producers and soldiers; society shaped its members by dictating the need to play those two roles, and the norm that society held up to its members was the ability and the willingness to play them. In its present late-modern (Giddens), second-modern (Beck), or post-modern stage, modern society has little need for mass industrial labor and conscript armies, but it needs--and engages--its members in their capacity as consumers. The role that our present-day society holds up to its members is the role of the consumer, and the members of our society are likewise judged by their ability and willingness to play that role. The difference between our present-day society and its immediate predecessor is not as radical as abandoning one role and picking up another instead. In neither of its two stages could modern societies do without its members producing things to be consumed, and members of both societies do, of course, consume. The consumer of a consumer society, however, is a sharply different creature from the consumer of any other society thus far. The difference is one of emphasis and priorities--a shift of emphasis that makes an enormous difference to virtually every aspect of society, culture, and individual life. The differences are so deep and multiform that they fully justify speaking of our society as a society of a separate and distinct kind--a consumer society. Ideally, all acquired habits should "lie on the shoulders" of that new type of consumer just like the ethically inspired vocational and acquisitive passions used to lie, as Max Weber repeated after Richard Baxter, "on the shoulders of the `saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.'"[3]^1 And the habits are indeed continually, daily, and at first opportunity thrown aside, and never given the chance to firm up into the iron bars of a cage (except one meta-habit: the "habit of changing habits"). Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment forever, no needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso "until further notice" attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment. It is the volatility, the in-built temporality of all engagements that counts; it counts more than the commitment itself, which anyway is not allowed to outlast the time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or the desirability of that object). That all consumption takes time is in fact the bane of the consumer society and a major worry for the merchandisers of consumer goods. The consumer's satisfaction ought to be instant and this in a double sense. Consumed goods should bring satisfaction immediately, requiring no learning of skills and no lengthy groundwork, but the satisfaction should end the moment the time needed for consumption is up, and that time ought to be reduced to bare minimum. The needed reduction is best achieved if the consumers cannot hold their attention nor focus their desire on any object for long; if they are impatient, impetuous, and restive; and above all if they are easily excitable and predisposed to quickly lose interest. Indeed when the waiting is taken out of wanting and the wanting out of waiting, the consumptive capacity of consumers may be stretched far beyond the limits set by any natural or acquired needs or designed by the physical endurability of the objects of desire. The traditional relationship between needs and their satisfaction is then reversed: the promise and hope of satisfaction precedes the need promised to be satisfied and will be always greater than the extant need--yet not too great to preclude the desire for the goods which carry that promise. As a matter of fact, the promise is all the more attractive the less the need in question is familiar; there is a lot of fun in living through an experience one did not know existed. The excitement of a new and unprecedented sensation--not the greed of acquiring and possessing nor wealth in its material, tangible sense--is the name of the consumer game. Consumers are first and foremost gatherers of sensations; they are collectors of things only in a secondary and derivative sense. As Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen put it, "Desire does not desire satisfaction. To the contrary, desire desires desire."[4]^2 Such is the case at any rate with the ideal consumer. The prospect of the desire fading off, dissipating, and having nothing in sight to resurrect it, or the prospect of a world with nothing left in it to be desired, must be the most sinister of the ideal consumer's horrors (and, of course, of the consumer-goods merchandiser's horrors). To increase their capacity for consumption, consumers must never be left to rest. They need to be constantly exposed to new temptations to keep them in the state of perpetual suspicion and steady disaffection. The bait commanding them to shift attention needs to confirm the suspicion while offering a way out of disaffection: "You reckoned you'd seen it all? You ain't seen nothing yet!" It is often said that the consumer market seduces its customers. But in order to do so, it needs customers who want to be seduced (just as to command his laborers, the factory boss needed a crew with the habits of discipline and command-following firmly entrenched). In a properly working consumer society, consumers seek actively to be seduced. They live from attraction to attraction, from temptation to temptation--each attraction and each temptation being somewhat different and perhaps stronger than its predecessor. In many ways they are just like their fathers, the producers, who lived from one turn of the conveyer belt to an identical next. This cycle of desire is a compulsion, a must, for the fully-fledged, mature consumer; yet that must, that internalized pressure, that impossibility of living one's life in any other way, is seen as the free exercise of one's will. The market might have already selected them as consumers and so taken away their freedom to ignore its blandishments, but in every successive visit to the market-place, consumers have every reason to feel that it is they who are in command. They are the judges, the critics, and the choosers. They can, after all, refuse their allegiance to any one of the infinite choices on display--except the choice of choosing among them. It is the combination of the consumer, constantly greedy for new attractions and fast bored with attractions already had, and of the world in all its dimensions--economic, political, personal--transformed after the pattern of the consumer market and, like that market, ready to oblige and change its attractions with ever accelerating speed, that wipes out all fixed signposts from an individual map of the world or from the plans for a life itinerary. Indeed, traveling hopefully is in this situation much better than to arrive. Arrival has that musty smell of the end of the road, that bitter taste of monotony and stagnation that signals the end to everything for which the ideal consumer lives and considers the sense of living. To enjoy the best this world has to offer, you may do all sorts of things except one: to declare, after Goethe's Faust, "O moment, you are beautiful, last forever!" And so we all travel, whether we like it or not. We have not been asked about our feelings anyway. Thrown into a vast and open sea with no tracks and milestones fast sinking, we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries or tremble out of fear of drowning. How does one voyage on these stormy seas--seas that certainly call for strong boats and skillful navigators? This becomes the question. Even more so when one understands that the more vast the expanse of free sailing, the more the sailor's fate tends to be polarized and the deeper the chasm between the poles. But there is a catch. Everybody may be cast into the mode of consumer; everybody may wish to be a consumer and indulge in the opportunities which that mode of life holds. But not everybody can be a consumer. Desire is not enough; to squeeze the pleasure out of desire, one must have a reasonable hope of obtaining the desired object, and while that hope is reasonable for some, it is futile for others. All of us are doomed to the life of choices, but not all of us have the means to be choosers. But you can tell one kind of society from another by the dimensions along which it stratifies its members, and, like all other societies, the postmodern, consumer society is a stratified one. Those "high up" and "low down" are plotted in a society of consumers along the lines of mobility--the freedom to choose where to be. Those "high up" travel through life to their hearts' desire and pick and choose their destinations by the joys they offer. Those "low down" are thrown out from the site they would rather stay in, and if they do not move, it is the site that is pulled from under their feet. When they travel, their destination, more often than not, is of somebody else's choosing and seldom enjoyable; and when they arrive, they occupy a highly unprepossessing site that they would gladly leave behind if they had anywhere else to go. But they don't. They have nowhere else to go; there is nowhere else where they are likely to be welcomed. ________________________ [5]^1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976) 181. ] [6]^2 Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, "Telerotics," Imagologies: Media Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994) 11. ] From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 8 14:16:17 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 10:16:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog Review: Colin Bird: Democracy and Its Nightmares Message-ID: Colin Bird: Democracy and Its Nightmares http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=114368&textreg=1&id=BirDemo2-1 Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1996 Ankersmit, F. R. Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996 From the beginning, democracy has confronted a recurring nightmare. In order to identify and pursue worthwhile collective goals, concerted, coherent, and purposive social action is necessary. But what if this invariably involves a higher degree of social control, discipline, and hierarchy than any recognizably democratic social ideal could ever tolerate? Plato was perhaps the first to canvas this possibility. If he is right, the circumstances of human life render self-defeating (and hence irrational) the democratic aspiration to empower and improve society by liberating it. Most of the historical and contemporary contributions to what we today call "democratic theory" can plausibly be seen as attempts to confront, dispel, or cope with particular variants of this nightmare. Opponents of the Ancien Regime monarchies needed Rousseau to explain how citizens could collectively identify and pursue their own Colin Bird is Assistant Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several articles on political neutrality and self-government. His book, The Myth of Liberal Individualism, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. common good better than an enlightened despot who claimed to represent them; early Americans needed Madison to explain how democratic conflict could be exploited to combat rather than exacerbate the perceived instability of democratic self-rule; reluctant parliamentary reformers in nineteenth-century Britain needed Mill to explain how wider political participation might edify rather than corrupt public debate; cold warriors needed Schumpeter to redefine democracy so as to reconcile the democratic pretensions of the liberal nation-state with its systematically oligarchical reality. Convincing or not, these contributions all presuppose some interlocutor who charges either that democratic attempts to secure important public benefits are typically self-defeating, or that non-self-defeating social action must be basically undemocratic. Historically, such charges haven't just reflected anti-democratic prejudice. This is presumably one reason why we are able to take the idea of democratic theory at all seriously: if there were nothing but unreasoned fear and prejudice fuelling the democratic nightmare, theoretical argumentation would hardly seem a necessary or appropriate response. Only reasoned challenges to democratic politics call for, or deserve, reasoned apologias. The two works of democratic theory under consideration here confront, more or less explicitly, and with mixed success, contemporary variants of the democratic nightmare. This is harder to see in the case of Gutmann and Thompson's Democracy and Disagreement, because the authors decline to offer a systematic justification for the form of democracy that they recommend (7). Instead, the book engages a particular debate among proponents of democratic politics. As the authors conceive it, the participants in this debate all acknowledge the need to constrain democratic rule in various ways, but disagree about the form and location of the appropriate constraints. Gutmann and Thompson oppose those who would limit these constraints to either (a) a series of rules of a purely procedural nature, intended to ensure that the political process is fair and/or (b) a set of constitutionally defined and judicially enforced restrictions intended to ensure that certain fundamental social values are upheld (27-39). Gutmann and Thompson don't deny the importance of these sorts of constraints, but rather want to embed them within a braoder and in their view more basic set of democratic contstraints (40). They formulate these broader constraints as a set of rules of moral argument tio guide citizens' (not just judges' or academics' [4-5, 45]) deliberations about public policy. On their model, principles of "reciprocity," "publicity," and "accountability" structure the deliberations themselves, and determine what counts as an appropriate resolution, while the values of "basic liberty," "basic opportunity," and "fair opportunity" form the subject matter of the deliberation (348). According to Gutmann and Thompson, by observing these principles citizens can make up a "deliberative deficit" whose contemporary symptoms include "communicating by soundbite, competing by character assassination, and resolving political conflicts through self-seeking bargaining" (12). A critic of democracy might reasonably regard these as chronic and perhaps decisive failings of representative democracy. However, Gutmann and Thompson aren't ready to give up on democracy, and they suggest that deliberative democracy will yield public decisions that are "more morally legitimate, public-spirited, mutually respectful, and self-correcting." As they concede, this "is more than democracy in America now offers most of its citizens most of the time" (51). The clear implication is that contemporary "soundbite" democracy typically produces morally questionable outcomes, undermines mutual respect and fellow-feeling among citizens, and fails adequately to correct its own mistakes. It is here that Democracy and Disagreement offers a response, albeit tentative, to a familiar contemporary variant of the democratic nightmare. Gutmann and Thompson want to convince us that their deliberative principles can inject (a currently often absent) moral coherence and rationality into the democratic process. By encouraging a sense of "collective moral purpose" (62), deliberative democracy can express "as complete a conception of the common good as is possible within a morally pluralistic society" (93). Democracy and Disagreement does not set out to vindicate deliberative democracy against all-comers. Instead, Gutmann and Thompson aim simply to sketch the outlines and likely virtues of a new democratic model and to invite further reflection on its prospects. However, the idea that their recommended forms of deliberation can be expected to enhance democratic debate and decision-making is open to question. By what standard do Gutmann and Thompson assess the quality of debate and decision for the purposes of developing their account of democratic deliberation? Throughout the book, they insist that the relevant test concerns the degree to which procedural, constitutional, and deliberative democracy can "resolve" moral disagreement. But why should this be the appropriate barometer of the relative merits of these three kinds of democracy? The answer suggested by Gutmann and Thompson in several passages is that all three conceptions accept the principle that political decisions ought to be justified on the basis of reasons that are acceptable to citizens bound by them (26, 39). I doubt that this is a sufficient answer. Gutmann and Thompson here mobilize a very vague principle of political legitimacy and authority accepted by a huge range of theories (democratic and nondemocratic). Plausible as it is as a general condition for legitimacy, it nevertheless leaves us well short of the demand that citizens publicly resolve their moral differences as far as possible. Moreover, focusing exclusively on this aim surely reflects an oddly narrow view of the point of the democratic project. Far more natural criteria by which to judge the merits of different democratic forms might include the extent to which they: empower citizens, realize the value of self-government, curb the power of elites, make society more just, encourage worthwhile forms of life, etc. And why would realizing any of these less obliquely salient goals necessarily require citizens to aim as far as possible for public "resolutions" of their moral disagreements? Perhaps suitably empowered, self-governing, just, and worthwhile forms of life are ones in which most moral disagreements are authoritatively settled without "minimizing rejection" (85) of views held by citizens. Setting aside cases in which moral disagreement threatens serious social dislocation or instability (which seem irrelevant to the proposed comparison between procedural, constitutional, and deliberative democracy), public moral reconciliation isn't automatically self-justifying. Gutmann and Thompson, of course, aren't expecting citizens to reach comprehensive moral consensus on all disputed questions. Still, their form of deliberative democracy "imposes obligations on citizens to seek moral accommodation when their comprehensive conceptions differ" (39). But perhaps democrats, and particularly deliberative democrats, might reasonably view this obligation as a liability, not an asset. Could they not conclude that the perpetual imperative to "economize" on disagreement is likely to constipate the deliberative process? Or that sometimes a bit of healthy disrespect is a reasonable price to pay for a robust democratic discourse that realizes the value of self-government or strives with "collective moral purpose" to eliminate injustice? If so, such democrats could reasonably reject both Gutmann and Thompson's model of deliberation and the criterion by which they favorably contrast it with procedural and constitutional democracy. Suppose, however, we concede this point to Gutmann and Thompson. Could we then accept their argument that deliberative democracy promises to "resolve" moral disagreement more "satisfactorily" than its competitors? For this argument to be convincing, we would obviously need a fairly clear account of what makes some "resolutions" of moral disagreement more "satisfactory" than others. Unfortunately, Gutmann and Thompson leave this crucial issue fuzzy. At different points, they suggest that more "satisfactory resolutions" (44) are those that: increase the likelihood that citizens are able to respect each other (43, 51, 56, 80), increase the "justifiability" of outcomes (43), promote "moral learning" (93), are fairer (26, 52-3), are more likely to elicit citizens' compliance and co-operation (41-2, 67), enhance civic virtue and public-spiritedness (42). These aren't obviously equivalent or even compatible (perhaps more "justifiable" outcomes express "disrespect" toward certain citizens' reasonable points of view, and perhaps citizens won't want to comply or co-operate with "fair" decisions). Given this, it is difficult to extract from Democracy and Disagreement clear reasons for thinking that deliberative "public reason" improves on other ways of resolving moral disagreement under democratic conditions. There isn't space here to examine this question in full, but one can appreciate some of the relevant issues by contrasting Gutmann and Thompson's own view with an alternative way of addressing moral disagreement that they explicitly reject: the model of toleration. According to them, "toleration requires majorities to let minorities express their views in public and practice them in private" (61). As interpreted by Gutmann and Thompson, deliberative democracy goes beyond this in two ways. First, citizens are asked to resolve discursively, not merely express, their views in the public sphere. Second, deliberative democracy requires that citizens aim to respect, not merely tolerate, each others' views: the deliberative goal of moral accommodation requires citizens to learn the difference between "respectable and merely tolerable differences of opinion" and adopt a "favorable attitude toward" those with whom they disagree (79, 93). Although Gutmann and Thompson aren't clear on this point, it seems reasonable to suppose that the model of toleration affiliates most naturally with a constitutional conception of democracy. Certainly, one very obvious way of institutionalizing toleration is to impose firm constitutional restrictions on the rights of majorities to interfere in others' ways of life. In any case, Gutmann and Thompson clearly oppose this way of dealing with moral disagreement: "mere toleration...locks into place the moral divisions in society and makes collective moral progress far more difficult" (62-3). But is it obvious that this approach to moral disagreement is inferior to Gutmann and Thompson's deliberative alternative? Suppose we concede to Gutmann and Thompson the claim that "resolutions" of moral disagreement are more "satisfactory" insofar as they promote greater mutual respect among citizens who disagree. Even judged by this standard, it seems to me an open question whether deliberative democracy is a better way of coping with moral disagreement than the model of toleration. It is true that if "mutual respect" requires a strongly "favorable attitude" toward those with whom one disagrees or "collective acceptance of individual moral beliefs" (93), then the model of toleration doesn't demand or expect citizens to display it in the context of political debate. But by itself this claim is hardly decisive. A defender of toleration can respond in several ways. First, she might deny that Gutmann and Thompson can simply arrogate all desirable forms and elements of "respect" to their own view. "Respect" and "mutual respect" are vague terms that gesture toward a cluster of complex and underspecified moral claims and attitudes. Given this, it isn't obvious that one who rejects deliberative democracy and opts instead for the model of toleration also rejects mutual respect. For example, in the current climate, I find it very hard not to regard the views of the NRA and of those who oppose strict gun control with contempt. Presumably, however, deliberative democracy would impose upon me an obligation to accommodate these views when I deliberate with my fellow citizens about gun control policy. But suppose I reject this requirement, and choose instead to express my intransigent views about the gun lobby within the looser terms of democratic debate implied by the model of toleration. Gutmann and Thompson might then accuse me of failing to be appropriately respectful toward those with whom I disagree. But to this I can reasonably reply that the model of toleration has its own account of "mutual respect." While under the model of toleration I'm not required to affirm the respectability of the NRA's views, I am obliged to respect the constitutional rights of the NRA to defend them, and those of other citizens to make up their own minds. This demands much less than deliberative accommodation, but upholding others' constitutional rights does arguably express a kind of respect toward them. In the absence of some fuller argument for the claim that this constitutionally mediated kind of respect is insufficient, the vague concept of "mutual respect" can't automatically serve as a tie-breaker between deliberative democracy and the constitution of toleration. Second, while it is true that toleration doesn't demand that citizens strongly affirm the respectability of views they reject, or impose obligations upon citizens to reach binding accommodations through public deliberation, that doesn't mean that it prevents dissenting citizens from developing strong attitudes of mutual respect in other ways. All that it means is that we shouldn't necessarily expect public debate about social policy to foster appropriately respectful attitudes toward those with whom one is arguing. Sometimes, Gutmann and Thompson seem to imply that if citizens fail to develop attitudes of mutual respect in this context, there are no other venues or ways in which citizens might learn to respect each other's moral views. Thus they say that under the model of toleration, "[c]itizens go their separate ways, keeping their moral reasons to themselves, avoiding moral engagement" (62). However, such claims are almost certainly exaggerated. Political debate that aims for an authoritative resolution of moral disagreement is only one arena within which I interact with my fellow citizens and can learn about their "moral reasons" and beliefs. Indeed, the proponent of democratic toleration might plausibly suggest that this is a particularly unsuitable arena for fostering attitudes of mutual respect. Perhaps the highly charged context of debate over public policy, in which entrenched social interests are playing for high political stakes, and where individuals often become psychologically invested in their positions, tends to exacerbate antagonism and contention. If so, it might turn out that the model of toleration actually indirectly promotes greater mutual respect, by encouraging deliberative encounters among dissenting citizens to take place in less polarizing environments. These counterarguments may not be decisive, but I hope they suggest some of the issues that need to be addressed if Gutmann and Thompson's project is to be carried forward. It's worth noting that answering these questions would require at least some consideration of the practical viability of deliberative public reason. Although Gutmann and Thompson consider an impressive array of actual political disputes, they do so mainly to illustrate the moral content of deliberative democracy, not to assess its viability empirically (7). Until the empirical preconditions for successful deliberative democracy are addressed, however, doubts of the sort canvassed here will remain. This raises a final question about Democracy and Disagreement: how is it possible for Gutmann and Thompson to intervene in these actual debates and recognize appropriately "reciprocal" resolutions without actually directly consulting the participants, and in the absence of empirically informed assessments of how one might reasonably expect deliberations to proceed in practice? The answer to this question highlights a fundamental feature of their theory: ultimately, the standard of "justifiability" that deliberative democracy uses to determine whether an appropriate "resolution" has been reached is nonempirical. That is, it isn't a question of what citizens have accepted or likely would actually accept, but of what they could, and should, accept if they think through the relevant issues in the appropriate fashion. Whether or not we agree with Gutmann and Thompson that the institutionalization of deliberative public reason would be a good thing, it is clear from their own discussion that one doesn't need to institutionalize it in order to recognize the sorts of public policies it is likely to recommend. This is what allows Gutmann and Thompson to enter debates (about, for example, abortion, paternalism, affirmative action, and environmental protection) as hypothetical deliberative participants and identify resolutions that citizens should accept as binding. Gutmann and Thompson's discussions of these and other cases form the most valuable parts of their book, and taken as direct theoretical analyses of the issues, they are always lucid and often thought-provoking. It would be an excellent thing if citizens deliberating about public policy could match the standard of argument set by the discussions of such issues in Democracy and Disagreement. But what is necessary to make this possible? Again, Gutmann and Thompson draw back from systematically addressing this question. However, they make some telling remarks en passant. In one passage, they concede that certain "background conditions" must be met in order to prepare citizens for worthwhile deliberative participation, and they mention: "the level of political competence (how well informed they are), the distribution of resources (how equally situated they are), and the nature of political culture (what kinds of arguments are taken seriously)" (42). Later on, they discuss the kind of "civic education" that is necessary to sustain deliberative democracy: such education, they say "would teach children not only to respect human dignity but also to appreciate its role in sustaining political cooperation on terms that can be shared by morally motivated citizens" (66). These aren't insignificant conditions, and realizing them might require considerable institutional reform. Gutmann and Thompson sometimes recognize this. For example, they say that cultivating the appropriate "moral character" is "likely to require some significant changes in traditional civics education" (359). How might civics education be re-organized so as to cultivate the appropriate kinds of civic virtue? Gutmann and Thompson say "it would be pedagogically self-defeating if schools were to teach this lesson dogmatically or through indoctrination. But they are not bound to remain neutral on a question that affects the nature of democracy itself" (66). This tantalizing formulation raises difficult questions. What would "not remaining neutral" actually mean in practice? When schools punish students for cheating or stealing are they neither "remaining neutral" nor indoctrinating them about good moral behavior? If so, would the required civics education authorize the punishment of those who refuse to acknowledge "human dignity" and the values of deliberative civic virtue? When one asks such questions about this and all the other preconditions for deliberative democracy mentioned by Gutmann and Thompson, the democratic nightmare returns to haunt us. Even if a deliberative, civically virtuous, and mutually respectful polity is a worthwhile collective goal, it may be that achieving it would require forms of discipline and social control that are hard to reconcile with the freedom and equality that democrats characteristically prize. It is difficult to imagine a work of democratic theory more antithetical to Gutmann and Thompson's book than Ankersmit's Aesthetic Politics. Apart from the fact that he emphatically repudiates the tradition of Anglo-American analytical political theory within which Gutmann and Thompson operate, Ankersmit also explicitly rejects many of the assumptions that underlie their deliberative model. In contrast to their claim that moral and civic engagement are conditions for political accommodation, Ankersmit asserts that it "is only because we do not personally care about every problem confronting society and are indifferent to a large number of issues that political compromise is possible at all" (103). And unlike Gutmann and Thompson, Ankersmit believes that "political debate is positively antidialectic...[T]he argument of one's opponent has to be rendered innocuous, shown [to be] not worthy of serious consideration" (106). Such claims illustrate the deliberately provocative and unconventional tone of this often dazzling, but profoundly muddled, book. Ankersmit's goal is to introduce and defend a form of "aesthetic" political philosophy. He believes that this is a necessary task because he thinks that almost all mainstream forms of political analysis remain mired in the bankrupt assumptions of what Richard Rorty and other so called "postmodern" writers call "the metaphysical tradition." According to Ankersmit, we can fully escape the pervasive "neo-stoicism" of these modern modes of thought only by embracing completely his alternative "aesthetic" approach (119). Instead of trying to excavate foundational political truths, "postmodern aesthetic political theory" artfully reconstructs political reality in the manner of painters or composers (161). The chief intellectual resource on which this alternative kind of political understanding draws is the practice of historical interpretation, which Ankersmit also takes to be essentially aesthetic. This is one reason why the centerpiece of Aesthetic Politics is an extended meditation on the historical predicament of modern representative democracy (350). Ankersmit chooses to illustrate the modus operandi of aesthetic political philosophy by offering a challenging and marvelously erudite historical interpretation of representative democracy in Europe and America. Ankersmit has an additional reason for using representative democracy as a testing ground for aesthetic political theory, and it is here that the democratic nightmare again comes into view. He believes that contemporary democracy is in trouble: "we all know that there is something fundamentally wrong in the relationship between the citizen and the late twentieth-century democratic state that we all want to mend--but we simply do not know how to mobilize our collective will." For Ankersmit, this situation is exemplified in the "unchecked reign of unintended consequences that is the major political problem of our age" (12). Though Ankersmit concedes that the problem of unintended consequences is a generic feature of human affairs (and compares it to Machiavelli's Fortuna), he nevertheless believes that this problem has been greatly exacerbated in recent history. He cites environmental exploitation, overpopulation, and the self-defeating character of much modern welfare policy as examples of the failure of democratic states to control the forces they have deliberately unleashed (13, 220, 370). Such problems expose the debility of contemporary democratic government, and for Ankersmit the "greatest challenge for the future will be how to deal with this kind of problem without falling back into new forms of feudalism and autocracy" (152). Ankersmit thinks that contemporary political theory, still hopelessly snarled in the "inevitable fiascoes" of neostoicism, has been blind to the predicament of representative democracy and is unable to recommend appropriate responses. Only his own aestheticized political theory is up to the task of saving democracy from itself. Why is traditional democratic theory ill-equipped to respond to, and indeed detect, this new variant of the democratic nightmare? Ankersmit's answer is that neostoic metaphysics encouraged generations of theorists to construe democratic representation mimetically. On this view, the goal of democratic politics is for representative institutions to act in accordance with some putatively independent and objective entity like "the public interest" or the "will of the people." But such a project presupposes that we can objectively measure the degree of correspondence between (say) the wishes of the represented and the actions of the representative, an assumption that cannot survive the postmodern assault on all notions of objective correspondence (38). In order to supersede this alleged confusion we must understand democratic representation along aesthetic lines. Instead of aiming for photographically accurate depictions of that which they represent, aesthetic representations offer creative reconstructions that "substitute for reality" (45-51). As should by now be clear, Ankersmit is a (high) priest of (high) postmodernism: he wants to do for postmodern democracy what Schoenberg did for chromaticism. Aesthetic Politics is the most substantial and ambitious contribution to democratic thought that "postmodern theory" has yet offered. As such, it affords a unique opportunity to assess the usefulness of postmodern paradigms for democratic theory. Unfortunately, Ankersmit's attempt to marry democracy and postmodernism is deeply problematic. To begin, why is it obviously useful to project debates about democratic representation onto the characteristic postmodern distinction between discourse that tries to "mirror" reality (the "metaphysical" tradition) and discourse that aims at aesthetic redescription? Even if we concede (for the sake of argument) the validity of the postmodern assault on traditional epistemology, it's not clear that the point carries over unproblematically into the arena of democratic representation. Perhaps there is a rough analogy between the aspiration to reflect accurately some mind-independent reality and the attempt to disclose the real will or interest of the people for the purposes of impartial political representation. But there are several disanalogies that Ankersmit doesn't adequately address. One very basic disanalogy can be brought out in the following way. In the second context, the relevant standard of "impartiality" is a moral one, whereas in the first the operative criterion of "objectivity" refers to some nonmoral measure of accuracy or correspondence. Even if we accept the postmodern argument that no viable measure of correspondence is available for those seeking to cut nature at its joints, why would that show that moral impartiality is similarly problematic? Consider, for example, the case of a corrupt military regime that uses force and intimidation to maintain the rule of an unaccountable, self-serving cabal of oligarchs. The oligarchs and their military associates claim to represent the best interests of the public, but actually they exploit their power to subsidize their own lavish lifestyle and to protect themselves against popular insurgency. Most of us would be inclined to say that this regime's claims to be genuinely representative are transparently spurious. Is it clear that when we do so, we automatically fall into naively mimetic understandings of representation, as Ankersmit suggests (38)? I don't think so: when we indict this regime's unrepresentativeness, we aren't claiming that the regime is inaccurately depicting the interests of the citizens, or failing to perceive objectively the "will of the people." The problem is rather that the regime simply disregards any considerations other than its own partisan interest, and that this is unfair. The appropriate remedy for this would not be an optimally accurate representation of the public interest (whatever that might mean), but rather a regime in which the partisan interests of the current ruling elite don't enjoy an arbitrary and unjustified privilege. The issue here isn't accuracy, but fairness. This kind of representation is more or less "impartial" insofar as it gives due weight to all relevant social interests. It is this ethical standard of representation, or something close to it, that I take to be primarily relevant to democratic theory. But identifying this with the goal of reflecting "the people represented as accurately as possible" (28) seems to me to miss its point. Ankersmit's determination to assimilate these two forms of representation results in a caricatured account of traditional theories of democracy. Ankersmit claims that on the traditional, nonaesthetic view, "the identity of the represented and the person representing is the ideal of all political representation" (28). In one sense, Ankersmit is right; democrats' characteristic (and in Ankersmit's eyes misplaced) enthusiasm for popular sovereignty and forms of direct democracy supports this assertion. But Ankersmit interprets this in a misleading way. It's not true that democrats have advocated narrowing the gap between representatives and represented because they aim for mimetic accuracy. Rather, they have argued that narrowing this gap increases the likelihood that citizens' interests and points of view will be given a fair hearing, and guards against the possibility that certain social groups enjoy unjust privileges. Again, the argument centers on norms of justice and fairness, not standards of mimetic correspondence. These points can be reinforced by reflecting on the practice of democratic representation. From the perspective of traditional democratic theory, it seems eccentric to think of democratic representatives, like senators or ministers of state, giving descriptions of their constituents and the citizens they represent in either mimetic or aesthetic terms. The relevant relations of representation are wholly different. They involve, for example, interpersonal practical relations of authority, delegation, accountability, and trust that just don't naturally map onto the model of intellectual reflection that is in play in the epistemological arguments that have made postmodernism famous. It's true that senators and other public officials need to "know" what their constituents want from, and expect of, them. But the activity of representation doesn't consist in gathering this information (38-9), but rather in being authorized to act upon it in various complicated, institutionally-specified ways. Ankersmit's obsession with the slogans of postmodernism, then, cause him to beg all the important questions against ethical theories of democratic representation. But even if his criticisms of traditional democratic theory are misguided, it is still possible that Ankersmit's alternative analysis of democracy contains important insights. Does postmodern, aesthetic political theory provide valuable hints as to how representative democracy can survive and flourish in the "Age of Unintended Consequences"? The key to Ankersmit's nonmimetic theory is the idea that representative democracy is essentially a device for controlling a particular kind of social conflict (123). According to Ankersmit, representative democracy originated as a way of negotiating an historically specific conflict between post-Enlightenment ideologies of tradition and revolutionary reform (137f). Democracy deals with this enduring legacy of the French revolution by channeling revolutionary and reformist aspirations through the party political system. But this way of taming the revolutionary impulse requires maintaining a delicate balance, a "juste milieu," between the state (which instinctively resists change and seeks to avoid conflict [110]) and elements of civil society (which seek in various ways to capture the state to further some reformist agenda [138]). But in the "Age of Unintended Consequences," the state is constantly tempted to address macro-social problems (e.g., the degradation of the environment, welfare policy) in neofeudal or autocratic ways, and this threatens the equilibrium between state and civil society on which representative democracy depends (150-154, 194-211). This brief summary of Ankersmit's characterization of modern democracy doesn't do justice to the richness of his discussion. His account of the nature and historical predicament of representative institutions is largely independent of its problematic postmodernist setting, and it deserves to be taken seriously. However, Ankersmit's aesthetic response to this predicament is another matter. It's not just that Ankersmit regards all ideals of direct democratic control and popular sovereignty as obsolete and delusive, though this will be bad enough for many democrats. There are deeper worries. For one thing, Ankersmit effectively concedes that problems like environmental degradation are more effectively dealt with autocratically than democratically (150-153). Again and again, Ankersmit calls for a stronger state, and he makes it clear that this is likely to require insulating complex policy arenas from direct democratic influence. It will be better for all of us if (for example) the environmental issue is dealt with by experts. This is not the sort of job for which representative democracy is best suited. What role then is left for aesthetic representation, and how will it help us to "mobilize our collective will"? Ankersmit's answer centers on the aesthetic category of "style." The role of the democratic "stylist" is artfully and creatively to "represent" public policy to civil society (voters) (54). On this view, the state assumes the role of a canvas or "scene" (372), on which creative politicians paint (and thereby politically organize) an aesthetically appealing portrait of how civil society's conflicting aims, fears, and desires are reconciled with each other and with public policy. Just as artistic "style" permits painters to produce compelling portraits, so political "style" enables the skilled politician to "organize political knowledge" (39) in a powerful and stabilizing way (157). As the picture is painted (and presumably endlessly repainted), the state assumes a "representation" that reflects civil society to itself (191). The institutions that facilitate this ongoing process are political parties, as they vie for the allegiance of voters and craft manifestoes and platforms (370). Ankersmit maintains that using the medium of party politics to effect this sort of aesthetic self-representation is a desirable substitute for the traditional but defunct democratic goal of self-government. Such puns on the word "representation" are presumably the essence of aesthetic virt?, but what would aesthetic democracy actually look like? Ankersmit's proposal suggests a dualist view. The responsibility for addressing large-scale social problems will be left to a stronger, less accountable state (360), and its decisions will likely be made extrademocratically (151-152). Meanwhile, the party system (which Ankersmit regards as part of the state, a sort of ministry of ideological conflict resolution) will work on civil society's self image. Through skillful aesthetic redescription, citizens will be led to recognize themselves in the "representation" of the state disseminated by party political "stylists." On this view, citizens learn to see the state's actions as their own, but only in the "hyper-reality" of rhetorical self-representation (150, 210). It turns out, then, that for Ankersmit the democratic future lies not in increasing citizens' control of public policy, but rather in politicians like Ronald Reagan (Ankersmit's paradigm of the political "stylist" [158]) and institutions like advertising companies, already quite adept at using aesthetic techniques to reduce consumers' cognitive dissonance. But to see these agencies as the vanguard of democratic renewal strikes me as perverse. Today, while key political decisions affecting our livelihood and future are made in secret by unaccountable organizations like central banks, political parties seem obsessed with issues of political style ("spin") to the exclusion of substance. It is hard to see how democrats could possibly be enthusiastic about these developments, but Ankersmit's theory implies that democrats should welcome and embrace them. If this is the best future for which friends of democracy can hope, who needs the democratic nightmare? Democracy and Disagreement and Aesthetic Politics are both attempts to redeem the promise of democratic politics at a time when its recent successes around the world ring strangely hollow. But their diagnoses and proposed remedies move in opposite directions. Like many today, Ankersmit is tempted by the cut-price radicalism advertised by theorists of the "postmodern." This drives him to view such traditional democratic values as self-government and fair representation as useless relics of a now defunct "metaphysical tradition." Whether or not that tradition (if it really exists) is worth defending, I fail to see the utility of associating it with such perfectly reasonable social ideals as fair representation and self-government. The idea that these values are merely the idle daydreams of a certain foolish philosophical culture is an insult to those who have fought to realize them. Moreover, Ankersmit's aesthetic remedies seem less a solution than a surrender to the more problematic features of modern representative democracy. By contrast, Gutmann and Thompson's work is both more compelling and more promising. But this is at least partly because it is difficult, perhaps impossible, for us to oppose wholeheartedly the idea that democracy should become more deliberative. The reason for this is that those attributes of which we humans are typically most proud (intelligence, forethought, consideration, magnanimity, fair-mindedness, detachment, etc.) are already built into our concept of deliberation. Gutmann and Thompson have made a useful start on reconciling these deliberative virtues with democratic ideals and procedures. But can their sort of deliberative democracy shift the burden of proof back onto the shoulders of those under the sway of the democratic nightmare? Is it likely that deliberative ideals and democratic practice can cooperate rather than endanger each other? Readers of Democracy and Disagreement will find that these remain open questions. From guavaberry at earthlink.net Sat Oct 9 18:13:57 2004 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Sat, 09 Oct 2004 14:13:57 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] the global pulse - "tonalities" that shape global events. Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.0.20041009141346.01f06960@mail.edu-cyberpg.com> 'Google With Judgment' By David Ignatius Imagine for a moment that you could study the ebb and flow of public discussion about American politics as if it were a computer graphic. What would this database of "aggregated thought" tell you about the presidential campaign debates? It happens that a former Republican campaign strategist named Charles M. McLean has created just such a database. His consulting company, Denver Research Group Inc., monitors more than 7,000 sources on a constant, real-time basis -- giving him a window on what he estimates is about 80 percent of all original political content around the world. Using a combination of computer algorithms and human analysis, he sifts this mass of information to discern the "tonalities" that shape global events. This approach has identified key political trends one to two weeks before those changes appear in traditional poll numbers, he says. And what does McLean's giant Wurlitzer of information tell him about the debates? Like the conventional pollsters, he rated last Thursday night as a giant victory for John Kerry. The difference is that McLean's methodology allowed him to see this shift coming. His "tonality" measure for Kerry began to move up sharply just after Kerry gave a speech Sept. 20, outlining a four-point plan on Iraq. When Kerry performed well Thursday night, he was pushing on an open door. What's driving this election, argues McLean, is something he calls the "unease factor." He estimates that more than 20 percent of the electorate is worried about America's security in the world -- and is looking for reassurance. It's a large group -- much bigger than the usual measure of undecided swing voters because it includes a lot of Bush supporters who had been comforted by the Republican candidate's certitude about Iraq and the war on terrorism. Kerry couldn't reassure these uneasy voters until he had an alternative explanation of what the United States should do in Iraq. His "tonality," by McLean's measure, had collapsed in early August after the ad campaign by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth challenged his trump card of Vietnam service. It didn't recover until his Iraq speech, which reassured voters that Kerry had an alternative "plan" for the war, as he kept repeating Thursday night. The poll numbers didn't show the swing before the debate, but McLean's indicators did. "The uneasy voters want to hear how it's all going to be okay," McLean explains. "They've been waiting for something to grab hold of with Kerry. Bush's greatest strength was his sense of assurance, comfort, confidence -- but his performance Thursday took all three away. All Kerry had to do was stand there with a catcher's mitt." I've been exchanging e-mails with McLean for the past year, pestering him to let me write about his methodology. Since he's selling the system to various Fortune 500 corporations, he's wary about sharing too many details. And I should note, as a caveat, that he's shared information this year with the Kerry campaign. McLean says he's applying to politics something he learned doing commercial research: By the time a new product shows up in sales data, it's too late for another company to compete effectively. An aggressive competitor must analyze the technical and market environment and then develop products for that space. It's the same in politics, McLean says: By the time you see a candidate's weakness in poll numbers, it may be too late to fix it. McLean has applied his intriguing approach to the Middle East, helping build an organization called Access/Middle East, which automatically monitors and translates more than 400 sources covering Israel and the Arab world. This database also includes information from more than 50 think tanks. So what does McLean's survey of "aggregated thought" in the Islamic world tell him about the possibility of terrorist attacks? The likelihood of an attack on U.S. soil now stands at 46 percent, the highest level since Sept. 11, 2001. But the risk is even higher, at 54 percent, in the six months after the November presidential election. And for better or worse, McLean sees a high likelihood (68 percent) that radical Islamists will make a political push in Iraq -- perhaps focusing on winning next January's elections. McLean describes his system as "Google with judgment." To me, it sounds almost like an electronic "marketplace of ideas" that allows you to track the direction and momentum of what people are thinking, 24 hours a day. If the system works as well as he says, it could eventually change the way people analyze politics, and a lot of other things as well. davidignatius at washpost.com From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 9 22:42:22 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 15:42:22 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] the global pulse - "tonalities" that shape global events. Message-ID: <01C4AE16.922A5D60.shovland@mindspring.com> All of us have a childish side that want simple answers to complex questions. I would say Bush plays to that better than Kerry. On the other hand, the cost of voting for simple assurances may turn out to be quite high. If there is such as thing as "Security Moms," most of them probably don't understand that some of their children will have to die to keep us "safe." Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: K.E. [SMTP:guavaberry at earthlink.net] Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 11:14 AM To: paleo Subject: [Paleopsych] the global pulse - "tonalities" that shape global events. 'Google With Judgment' By David Ignatius Imagine for a moment that you could study the ebb and flow of public discussion about American politics as if it were a computer graphic. What would this database of "aggregated thought" tell you about the presidential campaign debates? It happens that a former Republican campaign strategist named Charles M. McLean has created just such a database. His consulting company, Denver Research Group Inc., monitors more than 7,000 sources on a constant, real-time basis -- giving him a window on what he estimates is about 80 percent of all original political content around the world. Using a combination of computer algorithms and human analysis, he sifts this mass of information to discern the "tonalities" that shape global events. This approach has identified key political trends one to two weeks before those changes appear in traditional poll numbers, he says. And what does McLean's giant Wurlitzer of information tell him about the debates? Like the conventional pollsters, he rated last Thursday night as a giant victory for John Kerry. The difference is that McLean's methodology allowed him to see this shift coming. His "tonality" measure for Kerry began to move up sharply just after Kerry gave a speech Sept. 20, outlining a four-point plan on Iraq. When Kerry performed well Thursday night, he was pushing on an open door. What's driving this election, argues McLean, is something he calls the "unease factor." He estimates that more than 20 percent of the electorate is worried about America's security in the world -- and is looking for reassurance. It's a large group -- much bigger than the usual measure of undecided swing voters because it includes a lot of Bush supporters who had been comforted by the Republican candidate's certitude about Iraq and the war on terrorism. Kerry couldn't reassure these uneasy voters until he had an alternative explanation of what the United States should do in Iraq. His "tonality," by McLean's measure, had collapsed in early August after the ad campaign by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth challenged his trump card of Vietnam service. It didn't recover until his Iraq speech, which reassured voters that Kerry had an alternative "plan" for the war, as he kept repeating Thursday night. The poll numbers didn't show the swing before the debate, but McLean's indicators did. "The uneasy voters want to hear how it's all going to be okay," McLean explains. "They've been waiting for something to grab hold of with Kerry. Bush's greatest strength was his sense of assurance, comfort, confidence -- but his performance Thursday took all three away. All Kerry had to do was stand there with a catcher's mitt." I've been exchanging e-mails with McLean for the past year, pestering him to let me write about his methodology. Since he's selling the system to various Fortune 500 corporations, he's wary about sharing too many details. And I should note, as a caveat, that he's shared information this year with the Kerry campaign. McLean says he's applying to politics something he learned doing commercial research: By the time a new product shows up in sales data, it's too late for another company to compete effectively. An aggressive competitor must analyze the technical and market environment and then develop products for that space. It's the same in politics, McLean says: By the time you see a candidate's weakness in poll numbers, it may be too late to fix it. McLean has applied his intriguing approach to the Middle East, helping build an organization called Access/Middle East, which automatically monitors and translates more than 400 sources covering Israel and the Arab world. This database also includes information from more than 50 think tanks. So what does McLean's survey of "aggregated thought" in the Islamic world tell him about the possibility of terrorist attacks? The likelihood of an attack on U.S. soil now stands at 46 percent, the highest level since Sept. 11, 2001. But the risk is even higher, at 54 percent, in the six months after the November presidential election. And for better or worse, McLean sees a high likelihood (68 percent) that radical Islamists will make a political push in Iraq -- perhaps focusing on winning next January's elections. McLean describes his system as "Google with judgment." To me, it sounds almost like an electronic "marketplace of ideas" that allows you to track the direction and momentum of what people are thinking, 24 hours a day. If the system works as well as he says, it could eventually change the way people analyze politics, and a lot of other things as well. davidignatius at washpost.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 9 23:41:27 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 19:41:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Mystery of the Bulge in the Jacket Message-ID: The Mystery of the Bulge in the Jacket NYT October 9, 2004 By ELISABETH BUMILLER [This article does not refer to the site http://isbushwired.com--thanks to George for pointing me to this site--which gives several lines of argument that Bush has been listening to instructions by his handlers through a radio receiver. If true, it would be shocking but hardly unprecedented for a politician to hold onto power by devious means. More shocking would be the press cover-up of the issue. We know, of course, that the public was not informed of Woodrow Wilson's incapacity during the last year and a half of his Presidency, or of FDR's incapacity during the last few months or of his polio, or of JFK's sexual behavior. [That a press coverup would continue in what we think are more open times is, indeed, shocking. More shocking still, I thought yesterday, is that it makes no difference, that everyone now pretty much expects coverups and conspiracies. Paranoia is indeed the default mode of thinking in the post-modern age, as Peter Knight explains in _Conspiracy Culture_, by far the best book on the subject. [So I decided to turn on the second debate last night, having skipped the first one, to try to decide for myself. What I saw was not the bumbler and incompetent figure head that I read about in so many places, but a fast and articulate man. I am ashamed to have relied on these sources so much, though it's partly excused by the fact that I watch little teevee because of my hearing loss. [Bush will be reelected, on the strength of his mollifying doubts among swing voters that he is not mentally up to par. It was in showing his strengths as a leader and fast thinker last night that matters, not whether he "won" or "lost" this particular debate. Having decided that the hidden receiver theory was bogus, since Bush responded too rapidly and too articulately during the second debate, I stopped watching the usual bad reasoning, equal by both Bush and Kerry, after an hour. [If you now go to http://isbushwired.com, you'll find that the conspiracy theory still thrives. But shame on the New York Times for not informing its readers of this site. [I have a poor record as a prophet, so don't put too much credence in my assertion that Bush will win. There's still room for an October surprise, in any case.] ---------- WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 - What was that bulge in the back of President Bush's suit jacket at the presidential debate in Miami last week? According to rumors racing across the Internet this week, the rectangular bulge visible between Mr. Bush's shoulder blades was a radio receiver, getting answers from an offstage counselor into a hidden presidential earpiece. The prime suspect was Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's powerful political adviser. When the online magazine Salon published an article about the rumors on Friday, the speculation reached such a pitch that White House and campaign officials were inundated with calls. First they said that pictures showing the bulge might have been doctored. But then, when the bulge turned out to be clearly visible in the television footage of the evening, they offered a different explanation. "There was nothing under his suit jacket," said Nicolle Devenish, a campaign spokeswoman. "It was most likely a rumpling of that portion of his suit jacket, or a wrinkle in the fabric." Ms. Devenish could not say why the "rumpling" was rectangular. Nor was the bulge from a bulletproof vest, according to campaign and White House officials; they said Mr. Bush was not wearing one. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/09/politics/campaign/09bulge.html From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 9 23:48:24 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 19:48:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing Message-ID: Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University http://www.futurebrief.com/robinhanson.asp [16](read his bio) A postcard summary of life, the universe and everything might go as follows. The universe appeared and started expanding. Life appeared somewhere and then on Earth began making larger and smarter animals. Humans appeared and became smarter and more numerous, by inventing language, farming, industry, and computers. The events in this summary are not evenly distributed over the history of the universe. The first events are relatively evenly distributed: the universe started fourteen billion years ago, life appeared by four billion years ago, and on Earth animals started growing larger and smarter about half a billion years ago. But the other events are very recent: our species appeared two million years ago, farming started ten thousand years ago, industry started two hundred years ago, and computers started a few decades ago. Do we over-emphasize these recent events relative to their fundamental importance, because they are about our species and us? Are these events just arbitrary markers, chosen from thousands in a long history of relatively continuous change? I think not, and here is why: most of these events separate a chain of distinct exponential growth modes. (Exponential growth is where a quantity doubles after some time duration, then continues to double again and again after similar durations.) The growth rates of these modes have varied enormously. The slowest growth mode started first. Our fourteen billion year old universe is expanding, and that expansion is becoming exponential due to a mysterious "dark energy." The distance between the galaxies is predicted to double every ten billion years. We don't know enough about the history of non-animal life in the universe to identify its growth rates, but we can see that for the last half billion years the size of animals on Earth has grown exponentially. While the size of the typical animal is largely unchanged, the variation among animal size has greatly increased. Because of this, the mass of the largest animal has doubled about every seventy million years, and the mass of the largest brain has doubled about three times every hundred million years. So the largest brains have doubled about three hundred times faster than the distance between galaxies. Humans (really "our human-like ancestors") began with some of the largest brains around, and then tripled their size. Those brains, and the innovations they embodied, seem to have enabled a huge growth in the human niche - it supported about ten thousand humans two million years ago, but about four million humans ten thousand years ago. While data is scarce, this growth seems exponential, doubling about every two hundred and twenty five thousand years, or one hundred and fifty times faster than animal brains grew. (This growth rate for the human niche is consistent with faster growth for our ancestors - groups might kill off other groups to take over the niche.) About ten thousand years ago, those four million humans began to settle and farm, instead of migrating to hunt and gather. The human population on Earth then began to double about every nine hundred years, or about two hundred and fifty times faster than hunting humans doubled. Since the industrial revolution began a few hundred years ago, the human population has grown even faster. Before the industrial revolution total human wealth grew so slowly that population quickly caught up, keeping wealth per person at a near subsistence level. But in the last century or so wealth has grown faster than population, allowing for great increases in wealth per person. Economists' best estimates of total world product (average wealth per person times the number of people) show it to have been growing exponentially over the last century, doubling about every fifteen years, or about sixty times faster than under farming. And a model of the whole time series as a transition from a farming exponential mode to an industry exponential mode suggests that the transition is not over yet - we are slowly approaching a real industry doubling time of about six years, or one hundred and fifty times the farming growth rate. A revised postcard summary of life, the universe, and everything, therefore, is that an exponentially growing universe gave life to a sequence of faster and faster exponential growth modes, first among the largest animal brains, then for the wealth of human hunters, then farmers, and then industry. It seems that each new growth mode starts when the previous mode reaches a certain enabling scale. That is, humans may not grow via culture until animal brains are large enough, farming may not be feasible until hunters are dense enough, and industry may not be possible until there are enough farmers. Notice how many "important events" are left out of this postcard summary. Language, fire, writing, cities, sailing, printing presses, steam engines, electricity, assembly lines, radio, and hundreds of other "key" innovations are not listed separately here. You see, most big changes are just a part of some growth mode, and do not cause an increase in the growth rate. While we do not know what exactly has made growth rates change, we do see that the number of such causes so far can be counted on the fingers of one hand. While growth rates have varied widely, growth rate changes have been remarkably consistent -- each mode grew from one hundred and fifty to three hundred times faster than its predecessor. Also, the recent modes have made a similar number of doublings. While the universe has barely completed one doubling time, and the largest animals grew through sixteen doublings, hunting grew through nine doublings, farming grew through seven and a half doublings, and industry has so far done a bit over nine doublings. This pattern explains event clustering - transitions between faster growth modes that double a similar number of times must cluster closer and closer in time. But looking at this pattern, I cannot help but wonder: are we in the last mode, or will there be more? If a new growth transition were to be similar to the last few, in terms of the number of doublings and the increase in the growth rate, then the remarkable consistency in the previous transitions allows a remarkably precise prediction. A new growth mode should arise sometime within about the next seven industry mode doublings (i.e., the next seventy years) and give a new wealth doubling time of between seven and sixteen days. Such a new mode would surely count as "the next really big enormous thing." The suggestion that the world economy will soon double every week or two seems so far from ordinary experience as to be, well, "crazy." Of course similar predictions made before the previous transitions would have seemed similarly crazy. Nevertheless, it is hard to take this seriously without at least some account of how it could be possible. Now we cannot expect to get a very detailed account. After all, most economics has been designed to explain the actual social worlds that we have seen so far, and not all the possible social worlds that might exist. Even then we are still pretty ignorant about the causes of the previous transitions. But we do want at least a sketchy account. It turns out to be hard to create such an account using things like space colonization or new energy sources, mainly because we now pay only a small fraction of our budget on things like land and energy. But we pay seventy percent of world income for human labor, so anything that can lower this cost can have a huge impact. I am thus drawn to consider scenarios involving robotics or artificial intelligence. While machines have sometimes displaced human workers, they have much more often helped humans be more productive at tasks that machines cannot do. Machines have thus on net raised the value, and hence the cost, of human labor. And because people are essential, the limited rate of human population growth has limited the economic growth rate. Once we have machines that can do almost all the tasks that people can do, however, this picture changes dramatically. Since the number of machines can grow as fast as the economy needs them, human population growth no longer limits economic growth. In fact, simple growth models which assume no other changes can easily allow a new doubling time of a month, a week, or even less. Now admittedly, progress in robotics and artificial intelligence has been slow over the decades, primarily because it is so hard to write the software. And at these rates it could be centuries before we have software that can do almost all tasks that people do. The "upload" approach, however, of scanning human brains then simulating them in detail in computers, seems likely to succeed within the next half century or so. The transition from farming to industry seems to have been more gradual than the transition from hunting to farming. Even such a "gradual" transition, however, would be very dramatic. Assume that a new transition was as gradual as the one to industry, and that the world economic growth rate was six percent in both 2039 and 2040, plus or minus a typical yearly fluctuation of half a percent. If so, then in 2041, the increase in the growth rate might be the size of a typical fluctuation, and then in 2042 the growth rate would be a noticeably different eight percent. Growth would then be 14% in 2043, 50% in 2044, 150% in 2045, and 500% in 2046. Within five years the change would go from barely noticeable to overwhelming. This is disturbing because human wages should fall quickly with the falling price of machines. So while humans who owned shares in the firms that made machines would get very rich, those whose only source of income was their labor could die of starvation. And if people wait to see the transition happen before they believe it is real, they might not have time to arrange for other sources of income. If we stand back from all the big events and innovations we have seen in the last century and look at the overall world economic growth rate, it seems surprisingly steady. All those events and innovations contribute to growth, but have not much changed the overall growth rate. From this, one might expect such steady growth to continue for a long time. Looking further back in time, however, we see that once in a while something has changed the growth rate by enormous factors in a relatively short time. We might do well to not ignore such a speeding freight train until it actually hits us. For more information see my papers: [17]Long-Term Growth As A Sequence of Exponential Modes [18]Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence [19]If Uploads Come First This essay is original and was specifically prepared for publication at Future Brief. A brief biography of Dr. Hanson can be found at our main [20]Commentary page. Other essays written by Dr. Hanson can be found at his [21]web site. Other websites are welcome to link to this essay, with proper credit given to Future Brief and Dr. Hanson. This page will remain posted on the Internet indefinitely at this web address to provide a stable page for those linking to it. References 15. http://www.futurebrief.com/RobinHanson.pdf 16. http://www.futurebrief.com/robinbio.asp 17. http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.pdf 18. http://hanson.gmu.edu/aigrow.pdf 19. http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html 20. http://www.futurebrief.com/commentary.asp 21. http://hanson.gmu.edu/vita.html 22. http://www.futurebrief.com/RobinHanson.pdf 23. http://www.futurebrief.com/brief.asp From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 9 23:56:32 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 16:56:32 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing Message-ID: <01C4AE20.EED0E2F0.shovland@mindspring.com> Apparently this guy has been spending too much time alone with his computer models :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 4:48 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; World Transhumanist Ass. Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University http://www.futurebrief.com/robinhanson.asp [16](read his bio) A postcard summary of life, the universe and everything might go as follows. The universe appeared and started expanding. Life appeared somewhere and then on Earth began making larger and smarter animals. Humans appeared and became smarter and more numerous, by inventing language, farming, industry, and computers. The events in this summary are not evenly distributed over the history of the universe. The first events are relatively evenly distributed: the universe started fourteen billion years ago, life appeared by four billion years ago, and on Earth animals started growing larger and smarter about half a billion years ago. But the other events are very recent: our species appeared two million years ago, farming started ten thousand years ago, industry started two hundred years ago, and computers started a few decades ago. Do we over-emphasize these recent events relative to their fundamental importance, because they are about our species and us? Are these events just arbitrary markers, chosen from thousands in a long history of relatively continuous change? I think not, and here is why: most of these events separate a chain of distinct exponential growth modes. (Exponential growth is where a quantity doubles after some time duration, then continues to double again and again after similar durations.) The growth rates of these modes have varied enormously. The slowest growth mode started first. Our fourteen billion year old universe is expanding, and that expansion is becoming exponential due to a mysterious "dark energy." The distance between the galaxies is predicted to double every ten billion years. We don't know enough about the history of non-animal life in the universe to identify its growth rates, but we can see that for the last half billion years the size of animals on Earth has grown exponentially. While the size of the typical animal is largely unchanged, the variation among animal size has greatly increased. Because of this, the mass of the largest animal has doubled about every seventy million years, and the mass of the largest brain has doubled about three times every hundred million years. So the largest brains have doubled about three hundred times faster than the distance between galaxies. Humans (really "our human-like ancestors") began with some of the largest brains around, and then tripled their size. Those brains, and the innovations they embodied, seem to have enabled a huge growth in the human niche - it supported about ten thousand humans two million years ago, but about four million humans ten thousand years ago. While data is scarce, this growth seems exponential, doubling about every two hundred and twenty five thousand years, or one hundred and fifty times faster than animal brains grew. (This growth rate for the human niche is consistent with faster growth for our ancestors - groups might kill off other groups to take over the niche.) About ten thousand years ago, those four million humans began to settle and farm, instead of migrating to hunt and gather. The human population on Earth then began to double about every nine hundred years, or about two hundred and fifty times faster than hunting humans doubled. Since the industrial revolution began a few hundred years ago, the human population has grown even faster. Before the industrial revolution total human wealth grew so slowly that population quickly caught up, keeping wealth per person at a near subsistence level. But in the last century or so wealth has grown faster than population, allowing for great increases in wealth per person. Economists' best estimates of total world product (average wealth per person times the number of people) show it to have been growing exponentially over the last century, doubling about every fifteen years, or about sixty times faster than under farming. And a model of the whole time series as a transition from a farming exponential mode to an industry exponential mode suggests that the transition is not over yet - we are slowly approaching a real industry doubling time of about six years, or one hundred and fifty times the farming growth rate. A revised postcard summary of life, the universe, and everything, therefore, is that an exponentially growing universe gave life to a sequence of faster and faster exponential growth modes, first among the largest animal brains, then for the wealth of human hunters, then farmers, and then industry. It seems that each new growth mode starts when the previous mode reaches a certain enabling scale. That is, humans may not grow via culture until animal brains are large enough, farming may not be feasible until hunters are dense enough, and industry may not be possible until there are enough farmers. Notice how many "important events" are left out of this postcard summary. Language, fire, writing, cities, sailing, printing presses, steam engines, electricity, assembly lines, radio, and hundreds of other "key" innovations are not listed separately here. You see, most big changes are just a part of some growth mode, and do not cause an increase in the growth rate. While we do not know what exactly has made growth rates change, we do see that the number of such causes so far can be counted on the fingers of one hand. While growth rates have varied widely, growth rate changes have been remarkably consistent -- each mode grew from one hundred and fifty to three hundred times faster than its predecessor. Also, the recent modes have made a similar number of doublings. While the universe has barely completed one doubling time, and the largest animals grew through sixteen doublings, hunting grew through nine doublings, farming grew through seven and a half doublings, and industry has so far done a bit over nine doublings. This pattern explains event clustering - transitions between faster growth modes that double a similar number of times must cluster closer and closer in time. But looking at this pattern, I cannot help but wonder: are we in the last mode, or will there be more? If a new growth transition were to be similar to the last few, in terms of the number of doublings and the increase in the growth rate, then the remarkable consistency in the previous transitions allows a remarkably precise prediction. A new growth mode should arise sometime within about the next seven industry mode doublings (i.e., the next seventy years) and give a new wealth doubling time of between seven and sixteen days. Such a new mode would surely count as "the next really big enormous thing." The suggestion that the world economy will soon double every week or two seems so far from ordinary experience as to be, well, "crazy." Of course similar predictions made before the previous transitions would have seemed similarly crazy. Nevertheless, it is hard to take this seriously without at least some account of how it could be possible. Now we cannot expect to get a very detailed account. After all, most economics has been designed to explain the actual social worlds that we have seen so far, and not all the possible social worlds that might exist. Even then we are still pretty ignorant about the causes of the previous transitions. But we do want at least a sketchy account. It turns out to be hard to create such an account using things like space colonization or new energy sources, mainly because we now pay only a small fraction of our budget on things like land and energy. But we pay seventy percent of world income for human labor, so anything that can lower this cost can have a huge impact. I am thus drawn to consider scenarios involving robotics or artificial intelligence. While machines have sometimes displaced human workers, they have much more often helped humans be more productive at tasks that machines cannot do. Machines have thus on net raised the value, and hence the cost, of human labor. And because people are essential, the limited rate of human population growth has limited the economic growth rate. Once we have machines that can do almost all the tasks that people can do, however, this picture changes dramatically. Since the number of machines can grow as fast as the economy needs them, human population growth no longer limits economic growth. In fact, simple growth models which assume no other changes can easily allow a new doubling time of a month, a week, or even less. Now admittedly, progress in robotics and artificial intelligence has been slow over the decades, primarily because it is so hard to write the software. And at these rates it could be centuries before we have software that can do almost all tasks that people do. The "upload" approach, however, of scanning human brains then simulating them in detail in computers, seems likely to succeed within the next half century or so. The transition from farming to industry seems to have been more gradual than the transition from hunting to farming. Even such a "gradual" transition, however, would be very dramatic. Assume that a new transition was as gradual as the one to industry, and that the world economic growth rate was six percent in both 2039 and 2040, plus or minus a typical yearly fluctuation of half a percent. If so, then in 2041, the increase in the growth rate might be the size of a typical fluctuation, and then in 2042 the growth rate would be a noticeably different eight percent. Growth would then be 14% in 2043, 50% in 2044, 150% in 2045, and 500% in 2046. Within five years the change would go from barely noticeable to overwhelming. This is disturbing because human wages should fall quickly with the falling price of machines. So while humans who owned shares in the firms that made machines would get very rich, those whose only source of income was their labor could die of starvation. And if people wait to see the transition happen before they believe it is real, they might not have time to arrange for other sources of income. If we stand back from all the big events and innovations we have seen in the last century and look at the overall world economic growth rate, it seems surprisingly steady. All those events and innovations contribute to growth, but have not much changed the overall growth rate. From this, one might expect such steady growth to continue for a long time. Looking further back in time, however, we see that once in a while something has changed the growth rate by enormous factors in a relatively short time. We might do well to not ignore such a speeding freight train until it actually hits us. For more information see my papers: [17]Long-Term Growth As A Sequence of Exponential Modes [18]Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence [19]If Uploads Come First This essay is original and was specifically prepared for publication at Future Brief. A brief biography of Dr. Hanson can be found at our main [20]Commentary page. Other essays written by Dr. Hanson can be found at his [21]web site. Other websites are welcome to link to this essay, with proper credit given to Future Brief and Dr. Hanson. This page will remain posted on the Internet indefinitely at this web address to provide a stable page for those linking to it. References 15. http://www.futurebrief.com/RobinHanson.pdf 16. http://www.futurebrief.com/robinbio.asp 17. http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.pdf 18. http://hanson.gmu.edu/aigrow.pdf 19. http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html 20. http://www.futurebrief.com/commentary.asp 21. http://hanson.gmu.edu/vita.html 22. http://www.futurebrief.com/RobinHanson.pdf 23. http://www.futurebrief.com/brief.asp _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 9 23:57:21 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 19:57:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] PhysOrg: Going from a 'Web of links' to a 'Web of meaning' Message-ID: Going from a 'Web of links' to a 'Web of meaning' http://www.physorg.com/news1509.html October 08, 2004 Computer scientist Jeff Heflin and others are building the Semantic Web, which they hope will handle more data, resolve contradictions and draw inferences from users' queries. The new improved Web will also combine pieces of information from multiple sites in order to find answers to questions. ------- To sports car enthusiasts, football fans and wildlife specialists, the word jaguar connotes highly discrete entities. Real-estate agents and home buyers argue over titles and plots - as do book lovers and moviegoers. If the English language, with millions of shades of meaning, can baffle the wisest of scholars, how much more does it confound an artificially intelligent computer search engine that must find links to thousands of Web sites in an eyeblink? Especially, says Jeff Heflin, when the Web's frontiers expand hourly by leaps and bounds and are governed by no standard rules of searching. Heflin, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University, is part of an international effort to build a "Semantic Web," a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. By developing languages and tools that make it easier for computers to understand web pages, says Heflin, computer scientists hope to upgrade the Web from a "web of links" to a "web of meaning." Heflin recently received a five-year, $500,000 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to study distributed ontologies that could bring the Semantic Web closer to reality. Ontology is defined in the dictionary as a theory concerning the kinds of entities, specifically abstract entities, that should be admitted into a language system. Researchers in artificial intelligence have proposed to make ontologies explicit, says Heflin. In computer science, an ontology encodes knowledge about the world, and can thus determine what is implied and find answers without explicit instructions. Ontologies can be used by people, and by databases and other applications that need to share information about domains, or specific subject or knowledge areas, such as cars, medicine or real estate. But because the Web is such a vast network, with so many people posting and searching for so many different kinds of information, achieving one single ontology that applies to everyone would require too huge a standardization effort. Instead, the Web overflows with overlapping and often contradictory ontologies. "No formal theory," Heflin wrote in his proposal to NSF, "has considered how ontologies can be integrated and how they may change, or the role of trust in integration." This, he says, can frustrate those who are conducting a search on the Web. "Searching can be difficult if you're a novice," says Heflin, "if you're looking for really hard-to-find things, or if you're looking for an answer that does not exist on one single page." Search engines on the Semantic Web, says Heflin, can better infer from a query the site that would be most helpful to the user. They will also be able to combine different pieces of information from multiple sites in order to find an answer to a question. Heflin is an invited expert in the Web Ontology Working Group, which was formed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Directed by Berners-Lee, the W3C develops standards for the Web. The working group designed the Web Ontology Language, or OWL. Although this name is not an accurate acronym, its inventors decided that OWL rolls off the tongue more readily, and connotes more wisdom, than does WOL. The success of a web search, says Heflin, now depends on the rarity of a name or topic or on how popular a web page is. Google, for example, takes into account the number of pages that point to a given page when ranking the results of a search. "We have a language in which to write an ontology," says Heflin, "but we don't know how to properly combine [distributed] ontologies, or what to do when ontologies are contradictory. We need an environment that people can search in that resolves contradictions meaningfully." Heflin wants to look at ways of partitioning the Web into useful subsets so users can determine which ontology to use when they have a query and can find an ontology that will point them to the web page that is most suited to the perspective of their search. "I want to develop an underlying theory so we can understand and build a system that can handle large amounts of data," says Heflin. "That system should be able to look at medicine from the point of view of a patient, a doctor or a pharmaceutical manufacturer, or to search universities from a professor's or a student's point of view." Source: Lehigh University From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Sun Oct 10 02:45:02 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 22:45:02 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] fall/winter EMAC is out... Message-ID: <004101c4ae73$253c2ff0$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> www.entelechyjournal.com Hope it is warming. Best wishes and cheers, alice (ed), and phillip (poetry ed) poetry Patient gretchen primack Panama george wallace Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain irene p?rez Resistentially Yours calla jones I Said Coffee sharmagne leland-st.john essays Pulling Away (After Sex) marnia robinson The Science of Oppositionality wyatt ehrenfels Nature Lover john wymore stories Arctic Refuge e.m.salle White Fur adrian flange A General Theory of Relativity jannie wolff reviews What Wild Kingdom Never Told You: A review of Evolution's Rainbow george williamson art Botanica Fantasia jill parisi Instant Evolution howard bloom _______________________ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 4907 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dsmith06 at maine.rr.com Sun Oct 10 03:21:58 2004 From: dsmith06 at maine.rr.com (David Smith) Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 23:21:58 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] fall/winter EMAC is out... References: <004101c4ae73$253c2ff0$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Message-ID: <002201c4ae78$4d621a80$0200a8c0@dad> Alice, Congratulations on another excellent issue. David ----- Original Message ----- From: Alice Andrews To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 10:45 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] fall/winter EMAC is out... www.entelechyjournal.com Hope it is warming. Best wishes and cheers, alice (ed), and phillip (poetry ed) poetry Patient gretchen primack Panama george wallace Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain irene p?rez Resistentially Yours calla jones I Said Coffee sharmagne leland-st.john essays Pulling Away (After Sex) marnia robinson The Science of Oppositionality wyatt ehrenfels Nature Lover john wymore stories Arctic Refuge e.m.salle White Fur adrian flange A General Theory of Relativity jannie wolff reviews What Wild Kingdom Never Told You: A review of Evolution's Rainbow george williamson art Botanica Fantasia jill parisi Instant Evolution howard bloom _______________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Oct 10 04:39:47 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 09 Oct 2004 22:39:47 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] the global pulse - "tonalities" that shape global events. In-Reply-To: <01C4AE16.922A5D60.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4AE16.922A5D60.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <4168BD13.5000408@solution-consulting.com> Those of us who served in the military when we were young knew very well that 'freedom is not free' as we used to say. The moms I know understand this very well, and it is disrespectful and even narcissistic to say they don't (as if the speaker is somehow wiser). Iraq may or may not turn out to be the right war for the right outcome, but to think that we can be free without spilling blood is utterly irrational. I put my life on the line, and if my children want to do the same, I will support them. Safety is relative; we are in a war with islamofacisim that may last for generations, as our war with communism did. both systems wished to deprive us of freedom, and both must be successfully defeated over many years if we are to remain free. Lynn Johnson Steve Hovland wrote: >(snip) > >If there is such as thing as "Security Moms," most of them probably don't understand that >some of their children will have to die to keep us "safe." > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: K.E. [SMTP:guavaberry at earthlink.net] >Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 11:14 AM >To: paleo >Subject: [Paleopsych] the global pulse - "tonalities" that shape global events. > > 'Google With Judgment' > > By David Ignatius > > Imagine for a moment that you could study the ebb and flow of >public discussion about American politics as if it were a computer >graphic. What would this database of "aggregated thought" tell you >about the presidential campaign debates? > > It happens that a former Republican campaign strategist named Charles >M. McLean has created just such a database. His consulting company, >Denver Research Group Inc., monitors more than 7,000 sources on a >constant, real-time basis -- giving him a window on what he estimates >is about 80 percent of all original political content around the world. >Using a combination of computer algorithms and human analysis, he sifts >this mass of information to discern the "tonalities" that shape global >events. This approach has identified key political trends one to two >weeks before those changes appear in traditional poll numbers, he says. > > And what does McLean's giant Wurlitzer of information tell him about >the debates? Like the conventional pollsters, he rated last Thursday >night as a giant victory for John Kerry. The difference is that >McLean's methodology allowed him to see this shift coming. His >"tonality" measure for Kerry began to move up sharply just after Kerry >gave a speech Sept. 20, outlining a four-point plan on Iraq. When Kerry >performed well Thursday night, he was pushing on an open door. > > What's driving this election, argues McLean, is something he calls >the "unease factor." He estimates that more than 20 percent of the >electorate is worried about America's security in the world -- and is >looking for reassurance. It's a large group -- much bigger than the >usual measure of undecided swing voters because it includes a lot of >Bush supporters who had been comforted by the Republican candidate's >certitude about Iraq and the war on terrorism. > > Kerry couldn't reassure these uneasy voters until he had an >alternative explanation of what the United States should do in Iraq. >His "tonality," by McLean's measure, had collapsed in early August >after the ad campaign by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth challenged his >trump card of Vietnam service. It didn't recover until his Iraq speech, >which reassured voters that Kerry had an alternative "plan" for the >war, as he kept repeating Thursday night. The poll numbers didn't show >the swing before the debate, but McLean's indicators did. > > "The uneasy voters want to hear how it's all going to be okay," >McLean explains. "They've been waiting for something to grab hold of >with Kerry. Bush's greatest strength was his sense of assurance, >comfort, confidence -- but his performance Thursday took all three >away. All Kerry had to do was stand there with a catcher's mitt." > > I've been exchanging e-mails with McLean for the past year, pestering >him to let me write about his methodology. Since he's selling the >system to various Fortune 500 corporations, he's wary about sharing too >many details. And I should note, as a caveat, that he's shared >information this year with the Kerry campaign. > > McLean says he's applying to politics something he learned doing >commercial research: By the time a new product shows up in sales data, >it's too late for another company to compete effectively. An aggressive >competitor must analyze the technical and market environment and then >develop products for that space. It's the same in politics, McLean >says: By the time you see a candidate's weakness in poll numbers, it >may be too late to fix it. > > McLean has applied his intriguing approach to the Middle East, >helping build an organization called Access/Middle East, which >automatically monitors and translates more than 400 sources covering >Israel and the Arab world. This database also includes information from >more than 50 think tanks. > > So what does McLean's survey of "aggregated thought" in the Islamic >world tell him about the possibility of terrorist attacks? The >likelihood of an attack on U.S. soil now stands at 46 percent, the >highest level since Sept. 11, 2001. But the risk is even higher, at 54 >percent, in the six months after the November presidential election. >And for better or worse, McLean sees a high likelihood (68 percent) >that radical Islamists will make a political push in Iraq -- perhaps >focusing on winning next January's elections. > > McLean describes his system as "Google with judgment." To me, it >sounds almost like an electronic "marketplace of ideas" that allows you >to track the direction and momentum of what people are thinking, 24 >hours a day. If the system works as well as he says, it could >eventually change the way people analyze politics, and a lot of other >things as well. > > davidignatius at washpost.com > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 10 05:06:03 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 22:06:03 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] the global pulse - "tonalities" that shape global events. Message-ID: <01C4AE4C.2B943FE0.shovland@mindspring.com> I take a lot of comfort in realizing that babies who are being born today will have a chance to die in Iraq. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 9:40 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] the global pulse - "tonalities" that shape global events. Those of us who served in the military when we were young knew very well that 'freedom is not free' as we used to say. The moms I know understand this very well, and it is disrespectful and even narcissistic to say they don't (as if the speaker is somehow wiser). Iraq may or may not turn out to be the right war for the right outcome, but to think that we can be free without spilling blood is utterly irrational. I put my life on the line, and if my children want to do the same, I will support them. Safety is relative; we are in a war with islamofacisim that may last for generations, as our war with communism did. both systems wished to deprive us of freedom, and both must be successfully defeated over many years if we are to remain free. Lynn Johnson Steve Hovland wrote: >(snip) > >If there is such as thing as "Security Moms," most of them probably don't understand that >some of their children will have to die to keep us "safe." > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: K.E. [SMTP:guavaberry at earthlink.net] >Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 11:14 AM >To: paleo >Subject: [Paleopsych] the global pulse - "tonalities" that shape global events. > > 'Google With Judgment' > > By David Ignatius > > Imagine for a moment that you could study the ebb and flow of >public discussion about American politics as if it were a computer >graphic. What would this database of "aggregated thought" tell you >about the presidential campaign debates? > > It happens that a former Republican campaign strategist named Charles >M. McLean has created just such a database. His consulting company, >Denver Research Group Inc., monitors more than 7,000 sources on a >constant, real-time basis -- giving him a window on what he estimates >is about 80 percent of all original political content around the world. >Using a combination of computer algorithms and human analysis, he sifts >this mass of information to discern the "tonalities" that shape global >events. This approach has identified key political trends one to two >weeks before those changes appear in traditional poll numbers, he says. > > And what does McLean's giant Wurlitzer of information tell him about >the debates? Like the conventional pollsters, he rated last Thursday >night as a giant victory for John Kerry. The difference is that >McLean's methodology allowed him to see this shift coming. His >"tonality" measure for Kerry began to move up sharply just after Kerry >gave a speech Sept. 20, outlining a four-point plan on Iraq. When Kerry >performed well Thursday night, he was pushing on an open door. > > What's driving this election, argues McLean, is something he calls >the "unease factor." He estimates that more than 20 percent of the >electorate is worried about America's security in the world -- and is >looking for reassurance. It's a large group -- much bigger than the >usual measure of undecided swing voters because it includes a lot of >Bush supporters who had been comforted by the Republican candidate's >certitude about Iraq and the war on terrorism. > > Kerry couldn't reassure these uneasy voters until he had an >alternative explanation of what the United States should do in Iraq. >His "tonality," by McLean's measure, had collapsed in early August >after the ad campaign by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth challenged his >trump card of Vietnam service. It didn't recover until his Iraq speech, >which reassured voters that Kerry had an alternative "plan" for the >war, as he kept repeating Thursday night. The poll numbers didn't show >the swing before the debate, but McLean's indicators did. > > "The uneasy voters want to hear how it's all going to be okay," >McLean explains. "They've been waiting for something to grab hold of >with Kerry. Bush's greatest strength was his sense of assurance, >comfort, confidence -- but his performance Thursday took all three >away. All Kerry had to do was stand there with a catcher's mitt." > > I've been exchanging e-mails with McLean for the past year, pestering >him to let me write about his methodology. Since he's selling the >system to various Fortune 500 corporations, he's wary about sharing too >many details. And I should note, as a caveat, that he's shared >information this year with the Kerry campaign. > > McLean says he's applying to politics something he learned doing >commercial research: By the time a new product shows up in sales data, >it's too late for another company to compete effectively. An aggressive >competitor must analyze the technical and market environment and then >develop products for that space. It's the same in politics, McLean >says: By the time you see a candidate's weakness in poll numbers, it >may be too late to fix it. > > McLean has applied his intriguing approach to the Middle East, >helping build an organization called Access/Middle East, which >automatically monitors and translates more than 400 sources covering >Israel and the Arab world. This database also includes information from >more than 50 think tanks. > > So what does McLean's survey of "aggregated thought" in the Islamic >world tell him about the possibility of terrorist attacks? The >likelihood of an attack on U.S. soil now stands at 46 percent, the >highest level since Sept. 11, 2001. But the risk is even higher, at 54 >percent, in the six months after the November presidential election. >And for better or worse, McLean sees a high likelihood (68 percent) >that radical Islamists will make a political push in Iraq -- perhaps >focusing on winning next January's elections. > > McLean describes his system as "Google with judgment." To me, it >sounds almost like an electronic "marketplace of ideas" that allows you >to track the direction and momentum of what people are thinking, 24 >hours a day. If the system works as well as he says, it could >eventually change the way people analyze politics, and a lot of other >things as well. > > davidignatius at washpost.com > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From david_mcfadzean at hotmail.com Sun Oct 10 12:16:27 2004 From: david_mcfadzean at hotmail.com (David McFadzean) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 08:16:27 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing References: <01C4AE20.EED0E2F0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" > Apparently this guy has been spending too much > time alone with his computer models :-) Funny. Is ridicule your best argument against Dr. Hanson's thesis? From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Sun Oct 10 12:46:08 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 08:46:08 -0400 Subject: [SPAM] Re: [Paleopsych] fall/winter EMAC is out... References: <004101c4ae73$253c2ff0$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> <002201c4ae78$4d621a80$0200a8c0@dad> Message-ID: <008401c4aec7$3ec57770$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Thank you, David! And I hope the wonderful minds on paleo will think about submitting stuff for the next issue! Always looking for what i call 'evolutionary fiction'.... and would just love a book review done with an evolutionary perspective (Darwinian lit crit)..... and always looking for brilliant, sexy, creative 'evolutionary' essays, etc. Thanks again... Cheers, Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: David Smith To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 11:21 PM Subject: [SPAM] Re: [Paleopsych] fall/winter EMAC is out... Alice, Congratulations on another excellent issue. David ----- Original Message ----- From: Alice Andrews To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 10:45 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] fall/winter EMAC is out... www.entelechyjournal.com Hope it is warming. Best wishes and cheers, alice (ed), and phillip (poetry ed) poetry Patient gretchen primack Panama george wallace Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain irene p?rez Resistentially Yours calla jones I Said Coffee sharmagne leland-st.john essays Pulling Away (After Sex) marnia robinson The Science of Oppositionality wyatt ehrenfels Nature Lover john wymore stories Arctic Refuge e.m.salle White Fur adrian flange A General Theory of Relativity jannie wolff reviews What Wild Kingdom Never Told You: A review of Evolution's Rainbow george williamson art Botanica Fantasia jill parisi Instant Evolution howard bloom _______________________ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 10 15:38:20 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 08:38:20 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing Message-ID: <01C4AEA4.7FF5EEF0.shovland@mindspring.com> No. The best argument would be that endless exponential growth cannot occur on a finite planet. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: David McFadzean [SMTP:david_mcfadzean at hotmail.com] Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 5:16 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" > Apparently this guy has been spending too much > time alone with his computer models :-) Funny. Is ridicule your best argument against Dr. Hanson's thesis? _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 10 16:07:20 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 09:07:20 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing Message-ID: <01C4AEA8.8C6F2710.shovland@mindspring.com> I think there are some errors of fact in this essay. He talks about increases in the size of animals. We know that a long time ago there were many animals that were larger than anything that lives today. This points to a collapse phenomenon that turned back progress dramatically. Is there any evidence that human brains are increasing in size? It should be possible to measure it from decade to decade if it is actually happening. In terms of economic progress, we know that in spite of the good life in first world countries, much of the world's population lives in material poverty. Our ability to distribute the output of industry has not growth exponentially. At the moment we are all waking up to the reality of Peak Oil. Those of us who think about it realize that an enormous task lies ahead of us, larger than any other enterprise in the history of mankind. Back in the 70's economic growth virtually halted for a number of years while we adjusted to the new reality of higher oil prices. We are probably facing decades of slow or even negative growth while we shift to the low-intensity sources that will become more important as fossil fuels diminish. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2004 4:48 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; World Transhumanist Ass. Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University http://www.futurebrief.com/robinhanson.asp [16](read his bio) A postcard summary of life, the universe and everything might go as follows. The universe appeared and started expanding. Life appeared somewhere and then on Earth began making larger and smarter animals. Humans appeared and became smarter and more numerous, by inventing language, farming, industry, and computers. The events in this summary are not evenly distributed over the history of the universe. The first events are relatively evenly distributed: the universe started fourteen billion years ago, life appeared by four billion years ago, and on Earth animals started growing larger and smarter about half a billion years ago. But the other events are very recent: our species appeared two million years ago, farming started ten thousand years ago, industry started two hundred years ago, and computers started a few decades ago. Do we over-emphasize these recent events relative to their fundamental importance, because they are about our species and us? Are these events just arbitrary markers, chosen from thousands in a long history of relatively continuous change? I think not, and here is why: most of these events separate a chain of distinct exponential growth modes. (Exponential growth is where a quantity doubles after some time duration, then continues to double again and again after similar durations.) The growth rates of these modes have varied enormously. The slowest growth mode started first. Our fourteen billion year old universe is expanding, and that expansion is becoming exponential due to a mysterious "dark energy." The distance between the galaxies is predicted to double every ten billion years. We don't know enough about the history of non-animal life in the universe to identify its growth rates, but we can see that for the last half billion years the size of animals on Earth has grown exponentially. While the size of the typical animal is largely unchanged, the variation among animal size has greatly increased. Because of this, the mass of the largest animal has doubled about every seventy million years, and the mass of the largest brain has doubled about three times every hundred million years. So the largest brains have doubled about three hundred times faster than the distance between galaxies. Humans (really "our human-like ancestors") began with some of the largest brains around, and then tripled their size. Those brains, and the innovations they embodied, seem to have enabled a huge growth in the human niche - it supported about ten thousand humans two million years ago, but about four million humans ten thousand years ago. While data is scarce, this growth seems exponential, doubling about every two hundred and twenty five thousand years, or one hundred and fifty times faster than animal brains grew. (This growth rate for the human niche is consistent with faster growth for our ancestors - groups might kill off other groups to take over the niche.) About ten thousand years ago, those four million humans began to settle and farm, instead of migrating to hunt and gather. The human population on Earth then began to double about every nine hundred years, or about two hundred and fifty times faster than hunting humans doubled. Since the industrial revolution began a few hundred years ago, the human population has grown even faster. Before the industrial revolution total human wealth grew so slowly that population quickly caught up, keeping wealth per person at a near subsistence level. But in the last century or so wealth has grown faster than population, allowing for great increases in wealth per person. Economists' best estimates of total world product (average wealth per person times the number of people) show it to have been growing exponentially over the last century, doubling about every fifteen years, or about sixty times faster than under farming. And a model of the whole time series as a transition from a farming exponential mode to an industry exponential mode suggests that the transition is not over yet - we are slowly approaching a real industry doubling time of about six years, or one hundred and fifty times the farming growth rate. A revised postcard summary of life, the universe, and everything, therefore, is that an exponentially growing universe gave life to a sequence of faster and faster exponential growth modes, first among the largest animal brains, then for the wealth of human hunters, then farmers, and then industry. It seems that each new growth mode starts when the previous mode reaches a certain enabling scale. That is, humans may not grow via culture until animal brains are large enough, farming may not be feasible until hunters are dense enough, and industry may not be possible until there are enough farmers. Notice how many "important events" are left out of this postcard summary. Language, fire, writing, cities, sailing, printing presses, steam engines, electricity, assembly lines, radio, and hundreds of other "key" innovations are not listed separately here. You see, most big changes are just a part of some growth mode, and do not cause an increase in the growth rate. While we do not know what exactly has made growth rates change, we do see that the number of such causes so far can be counted on the fingers of one hand. While growth rates have varied widely, growth rate changes have been remarkably consistent -- each mode grew from one hundred and fifty to three hundred times faster than its predecessor. Also, the recent modes have made a similar number of doublings. While the universe has barely completed one doubling time, and the largest animals grew through sixteen doublings, hunting grew through nine doublings, farming grew through seven and a half doublings, and industry has so far done a bit over nine doublings. This pattern explains event clustering - transitions between faster growth modes that double a similar number of times must cluster closer and closer in time. But looking at this pattern, I cannot help but wonder: are we in the last mode, or will there be more? If a new growth transition were to be similar to the last few, in terms of the number of doublings and the increase in the growth rate, then the remarkable consistency in the previous transitions allows a remarkably precise prediction. A new growth mode should arise sometime within about the next seven industry mode doublings (i.e., the next seventy years) and give a new wealth doubling time of between seven and sixteen days. Such a new mode would surely count as "the next really big enormous thing." The suggestion that the world economy will soon double every week or two seems so far from ordinary experience as to be, well, "crazy." Of course similar predictions made before the previous transitions would have seemed similarly crazy. Nevertheless, it is hard to take this seriously without at least some account of how it could be possible. Now we cannot expect to get a very detailed account. After all, most economics has been designed to explain the actual social worlds that we have seen so far, and not all the possible social worlds that might exist. Even then we are still pretty ignorant about the causes of the previous transitions. But we do want at least a sketchy account. It turns out to be hard to create such an account using things like space colonization or new energy sources, mainly because we now pay only a small fraction of our budget on things like land and energy. But we pay seventy percent of world income for human labor, so anything that can lower this cost can have a huge impact. I am thus drawn to consider scenarios involving robotics or artificial intelligence. While machines have sometimes displaced human workers, they have much more often helped humans be more productive at tasks that machines cannot do. Machines have thus on net raised the value, and hence the cost, of human labor. And because people are essential, the limited rate of human population growth has limited the economic growth rate. Once we have machines that can do almost all the tasks that people can do, however, this picture changes dramatically. Since the number of machines can grow as fast as the economy needs them, human population growth no longer limits economic growth. In fact, simple growth models which assume no other changes can easily allow a new doubling time of a month, a week, or even less. Now admittedly, progress in robotics and artificial intelligence has been slow over the decades, primarily because it is so hard to write the software. And at these rates it could be centuries before we have software that can do almost all tasks that people do. The "upload" approach, however, of scanning human brains then simulating them in detail in computers, seems likely to succeed within the next half century or so. The transition from farming to industry seems to have been more gradual than the transition from hunting to farming. Even such a "gradual" transition, however, would be very dramatic. Assume that a new transition was as gradual as the one to industry, and that the world economic growth rate was six percent in both 2039 and 2040, plus or minus a typical yearly fluctuation of half a percent. If so, then in 2041, the increase in the growth rate might be the size of a typical fluctuation, and then in 2042 the growth rate would be a noticeably different eight percent. Growth would then be 14% in 2043, 50% in 2044, 150% in 2045, and 500% in 2046. Within five years the change would go from barely noticeable to overwhelming. This is disturbing because human wages should fall quickly with the falling price of machines. So while humans who owned shares in the firms that made machines would get very rich, those whose only source of income was their labor could die of starvation. And if people wait to see the transition happen before they believe it is real, they might not have time to arrange for other sources of income. If we stand back from all the big events and innovations we have seen in the last century and look at the overall world economic growth rate, it seems surprisingly steady. All those events and innovations contribute to growth, but have not much changed the overall growth rate. From this, one might expect such steady growth to continue for a long time. Looking further back in time, however, we see that once in a while something has changed the growth rate by enormous factors in a relatively short time. We might do well to not ignore such a speeding freight train until it actually hits us. For more information see my papers: [17]Long-Term Growth As A Sequence of Exponential Modes [18]Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence [19]If Uploads Come First This essay is original and was specifically prepared for publication at Future Brief. A brief biography of Dr. Hanson can be found at our main [20]Commentary page. Other essays written by Dr. Hanson can be found at his [21]web site. Other websites are welcome to link to this essay, with proper credit given to Future Brief and Dr. Hanson. This page will remain posted on the Internet indefinitely at this web address to provide a stable page for those linking to it. References 15. http://www.futurebrief.com/RobinHanson.pdf 16. http://www.futurebrief.com/robinbio.asp 17. http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.pdf 18. http://hanson.gmu.edu/aigrow.pdf 19. http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html 20. http://www.futurebrief.com/commentary.asp 21. http://hanson.gmu.edu/vita.html 22. http://www.futurebrief.com/RobinHanson.pdf 23. http://www.futurebrief.com/brief.asp _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 10 16:42:32 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 09:42:32 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Energy Shift: getting the scale right Message-ID: <01C4AEAD.779F4B80.shovland@mindspring.com> Take a clean piece of printer paper. Make a dot in the middle with a pen or pencil. The area of the paper represents the shift from oil to other energy sources. The dot represents The War on Terror. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sun Oct 10 21:54:44 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 17:54:44 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] ruminations on entropy, order, life In-Reply-To: <008401c4aec7$3ec57770$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> References: <004101c4ae73$253c2ff0$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> <002201c4ae78$4d621a80$0200a8c0@dad> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20041010110814.00c297d0@incoming.verizon.net> Good morning! Please forgive me if most of this email is more like rumination than communication... but Howard has ruminated about entropy here before! My excuse is that I am in something of a state of shock at this moment. I was supposed to be in Quaker Meeting -- but the police waved me away from it today. And no, I did nothing wrong, no fines, no harsh conversations, just firmly waved away. Just a coincidence. Not like two weeks ago, when I made an accidental wrong turn down an unmarked road near the meeting - and got bombarded with sirens, fast police cars, and was told I would be arrested by the CIA if I ever made such a random mistake again. Or the Inspector General doing strange things at a curious time... whatever... So I will think of science for a moment. There is lots of public noise and poetry about entropy. Certainly I respect the folks who say we need more courses in "sciences for poets." And CERTAINLY we need more intuitive explanation before launching in, say, to solutions to the Schrodinger equation. But sometimes the "science for poets" becomes so widespread and poorly marked (and devoid of clear abstract logic) that it's hard to tell what is the science and what is the fuzz. Even scientists get fooled. And it end sup becoming dangerous and unwieldy in some ways. So for example -- entropy is NOT disorder. Period. "Entropy" basically has two closely related meanings, one in information theory and one in thermodynamics. As Eschel has said, the relations between the two are interesting and important, but just for now let's think about system dynamics. In essence, "entropy" is basically just... logarithm of the probability of a state. That's still a simplification, but close enough for now. The entropy function which applies to a system or universe depends on the specific dynamics of that system or universe. In some universes, the entropy function is strictly local --- just the sum over space of some local functions (local entropy functions) of local condition. In this case, there is no correlation between the state at one point in space and the state in another -- and in that case entropy does become something like a measure of disorder. Crudely. In systems like that, the probability distribution of states will converge to a distribution without correlations -- "disorder." But not all systems are like that. Many of the classical "proofs" of entropy being disorder are based on elaborate simplifying assumptions or approximations. Take an extreme enough approximation, and you could say there is no life on earth at all even today -- after all, MOST of the planet is nonliving. (OK -- sic unless you are a pantheist. But as a mathematical exercise, let us at least consider the mathematical possibility of an earth which is as it seems to the naive eye.) If we begin the analysis by saying "let us assume, for simplicity, that life does not exist. Now what can we deduce about life?" -- well, of course we get nowhere. So what, then, can we prove? Years ago, I did scan through some of the work by Von Neumann on entropy and such. There are others who would know much better. But I noticed a key strategy. First, for any system, he would derive an "invariant measure," d mu, a kind of null example of one allowed equilibrium probability distribution for the state of the system. If ANY state in the system eventually gets to ANY OTHER state of the system, the allowed distribution is unique, and that's it. BUT IF some regions in state space are disconnected from other regions, then... one can define variables which represent WHICH one of the disconnected regions one is in. For example, when energy is conserved, a state of energy E1 can never get to a state of energy E2, if E1 does not equal E2; energy E is the variable which distinguishes these states and energy does not change with time, in this example. In the general case, there is a set of conserved quantities or "integrals," Q1 to Qn (possibly infinite!). All allowed equilibrium probability distributions can be expressed as d mu * f(Q1,...Qn), where ANY nonnegative function f is allowed. Thus -- the task of understanding what can ACTUALLY happen, eventually, in any system or universe, is basically a matter of identifying (d mu) and Q1... Qn. To start. The generalized Boltzmann probability distribution is still the foundation for all practical thermodynamics, under quantum theory as it was under classical theory... if by "generalized Boltzmann distribution" I mean the following. Usually, people look only at the function "f" and consider the particular case: f(Q1,....,Qn) = exp(-k1*Q1-k2*Q2... - kn*Qn)/Z, where Z is just a "constant" we throw in to scale the probabilities so that they add up to one. And usually they don't pay a WHOLE lot of attention to "d mu" -- but sometimes in quantum theory people are careful to note that "how many states are available depends on whether it's a boson or a fermion," and that is part of the issue of determining "d mu." ============= At the end of the day... what we really have is a kind of taxonomy of systems or universes, analogous in a way to the taxonomies of types of control system and types of intelligent system fundamental to the clear understanding of those fields. And the taxonomy may be viewed as a chain of possible simplifications or approximations. One VERY broad class of possible universes is a class... which might be called "statistically flat." (I coin that phrase here and now. Maybe others have another term for this; maybe not.) A statistically flat universe, crudely, is one whose "d mu" is... well, you could call it disorderly, like heat death. A product of local "d mu" components -- such that the logarithm of d mu, the entropy, really is a sum of local components. Playing with the math... I see that all normal classical field theories (based on a Lagrangian) are statistically flat. Likewise, all wave function evolution theories based on the usual kind of dynamics (loosely, "Schrodinger" or Louiville equations) are statistically flat. An interesting corollary is that the statistical equilibrium distributions predicted by (any bosonic) quantum theory are IDENTICAL to those predicted by the corresponding classical field theory -- as Einstein predicted but few believed -- if one represents the statistics of the classical field theory by used of "classical density matrices" as defined in quant-ph 0309031 and 0309087. (arXiv.org). And, according to Vachaspati, there does exist a bosonic field theory in the SU(5) family equivalent to the standard model of physics -- i.e. a theory which fits every successful prediction ever made by quantum field theory. OK ... so ... so far as the standard model of physics goes, we seem to be living in a statistically flat universe. The "natural" (d mu) equilibrium probability distribution is indeed flat or disorderly. (One may ask... what about local gradients... but you can use a series of lattice approximations to prove that they change nothing, at least for bounded fields like SU(5)). This seems to imply a much stronger demonstration of entropy and heat death and the rest than the usual thermodynamics provides! ------- But... There are some caveats. First, Boltzmann universes are a subset of statistically flat universe. They represent a particular POSSIBILITY for the function f. Yet in actuality... our universe presumably has a certain level of Q1,...Qn in total (or per unit of volume of space). So often enough (i.e. in many possible universe states)... we may expect a Boltzmann distribution should fit in any case. Often -- but not always. If Qk can be negative OR positive, things can become tricky. But as a practical matter -- the Boltzmann distribution is really used as a LOCAL probability distribution, when we make the simplifying assumption that some PIECE of the universe is essentially decoupled from the rest of it. That's an important simplification. But if we think of VERY BIG PIECES (like planets)... it can yield better results than we get if we make believe that individual atoms are disconnected from other atoms. -------- Anyway... we then get into some interesting questions. Under what conditions can a Boltzmann universe support life? And how can we get a rigorous representation for what happens in "open systems," like chunks of the universe whose influx and outflux of energy and matter is too large to neglect? What does life "look like" at this level? To what extent are non-Boltzmann (e.g. non-SU(5)) effects fundamental to the existence of even the most mundane forms of life in this universe? First -- the broader the context, the more we will find that the simple binary distinction of "alive" versus "not alive" becomes less and less meaningful. In the mathematics of consciousness (which is far more developed than the mathematics of life, and far more developed than most folks know)... the need to get beyond a binary way of thinking was apparent long ago. (See q-bio 0311006.) With life, it has not been apparent yet, because of the way our world tends to cluster. But clones and semiartificial life forms and ideas about machine replication have already begun to blur things. In more general mathematics... the diversity is immediate. In a Boltzmann universe, there are basically two loopholes which could allow life. (Roughly, as I ruminate this afternoon... ). One is the effect of the Boltzmann term proper, the exponent with energy and other conserved quantities. For example -- the energy term can favor condensed states like black holes instead of the uniform state that (d mu) by itself yields; maybe it could do more. The other is the "open system" kind of situation... which may exist on earth only because of nonBoltzmann effects ELSEWHERE, but still is important to understanding life on earth. Regarding open system effects.... I was recently somewhat startled to hear of the theoretical and experimental results of Prof. Zoya Popovic of the University of Colorado. (The key paper was http://nemes.colorado.edu/microwave/papers/2004/MTT_JHfhWMrzZP_Mar04.pdf) At first, it seems like a total refutation of the second law of thermodynamics as we usually understand it. She got 20 percent efficiency, they say, in extracting energy from totally disordered electromagnetic radiation, in the frequency 3-18 GHz. The temperature of her system was MUCH higher than the temperature of the radiation. How can something like THAT happen in a Boltzmann universe? Furthermore -- if we accept the principle that such things CAN WORK, then how do we know that they cannot work at 1000 times the frequency -- i.e. 3-18 THz? In principle, all it takes is to shrink the size of the "spiral rectenna" to have feature size 1000 times smaller -- i.e. nanotechnology. And that is an option becoming very real very fast. (Nano spiral rectennas would be very similar in flavor to metamaterials, which have become very real and very solid and very useful and very strange.) I have NOT CHECKED certain critical numbers AT ALL -- but I think I read somewhere that the flux of electromagnetic energy at night in the 3-18THz zone on warmish parts of earth is about 100 watts per square centimeter. "Heat radiation" it is sometimes called. If one could extract 5-20 percent of THAT, the implications would be truly monumental -- but is it possible? Is even 1 percent possible, really? Please forgive a bit of crazy science fantasy here. If it were 20 percent (which I doubt) at 3-18THz... and if those crazy numbers I think I heard were true... then a 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter board placed INSIDE a hybrid car somewhere could output 2 kilowatts... enough to recharge the batteries over a 24-hour cycle without a need to plug in or buy gasoline. That would be really handy to have, as a safety measure in case of a 1979-style gasoline shortage! Or to survive a prolonged war. I really doubt it... but on a scale between 0 to 20 percent, I have no idea what we really could get here on earth. The implications are not entirely academic. It would be worth knowing. It comes down to: what DOES the ambient 3-18 THz radiation on earth look like? And how would the output of a nanospiralrectenna look as a function of those characteristics? Does it have variations we need to be aware of, over space and time? I could **IMAGINE** two possible sources of properties that **COULD CONCEIVABLY** allow nonzero efficiency of a nanospiralrectenna. Again, nonlocal correlations (coherence) CONSISTENT WITH a kind of partial Boltzmann equilibrium... and open system effects. The open system effects would be partly obvious. If we look around us in the infrared frequency, we don't see a homogeneous fuzz. We see bright spots and dark spots. Angular variation should allow energy extraction, in principle. Yet I wonder... how much could this buy us, in reality, for a scaled-down version of the Popovic antenna? But then... is that the only effect? What of coherence length (or even polarization?) effects? When we look at far-away stars, we do see "blackbody light" -- but I think it has enough coherence ANYWAY that we can do interferometry. Could the same possibly be true even of heat radiation on earth? In fact... such a scheme suggests that a partially coherent ... bath... of ambient heat radiation... would really be a legitimate "closed system" equilibrium -- APPROXIMATELY. A kind of metastable state. Like the state of a forest full of dry wood and oxygen. And in this context... what life is... is a spark. It is the specific improbable local pattern/object/device... which is... an "unstable mode" of the large system... and such can exist to be sure in some universes. One species of life then accomplishes something like a phase change... which create a new metastable state, which creates a niche for yet another species, and so on, in a kind of endless progression ... from which emerges the kind of picture that George Gaylord Simpson and E.O.Wilson have so well articulated. (Though Wilson does tend to understate the role of learning at times.) Who knows? Best, Paul From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 10 22:10:57 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:10:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'The Cult of Personality': Are You Normal? Think Again Message-ID: 'The Cult of Personality': Are You Normal? Think Again New York Times Book Review, 4.10.10 By SALLY SATEL THE CULT OF PERSONALITY: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves. By Annie Murphy Paul. 302 pp. Free Press. $26. PSYCHOLOGISTS have long tried to capture our personalities. Their efforts thrive today in a testing business, worth $400 million a year, in which some 2,500 tests are on the market. In her engaging book, ''The Cult of Personality,'' Annie Murphy Paul uses research and interviews to expose this sprawling unregulated industry -- a world in which personality tests are used to help answer a range of social questions: which divorcing spouse will be the better parent, who will do well at what job, which student should be admitted to a special program. But as she argues, the tests rarely meet the demands to which they are put. Nonetheless, she writes, their ubiquity ''suggests that they have become our era's favored mode of self-understanding, our most accessible and accepted way of describing human nature.'' A former senior editor at Psychology Today, Paul is a graceful writer who combines lucid science reporting with colorful biography and intelligent social commentary. She begins the story of personality assessment in America with phrenology, the popular 19th-century practice of measuring bumps (''organs'') on the head to divine various traits. Today phrenology is synonymous with quackery. Its unofficial demise surely came when a practitioner told Mark Twain, who mischievously concealed his identity, that he completely lacked the Organ of Humor. But the search to find ''a key to the knowledge of mankind'' continued. Those were the words of the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, one of the test inventors Paul profiles. Rorschach hoped to administer his set of inkblots to everyone, from artists to aborigines, though when he died in 1922 at the age of 37 many European colleagues considered his test contrived and superficial. But the test flourished in America after a German psychologist fleeing the Nazis brought it here. It is no surprise that the inkblot -- often called ''a foolproof X-ray of a personality'' -- blossomed in America in the 1930's and 40's. It was a culture bewitched by Freud's theory that our longings, fears and fantasies are largely hidden from awareness. The Rorschach came to be known as a projective technique -- the subject projects his or her anxieties and desires onto ambiguous images -- and it was soon joined by the Thematic Apperception Test (T.A.T.). By 1950 the T.A.T. was one of the most frequently used personality tests, and it is still widely taught to psychologists in training. The T.A.T. uses evocative drawings (e.g., a man lying on a bed with another man standing over him; a boy with a violin) to illuminate, in the words of its co-creator Henry Murray, ''the darker, blinder recesses of the psyche.'' Subjects form elaborate stories about the characters in the drawings, but their narratives actually reveal, or so it is believed, subliminal themes that drive their own behavior. Today, however, the Rorschach, T.A.T. and other tests are largely discredited as diagnostic devices. They cannot reliably determine a person's ability to relate appropriately to other people, his sexuality or his fantasies, fears and preoccupations. The tests tend to mislabel most normal people as ''sick.'' Conversely, they are poor at detecting psychological defects (with the exception of psychosis). Still, the Rorschach, despite its severe limitations, is used in parole and sentencing hearings to evaluate whether prisoners are prone to violence or likely to commit future crimes, and almost half the psychologists who do child-custody evaluation use it. Projective tests were created for psychoanalysis, but another personality measure, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, was developed for the workplace. Isabel Myers, a college-educated homemaker, sought to aid the war effort by creating a worker ''sorter'' that would help bosses fit employees to the right jobs. Unfortunately, Paul doesn't provide much information about how the questions in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator actually work. She does, however, provide ample evidence of its popularity. Eighty-nine of the Fortune 100 companies, including AT&T, Exxon and General Electric, use it ''to identify job applicants whose skills match those of their top performers.'' Beyond the office park, workshops apply Myers-Briggs theory to marriage, spirituality, financial planning, sports and parenthood. By far the most popular personality test today is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, created in the 1930's. It is employed chiefly in clinical situations to good benefit, yet Paul highlights its use in government hiring four decades ago and some current class-action suits against businesses giving the test. True, these applications were not legitimate, but they misrepresent the test. Readers would never know, for example, how often it is valuable in selecting among psychiatric diagnoses. Nor would they know that it can identify psychological strengths and weaknesses in patients to help them cope with physical illness and treatment. Or that the test can help detect when a plaintiff is exaggerating symptoms to appear disabled. What is the allure of personality tests? They provide ''an unwavering self-conception, a foundation for relating to others, a plan for success and an excuse for failure,'' Paul concludes. But, alas, the virtues of tests that try to assess personality types are illusory: research shows that a single person's scores are unstable, often changing over the course of years, weeks, even hours (a subject may be ''a good intuitive thinker in the afternoon but not in the morning,'' some researchers have noted). And, worse, there is little evidence of the correlation of test scores with school performance, managerial effectiveness, team building or career counseling. On a deeper level, enthusiasm for testing may be a particularly American phenomenon. After all, a society that extols freedom and self-determination is one whose citizens have choices. And with choices come anxieties -- about educational options, career paths, even mate selection. Better self-understanding and advice are thus welcome, if not eagerly sought. Besides, what could be more attractive to a society as individualistic as ours than devices that explore and exalt our perceived uniqueness? THE paradox, Paul is quick to emphasize, is that personality tests ultimately give us a cramped vision of ourselves; instead of opening opportunities, they may confine people by identifying weaknesses that are either not there or that can be overcome. When personality typing is applied to children, Paul writes, it imposes ''limiting labels on young people who are still developing a sense of themselves and their capacities.'' Attempts to fit people into manageable categories end up being the best evidence -- if any were needed -- that we encounter the world in highly idiosyncratic ways. Paul is by no means against personality assessment, but she wants appraisals of workers and students to focus on gauging specific abilities. This can be done more effectively, she says, by talking to people, learning details of their past and observing their current behavior. Occasionally, narrowly focused tests can help. On the other hand, the role of tests in custody battles, in particular, is nothing short of malpractice. ''It's not fair to be separated from your family because you saw a wolf instead of a butterfly,'' a divorced father told her. If this book is instrumental in getting personality testing out of the courtroom, Paul will have done a great public service. Sally Satel is a psychiatrist in Washington and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the coauthor of the forthcoming ''One Nation Under Therapy.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/books/review/10SATELL.html From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 10 22:11:55 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:11:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag: The Genome in Black and White (and Gray) Message-ID: The Genome in Black and White (and Gray) New York Times Magazine, 4.10.10 By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG Imagine that you have heart failure. What can medicine do for you? It depends: are you white or black? If you're white, your doctor may prescribe one of the drugs that seem to ease the symptoms, maybe a beta-blocker or an ACE inhibitor. And if you're black, your doctor may still prescribe those drugs, but they might not really help. That's about to change. In the not-too-distant future, if you're black and have heart failure, drug-company researchers predict you'll be able to go to the doctor and walk out with a prescription tailor-made for you. Well, not tailor-made, exactly, but something that seems to work in people a lot like you. Well, not a lot like you, exactly, except that they're black, too. In this not-too-distant future, if you're black, your doctor will be able to prescribe BiDil, the first drug in America that's being niche-marketed to people of a particular race -- our first ethnic medicine. BiDil, expected to be approved early next year by the Food and Drug Administration, is on the leading edge of the emerging field of race-based pharmacogenomics. It signals a shift in perception, a new approach to medicine that has at its core an idea at once familiar and incendiary: the assumption that there are biological differences among the races. BiDil is also a feat of creative repackaging. Five years ago, the F.D.A. rejected it for use in the general population because it was found to be ineffective in the treatment of heart failure, a common complication of cardiovascular disease that affects some five million Americans and leads to 300,000 deaths a year. But in 2001, the manufacturer, NitroMed, asked permission to test BiDil exclusively in blacks, whose heart failure tends to be more severe and harder to treat. The company reasoned that the drug's effect on nitric-oxide deficiency, more common in black heart-failure patients than in nonblacks, might make it especially suited to them. With the collaboration of the Association of Black Cardiologists, NitroMed embarked on a large clinical trial involving more than 400 black women and 600 black men, all of whom had heart failure. Last summer, investigators called an early end to the study because they thought BiDil was so effective that it would be unethical to continue to deny it to people in the control group. Thus, a drug that had been deemed ineffective in the population at large seemed to work so well in one racial subgroup that the scientists thought everyone in that subgroup should get it. Pharmacogenomics has for years been touted as the ultimate benefit of the genomics revolution. But to many, this revolution has a troubling side. For race-based niche marketing to work, drug developers first will have to explore the ways that blacks, whites, Asians and Native Americans are biologically different. And the more they explore and describe such differences, critics say, the more they play into the hands of racists. Even the broad-minded might inadvertently use such information to stigmatize, isolate or categorize the races. Could it be that this terrain is too dangerous to let anyone, no matter how well meaning, try to navigate it? In two weeks, a major scientific journal, Nature Genetics, will publish a special issue on the genetics of race. This comes on the heels of several conferences on the subject, most recently one held last Monday by Johns Hopkins University, as well as editorials in the science press, including one in the Journal of the American Medical Association just last week. All of these forums pose some thorny questions: Can genes tell us anything meaningful about race, beyond the obvious connection to things like skin color? Do the races differ biologically in terms of drug response or disease susceptibility? Can genes say anything about how ''race'' -- which is itself all but impossible to define -- is related to complex traits like behavior and intelligence? Looking for biological determinants of race is nothing new. It has a potent history, with poisonous associations dating back to the early days of eugenics. But contemporary science has given these efforts a new respectability. In the wake of the completion of the Human Genome Project, geneticists are trying to arrange pieces of the genome like a Rubik's Cube, searching for patterns of variation that align into some useful matrix. Their goal is to generate information that will help prevent and treat common diseases. But in the process, they're generating information that might also lead to declarations about the biological meaning of race. The new interest in racial genetics comes at a time when the softer sciences, like anthropology and sociology, have declared that race is a cultural construct, without any biological significance. The social designations go back at least to the 19th century, when humans were generally divided into five races that were loosely tied to skin color; this has lingered as the basic grammar of race even into the 21st century. But in a 1998 position paper, the American Anthropological Association called race a social invention, with a variety of pernicious consequences ranging from day-to-day bigotry to the Holocaust. Racial beliefs are myths, the anthropologists wrote, and the myths fuse ''behavior and physical features together in the public mind, impeding our comprehension of both biological variations and cultural behavior, implying that both are genetically determined.'' Geneticists, too, have gone on record as saying that race has no biological significance. ''The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis,'' said J. Craig Venter in June 2000, standing beside President Bill Clinton to announce the completion of the first draft of the human genome sequence. Venter was at the time the president of Celera, the private company that competed with the National Human Genome Research Institute, a publicly financed international team, to sequence the genome. (It was declared a tie.) Venter's scientific rival, Francis S. Collins, the head of the genome institute, stood at the podium that day on Clinton's other side -- two male, middle-aged white scientists saying we're all brothers and sisters under the skin. Collins made much of the fact that humans share 99.9 percent of their genome with one another -- and that the remaining 0.1 percent probably codes for variations, like skin color, that are for the most part biologically insignificant. In fact, there is more variation within races than between them. A few months later he made the point more informally, playing his electric guitar and regaling his co-workers with a musical ditty he had written to the tune of Woody Guthrie's ''This Land Is Your Land'': ''We only do this once, it's our inheritance, Joined by this common thread -- black, yellow, white or red, It is our family bond, and now its day has dawned. This draft was made for you and me.'' Today, the two men have parted company on this narrow strip of common ground. Venter says he still believes the genome is colorblind. ''I don't see that there's any fundamental need to classify people by race,'' he says. ''What's the goal of that, other than discrimination?'' But Collins sees the matter differently now. Maybe in that 0.1 percent of the genome there are some variations with relevance to medicine, he says. And maybe identifying them could help reduce health disparities among the races. He is using his bully pulpit at the genome institute to urge scientists to study whether these variations can, or should, be categorized according to racial groupings. ''It's always better to face up to a controversial scientific issue, to tackle the issue head on and not run away from it,'' Collins says. ''And if we don't do it, someone else will -- and probably not as well.'' One reason to focus on the genetics of race is to try to make a dent in health disparities: the frustrating gap in the health status of different racial groups that stubbornly refuses to close or even to be adequately explained. In terms of national measures of physical well-being -- life expectancy, infant mortality, some chronic diseases -- blacks tend to do worse than whites. Many factors account for this health gap, including the fact that minorities suffer disproportionately the effects of low income, lack of health insurance, poor diet, exposure to environmental toxins, discrimination and stress. But some geneticists think that at least some part of health disparities can be explained by genes. Social scientists think genetic explanations might obscure the all-too-real social and economic causes. Take hypertension, which affects black Americans at a higher rate than white Americans. Geneticists try to explain this difference in terms of genes: genes for salt retention, genes for low levels of renin in the kidneys. But a classic study found that one thing that correlated most strongly with level of blood pressure was, surprisingly, skin color. Among black subjects of low socioeconomic status, the darker the skin, the higher the blood pressure. Social scientists' explanation is that people with darker skin are subject to greater discrimination, and therefore to greater stress. ''If you follow me around Nordstrom's, and put me in jail at nine times the rate of whites, and refuse to give me a bank loan, I might get hypertensive,'' says Troy Duster, a professor of sociology at New York University and at the University of California at Berkeley. ''What's generating my increased blood pressure are the social forces at play, not my DNA.'' But pharmacogenomics researchers presume that health disparities can be addressed, at least in part, by exploiting tiny group differences in DNA. If the BiDil experience pans out, other companies are likely to try their own versions of race-based drug development. Some candidates already exist. People known as slow acetylators, for instance, take a longer time than fast acetylators to clear certain drugs from the liver. This means they're more likely to build up toxic levels of some common drugs. The proportion of slow acetylators in different racial groups ranges from a low of 14 percent among East Asians to a high of 54 percent among whites. Some whites, therefore, might benefit from a different version of medications that are cleared through the liver. The ultimate goal of pharmacogenomics would be for everyone's genome to be analyzed individually, so that doctors could gauge how much of a medication, and which type, is most likely to work for a specific patient. Even the BiDil investigators are moving in that direction. Michael D. Loberg, the president of NitroMed, says that the company asked each participant in the BiDil trial for permission to take a DNA sample and that he hopes to get a total of at least 400 such samples. These will be sequenced, he says, ''to see if there's some genetic marker that predicts which of the trial patients responded to BiDil favorably and which didn't.'' But at this point, geneticists cannot sequence individual genomes in a cost-effective way. Until they can, they may view race as a handy shortcut, a way to make some useful generalizations about how an individual patient will fare with a particular drug. But while using race this way might increase the odds of finding the right medication, it is an imprecise method, a kind of roulette in which the physician is making educated guesses based on probabilities. The temptation of race-based medication is clear: it's convenient for the investigator, and it suits the way drug companies' products are sold. ''The mantra of pharmacogenomics is that drugs will be fine-tuned for the individual,'' Duster says. ''But individuals are not a market. Groups are a market.'' And one typical way to identify markets, in a country where skin color seems to count for so much, is race. In terms of our genes, we humans are all the same -- except for the ways in which we're different. The human genome comprises 3 billion nucleotides, strung together in a specific order along the chromosomes. About 99.9 percent are identical from one person to another, no matter what that person's race, ethnicity, continent of origin or bank account. Among our 3 billion nucleotides, an estimated 10 million are locations of common variations. Where most people will have a nucleotide represented by the letter A, for instance, a big group of people might have a T instead. Elucidating where those spots are, and whether replacing a T with an A has any clinical significance, are what occupies today's geneticists. The most common type of variants are called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNP's (pronounced ''snips''). Usually they occur in regions where the nucleotides seem to be doing nothing. This means the SNP's don't have any function, either, or at least none that has been discovered yet; they're just there. Still, SNP's tend to occur in different patterns in different populations. Say there's a SNP on Chromosome 12 in which a person might have either an A or a T. At this hypothetical SNP, 20 percent of Africans might have an A, and 80 percent a T. At the same spot, the frequency might be flipped in Europeans: 80 percent might have an A, while only 20 percent have a T. So while SNP patterns don't reveal anything about the function of the genes, they can say something about an individual's continent of ancestry -- and, by extension, something about migration pathways through human history. SNP's tend to be inherited in clusters, called haplotype blocks. Like SNP's, varieties of haplotype blocks occur at different frequencies in different regions of the world -- and that's how population geneticists have managed to reconstruct the story of human migration. The biggest variety of haplotype blocks occurs in Africa, because modern humans arose there more than 150,000 years ago, and variations have had the longest chance to accrue simply because of random mutations. About 55,000 years ago, a small group of modern humans, who carried in their genomes a subset of the original haplotype varieties, traveled to Australia; later, in sequence and timing that are still a source of controversy among paleoanthropologists, other small groups migrated to parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. As time went on, there were some evolutionary changes in response to the new environments. In Northern Europe, for instance, people carrying mutations for lighter skin color thrived, probably because the scarcity of sunlight made dark-skinned people especially susceptible to Vitamin D deficiency and rickets. But most of the variations occurred in the nonfunctional regions of the genome, with no effect on an individual's appearance or health. All that the variations did was allow geneticists, some 2,000 generations later, to assign a continent of origin to the descendents of these original travelers based on the descendants' DNA. To the dismay of Troy Duster, several private companies are now taking these findings about SNP's to a new level: scanning the genome for variations that can say something about an individual's race. Last year, a company called DNAPrint Genomics made headlines by telling law-enforcement officials in Louisiana that they'd been looking for a serial killer of the wrong race. Eyewitnesses had offered different accounts of the race of the suspect -- some thought he was black, others white -- and authorities had focused their search on white males between the ages of 25 and 35 based in part on an F.B.I. psychological profile. But based on crime-scene specimens, DNAPrint said the murderer was probably black -- in fact, the company said it could detect 85 percent sub-Saharan African ancestry and 15 percent Native American -- and even gave an assessment of his skin tone. When a black male was apprehended, his DNA was found to match that at one of the crime scenes. He was convicted of second-degree murder in August. For some, this would be a story of science advancing police work. But for people like Duster, the forensic use of genetic markers raises troubling questions. Can a DNA screen of a person's blood or hair really tell you anything more than where his ancestors probably came from? Would it lead to witch hunts based on some uncertain appraisal of skin color? Would it be used, wrongly, to give a patina of scientific authority to group prejudices? Worried, Duster approached his friend and colleague, Francis Collins, to suggest that Collins might want to use his position at the genome institute to mount an investigation into the genetics of race -- before the drug manufacturers and genomics companies set the tone for the public debate. Collins says he was already thinking the same thing. The two men approach the venture from different perspectives, less because Collins is white and Duster is black than because one is a geneticist and the other a sociologist. As Duster sees it, race is a relationship, largely dependent on social context. Take a Tutsi and a Hutu and set them down in Los Angeles, he says, and they're both the same race, both black. But put them back in Rwanda, and they're two different races, different enough to slaughter each other. There may be biological dimensions to race, Duster says, but that doesn't take away from his belief that race should be understood as a social construction. ''The myth is that somehow the biology is real and the social forces are unreal,'' he says. ''In fact, the social forces can feed the biological forces.'' Collins, for his part, recognizes that social forces explain many of the observed differences among the races -- but says he thinks something else might be involved as well. ''We need to try to understand what there is about genetic variation that is associated with disease risk,'' he says, ''and how that correlates, in some very imperfect way, with self-identified race, and how we can use that correlation to reduce the risk of people getting sick.'' Taking up Duster's challenge, Collins knew, meant walking into a quagmire. A decade earlier, another top government scientist lost his job by discussing the genetics of urban violence (though his case was egregious: he compared young black men with male monkeys). But Collins said he believed the idea, risky as it was, was worth pursuing because it offered the best chance of converting new genomic information into something of medical significance. The genome institute, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., currently spends some $31 million for studies into human genetic variation. The institute is also a major contributor to the Hap Map project, a $110million international collaboration that by late 2005 will have put together a coherent almanac of human variation using haplotype blocks. The Hap Map is meant to help scientists in their search for common disease-causing genes, but in the process it will also generate new information about the specific ways in which populations from the places being studied -- China, Japan, Nigeria and, in the United States, Utah -- differ from one another genetically. Collins is clean-cut and homespun, emphatically tall, with a fringe of sandy hair that makes him look younger than his 54 years. He exudes an aw-shucks earnestness when he talks about his favorite topics, which include his rebirth as a Christian during his medical training. Each time he makes a scientific discovery, he says, he gets a glimmer of insight into the workings of the mind of God. But for all his personal sincerity, Collins is finding that some of his allies are wary of this newest undertaking. They know that even a man with the best intentions can muck it up when it comes to race. While writing this article, I took a trip to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. I wanted to see the museum's current exhibit about eugenics, the scientific movement of the early 20th century that looked for evidence of biological racial differences to promote creation of a ''fitter'' species. In a very short time, eugenic ideas were subverted to support Nazi policies of ethnic cleansing and racial extermination. Since last spring, when Collins called to suggest that I might be interested in his institute's plan to investigate the genetics of race, I had talked to more than two dozen scientists about the issue. Uncomfortable questions about where such inquiries could lead underscored a number of those conversations -- the sort of questions that, as a white person in America today, I don't usually have to confront. I went to the Holocaust museum looking for resonances. How disturbing it was to see that the activities of the early eugenicists resembled, from a certain perspective, the activities of specimen collectors of the early days of zoology -- as well as those of genomics researchers today, going around collecting specimens of human variation. The eugenicists engaged in some straightforward scientific studies that can seem almost harmless, even ordinary. And that's what makes it so troubling to look back. With rulers, calipers, charts of eye shapes and elaborate reconstructions of family trees, eugenicists of the 1920's and 30's took great care to describe physical characteristics of different racial groups. They photographed subjects, measured their noses and mouths, made plaster casts of their faces and documented variations in facial features and head proportions. Is it possible that the difference between then and now is that the tools have changed -- that instead of using calipers and scales, scientists now use DNA-sequencing machines? Connecting contemporary genomic studies to the Holocaust is too glib, of course, and it obscures one crucial point: that the anthropometrics of the early eugenics movement turned ugly once fanatics perverted the information. But the exhibit is a sobering reminder of how easy it would be to travel down that path. ''I think our best protection against that -- because this work is going to be done by somebody -- is to have it done by the best and brightest and hopefully most well attuned to the risk of abuse,'' Collins says. ''That's why I think this has to be a mainstream activity of genomics, and not something we avoid and then watch burst out somewhere from some sort of goofy fringe.'' Collins doesn't quote the Bible often -- he tends to neither hide nor flaunt his religious faith -- but he quotes it now. He chooses a line from the New Testament's Book of John, in which Jesus says to his disciples, ''And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.'' Reducing health disparities and catching criminals are serious reasons for pursuing the genetics of race, but there's also a small but growing trend toward something its practitioners call ''recreational genomics.'' To satisfy curiosity about their heritage, more and more people are experiencing race-based genomics as a mail-in test, for which they pay up to $400, that will tell them how much of their genome is black, white, American Indian or Asian. These companies go beyond old-fashioned genealogical services, the kind that involve scouring archives and huddling over microfiche machines, and trace genetic linkages back many generations to a particular geographic location. Critics say that what these companies are doing sanctifies the genetic distinctions among racial groups, as if the question of whether race has a biological basis has been settled. The services, with names like GeoGene, AncestryByDNA and Roots for Real, begin by asking clients to mail in a cheek swab to get some stray skin cells from which DNA can be extracted. Though the process may feel like a parlor game, the results can be deeply affecting. One of those who traced his genetic lineage through a company called African Ancestry is Andrew Young, former United States ambassador to the United Nations and now chairman of an organization called Good Works International. Young was looking for information about his maternal lineage only; he assumed, he told me, that his paternal lineage would be ''contaminated'' with white DNA, a bitter memento of slave rape that he didn't feel ready to confront. (According to Rick Kittles, a cofounder of African Ancestry and a geneticist at Ohio State University, about one-third of blacks who do a paternal lineage analysis, himself included, find that there is European DNA somewhere in their past.) When a black client discovers that there's white in his genome, the results can be shattering. Last year, the ABC News program ''Nightline'' profiled a 50-year-old California man who had assumed his whole life that he was black. But a recreational genomics analysis by DNAPrint Genomics indicated that his genome was 57 percent of what the company called Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian -- and zero percent African. So what is this man: the race he has always thought himself to be, or the race his genome says he is? Young's reaction to his African Ancestry report is an indication of how much weight we ascribe to genes, how much we believe our DNA reflects not only our racial identity but our individual identity, too. When Young heard that the company had traced his DNA back to what is now Sierra Leone, he was disappointed because he considered Sierra Leone to have a ''snobbish'' middle class. But the report got much more specific: the people whose SNP pattern most resembled Young's, it said, were from the Mende tribe. Whether a few SNP matches can allow such precision is a matter of debate, but it fit happily into Young's self-image. Young, who got his start in the civil rights movement, was raised on tales about the Amistad slave-ship rebellion of 1839, for which the Mende were responsible. ''I always had a spiritual connection to these stories,'' he says. ''Now I have a genetic connection.'' So is there such a thing as race? It depends on whether you're defining it in terms of culture or biology. Culturally, there is no denying it. In the United States, with its race-stained legacy dating back to slavery, the government has tried for centuries to define a person's race. The Census Bureau has been asking about race on its forms since 1790, most recently giving individuals the opportunity to check off more than one race if they so desire. But the more vexing question is whether there's such a thing as race in terms of biology. Genetic variations do seem to cluster differently for people with different continents of origin, but is this race? And what does it mean if it is -- or if it isn't? Do we need to agree on whether race is a biological entity, since we can so readily agree that it's a social one? ''Race is a reality in this country, no matter what the genome tells us,'' says Vanessa Northington Gamble, director of the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University. ''If I can't get a cab in New York, it's because my skin is black. And I can't hold up my DNA and say: 'Wait a minute! I'm just the same as you!' '' Some critics worry that the more we find out about genetic differences among people of different racial groups, the more such information will be misinterpreted or abused. Already there are fears that the biological measures of racial differences might lead to pronouncements about inherent differences in such complex traits as intelligence, athletic ability, aggressiveness or susceptibility to addiction. Once such measures are given the imprimatur of science, especially genomic science, loathsome racist stereotypes can take on the sheen of received wisdom. Looking for racial genetic markers does indeed risk creating categories that can get us in trouble. It bears remembering, however, that the ''slippery slope'' argument is itself a danger. Rather than abort a whole field of research because it might bolster cranks and demagogues, maybe one solution to our national angst over race is to let scientists hunt down the facts -- facts that will no doubt affirm, one way or another, that the human genome is indeed our common thread. Robin Marantz Henig is the author, most recently, of ''Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/magazine/10GENETIC.html From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 10 22:14:08 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:14:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74 Message-ID: Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74 NYT October 10, 2004 By JONATHAN KANDELL [This obituary does not illuminate what deconstructionism is very well. I used to think Derrida was a fraud but have moderated since. Too many people I respect for other reasons respect him. First thoughts often come out unclearly!] Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born, French intellectual who became one of the most celebrated and notoriously difficult philosophers of the late 20th century, died Friday at a Paris hospital, the French president's office announced. He was 74. The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, according to French television, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author's intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts - whether literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence. The concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut of arts and social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political science, even architecture. While he had a huge following - larger in the United States than in Europe - he was the target of as much anger as admiration. For many Americans, in particular, he was the personification of a French school of thinking they felt was undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education, and one they often associated with divisive political causes. Literary critics broke texts into isolated passages and phrases to find hidden meanings. Advocates of feminism, gay rights, and third-world causes embraced the method as an instrument to reveal the prejudices and inconsistencies of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Freud and other "dead white male" icons of Western culture. Architects and designers could claim to take a "deconstructionist" approach to buildings by abandoning traditional symmetry and creating zigzaggy, sometimes disquieting spaces. The filmmaker Woody Allen titled one of his movies "Deconstructing Harry," to suggest that his protagonist could best be understood by breaking down and analyzing his neurotic contradictions. A Code Word for Discourse Toward the end of the 20th century, deconstruction became a code word of intellectual discourse, much as existentialism and structuralism - two other fashionable, slippery philosophies that also emerged from France after World War II - had been before it. Mr. Derrida and his followers were unwilling - some say unable - to define deconstruction with any precision, so it has remained misunderstood, or interpreted in endlessly contradictory ways. Typical of Mr. Derrida's murky explanations of his philosophy was a 1993 paper he presented at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York, which began: "Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible." Mr. Derrida was a prolific writer, but his 40-plus books on various aspects of deconstruction were no more easily accessible. Even some of their titles - "Of Grammatology," "The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond," and "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce" - could be off-putting to the uninitiated. "Many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing for deconstruction's demise - if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it," Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at New York University, wrote in a 1994 article in The New York Times Magazine. Mr. Derrida's credibility was also damaged by a 1987 scandal involving Paul de Man, a Yale University professor who was the most acclaimed exponent of deconstruction in the United States. Four years after Mr. de Man's death, it was revealed that he had contributed numerous pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic articles to a newspaper in Belgium, where he was born, while it was under German occupation during World War II. In defending his dead colleague, Mr. Derrida, a Jew, was understood by some people to be condoning Mr. de Man's anti-Semitism. A Devoted Following Nonetheless, during the 1970's and 1980's, Mr. Derrida's writings and lectures gained him a huge following in major American universities - in the end, he proved far more influential in the United States than in France. For young, ambitious professors, his teachings became a springboard to tenure in faculties dominated by senior colleagues and older, shopworn philosophies. For many students, deconstruction was a rite of passage into the world of rebellious intellect. Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El-Biar, Algeria. His father was a salesman. At age 12, he was expelled from his French school when the rector, adhering to the Vichy government's racial laws, ordered a drastic cut in Jewish enrollment. Even as a teenager, Mr. Derrida (the name is pronounced day-ree-DAH) was a voracious reader whose eclectic interests embraced the philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and the poet Paul Val?ry. But he could be an indifferent student. He failed his baccalaureate in his first attempt. He twice failed his entrance exam to the ?cole Normal Sup?rieure, the traditional cradle of French intellectuals, where he was finally admitted in 1952. There he failed the oral portion of his final exams on his first attempt. After graduation in 1956, he studied briefly at Harvard University. For most of the next 30 years, he taught philosophy and logic at both the University of Paris and the ?cole Normal Sup?rieure. Yet he did not defend his doctoral dissertation until 1980, when he was 50 years old. By the early 1960's, Mr. Derrida had made a name for himself as a rising young intellectual in Paris by publishing articles on language and philosophy in leading academic journals. He was especially influenced by the German philosophers, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Both were strong critics of traditional metaphysics, a branch of philosophy which explored the basis and perception of reality. As a lecturer, Mr. Derrida cultivated charisma and mystery. For many years, he declined to be photographed for publication. He cut a dashing, handsome figure at the lectern, with his thick thatch of prematurely white hair, tanned complexion, and well-tailored suits. He peppered his lectures with puns, rhymes and enigmatic pronouncements, like, "Thinking is what we already know that we have not yet begun," or, "Oh my friends, there is no friend..." Many readers found his prose turgid and baffling, even as aficionados found it illuminating. A single sentence could run for three pages, and a footnote even longer. Sometimes his books were written in "deconstructed" style. For example, "Glas" (1974) offers commentaries on the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the French novelist Jean Genet in parallel columns of the book's pages; in between, there is an occasional third column of commentary about the two men's ideas. "The trouble with reading Mr. Derrida is that there is too much perspiration for too little inspiration," editorialized The Economist in 1992, when Cambridge University awarded the philosopher an honorary degree after a bruising argument among his supporters and critics on the faculty. Elsewhere in Europe, Mr. Derrida's deconstruction philosophy gained earlier and easier acceptance. Shaking Up a Discipline Mr. Derrida appeared on the American intellectual landscape at a 1966 conference on the French intellectual movement known as structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. Its high priest was French anthropologist Claude L?vi-Strauss, who studied societies through their linguistic structure. Mr. Derrida shocked his American audience by announcing that structuralism was already pass? in France, and that Mr. L?vi-Strauss's ideas were too rigid. Instead, Mr. Derrida offered deconstruction as the new, triumphant philosophy. His presentation fired up young professors who were in search of a new intellectual movement to call their own. In a Los Angeles Times Magazine article in 1991, Mr. Stephens, the journalism professor, wrote: "He gave literature professors a special gift: a chance to confront - not as mere second-rate philosophers, not as mere interpreters of novelists, but as full-fledged explorers in their own right - the most profound paradoxes of Western thought." "If they really read, if they stared intently enough at the metaphors," he went on, "literature professors, from the comfort of their own easy chairs, could reveal the hollowness of the basic assumptions that lie behind all our writings." Other critics found it disturbing that obscure academics could presume to denigrate a Sophocles, Voltaire or Tolstoy by seeking out cultural biases and inexact language in their masterpieces. "Literature, the deconstructionists frequently proved, had been written by entirely the wrong people for entirely the wrong reasons," wrote Malcolm Bradbury, a British novelist and professor, in a 1991 article for The New York Times Book Review. Mr. Derrida's influence was especially strong in the Yale University literature department, where one of his close friends, a Belgian-born professor, Paul de Man, emerged as a leading champion of deconstruction in literary analysis. Mr. de Man had claimed to be a refugee from war-torn Europe, and even left the impression among colleagues that he had joined the Belgian resistance. But in 1987, four years after Mr. de Man's death, research revealed that he had written over 170 articles in the early 1940's for Le Soir, a Nazi newspaper in Belgium. Some of these articles were openly anti-Semitic, including one that echoed Nazi calls for "a final solution" and seemed to defend the notion of concentration camps. "A solution to the Jewish problem that aimed at the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would entail no deplorable consequences for the literary life of the West," wrote Mr. de Man. The revelations became a major scandal at Yale and other campuses where the late Mr. de Man had been lionized as an intellectual hero. Some former colleagues asserted that the scandal was being used to discredit deconstruction by people who were always hostile to the movement. But Mr. Derrida gave fodder to critics by defending Mr. de Man, and even using literary deconstruction techniques in an attempt to demonstrate that the Belgian scholar's newspaper articles were not really anti-Semitic. "Borrowing Derrida's logic one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal that [Adolf Hitler] was in conflict with anti-Semitism," scoffed Peter Lennon, in a 1992 article for The Guardian. According to another critic, Mark Lilla, in a 1998 article in The New York Review of Books, Mr. Derrida's contortionist defense of his old friend left "the impression that deconstruction means you never have to say you're sorry." Almost as devastating for deconstruction and Mr. Derrida was the revelation, also in 1987, that Heidegger, one of his intellectual muses, was a dues-paying member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. Once again, Mr. Derrida was accused by critics of being irresolute, this time for failing to condemn Heidegger's fascist ideas. By the late 1980's, Mr. Derrida's intellectual star was on the wane on both sides of the Atlantic. But he continued to commute between France and the United States, where he was paid hefty fees to lecture a few weeks every year at several East Coast universities and the University of California at Irvine. Lifting a Mysterious Aura In his early years of intellectual fame, Mr. Derrida was criticized by European leftists for a lack of political commitment - indeed, for espousing a philosophy that attacked the very concept of absolute political certainties. But in the 1980's, he became active in a number of political causes, opposing apartheid, defending Czech dissidents and supporting the rights of North African immigrants in France. Mr. Derrida also became far more accessible to the media. He sat still for photos and gave interviews that stripped away his formerly mysterious aura to reveal the mundane details of his personal life. A former Yale student, Amy Ziering Kofman, focused on him in a 2002 documentary, "Derrida," that some reviewers found charming. "With his unruly white hair and hawklike face, Derrida is a compelling presence even when he is merely pondering a question," wrote Kenneth Turan in The Los Angeles Times. "Even his off-the-cuff comments are intriguing, because everything gets serious consideration. And when he is wary, he's never difficult for its own sake but because his philosophical positions make him that way." Rather than hang around the Left Bank caf?s traditionally inhabited by French intellectuals, Mr. Derrida preferred the quiet of Ris-Orangis, a suburb south of Paris, where he lived in a small house with his wife, Marguerite Aucouturier, a psychoanalyst. The couple had two sons, Pierre and Jean. He also had a son, Daniel, with Sylviane Agacinski, a philosophy teacher who later married the French political leader Lionel Jospin. As a young man, Mr. Derrida confessed, he hoped to become a professional soccer player. And he admitted to being an inveterate viewer of television, watching everything from news to soap operas. "I am critical of what I'm watching," said Mr. Derrida with mock pride. "I deconstruct all the time." Late in his career, Mr. Derrida was asked, as he had been so often, what deconstruction was. "Why don't you ask a physicist or a mathematician about difficulty?" he replied, frostily, to Dinitia Smith, a Times reporter, in a 1998. "Deconstruction requires work. If deconstruction is so obscure, why are the audiences in my lectures in the thousands? They feel they understand enough to understand more." Asked later in the same interview to at least define deconstruction, Mr. Derrida said: "It is impossible to respond. I can only do something which will leave me unsatisfied." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/obituaries/10derrida.html From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 10 22:15:09 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:15:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Can Prayers Heal? Critics Say Studies Go Past Science's Reach Message-ID: Can Prayers Heal? Critics Say Studies Go Past Science's Reach NYT October 10, 2004 By BENEDICT CAREY In 2001, two researchers and a Columbia University fertility expert published a startling finding in a respected medical journal: women undergoing fertility treatment who had been prayed for by Christian groups were twice as likely to have a successful pregnancy as those who had not. Three years later, after one of the researchers pleaded guilty to conspiracy in an unrelated business fraud, Columbia is investigating the study and the journal reportedly pulled the paper from its Web site. No evidence of manipulation has yet surfaced, and the study's authors stand behind their data. But the doubts about the study have added to the debate over a deeply controversial area of research: whether prayer can heal illness. Critics express outrage that the federal government, which has contributed $2.3 million in financing over the last four years for prayer research, would spend taxpayer money to study something they say has nothing to do with science. "Intercessory prayer presupposes some supernatural intervention that is by definition beyond the reach of science," said Dr. Richard J. McNally, a psychologist at Harvard. "It is just a nonstarter, in my opinion, a total waste of time and money." Prayer researchers, many themselves believers in prayer's healing powers, say scientists do not need to know how a treatment or intervention works before testing it. Dr. Richard Nahin, a senior adviser at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, said in an e-mail message that the studies were meant to answer practical questions, not religious ones. "We only recently understood how aspirin worked, and the mechanisms of action of various antidepressants and general anesthetics remain under investigation," Dr. Nahin wrote. He said a recent government study found that 45 percent of adults prayed specifically for health reasons, and suggested that many of them were poor people with limited access to care. "It is a public health imperative to understand if this prayer offers them any benefit," Dr. Nahin wrote. Some researchers also point out that praying for the relief of other people's suffering is a deeply human response to disease. The 'Placebo Effect' Since 2000, at least 10 studies of intercessory prayer have been carried out by researchers at institutions including the Mind/Body Medical Institute, a nonprofit clinic near Boston run by a Harvard-trained cardiologist, as well as Duke University and the University of Washington. Government financing of intercessory prayer research began in the mid-1990's and has continued under the Bush administration. In one continuing study, financed by the National Institutes of Health and called "Placebo Effect in Distant Healing of Wounds," doctors at California Pacific Medical Center, a major hospital in San Francisco, inflict a tiny stab wound on the abdomens of women receiving breast reconstruction surgery, with their consent, and then determine whether the "focused intention" of a variety of healers speeds the wound's healing. Two large trials of the effects of prayer on coronary health are currently under review at prominent medical journals. Even those who defend prayer research concede that such studies are difficult. For one thing, no one knows what constitutes a "dose": some studies have tested a few prayers a day by individual healers, while others have had entire congregations pray together. Some have involved evangelical Christians; others have engaged rabbis, Buddhist and New Age healers, or some combination. Another problem concerns the mechanism by which prayer might be supposed to work. Some researchers contend that prayer's effects - if they exist - have little to do with religion or the existence of God. Instead of divine intervention, they propose things like "subtle energies," "mind-to-mind communication" or "extra dimensions of space-time" - concepts that many scientists dismiss as nonsense. Others suggest that prayer may have a soothing effect that works like a placebo for believers who know they are being prayed for. Either way, even many churchgoers are skeptical that prayer can be subjected to scientific scrutiny. For one thing, prayers vary in their purpose and content: some give praise, others petition for strength, many ask only that God's will be done. For another, not everyone sees God as one who does favors on request. "There's no way to put God to the test, and that's exactly what you're doing when you design a study to see if God answers your prayers," said the Rev. Raymond J. Lawrence Jr., director of pastoral care at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. "This whole exercise cheapens religion, and promotes an infantile theology that God is out there ready to miraculously defy the laws of nature in answer to a prayer." Prayer and Heart Disease Proponents of prayer research often cite two large heart disease trials to justify further study of prayer's healing potential. In one study, Dr. Randolph Byrd, a San Francisco cardiologist, had groups of born-again Christians pray for 192 of 393 patients being treated at the coronary care unit of San Francisco General Hospital. In 1988, Dr. Byrd reported in The Southern Medical Journal, a peer-reviewed publication of the Southern Medical Association, that the patients who were prayed for did better on several measures of health, including the need for drugs and breathing assistance. At the end of the paper, Dr. Byrd wrote, "I thank God for responding to the many prayers made on behalf of the patients." In the other study, of 990 heart disease patients, Dr. William S. Harris of St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., and his colleagues reported in The Archives of Internal Medicine in 1999 that the patients who were prayed for by religious strangers did significantly better than the others on a measure of coronary health that included more than 30 factors. Dr. Harris, who was one of the authors of a paper arguing that Darwin's theory of evolution is speculative, concluded that his study supported Dr. Byrd's. In the experiments, the researchers did not know until the study was completed which patients were being prayed for. But experts say the two studies suffer from a similar weakness: the authors measured so many variables that some were likely to come up positive by chance. In effect, statisticians say, this method is like asking the same question over and over until you get the answer you want. "It's a weak measure," said Dr. Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia who has been critical of prayer research. "You're collecting 30 or 40 variables but can't even specify up front which ones" will be affected. Dr. Harris corrected for this problem, experts say, but he then found significant differences between prayer and no-prayer groups only by using a formula that he and his colleagues had devised, and that no one else had ever validated. A swarm of letters to the journal challenged Dr. Harris's methods. One correspondent, a Dutch doctor, jokingly claimed that he could account for the results because he was clairvoyant. "I have subsequently used my telepathic powers to influence the course of the experimental group," he wrote. Still, some religious leaders and practitioners of alternative medicine argue that because prayer is so common a response to illness, researchers have a responsibility to investigate it. "We need to look at this with what I call open-minded skepticism," said Dr. Marilyn Schlitz, the lead investigator of the federally financed wound healing study and the director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an alternative medicine research center near San Francisco. Questions About Data It was a former associate of Dr. Schlitz's, Dr. Elisabeth Targ, who first helped draw federal money into research on so-called distant healing. The daughter of Russell Targ, a physicist who studied extrasensory perception for government intelligence agencies in the 1970's, Dr. Targ made headlines with a 1998 study suggesting that prayers from assorted religious healers and shamans could protect AIDS patients from some complications related to the disease. The findings, and Dr. Targ's reputation, helped win her two grants from the complementary and alternative medicine center at the National Institutes of Health - one for a larger study of distant healing among AIDS patients, another to test the effect of prayers by outside healers on the longevity of people with deadly brain tumors. Both trials are continuing at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, which has a complementary medicine wing, but Dr. Targ is no longer running them. She herself died of brain cancer in 2002. Shortly after Dr. Targ's death, her methods came under attack. An article in Wired magazine charged that she and her co-authors had massaged their data on AIDS to make the effects of prayer look better than they were. Officials at California Pacific conducted an investigation of the study and concluded that the data had not been manipulated. Dr. John Astin, who is running the second AIDS study, said the biggest weakness of Dr. Targ's first trial was that it was too small to be conclusive. But in a letter defending the study, the hospital's director of research also acknowledged that he could not tell for sure from the original medical records which patients had been prayed for and which had not been. "Each subject's name, age and date of birth were blinded with what appears to be a black crayon," he wrote. The quality of original data is also at the center of the controversy over the 2001 Columbia fertility study, which was reported by many newspapers including The New York Times. Dr. Kwang Cha, a Korean fertility specialist visiting the university, was the study's lead author. Daniel Wirth, a lawyer from California who had conducted research on alternative healing, was his principal research associate. In the spring of 1999, the two met at a Starbucks on the Upper West Side to exchange data, according to Dr. Cha, who provided details of the meeting through a colleague. Dr. Cha had the pregnancy results with him, and Mr. Wirth had a roster of the women he said had been prayed for. The two had never shared the information before, and Dr. Cha was surprised enough by the results that he took them to a former mentor, Dr. Rogerio Lobo of Columbia, to make sure the study was done correctly. In a recent interview, Dr. Lobo said that the study had come to him as a "fait accompli" and that he had interrogated Dr. Cha to make sure his study methods were sound. He decided they were and helped write the study. "We had these results, we didn't believe them, we couldn't explain them, but we decided to put them out there," Dr. Lobo said. In May, Mr. Wirth pleaded guilty to conspiracy in connection with a $2 million business fraud in Pennsylvania. He is awaiting sentencing. Dr. Lobo said he had met Mr. Wirth but knew little about him or about his contributions to the study. He acknowledged that the data could have been manipulated, but said he did not know how. "I didn't actually conduct the study, so I can't know for sure," Dr. Lobo said. Mr. Wirth's lawyer, William Arbuckle, said his client was not available for comment. 'This Is No Routine Paper' One study that many people believe could either bolster prayer research or dampen interest in the topic has been completed, but has not yet been published. Dr. Herbert Benson, the cardiologist who founded the Mind/Body Medical Institute, began the trial in the late 1990's with $2.4 million from the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research into spirituality. The Mind/Body Institute, according to its Web site, is a "scientific and educational organization dedicated to the study of mind/body interactions." The study included some 1,800 volunteers, heart bypass patients at six hospitals. They were monitored according to strict medical guidelines and randomly assigned to be prayed for or not. One doctor who has seen a final version of the study said it was the most rigorous trial on the subject to date. Other experts say they wonder whether the study will be published at all, and what is holding it up. "He's got nothing, or we would have seen it by now," Dr. Sloan of Columbia said, referring to Dr. Benson. In an interview at his office, Dr. Benson acknowledged that at least two medical journals had turned down the study after asking for revisions. He said that the study was currently under review at another journal and that talking about the results could jeopardize publication. "This is no routine paper," he said. "What you're looking at obviously is not a typical intervention, not at all. We are at the interface of science and religion here, and there are boundary issues that you would not have for almost any other paper." Dr. Benson, who has studied the links between spirituality and medicine for many years, declined to answer when asked if he himself believed in the effects of intercessory prayer, saying only that he believed in God. "We know that praying for oneself can influence health, so that's what led us to this topic," he said. If researchers are struggling to prove that intercessory prayer has benefits for health, at least one study hints that it could be harmful. In a 1997 experiment involving 40 alcoholics in rehab, psychologists at the University of New Mexico found that although intercessory prayers did not have any effect on drinking patterns, the men and women in the study who knew they were being prayed for actually did worse. "It's not clear what that means," said Dr. William Miller, one of the study's authors. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/health/10prayer.html From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 10 22:41:11 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:41:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Visionaries outline web's future Message-ID: Visionaries outline web's future http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3725884.stm 2004.10.8 [$260 million is just $10 per book! A friend of Sarah's took us to a floor at the National Library of Medicine several years ago where human workers opened books at a 90 degree angle and placed two facing pages on a wedge. With suitable mirrors the images were scanned and turned into bitmaps or whatever, not files transformed by optical character recognition. This was so long ago that I wondered about the bandwidth costs of transmitting such files over the net. Today, bandwidth has greatly increased, so this should not be a problem, though searching for text will be. Furthermore, humans have been replaced by robots that, allegedly, can pull stuck pages apart better. [Also, $60,000 to store a terrabyte of scanned images sounds way too much. You can buy hard disks right now for a dollar a megabyte. Is this a case of governments driving up costs by a factor of 60, or is there something I don't know about. [Note that the article speaks of scanned images only. I have no idea what the cost function of converting images to text or html would be, the function being from quality to cost, that is. [Of course, copyrights would have to be bought up or just seized by the feds. I think copyrights should last only 20 years, on the grounds that there is little difference between a 20-year annuity, the 75-year one that exists now, and a perpetual one, and that the benefits of putting works into the public domain after 20 years exceed this slight difference. [Does anyone have an estimate of the value earned every year from the monopoly granted by copyrighting in this country? What percent of books are less than 20 years old? [Yes, yes, things get very complicated very quickly. I basically just want to pass along a news item. You should realize that the Library of Congress is unreasonable conservative when it comes to reproducing things: the sound recordings that it place on its site avoided everything that still *might* be under State copyright.] Universal access to all human knowledge could be had for around $260m, a conference about the web's future has been told. The idea of access for all was put forward by visionary Brewster Kahle, who suggested starting by digitally scanning all 26 million books in the US Library of Congress. His idea was just one of many presented at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco that aims to give a glimpse of what the net will become. Experts at the event said the next generation of the web will come out of the creative and programming communities starting to tinker with the vast pool of data the net has become. Small start Despite the hype surrounding the dotcom era, many believe that the vast potential of the net to change society and business remains largely untapped. The last few years have been more about making a working infrastructure and making it useable with browsers, search engines, blogs and a variety of other programming tools. The future will build on this basic infrastructure in ways that "grow in the telling", said Tim O'Reilly, co-organiser of the Web 2.0 conference. Web 2.0 will also build on the groups that are springing up around well-known net companies such as Google, Amazon, eBay and many others. Speaking about what this future will be like, Jeff Bezos, boss of e-commerce firm Amazon, said it will be about making the web useable for computers rather than people. This will revolve around tools and programs that re-work the information collected by firms like Amazon that will help create new services and businesses. One such is MusicPlasma which mines Amazon data to produce a visual search engine to let people find other music that resembles the stuff they already listen to. Another is the Scoutpal service that lets people scan book bar codes to find out what price of the title on Amazon. Amazon already has 65,000 developers who are working on ways to plunder information on its site for their own ends. The payback for Amazon is the selling of more stuff through its site. Big ideas Another glimpse of how the web is changing was given with the unveiling of new search engine Snap by net veteran Bill Gross. Snap lets people find web pages related to a keyword query but also produces lots of extra information. For instance, a search for digital cameras produces a table detailing popular models that others have looked for. Mr Gross said Snap was a precursor of what the net will become as it tries to encourage interaction and builds on the data trails that earlier visitors leave behind. A well as talking about what the web will become, the conference also gave a platform to people with big ideas for how the potential of the net can be harnessed. Brewster Kahle's idea is to scan as many books as possible and put them online so everyone has access to that huge amount of knowledge. In his speech, Mr Kahle pointed out that most books are out of print most of the time and only a tiny proportion are available on bookshop shelves. Using a robotic scanner, Mr Kahle said the job of scanning the 26 million volumes in the US Library of Congress, the world's biggest library, would cost only $260m (?146m). He estimated that the scanned images would take up about a terabyte of space and cost about $60,000 (?33,000) to store. Instead of needing a huge building to hold them, the entire library could fit on a single shelf. The Web 2.0 conference was held in San Francisco from 5-7 October. From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 10 22:44:55 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:44:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Business Week: Scouring The Planet For Brainiacs Message-ID: Scouring The Planet For Brainiacs http://www.businessweek.com/@@WDLGEIUQG6 at lQhYA/magazine/content/04_41/b3903409.htm 4.10.11 [Some stuff from a Ziff-Davis publication, called Microsoft Watch is appended.] Worldwide innovation networks are the new keys to R&D vitality -- and competitiveness Step inside the labs of Microsoft's advanced technology center outside Beijing for a lesson in 21st century innovation. In one lab, engineers have developed a program that simulates the movement of water around a tropical island, adjusting the lighting of the waves as they ripple over the reflection of a school of carp swimming at different depths. Technicians load a photo of a face into another program and the expression changes from a grin to a pout, down to the wrinkles on the cheeks and forehead. The lab also is doing cool things with speech -- computer-generated voices that speak English in natural-sounding sentences, or a "visual audio notebook" that rapidly searches tape recordings for specific words. This $80 million center, with nearly 500 engineers, PhD students, and visiting professors, is one of Microsoft's most important facilities for developing graphics, handwriting-recognition, and voice-synthesization technologies. "One of the reasons we opened the Beijing lab was to tap into a great pool of talent," says Microsoft Research Senior Vice-President Richard F. Rashid. Among the 72 innovations that have already ended up in Microsoft products is the "digital ink" used in software for tablet PCs. Others will eventually reach the market years down the road in everything from electronic-game players to industrial-design software. THE FLOATING LAB The Microsoft lab is much more than a showcase for how far China has come in computer technology. It also illustrates how innovation is an increasingly global game. It can involve a worldwide research and development operation like that of Microsoft, or IBM, which has major labs in China, Israel, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Or innovation can be the product of a much more amorphous structure, something that consultants call global innovation networks. These often consist of in-house engineers, contract designers and manufacturers, university scientists, and dozens of technology suppliers big and small -- all pulled together ad-hoc for a particular product. To many Americans, who assume that every engineer hired abroad by Microsoft, General Electric (GE ), Intel (INTC ), or Boeing (BA ) means one less high-paying job at home, this is a threatening trend. There's also growing angst that the rapid advance of Chinese, Indian, and Russian science is imperiling U.S. global economic leadership. But such fears often are based on an outdated view of global competitiveness. Because technology now crosses borders faster than ever -- thanks to the Internet, cheap telecom links, and advances in interactive-design software -- the location of R&D facilities matters less and less. What matters is who controls these networks -- and where the benefits accrue in terms of products, jobs, new companies, corporate profits, and higher economic productivity. "The real challenge is to commercialize technology," says Boston Consulting Group Executive Vice-President James P. Andrew. "Increasingly, that means integrating outside technologies and orchestrating global value chains." BOOSTING THE R&D BANG The 2000 tech bust and subsequent recession also have spurred companies to look at ways to get products to market faster. "There is tremendous pressure on industry to innovate more -- and do it more quickly," says Krishna Nathan, director of IBM's 200-engineer Zurich Research Laboratory. The problem is, many companies also are finding their R&D efforts aren't producing enough bang for the buck. In a Boston Consulting survey of 250 senior executives, nearly seven out of ten cited innovation as a top priority and said they plan to hike R&D spending. Yet 57% also said they aren't satisfied with the return on their innovation investments. A Forrester Research Inc. (FORR ) study found similar frustration. "CEOs feel they are throwing money into a hole, but little comes out," says Forrester Vice-President Navi Radjou. Thanks to the burst of global R&D, innovative companies can now shop the world for intellectual property needed for new products. Cities such as Bangalore, Tel Aviv, and Seoul are starting to have flourishing Silicon Valley-like tech clusters nurtured by venture capital, tie-ups between science universities and industry, and a critical mass of inventors and entrepreneurs adept at selling their intellectual property worldwide. South Korea, for example, is a trailblazer in next-generation digital displays, memory devices, wireless telecom, and electronic gaming. In Taiwan, long known for churning out me-too electronics products, R&D spending has leapt fourfold, to $7.5 billion, since 1990. The island now boasts some of the world's most profitable chip and hardware designers. "Taiwanese companies used to be able to focus on low-end products and survive," says spokesman David Chen of Novatek Microelectronics Corp., a leader in chips for liquid-crystal displays used in high-end TVs, notebook PCs, and digital cameras that earned $98 million on $333 million in sales in 2003. "Now intellectual property is a serious matter." A U.N. OF SUPPLIERS To get an idea of how diffuse the innovation process has become, try dissecting your new PDA, digital cameraphone, notebook PC, or cable set-top box. You will probably find a virtual U.N. of intellectual-property suppliers. The central processor may have come from Texas Instruments (TXN ) or Intel, and the operating system from BlackBerry (RIMM ), Symbian, or Microsoft. The circuit board may have been designed by Chinese engineers. The dozens of specialty chips and blocks of embedded software responsible for the dazzling video or crystal-clear audio may have come from chip designers in Taiwan, Austria, Ireland, or India. The color display likely came from South Korea, the high-grade lens from Japan or Germany. The cellular links may be of Nordic or French origin. If the device has Bluetooth technology, which lets digital appliances talk to each other, it may have been licensed from IXI Mobile Inc., one of dozens of Israeli wireless-telecom companies spun off from the defense industry. IXI has developed a package of software allowing users to wirelessly zap images, audio, and data from digital cameras to e-mail accounts to PCs. Among the products using IXI's package is ATT Wireless' new Ogo device for instant messaging. This spreading out of R&D is a boon to innovation. By mobilizing global R&D teams around the clock, nimble companies can accelerate development cycles, bringing new technologies to consumers and industry faster, cheaper, and in more varieties. Multinationals can reach deep into once-cloistered university labs in Shanghai or Moscow for help in advancing everything from genetics and molecular research to alternative energy. Besides employing several thousand in India, France, Germany, and the U.S. to develop chip sets and software, Texas Instruments taps brains at 100 info-tech companies from Berlin to Bangalore. This has been vital to maintaining TI's dominance in the $5 billion global market for digital-signal processors for cell phones and consumer electronics. "The more we can leverage outside talent and companies with great ideas, the more product we can get out," says Doug Raser, who oversees TI's global strategic marketing. Just as important, the global innovation supermarket lowers entry barriers for dynamic new players. A good example of the new breed of technology networker is Austin (Tex.)-based Motion Computing Inc. With just 110 employees, Motion is the No. 3 seller of slate style tablet PCs, a market that research firm IDC predicts will near $7 billion in three years. Motion shipped 25,000 of the $2,000 machines last year, mainly to health-care and financial-service companies in the U.S. and 14 other nations. Motion's latest M1400 PC, which allows users to write directly on the screen, display articles as they appear in a magazine, and transmit documents wirelessly, is loaded with cutting-edge applications sourced from outside suppliers. The digital pen comes from Japan's Wacom Co. and the software for digital sketches from Toronto's Alias Systems Corp. The 12-inch pen-based screen, which can be viewed in bright sunlight and while tilted at a 160-degree angle, was developed by Korea's Boe Hydis, the world's leading supplier of tablet PC displays. The machines are made in China by Taiwanese contract manufacturer Compal Electronics Inc. "This business model lets us bring core technologies from around the world to market faster than our competitors," says CEO Scott Eckert. The digital convergence has sped the global tech scramble, because it means that many of today's gadgets now need to incorporate video, telecom, imaging, computing, and audio. "Very few companies can afford to invest the time and effort to stay at the forefront of so many technologies," says Srini Rajam, chairman and CEO of Bangalore-based ITTIAM Systems. "By licensing our design innovations, they can cut the time it takes to launch a product by nine to 12 months." Founded in 2001 by seven veteran Texas Instruments executives, the 125-engineer company has found growing demand for its embedded software and systems designs for decoding highly compressed audio and video content on the MPEG4 format. ITTIAM's 50 clients in the U.S., Europe, and Asia have used its designs in everything from a hand-size $199 camcorder to a "digital-media album" that can store up to 130 hours of video and thousands of songs. One customer is e.Digital Corp. The San Diego outfit develops multimedia appliances such as the digEplayer, a portable in-flight entertainment system used by 11 carriers, including Ryanair, Alaska Air Group Inc., (ALK ) and Hawaiian Airlines Inc (HA ). The machine, sold by Tacoma (Wash.)-based APS Inc., stores up to 30 highly compressed movies. Economy passengers rent the player for around $10 to watch what and when they please. "We're constantly scouring the world for high-performance technologies that are already out there," says e.Digital Senior Vice-President Robert Putman. `YOU HAVE TO BE TIRELESS' Indeed, the challenge is to keep up with the ever-quickening pace of innovation. Design houses such as San Francisco-based IDEO are specialists at just that. The firm collects data on thousands of chip, software, and manufacturing outfits in more than 100 nations via trade shows, Web sites, and word of mouth -- all information that can speed product development. "You have to be tireless about updating these databases because the half-life of most of the information is about four weeks," says Dave Blakely, leader of IDEO's smart-products unit. Last year, IDEO was hired to develop a device to show patients what their smile would look like after a tooth-whitening process by Walnut Creek (Calif.)-based BriteSmile Inc. It found the digital image-compression algorithm from a Vancouver, B.C., company and an outfit in Amedabad, India, that specializes in making such algorithms work on TI's DSP chips. Such blending of technologies will become even more common as innovation networks extend their reach. Many corporations have been obsessed with improving quality in the 1980s, boosting productivity in the 1990s, and slashing costs in the wake of the 2000 tech bust. Now, companies are zeroing in on how to innovate more efficiently. "The fallacy of innovation was that it was all about spending on R&D or information technology," says Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute. "Instead, it has more to do with execution and getting products out better and faster." The answers are out there, waiting for the quickest and smartest to find them. By Pete Engardio With Dexter Roberts in Beijing, Neal Sandler in Tel Aviv, and Matt Kovac in Taipei > >========================================================= >MICROSOFT WATCH >from Mary Jo Foley >mailto:mfoley at ziffdavis.com >October 7, 2004 >========================================================= > >In This Issue > >Three Microsoft Research Projects to Watch: We bring you an >update on three of the more newsy MSR projects in the works. > >Mesh Connectivity Layer Code Posted for Download: MSR takes >a step toward making the Holy Grail of mesh computing a >reality. > >Making Passwords More Secure Through Mnemonic Clues: Could >randomly generated ink blots be used to help users create >more memorable and secure passwords? > >MSR Shields: A First Line of Worm Defense: There are two >different "Shields" efforts happening at Microsoft. The MSR >one is all about unearthing worms before they burrow into >users' PCs. > >========================================================= > >Three Microsoft Research Projects to Watch > >In every recent Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer speech, there >are inevitable references to the $7 billion that Microsoft >is sinking into R&D in fiscal 2005 in the name of >innovation. So what's Redmond doing with all this research >money? > >If you haven't checked out the Microsoft Research (MSR) Web >site lately, you might want to take a gander. There is >growing amount of information on an increasing variety of >projects in which Microsoft's Redmond, San Francisco, >Silicon Valley, Cambridge (UK) and Beijing labs are engaged. > >See the Main MSR Site Here >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd0_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >And Subscribe to the MSR RSS Feeds and E-mail Newsletter >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd1_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >In today's newsletter, we're calling out three of the more >newsworthy projects that have come across our RSS reader in >recent months. > >========================================================= > >Mesh Connectivity Layer Code Posted for Download > >Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has made several references >over the last couple of years to his interest in mesh >networking as a way to connect consumers more affordably. >Earlier this year, in fact, Gates dedicated part of his >regular "Think Weeks" to the topic of mesh networking. > >A quick refresher: Mesh networking is a way of routing data, >voice and instructions between nodes (thanks to Wikipedia >for the definition). > >See the Full 'Mesh Network' Definition Here >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd2_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >In March, Gates told eWEEK why he thinks mesh networking >matters: "There's a thing called mesh networking, which is >software making all this stuff work together in a way that >lets you do video and audio in a pretty neat way. And this >idea that we're going to unify on the network voice, video >and data, . . . . That's another one of those Holy Grails >that you can probably find in an article back when eWEEK >first came out talking about unified networks. But that's >really coming to the fore." > >What Is Bill Gates Thinking About? Mesh Networks, For One >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd3_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >And back in 2003, Gates said during the company's annual >Research Faculty Summit that mesh networking might have even >more potential in the developing world than in the developed >one. > >"If some advances in wireless and mesh computing can bring >the cost of connectivity down, that idea of being serious >about the digital divide, that is what would be the huge >breakthrough," Gates told faculty researchers. "It's not the >$400 PC, it's not the software, because Microsoft in all >those Digital Divide cases is willing to come in and provide >software donations for those things; what holds it back is >that just having a standalone machine, as nice as that is, >really isn't the vision of all the information that you want >to get at." > >Read Gates' MSR Summit Remarks From 2003 >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd4_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >Well, MSR's Redmond, Cambridge and Silicon Valley teams are >all working on mesh networking. According to the MSR Mesh >Networking Center Web site, the researchers have deployed >testbed mesh networks in their offices and in a local >apartment complex. > >In fact, in late September, MSR posted for download a piece >of its mesh-network code - its mesh connectivity layer (MCL) >driver. MSR describes MCL as a driver that implements a >virtual network adapter in a way that makes the rest of the >network appear as an "additional (virtual) network link." > >Check Out the MSR Mesh Networking Center Page >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd5_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >And the MCL Driver >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd6_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >Still, Microsoft has a long way to go to fill in more >elements of the mesh fabric. We'll keep you posted as the >MSR and/or product teams deliver more pieces. > >========================================================= > >Making Passwords More Secure Through Mnemonic Clues > >Another hot button for Chairman Gates is security, as the >whole Trustworthy Computing Initiative makes evident. But >lately, Gates has been playing up the necessity of securing >passwords in order to insure the integrity of home and >corporate PCs. > >While Gates has gone on the record saying that smart >cards/biometric recognition may be the ultimate solution, he >said it would likely be five or six years before such >systems become commonplace. > >Gates Talks Password Security, Spyware and More >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd7_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >But a solution for helping to secure passwords may be nearer >than that, especially if some MSR work pans out that >involves using mnemonic clues to create better passwords. > >MSR recently published a synopsis of some of the password >security work being done by Dan Simon, a cryptographer in >MSR's systems and networking group, and his intern Adam >Stubblefield. > >Simon and Stubblefield are looking to inkblots as hints that >users could rely on to create unique and more easily >memorable passwords. > >Read a Report on MSR's Ink-Blot Research >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd8_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >"To make the system work, they developed a program that can >generate an infinite amount of random inkblots," according >to an MSR article on Simon and Stubblefield's work. > >"'We show you a bunch of computer generated inkblots,' said >Simon. 'We ask you to look at the inkblot, see whatever you >see in the inkblot, and type a short abbreviation of what >you see. The first and last letter works well. We do that >for a sequence of inkblots. At the end of all that we take >you through it a few more times, but we scramble it in a >random order first to make sure you haven't just typed in >whatever you wanted to and ignored the inkblots altogether. >We run it a few more times to make sure you have it in your >memory, and thereafter whenever you try and log in we'll >give you that second order of your inkblots. Eventually >you'll just commit it to muscle memory and you'll learn it. >And the inkblots will trigger the same memory.'" > >There's no word on when or how this project might make its >way into any of the Microsoft product groups. But stay >tuned. > >========================================================= > >MSR Shields: First Line of Worm Defense > >Microsoft's security technology and business unit (SBTU) >officials have talked of Microsoft's plans to help >enterprises "secure the perimeter" via firewalls and >shields, This plan is part of the Active Protection >Technology initiatives upon which Microsoft's >security-product teams are working (and which we're going to >be hearing a lot about in the coming months). > >Get Your Active Protection Technology Refresher Here >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd9_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >But there's another Microsoft "Shields" strategy in the >works. And this one, which is purely research at this point, >is happening in MSR. > >A note on the MSR Shields Web site explains the distinction: >"The name of our research project coincides with our >company's "shield" security strategy. In fact, our research >project started before the Microsoft 'shield' initiative. >Our project is purely a research project at this stage." > >Check Out the MSR Shields Site >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd10_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >The MSR Shields team is developing "vulnerability-specific, >exploit-generic network filters" that can examine filter >traffic before a patch is applied. The ultimate goal of >MSR's Shields is to stop worms before they can burrow into >users' machines. > >"Shields are less disruptive to install and uninstall, >easier to test for bad side effects, and hence more reliable >than traditional software patches. Further, shields are >resilient to polymorphic or metamorphic variations of >exploits," claim the Shields team on their Web site. > >In August, members of the MSR Shields team published a new >white paper on their work, which they presented at an >Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) conference. (Dan >Simon, one of the researchers involved in the password >ink-blot research mentioned above, is a key member of the >Shields team.) > >Read the MSR Shields White Paper in Full >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd11_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >We'll be watching for more news on both kinds of Microsoft >shields as Microsoft's fiscal 2005 rolls on. > >========================================================= > >A couple of quick housekeeping notes: For those who wondered >if Microsoft Watch had the inside track on Rodney >Dangerfield's demise on Tuesday, the answer is no. Despite >one colleague's pronouncement that "the Microsoft Watcher >knows ALL," we can tell you it was a pure coincidence that >we likened Windows XP Starter Edition to Dangerfield in >Monday's newsletter. RIP, Rodney. > >Monday is Columbus Day here in the U.S. So we'll be sending >you your Microsoft Watch issues on Tuesday and Thursday next >week (instead of Monday/Thursday). > >Don't forget: We live on tips. Got a Microsoft product, >strategy or personality you're just dying to read more >about? Send your ideas, rants, raves, quibbles and other >tidbits to mfoley at ziffdavis.com. (Don't worry, though: >Confidentiality is guaranteed!) > >========================================================= > >Microsoft Watch Information > >If you experience any difficulties with receiving your >issues of Microsoft Watch, please click here: >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd12_AAHNPgAAAAcB > >Subscribe to Microsoft Watch: >http://news.microsoft-watch.com/lrd13_AAHNPgAAAAcB From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 10 22:48:13 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2004 18:48:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog Review: Albert Borgmann: On the Blessings of Calamity and the Burdens of Good Fortune Message-ID: Albert Borgmann: On the Blessings of Calamity and the Burdens of Good Fortune http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=159229&textreg=1&id=BorBles4-3 Albert Borgmann is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montana. Professor Borgmann's work has been the topic of conferences and books such as Technology and the Good Life? edited by Eric Higgs, Andrew Light, and David Strong (2000). His books include: Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (1999); Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992); and Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (1984). It is difficult now to recall the world of the nineties. At the time it seemed like the beginning of boundless prosperity, inspired by the manifest destiny of exploring and settling the new world of cyberspace, an era in which the iron laws of gravity and economics had been abrogated, a time of challenges that called for boldness and unconditional devotion. But at the turn of the millennium, diffidence and disappointment set in. We began to realize that the second coming might not occur in our lifetime. Limitless affluence would take longer, and more work was needed to construct hyperreal happiness. On September code 11 /code of code 2001 /code , diffidence turned to despair and disappointment to sorrow. In retrospect we could see that in the nineties we had been turning our private spheres into cocoons of self-indulgence, and we had enveloped the public realm in a virtual fog of cell phones, pagers, beepers, personal CD players, digital cameras, and video displays. September 11^th was in a terrifying way what Virginia Woolf has called a moment of being, a situation that made us feel the shock of reality. [3]^1 The attacks themselves were conducted in a primitively real way, and the terrors in turn shredded our cocoons and dispelled the virtual fog. Suddenly we became aware again of one another and of the things about us. People emerged from their seclusion and anonymity through their heroism, their selfless exertions, through acts of kindness and sometimes simply through the acknowledgment of tears and consolations. Suddenly the high-rises that had seemed so forbidding and aloof looked frail and precious. We felt affection and sorrow for the twin towers of the World Trade Center, which we had previously regarded as the height of witless arrogance. Calamity has a way of restoring us to reality and kindness. When the big snow paralyzed Chicago in code 1967 /code , people learned again how to walk, how to be neighbors, and how to attend to the simple tasks of getting milk and bread from the store on a sled and of clearing a space from the garage to the street. When an ice storm paralyzed the northern part of upstate New York early in code 1996 /code and shut down electricity for weeks, people shared their fuel and their kitchens and volunteered to minister to the sick and the elderly in makeshift shelters. [4]^2 When wildfires ravaged Montana in the summer of code 2000 /code , people sheltered and consoled one another, and the much detested "Feds" turned into heroic guardians. Yet, within weeks after the terror attacks, normalcy returned. People went back to their enclaves of entertainment. Irony and cynicism surfaced again. [5]^3 And while the prospects for the economy are generally clouded, the video game business is confident of growth and profits. [6]^4 The President urged us not exactly to indulge ourselves and not directly to consume, but certainly to go out and buy stuff; doing so usually comes to consumption and ends in self-indulgence. So should we hope for another disaster to wake us from our consumptive slumber and our sleepwalking pursuit of glamorous affluence? The blessings of calamity carry a forbidding price. Surely we must do everything to prevent catastrophe and misery and take up the burdens of good fortune that come with the progress of technology. Chief among them is the task of comprehending more consciously and deeply the benefits and liabilities of technology. For such purposes "technology" is not just the name for certain machineries and procedures that can be used for well or ill, although "technology" can certainly be so understood. But if we want to take the measure of the human condition in our time, "technology" is a suggestive and useful label for what is distinctive of contemporary culture as a whole. The characteristic forms of recent technology are information technology and biotechnology, and one way of locating both the crucial peril and the best hope of the moment is to consider the threats to mind, body, and world that appear to issue from these two technologies. The very identity of the human person and the very substance of reality are presumably called into question by developments in artificial intelligence, in genetics, and in virtual reality. Reactions to these prospects are as divided as they are to carnival rides--they produce exhilaration in some people and vertigo in others. [7]^5 Each of these three areas of development--artificial intelligence, genetics, and virtual reality--is enormously complex and technically sophisticated, and laypeople are tempted to throw up their hands in frustration and to surrender their destiny to the experts. But "I give up" is not an acceptable reply to recent technology. We must do our best to penetrate the thickets of technical terms and scientific findings. In addition, I want to suggest, there is a method of outlining the shape of our future through thought experiments that suggest moral bounds that emerge and remain no matter how perfect the technologies. Artificial Intelligence Let me begin with artificial intelligence. Its threat or its promise rests on the claim that the most distinctive human capacity, intelligence, is independent of the stuff that it is realized in and that computers consist of stuff that allows for the construction of intelligence that is at least as powerful as human intelligence. A related claim says that a person's particular intelligence can some day be transferred from the person's brain to a computer so that the essence of that person can exist alongside or beyond the person in question. Thus there could be duplicates of you, immortal versions of you, nonhuman superiors of you, but also vastly enhanced editions of you--prospects that surely can provoke excitement or vertigo. But how exactly could we tell whether an artificially intelligent computer had reached a stage of perfection that would at least equal human intelligence? The great British logician and mathematician Alan Turing proposed that we call a machine intelligent when in conversation it would be indistinguishable from a human being. For the purposes of our thought experiment we assume that the machine would easily pass the Turing test. There is at the moment no such computer, and, as far as I can tell, there would have to be presently inconceivable breakthroughs in our understanding of the syntax and semantics of natural language for such artificial intelligence to be possible. [8]^6 But in a thought experiment we can set these problems aside. Now the revealing question is under what circumstances and to what extent we would find it worthwhile to converse with such a computer. To answer the question we have to distinguish domains of discourse, and for our purposes three are enough: scientific discourse, factual discourse, and moral discourse. These domains shade over into one another but are distinct in their more central regions. We would certainly find it useful to query the computer about scientific matters, for example, the law of gravity, the number of the solar planets, the effect of the gravitational force on the orbits of the planets, the state of the search for a theory of everything, etc. Propositions in reply to such queries are made from nowhere since they are true everywhere. The same is true of brute historical facts, the fact, for example, that the terror attacks on the World Trade Center took place on September 11, code 2001 /code , that the Pentagon was attacked the same day, that a total of four planes had been hijacked, etc. Search engines are beginning to resemble artificially intelligent sources of scientific and factual information. They are both more versatile and quicker than their printed forebears. They are less focused and trustworthy than a human expert, but then we rarely have the privilege to ask such an expert in person and on the spot. In well-bounded and formal areas such as chess, moreover, computers already surpass humans. As soon, however, as you ask the computer for a fuller account of an event like the attacks of September 11^th, namely, for the background, the context, and the consequences of these events, the computer would have to assume a standpoint from which to tell the story. And at this point, moral matters come into play. From Osama bin Laden's point of view, this was a jihad; from our standpoint, it was terrorism. But so far, truth is still a guide for the computer. It was in truth terrorism, and not an act of holy war. Yet there are different standpoints that are morally valid and compatible with one another. A New Yorker's story of the terrors will differ from that of a Montanan; a sociologist will give an account that differs from a political scientist's. The point is that a selection from millions of facts and facets must be made, and any intelligible and consistent account betrays a point of view. But we would not find this unnatural or jarring in a computer. Even now we attribute a loose kind of standpoint and certain intentions to our personal computers, and as Daniel Dennett has pointed out, we would find it difficult to talk about the behavior of computers without ascribing states of mind to them. [9]^7 We do this when we say of our PC: "It's looking for a file," or "It thinks it's connected to the local area network," etc. It is also true that an intelligent computer would be unpredictable without being bizarre, just as the best chess computers surprise their designers with their inventiveness (another mental property). And finally, it is certain that some people would respond to an intelligent computer the way they answer a person. After all, Eliza, an unintelligent program mimicking a psychoanalyst, was so treated. [10]^8 Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the program, concealed its limitations by having Eliza turn statements to which no precooked reply was available into questions and by having it reply to unaswerable questions with "Tell me more about this" and the like. And yet people began to confide in Eliza as though it were a she or he. Though it is practical to act as though a computer were a person, there are limits to a computer's personality and to the scope of its discourse. It fails to meet the principles of equality and dignity that are crucial to moral conduct and discourse. Both principles are rooted in our bodily being, and it follows, trivially in one sense, that computers cannot be equal to those principles since they are not embodied in the human way. But in another respect, the difference in physical structure of humans and computers, when made vivid and concrete, reveals the distance that separates humans from machines. As regards equality, I shape my conduct in emulation, competition, or companionship with others who are like me. My complaint about a surly colleague evaporates when I hear of my friend's losing his mother. When my mother dies, I take consolation from my friend because he has suffered the same sorrow. I look toward my declining years with confidence because my spouse of forty years will be with me. I learn who I am and what I ought to do in conversation with others who have a standpoint like mine and experience reality the way I do--as children of venerable parents, as parents of vulnerable children, as helpful friends, as mature persons, as wise elders. A computer has none of these properties, relations, or experiences. A computer has designers rather than parents. It has breakdowns rather than illnesses. It becomes obsolete rather than old. It can be replaced and, as Kant already observed, has a price rather than dignity: Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has dignity. [11]^9 Each of us is a unique and inexhaustible locus of convergence and transmission through our ancestry, both evolutionary and historical, through our descendants, through the sensibility of each of our organs, through our pleasures and pains, through our wounds and our scars, through our attacks and our embraces. In moral matters we may turn to an intelligent computer the way we now turn to the Psalms or to Chicken Soup for the Soul. [12]^10 But in both cases it is the writers' experiences of pain and their fortitude in the face of it that give us a sense of trust and solace. No doubt artificial intelligence will become still more expert in cognitive and formal tasks. What it will always lack, however, is the human standpoint--the moral authenticity and authority of a good woman or a good man. Genetics Yet even if the human mind in its moral dimensions is beyond simulation, the realization of this distinctively human power, the body, seems itself to be cut loose from traditional norms and constraints due to the impending transformative power of genetics. Here too exciting or vertiginous prospects seem to open up--the possibility, for example, to customize one's children as to their height, their looks, their health, and their character. Our professed hopes are more modest. As Nicholas Wade has reported, "Dr. Richard Lifton of Yale predicted that in code 20 /code years researchers would be `able to identify the genes and pathways predisposing to every human disease.'" [13]^11 Another of the problems scientists would like to see solved is "the biological basis of intelligence and cognition." [14]^12 Here we obviously approach a different level of shaping and improving humans. Finding and utilizing the genetics of diseases will make humans, such as they are, healthier and live longer. But understanding the genetic organization of intelligence and cognition will allow us to build better humans--more insightful and resourceful persons, people of greatly superior quality to put it summarily. Or will it? Here again a thought experiment suggests limits to what looks like limitless power and fearful possibility. Imagine the oral culture of ancient Greece, say code 1000 /code bce, when the Homeric epics were presented at the manors of the chieftains. Such an epic was the possession of a singer of songs and would be realized as a great event, rising powerfully, commanding attention, and finally receding into memory. Imagine how strange and unsettling it would have been for a singer or listener to be told that the entire epic could be fixed on papyrus from a store of no more than code 24 /code letters, that such letters would compose words, that all the words of a language could be assembled in a dictionary, that there would be rules for the formation of words and for the formation of sentences from words. A quick and bright member of such an oral culture would realize that writing and grammar promise to provide incredible power over an epic. The entire poem could be inspected at leisure and to the smallest detail, and surely knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar would allow one to make vast improvements in the quality of an epic and to fix them for all time. Well, we do have such power over language now. Do we have the power to improve the quality of a novel such as The Firm? [15]^13 John Grisham's book is well-constructed and peopled with interesting and engaging characters. It tells the tale of a young man who finds his way and identity in an unreal world. Is it one of the great novels of the last century? As regards literary quality it is like you and me--alright, nothing special, but certainly estimable and thoroughly decent. Can we make it into a masterpiece in the same genre, something like Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, also a story of a young man searching for his identity under unreal circumstances? [16]^14 The analogy between the structure and quality of a novel and the organization and character of a person is loose, but it may be tight enough to suggest a limit of genetics when it comes to improving the quality of a person. We can hope to find a genetic cure for an obvious illness such as diabetes. Similarly we can do much by way of a spell check program to cure a poorly spelled novel. We may be able to determine genetically the color of a person's skin, eyes, or hair. We can change a novel's spelling from American to British English; we can replace adverbs and phrases such as "namely," "that is," "for example," "and so on," with their Latin abbreviations. More ambitious changes would, however, cause more damage than improvement. We could try to make the language more nuanced by replacing "said" alternately with "replied," "suggested," and "observed." We could replace basic color terms with their variants, replacing "blue" alternately with "indigo" and "cobalt." As often as not this would result in nonsense. Similarly, certain well-intentioned genetic changes may introduce as much debility as improvement. [17]^15 But could not a good writer introduce into The Firm the leitmotifs, philosophical discussions, subtle portraits, and artful syntax of The Magic Mountain? And could not an accomplished geneticist of the future analogously reshape the genetic material of an embryo? There are two problems here. The first is that the rewriter is not the analog of a geneticist but of a tutor, a personal trainer, or a cosmetic surgeon. The analog to the geneticist would be a programmer. But we cannot even conceive of a program that could perform the subtle and complex changes a competent editor can accomplish. Accordingly it seems unlikely that we will discover a theory of genetics that would allow us to grasp and control the complex and subtle ways in which all the human genes interact, not to mention the often unpredictable or uncontrollable forces of the environment that cooperate with the genes. The second problem is a corollary of the first. Since we do not understand fully or even thoroughly how exactly Thomas Mann wrote his novels, any emulation of Mann's style and constructions will look like a parody at best and a disaster at worst. There are surely ways of improving The Firm and the ordinary Joe and Josephine. But the result, via editing in one case and education in the other, would not be a creature of a higher order. Rather, The Firm would be more fully what it could have been, and Josephine and Joe would more fully come into their own. Virtual Reality Even if mind and body retain the core of their primal integrity, the reality of the world that contains human beings has come into question through recent technology and vis ? vis the new and different reality that has emerged from technology, namely, cyberspace. Moreover, while once reality was the last court of appeal and truth the supreme justice of knowledge, reality is a construction, we are now told, and truth an honorific term we bestow on the stories that are told by the powerful or that we all have consented to. The debates over these issues are mostly confined to English departments and to the social sciences. But these airy struggles have concrete counterparts in the foods, shelters, and entertainments of everyday life. What looks like old-fashioned ice cream is an engineered food drawn from genetically modified cows and corn. A building that seems to have the classic gravity of blocks of stone is a steel construction that has thin slices of limestone hung on it. In a film, the Colosseum seems to have been restored and filled with seething Romans, but the construction was done electronically rather than through stones, mortar, and living persons. The gravest challenge to the traditional world comes, however, from cyberspace because it is not merely a modification of old-fashioned reality but a separate reality. Especially in the nineties, there were confident predictions that the digital realm of bits and electrons would displace the world of bricks and atoms. [18]^16 If cyberspace is the new realm, virtual reality is its capital. It is a city still under construction, and visitors are only shown some roughly finished buildings. Once completed, however, virtual reality is supposed to provide experiences that would be indistinguishable from "real" ones were it not for the greater glamour of hyperreality and the superior powers we will be able to exercise in it. Virtual reality still has an exotic aura about it that makes us overlook the slice of hyperreality we have learned to take for granted--music on compact discs. We have pretty well come to accept the acoustic realization of the information on CDs as real music, or more precisely as hyperreal music, that is, as music that is so flawlessly resonant as to surpass easily any actual performance. It is, nonetheless, a mere slice of hyperreality since the visual part of the performance is unavailable, and it is a poor example of interactivity, by its nature, so to say--we do little in a concert hall beside listening, coughing, and applauding. We are not authorized to do to a live performance what we often do with a CD that is playing--interrupt it, start it over again, skip a portion of it, or stop it. Still, an enlargement of the CD's sonic segment to its full hyperreality will disclose the crucial limits of hyperreality. A hyperreal concert is in fact quite conceivable now. A supercompact DVD and a wall-sized digital screen of fine resolution together with an advanced stereo system will for all practical purposes provide you, sitting in a comfortable chair in front of the screen, with the same sensory input as you would receive front and center in a venerable concert hall with a top orchestra performing perfectly. [19]^17 Presented with a scenario like that, thoughtful people are stumped when challenged to tell what difference there could possibly be between the virtual and the actual concert, and often such people turn away whatever scruples come to mind as romantic sentiments or Luddite resentments. Is there a difference? To simplify and focus the issue, let us stipulate the experience, defined as the sum of sights and sounds, to be exactly the same in the two cases, in virtuality and actuality. The contexts and background experiences are different, of course, and as in the case of artificial intelligence, this difference is obvious and trivial at first sight, but pivotal and illuminating when considered closely. The virtual concert is disposable and discontinuous with reality where the actual performance reveals and is continuous with our world. To gain access to virtual reality, one has to cross a threshold and enter a hyperreal world. Such a crossing may be entering a flight simulator; donning a helmet with earphones and screens; putting on a body suit; or powering up an amplifier, inserting a DVD, and turning on the screen. In all cases, the threshold is clearly marked and easily traversed. Because it is clearly marked, we never forget, when immersed in virtual reality, the distinctiveness and ease of the threshold, and this background knowledge subtly infects our central experiences--it is entirely at our disposal; we can at any time withdraw from it, and return to it, or replace it. Virtual reality is disposable because it is discontinuous, unlike an actual concert that is anchored in commitments to a certain time and place by the respect we owe to actual humans who give their best in performing for us, by our acknowledgment of the audience and the mutual expectations that govern a concert hall. Because of its discontinuity with actuality, a virtual concert reveals little about what matters in the world. It will continue to exist whether the hall has burned down or not, the conductor has died or not, the orchestra has disbanded or not. A CD or DVD is, of course, a record of the past, but it is not even that, strictly speaking, since the information it contains has been carefully tweaked and assembled from many takes. It is certainly not the record of one continuous, actual performance. A real concert, to the contrary, tells you much about the world you live in. It reflects what kind of music is supported here and to what extent. It shows what kind of artistry one can expect at the level of this particular orchestra and community. And here once more the moral authority and aesthetic authenticity that an actual performance possesses and a virtual one lacks are undiminished by advances in information and entertainment technology. Conclusion What is the cumulative force of these reflections on technology and its effects on mind, body, and world? One result is surely that the common alarm about technology is misplaced. But why this fascination with the supposedly radical and revolutionary effects of technology? Social theorists and commentators realize, I suppose, that the house of American culture is not in order. But think of your reaction when last you contemplated cleaning up your garage, your closets, or just your post-holiday kitchen. It is one thing to recognize but quite another to remedy disorder, and it is harder still to determine why and how things got that way and how they could be put on a better footing. There seems to be a similar disinclination among most social theorists to acknowledge the common intuition that there is something wrong with the daily, inconspicuous, ordinary American household and to instigate a significant and sustained conversation about the quality of contemporary life. Given this apparently distasteful and intractable situation, it is convenient to be told: There is no need to put this house in order. It is obsolete, condemned, and will soon be torn down; we have to move out anyway, and we may as well begin to envision a radically new and revolutionary kind of life. We are alert to damage to the infrastructure, to the security or healthfulness of our lives, and willing, if not eager, to undertake judicial or environmental repairs. Hence you find most social critics and reformers in the utility room of the republic, worrying about the circuit breakers, the water lines, and the sewage pipes. But no one worries about the music room and the fact that the violin is out of tune, the flute is tarnished, and dust has settled on the piano. And worse, few are exercised by the transformation of the music room into a TV den. To be clear on a contentious point, I am not invoking a romantic view of the musical culture as a lost tradition, though there is some truth to seeing things that way. Something like the music room--a place of skilled and leisurely engagement--is at any rate the tacit ideal and promise that is supposed to warrant our obsessive concern with the means to the good life. Are we to conclude then that there is an enduring cultural ideal and that putting our house in order comes to sweeping technological junk into the corners to make room for Haydn's piano trios? Something like this scheme is needed, but the content need not be borrowed from the high culture of the past. One of the remarkable features of contemporary culture is that the distinctive creations of our time fail to be actually and tangibly central to our culture. Haydn's music was one of the characteristic achievements of late 18^th century Europe, and so were the violins and pianos built at the time. All of this occupied a central position in the culture of the day. Information technology is likely the crucial human achievement at the turn of the millennium. In outward appearance there have been few changes in kind within the last forty years. There have been massive quantitative changes--more highways, more high-rises, more cars, and more planes. What has qualitatively changed has taken place under the skin of buildings, planes, and cars; and it has surfaced inconspicuously in the boxes and keyboards we call computers. However, information technology is not just the distinctive marker of our time, it is also astounding and admirable in itself. Computer chips are by far the most densely complex creations of the human mind. They represent, moreover, the convergence of incredible ingenuity and strenuous diligence in logic, mathematics, computer science, material science, electrical engineering, industrial production, and marketing. But none of these amazing disciplines and structures are at the surface and center of contemporary culture. Of course, all of us use information technology for communication and information, and everybody employs it in entertainment. So what does a word-processing English professor learn about Boolean algebra and logic gates? Where does a video-game-playing teenager run into the properties of semiconductors and the behavior of electrons? Answer: Nothing and nowhere. Information technology has imploded into the subterranean machinery of our devices. What we enjoy at the surface is some commodity, some consumer good that, resting on a sophisticated machinery, is preternaturally instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy. The development of personal computers over the past quarter century is a paradigm of the culture of technology--the divergence between the surfaces and the substructure, between the commodity and the machinery of the devices that inform the course of daily life. The increase in the speed, capacity, and sophistication of computer technology in the last twenty-five years is mind-boggling and defies all attempts at making it palpable through analogies and illustrations. Those of us who in the mid-seventies used computers to write articles, search for information, retrieve information, or communicate with colleagues will realize immediately where that tremendous increase in computer power went--not into teaching us more about the nature of information and the structure of technology, but into concealing all this more tightly and, most important, to make the use and scope of computers easier, quicker, more extensive, and more stable. Information technology has furnished powerful tools for the sciences, and these tools have been engaged in the discovery of phenomena and relationships that would have remained hidden without those tools. But for most of us the progress of technology has been a transition from the engagement with things in their contexts to the consumption of commodities that are available anywhere and anytime. At the center of contemporary culture is consumption. This is a truism we are deeply conflicted about. We hang on to consumption because it still contains a measure of promise and plausibility. Yet we cannot bring ourselves to celebrate it anymore because we sense the vacuity at its center. We still are drawn to consumption because it promises uniquely pure enjoyment, pleasure unmixed with labor and unconstrained by challenges. But being so easy and undemanding, consumption has nothing ennobling or elevating about it. Looking back in light of this pattern at recent developments in artificial intelligence, genetics, and virtual reality, we can see that they fail to be truly revolutionary and only push along a tendency that has been emerging for over two hundred years. The future of artificial intelligence is unlikely to equal the procurement of knowledge that the Internet has already accomplished. Virtual reality will transform our sense of the actual world less than the telephone and television have done. And genetics is unlikely to produce the bursts of health and longevity that public health measures, vaccinations, and antibiotics have produced. But surely all three endeavors will make the realm of consumption and commodities still more instantly and ubiquitously available and more safely and easily enjoyable. To see the characteristic pattern of technology, that is, the pairing and perfection of easy commodities with intricate machineries, is to recognize why the characteristic achievements of our time have left the centers of our lives barren. Most of the enormous ingenuity and application that the best and the brightest of today are capable of flows into the creation or perfection of concealed machineries, never to be seen again. Most of the most difficult endeavors today serve consumption, and thus incisiveness begets superficiality, exertion begets passivity, and expertise begets ignorance. The disparity between the producers and recipients of culture was not always so stark. Writers, composers, and builders used to create works that invited deep and knowledgeable engagement. But Shakespeare's plays, Mozart's symphonies, and Jefferson's buildings attracted even the untutored ear or eye, and persistent attention often made amateurs into connoisseurs. These observations seem to leave us with the melancholy conclusion that when it comes to leisure we have to choose between contemporary distractions and obsolete engagements. Superficially it does seem that the activities and celebrations we take pleasure and pride in are old-fashioned and inherited from pretechnological activities and practices--reading books, running races, playing music, etc. But the fact is that traditional things assume new significance against the backdrop of the technological culture. That is true of mind, body, and world when seen within the horizons of artificial intelligence, genetics, and virtual reality. Vis ? vis artificial intelligence the dignity of the mind's embodiment comes into focus. The human mind does not happen to be housed in wetware from which it could be extracted and transferred to the crystalline and metallic stuff of a computer. Rather the human mind is the uniquely unified sensibility, the precious vulnerability, and the generational connectedness of the body (though it is not merely that). The body in turn, when examined in light of genetics, emerges as the inexhaustible richness of evolution and the unsurpassable harmony of trillions of distinguishable parts. The world, finally, when contrasted with virtual reality, comes to the fore in its commanding presence and the unsearchable depth of its connectedness. When the culture of technology prospers, that is, when research is revolutionary, industry productive, commerce flourishing, and consumers confident, we feel blessed with good fortune as well we might. But blessings come with burdens. The clearest is the requirement that we share our prosperity with the poor, the hungry, and the sick here and around the globe. The hardest is to see the emptiness at the center of consumption and to search for those focal things and practices that deserve and reward our whole-hearted engagement. ________________________ [20]^1 Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt, 1976) 70-3. ] [21]^2 Stephen Doheny-Farina, The Grid and the Village (New Haven: Yale University Press, code 2001 /code ). ] [22]^3 Rick Lyman, "In Little Time, Pop Culture is Almost Back to Normal," New York Times on the Web, code 4 /code October code 2001 /code [23]; Michiko Kakutani, "The Age of Irony Isn't Over After All," The New York Times, section code 4 /code ( code 9 /code October code 2001 /code ): 1. ] [24]^4 Chris Gaither, "Video Game Field Becomes Crowded and Highly Profitable," New York Times on the Web, code 19 /code December code 2001 /code [25]. ] [26]^5 Bill Joy and Francis Fukuyama are alarmed by the potentially catastrophic abuse of biotechnology. Joy is also worried about information technology and nanotechnology. My sense is that utopians will be foiled and Cassandras disproven by the enormous, if intelligible, complexity of the brain. See Joy, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," Wired (April 2000) code 3 /code April code 2002 /code [27]; Fukuyama, "Biotechnology and the Threat of a Posthuman Future," The Chronicle of Higher Education ( code 22 /code March 2002): B7-10. ] [28]^6 If we are to believe MIT's Technology Review, artificial intelligence researchers have turned their back on the project of simulating or equaling human intelligence. See Michael Hiltzik, "A.I. Reboots," Technology Review (March 2002): 46- code 55 /code . ] [29]^7 Daniel Dennett, "Intentional Systems," Brainstorms (Montgomery: Bradford, 1978) 3-22. ] [30]^8 Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976) 188- code 91 /code . ] [31]^9 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959) code 53 /code ( code 434 /code in the Prussian Academy edition). ] [32]^10 Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, eds., Chicken Soup for the Soul (Deerfield Beach: Health Communications, 1993). ] [33]^11 Nicolas Wade, "With Genome, a Radical Shift for Biology," The New York Times ( code 25 /code December code 2001 /code ): code F7 /code . ] [34]^12 Wade F7. ] [35]^13 John Grisham, The Firm (New York: Doubleday, 1991). ] [36]^14 Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (1924; Berlin: Fischer, 1954). ] [37]^15 Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon, Good Work (New York: Basic, code 2001 /code ) 41-2, code 117 /code -21. Colin Tudge, "The Future of Humanity," New Statesman on the web, code 8 /code April code 2002 /code . [38]. ] [39]^16 William Mitchell, City of Bits (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage, 1996). ] [40]^17 Cf. Katie Hafner, "Drawn to the Hearth's Electronic Glow," New York Times on the Web, code 24 /code January code 2002 /code [41]. ] References 23. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/04/arts/04POP.html 25. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/17/technology/17GAME.html 27. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html 38. http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN=2 41. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/24/technology/circuits/24SCRE!.html?homepageinsidebox... From HowlBloom at aol.com Mon Oct 11 06:05:05 2004 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 02:05:05 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] the prison of left vs. right Message-ID: This cropped up in an email conversation with a friend from India tonight. It relates to things Michael Lockhart (anonymous_animus) and I have been discussing. Abhinav Goyal: To be frank, I am a little confused about which side of the spectrum - right or left - do I really belong to? hb: it's disturbing that in India you feel compelled to fit into the two available stereotypes of political thought in the West. A choice between only two political approaches in a world of great complexity indicates that our political concepts are primitive and stifling. What's worse, it indicates that our politics are a badge of identity, a decision about which of two social groups we want to join. The notion that they are useful or penetrating ideas is merely a blind, a disguise for a social choice. I suspect that the more you maintain a position above, below, and outside the acceptable spectrum of left and right, the more likely you are to produce thoughts of value to your fellow human beings. Howard ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Oct 11 18:41:41 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 11:41:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] deconstructionism In-Reply-To: <200410111800.i9BI0U006887@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041011184141.55751.qmail@web13423.mail.yahoo.com> >>For many Americans, in particular, he was the personification of a French school of thinking they felt was undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education, and one they often associated with divisive political causes.<< --What's really ironic is when people who DETEST deconstructionism use deconstructionist techniques (often alongside traditional juvenile ad-hominem attacks) to tear apart evolutionary theory, atheism and whatever else gets their goat. It's been sort of a fad among pseudo-intellectual right wingers in the US (by pseudo-intellectual I mean people who use the output of deep thinkers as bricks to throw at enemies, as opposed to appreciating ideas for what they are). When a left winger uses "psychobabble" it's Freudian nonsense. When a right winger uses it, whether to shallowly psychoanalyze homosexuals or feminists or liberals in general, it's a victory for traditional values. Double standards abound. I think there's always a tension between "insider" and "outsider" perceptions. Even within one's own self, there is an "inside" view and an "outside" view. When I am fully occupied with being myself, I'm inside. When I'm looking back at myself to figure out why I did what I did, I'm attempting to get an outside view. Prematurely disconnecting from the "inside" can result in confusion, vacillation and a feeling of alienation from oneself. If I'm falling in love, do I trust the feeling? Do I analyze it and risk destroying it? That tension between trusting an emotion and dissecting it may be behind the uproar over deconstructionist theory -- it symbolizes something everyone must deal with. It relates to the fear of "flip-flopping" (i.e. going from certainty to uncertainty) and the fear of losing the potency of a truly engaged self. By attempting to observe the self, one risks changing it. Michael _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Oct 11 19:44:41 2004 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Geraldine Reinhardt) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 12:44:41 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Fw: [bigbangtango] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War Message-ID: <021001c4afca$c14f70c0$1549bb3f@S0027397558> ----- Original Message ----- From: Geraldine Reinhardt To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Cc: bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 11:36 AM Subject: Re: [bigbangtango] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War Rob and Howard, I think both of you present succinct and clearly defined arguments not unlike what we see and hear from American's two presidential candidates Bush and Kerry. Howard, not unlike Bush, believes in laissez-faire style capitalism while Rob offers a somewhat softer, gentler picture that Kerry also presents i.e. stressing the importance of universal health care paid for by taxing the wealthy 2% in our nation, retaining jobs in the USA, assisting the disenfranchised, protecting our environment etc. Classic liberals like Howard (and really not unlike Bush) differ from modern liberals such as Kerry in that the ultimate result would be the deindustrialization of the West. Whether or not that brings about the disintegration of America is a strong issue that must be addressed. My guess is that China is off to a running start and will be impossible to overtake. Besides, why do we need retain topdog status when a softer, gentler stance seems to be what many Americans now wish. Best wishes, Gerry Reinhardt ----- Original Message ----- From: Rob Kritkausky To: bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com ; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Cc: bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com Sent: Friday, October 08, 2004 1:58 AM Subject: Re: [bigbangtango] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War Howard: Thanks for the excellent editorial. While I enjoyed your analysis, I must admit it left me feeling rather malnourished.... even cheated. I fear the public(you ...me all of us) have been happily thinking on a diet made up almost entirely of the junk food that the media has been preparing for us daily. I fear this type of big picture, politically detached, data driven thinking you are serving here, may no longer be relished by a large segment of the population. We are being fed a most unhealthy diet.......information is expected to come processed, slanted, sweetened or spiced up.. The objective communication/description of events (news) is currently exceedingly rare and in fact, come to think of it, I don't even think objectivity to be a goal of the media these days. All that being said....I loved the piece, but don't be surprised if it keeps getting sent back. "Excuse me, I ordered my information spun and could you sugar coat it a little for me?" Regards: Rob Kritkausky howlbloom at aol.com wrote: ??oIt is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind: You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws.??? Osama bin Laden explaining to Americans why they are Satanic, Message To the Ummah May 12, 2004 Western Civilization gives the right to do it your self, diy, the right to create??"the right to create new movements, the right to create new artforms, the right to create our own constitutions, laws, theories, and beliefs. Osama wants to take all that away. Every pecking order battle between groups is a battle between hypotheses in the mass mind??"guesses about the best way to do things. Osama??Ts guess, his hypothesis, has been tried out in Sudan and Afghanistan. Its result is a living nightmare. Margaret Mead said that every primitive, indigenous tribe in the early days of man forbade the murder of human beings. The problem was the definition of a human. The name of our tribe meant we were humans. Everyone from another tribe wasn??Tt human at all. he or she was fair game. In early tribes like these, said Mead, the number of ??ohumans??? whose lives were sacred was only 50 to 75. The rest of the earth's population was a legitimate target for murder. But today, Mead pointed out, the number a single society says ??othou shalt not kill??? is much, much greater. In India and China your fellow tribe members, your fellow human beings, your fellow Indians or Chinese, your brethren who you??Tre not supposed to kill, is 1.2 billion. Two anthropologists, William Divale and Marvin Harris, combed through data from 561 primi?tive tribes and discovered that 21% of the males were killed off violently before they ended adolescence. One out of every five men in these primitive, indigenous tribes died in skirmishes and war. The percentage of the slaughtered skyrockets if you include the women and children wiped out by indigenous peoples like the South American Taulipang, who burned dozens of families in their huts, loved the screams of pain inside, then marched home shouting a joyous "hei-hei-hei-hei-hei!"[i] If our techno-modern society killed at the old tribal rate, roughly 720 million modern humans would be blasted to smithereens in wars or homicides every generation. Compare this with the 55 million who died in WWII, and the bloodlettings of the last hundred years, are less than one-tenth of what they'd amount to under tribal or hunter-gatherer ways. Much as many of us hate Donald Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld tried to invent a new form of humanitarian war in Iraq. He tried to achieve it with smart bombs and with missiles that could jet down the street, turn a corner, and go directly into the room where a military group was hiding out. Total American deaths in Iraq now total 1,100. Civilian deaths come to a maximum of 13,603 . The total deaths in a regional conflict of this sort 150 years ago, the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, came to 615,378.[ii] For every 41 people killed in the Crimean War, the Iraq War has killed only one. The war in Iraq is grisly, ghastly, and deplorable. But for all practical purposes, the War In Iraq has saved 600,000 lives. That is a huge reduction in violence. Compare the deaths in the current Iraq War, revolting as it is, to deaths in the war that dragged on between Iraq and Iran from 1980 to 1988. That war lasted eight years and cost more than a million lives. Or compare this to a total of a million deaths every year worldwide in car accidents. Or compare it with the deaths worldwide each year caused by cigarette smoking, which total about 5 million[iii]. Every death is horrible and every war is deplorable. But thanks to industrialism, capitalism, technology, cultural advances, the spread of western values, and thanks to what some of us call cultural imperialism, we are making progress. There??Ts an unspoken moral imperative to capitalism. It says to those who practice it, ??osave thy neighbor???. Save her with a delight. Save her with a moment of joy. Save her by taking her out of herself for a minute, an hour, or a day. Save her by giving her new powers. Save her by giving her new comforts and new consolations. Save one neighbor and you make a dollar. Save a thousand neighbors and you can make a thousand dollars. Save ten million folks you??Tve never seen, folks who are your neighbors on this planet, and you can make ten million dollars. If you forget that your mission is to understand your neighbor??Ts needs and serve them, you will go home empty at the end of the day. You??Tll wonder why you??Tre among the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation, why you??Tre among the hollow men, heads filled with straw, trudging without purpose through life. Save your fellow human beings with what we call products and services and you can go home knowing that someone needed you today. You can go home knowing that you were a part of something far, far greater than yourself??"the advancement of others. And perhaps you were even a part of something that Osama deplores and we should celebrate-- the handmade evolution of the human race. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net www.worldblend.net - Where art and science conspire to produce a digital world ruled by the imagination and where the possible exists within the realm of the infinite. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Do you Yahoo!? vote.yahoo.com - Register online to vote today! Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links a.. To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bigbangtango/ b.. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: bigbangtango-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com c.. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 11 20:16:11 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 13:16:11 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] the prison of left vs. right Message-ID: <01C4AF94.7B0089F0.shovland@mindspring.com> I think the most persistent polarization is that between the few and the many, the aristocrats and the commoners, the elite and the rest of us. Often the left-right mirrors the upper-lower, but at the moment in the US the major parties are both elite parties. This would also be true in India, where the upper castes are descended from people who conquered India and placed the natives into the lower castes. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: HowlBloom at aol.com [SMTP:HowlBloom at aol.com] Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 11:05 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] the prison of left vs. right This cropped up in an email conversation with a friend from India tonight. It relates to things Michael Lockhart (anonymous_animus) and I have been discussing. Abhinav Goyal: To be frank, I am a little confused about which side of the spectrum - right or left - do I really belong to? hb: it's disturbing that in India you feel compelled to fit into the two available stereotypes of political thought in the West. A choice between only two political approaches in a world of great complexity indicates that our political concepts are primitive and stifling. What's worse, it indicates that our politics are a badge of identity, a decision about which of two social groups we want to join. The notion that they are useful or penetrating ideas is merely a blind, a disguise for a social choice. I suspect that the more you maintain a position above, below, and outside the acceptable spectrum of left and right, the more likely you are to produce thoughts of value to your fellow human beings. Howard ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net << File: ATT00010.html >> << File: ATT00011.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 11 20:20:22 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 13:20:22 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Fw: [bigbangtango] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War Message-ID: <01C4AF95.105C2A40.shovland@mindspring.com> I was impressed by the situation in "Dune," where people flew in their space ships to battlefields where they fought with swords. That is honest combat. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Geraldine Reinhardt [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 12:45 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Fw: [bigbangtango] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War ----- Original Message ----- From: Geraldine Reinhardt To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Cc: bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 11:36 AM Subject: Re: [bigbangtango] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War Rob and Howard, I think both of you present succinct and clearly defined arguments not unlike what we see and hear from American's two presidential candidates Bush and Kerry. Howard, not unlike Bush, believes in laissez-faire style capitalism while Rob offers a somewhat softer, gentler picture that Kerry also presents i.e. stressing the importance of universal health care paid for by taxing the wealthy 2% in our nation, retaining jobs in the USA, assisting the disenfranchised, protecting our environment etc. Classic liberals like Howard (and really not unlike Bush) differ from modern liberals such as Kerry in that the ultimate result would be the deindustrialization of the West. Whether or not that brings about the disintegration of America is a strong issue that must be addressed. My guess is that China is off to a running start and will be impossible to overtake. Besides, why do we need retain topdog status when a softer, gentler stance seems to be what many Americans now wish. Best wishes, Gerry Reinhardt ----- Original Message ----- From: Rob Kritkausky To: bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com ; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Cc: bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com Sent: Friday, October 08, 2004 1:58 AM Subject: Re: [bigbangtango] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War Howard: Thanks for the excellent editorial. While I enjoyed your analysis, I must admit it left me feeling rather malnourished.... even cheated. I fear the public(you ...me all of us) have been happily thinking on a diet made up almost entirely of the junk food that the media has been preparing for us daily. I fear this type of big picture, politically detached, data driven thinking you are serving here, may no longer be relished by a large segment of the population. We are being fed a most unhealthy diet.......information is expected to come processed, slanted, sweetened or spiced up.. The objective communication/description of events (news) is currently exceedingly rare and in fact, come to think of it, I don't even think objectivity to be a goal of the media these days. All that being said....I loved the piece, but don't be surprised if it keeps getting sent back. "Excuse me, I ordered my information spun and could you sugar coat it a little for me?" Regards: Rob Kritkausky howlbloom at aol.com wrote: a?oIt is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind: You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws.a?? Osama bin Laden explaining to Americans why they are Satanic, Message To the Ummah May 12, 2004 Western Civilization gives the right to do it your self, diy, the right to createa?"the right to create new movements, the right to create new artforms, the right to create our own constitutions, laws, theories, and beliefs. Osama wants to take all that away. Every pecking order battle between groups is a battle between hypotheses in the mass minda?"guesses about the best way to do things. Osamaa?Ts guess, his hypothesis, has been tried out in Sudan and Afghanistan. Its result is a living nightmare. Margaret Mead said that every primitive, indigenous tribe in the early days of man forbade the murder of human beings. The problem was the definition of a human. The name of our tribe meant we were humans. Everyone from another tribe wasna?Tt human at all. he or she was fair game. In early tribes like these, said Mead, the number of a?ohumansa?? whose lives were sacred was only 50 to 75. The rest of the earth's population was a legitimate target for murder. But today, Mead pointed out, the number a single society says a?othou shalt not killa?? is much, much greater. In India and China your fellow tribe members, your fellow human beings, your fellow Indians or Chinese, your brethren who youa?Tre not supposed to kill, is 1.2 billion. Two anthropologists, William Divale and Marvin Harris, combed through data from 561 primi-tive tribes and discovered that 21% of the males were killed off violently before they ended adolescence. One out of every five men in these primitive, indigenous tribes died in skirmishes and war. The percentage of the slaughtered skyrockets if you include the women and children wiped out by indigenous peoples like the South American Taulipang, who burned dozens of families in their huts, loved the screams of pain inside, then marched home shouting a joyous "hei-hei-hei-hei-hei!"[i] If our techno-modern society killed at the old tribal rate, roughly 720 million modern humans would be blasted to smithereens in wars or homicides every generation. Compare this with the 55 million who died in WWII, and the bloodlettings of the last hundred years, are less than one-tenth of what they'd amount to under tribal or hunter-gatherer ways. Much as many of us hate Donald Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld tried to invent a new form of humanitarian war in Iraq. He tried to achieve it with smart bombs and with missiles that could jet down the street, turn a corner, and go directly into the room where a military group was hiding out. Total American deaths in Iraq now total 1,100. Civilian deaths come to a maximum of 13,603 . The total deaths in a regional conflict of this sort 150 years ago, the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, came to 615,378.[ii] For every 41 people killed in the Crimean War, the Iraq War has killed only one. The war in Iraq is grisly, ghastly, and deplorable. But for all practical purposes, the War In Iraq has saved 600,000 lives. That is a huge reduction in violence. Compare the deaths in the current Iraq War, revolting as it is, to deaths in the war that dragged on between Iraq and Iran from 1980 to 1988. That war lasted eight years and cost more than a million lives. Or compare this to a total of a million deaths every year worldwide in car accidents. Or compare it with the deaths worldwide each year caused by cigarette smoking, which total about 5 million[iii]. Every death is horrible and every war is deplorable. But thanks to industrialism, capitalism, technology, cultural advances, the spread of western values, and thanks to what some of us call cultural imperialism, we are making progress. Therea?Ts an unspoken moral imperative to capitalism. It says to those who practice it, a?osave thy neighbora??. Save her with a delight. Save her with a moment of joy. Save her by taking her out of herself for a minute, an hour, or a day. Save her by giving her new powers. Save her by giving her new comforts and new consolations. Save one neighbor and you make a dollar. Save a thousand neighbors and you can make a thousand dollars. Save ten million folks youa?Tve never seen, folks who are your neighbors on this planet, and you can make ten million dollars. If you forget that your mission is to understand your neighbora?Ts needs and serve them, you will go home empty at the end of the day. Youa?Tll wonder why youa?Tre among the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation, why youa?Tre among the hollow men, heads filled with straw, trudging without purpose through life. Save your fellow human beings with what we call products and services and you can go home knowing that someone needed you today. You can go home knowing that you were a part of something far, far greater than yourselfa?"the advancement of others. And perhaps you were even a part of something that Osama deplores and we should celebrate-- the handmade evolution of the human race. ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net www.worldblend.net - Where art and science conspire to produce a digital world ruled by the imagination and where the possible exists within the realm of the infinite. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------ Do you Yahoo!? vote.yahoo.com - Register online to vote today! Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------ Yahoo! Groups Links a.. To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bigbangtango/ b.. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: bigbangtango-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com c.. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. << File: ATT00027.html >> << File: ATT00028.txt >> From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 11 22:27:18 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 18:27:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Jacques Derrida, Thinker Who Influenced and Infuriated a Range of Humanistic Fields, Dies at 74 Message-ID: Jacques Derrida, Thinker Who Influenced and Infuriated a Range of Humanistic Fields, Dies at 74 News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.10.11 http://chronicle.com/free/2004/10/2004101102n.htm By SCOTT MCLEMEE Jacques Derrida, the thinker whose concept of "deconstruction" influenced at least two generations of scholarship in the humanities, died in Paris on Friday at the age of 74. The director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, Derrida also held a professorship at the University of California at Irvine, beginning in 1986. Irvine houses an archive of Derrida's manuscripts. News that the philosopher was in treatment for pancreatic cancer had been circulating among his students and admirers since the spring of 2003. In a statement from the office of Jacques Chirac, the French president announced the death "with sadness," calling Derrida "one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time," whose work was "read, discussed, and taught around the world." Discussion of Derrida's complex legacy (always a topic of heated debate, informed and otherwise) will undoubtedly continue for years to come -- particularly in the United States, where his work has had a devoted following. One of Derrida's earliest formulations of deconstruction -- the landmark essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" -- was delivered at a now-legendary conference at the Johns Hopkins University in 1966. By the early 1970s, a few American scholars had taken up deconstruction as one of the most challenging approaches to emerge in the wake of "the structural revolution" in French critical thought. Derrida offered not so much a theory as a new way of reading. The deconstructive analysis of literary or philosophical writings involved teasing out the nuggets of inescapable complexity. Reading a dialogue by Plato, a scene in Shakespeare, or one of Freud's essays, Derrida would locate a moment in the text when some concept or image proved impossible to reconcile with whatever theme or argument seemed to drive the rest of the work. Then, from that interpretive sticking point, he would work his way back through the text, patiently revealing intricate networks of meaning and otherwise hidden levels of internal conflict. It was an approach that could push one's mental stamina to the limits. In her novel about French intellectual life in the 1960s and '70s. The Samurai, Julia Kristeva, a professor of literature at the University of Paris, portrays Derrida as the character Saida, whose seminars "irritated the philosophers and reduced the literature merchants to silence." (Both, she writes, "were confronted with their own transcendental stupidity.") He "broke down word into its minutest elements, and from these seeds produced shoots so flexible he could later weave them into his own dreams, his own literature, rather ponderous but as profound as it was inaccessible." "This," the novel goes on, "was how he started to acquire his reputation as a guru, which was to overwhelm the United States and the American feminists." A much less sardonic account of the thinker's appeal to young American intellectuals of the early 1970s came from Peggy Kamuf, the translator of numerous works by Derrida, including Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (Routledge, 1994) and Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford University Press, 1998). Ms. Kamuf, a professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California, recalled on Saturday what it was like to read Derrida's work as a graduate student at Cornell University in 1970. "There was a sense of urgency when we encountered it," she said, "urgency in the context of the American political circumstances at the time. It was a few months after Kent State. But we were intellectuals who were not willing just to condemn the university, to renounce rigor of thought, in order to get out into the streets." Derrida's theory, she said, offered a way to perform serious intellectual work in the humanities while maintaining "that urgency of response to the abuses of power" that fed political engagement. Another student of that era spoke of the exhilaration Derrida's work provoked in the early years of the deconstructive invasion. "For those of us in literature," said Forest Pyle, an associate professor of English at the University of Oregon, "it was extraordinarily exciting to see a philosopher reading texts in a way that was rigorous and careful, that showed things that had remained unseen before." As an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1970s, Mr. Pyle studied with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who had translated Derrida's book Of Grammatology (originally published in 1967). The practice of deconstructive analysis "engaged our interpretive skills, and pushed our reading beyond any prescribed boundaries." "It was intellectually exciting and politically hopeful," he said. It was also alarming, at least to some literary scholars. Ren? Wellek, an eminent figure in comparative literature and the author of an eight-volume history of literary theory and criticism, denounced the approach in The New Criterion in 1983, saying that Derrida had provided "license to the arbitrary spinning of metaphors, to the stringing of puns, to mere language games." Deconstruction, he wrote, "has encouraged utter caprice, extreme subjectivity, and hence the destruction of the very concepts of knowledge and truth." Someone loyal to Derrida could readily cite passages in which the thinker insisted that he respected "all the instruments of traditional criticism" -- since otherwise, "critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything." By the 1980s, deconstruction had grown into a phenomenon much larger than Derrida's own work. A prominent group of literary critics at Yale University (including Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller) used Derridean methods to analyze Romantic and Victorian literature. As their students fanned out across the country, they met resistance -- and not just from those who rejected deconstruction itself. Other currents influenced by Derrida stressed his roots in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger or sought to bring Derrida together with Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial concerns. The field of deconstructionist literary scholarship underwent a severe crisis following the revelation, in 1987, that de Man, arguably the most influential critic associated with the "Yale school," had published numerous articles in a collaborationist newspaper in Belgium during World War II. That same year, a well-publicized book on Heidegger's membership in the Nazi party provoked still more soul-searching among French deconstructionist thinkers and their American acolytes. And other theoretical approaches began to displace deconstruction from its former eminence in American literary scholarship. That was not, however, the end of the story. While his American readers argued over how to understand his work from earlier years, or how to handle the embarrassing disclosures about de Man and Heidegger, Derrida himself continued to publish at a bewildering pace, including writings on art criticism, law, psychoanalysis, and social theory. He also began to emerge as a kind of theologian sui generis. "He acquired a whole new life in the academy in the last 15 years or so," said John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University, and the author of The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Indiana University Press, 1997). "He began to talk about what he called 'the undeconstructible.' When Derrida was in vogue among literary theorists, you would not have heard that expression. The idea that deconstruction could be carried out in the name of something undeconstructible -- you just didn't hear from literary folks. But in his later work, he began to talk about the undeconstructibility of justice, of democracy, of friendship, of hospitality." Some scholars have referred to "the ethico-political turn" in Derrida's work during the 1990s. Interest in his writings increased among philosophers, and also among those in religious studies. In earlier years, some commentators on Derrida's work had wondered whether his exacting attention to texts might not make him, in effect, a secular practitioner of the reading skills cultivated by centuries of Talmudic scholars. (Indeed, Derrida had hinted as much himself: His book Writing and Difference closes with a quotation attributed to a rabbi named Derrisa.) In interviews and autobiographical texts from his final decade, he began to speak about growing up as a Jew in Algeria during the Vichy period. More and more of his writing began to take the form of an overt dialogue with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, a French Jewish thinker who worked at the intersection of Heideggerian philosophy, ethical reflection, and biblical commentary. "The idea of something of unconditional value begins to emerge in Derrida's work -- something that makes an unconditional claim on us," said Mr. Caputo. "So the deconstruction of this or that begins to look a little bit like the critique of idols in Jewish theology." In 2002 Derrida gave the keynote address at the convention of the American Academy of Religion, held in Toronto. Speaking to a crowded auditorium, the philosopher said, "I rightly pass for an atheist" -- a puzzling formulation, by any measure. Mr. Caputo recalled that other scholars asked Derrida, "Why don't you just say, 'Je suis. I am an atheist'?" Derrida replied, "Because I don't know. Maybe I'm not an atheist." "He meant that, I think, the name of God was important for him," said Mr. Caputo, "even if, by the standards of the local pastor or rabbi, he was an atheist. The name of God was tremendously important for him because it was one of the ways that we could name the unconditional, the undeconstructible." It also sounds, in hindsight, like a reasonably safe metaphysical wager. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 11 22:28:55 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 18:28:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Derrida) The Man Who Showed Us How to Take the World Apart Message-ID: The Man Who Showed Us How to Take the World Apart NYT October 11, 2004 By DANIEL J. WAKIN The way I recall the lecture archaeologically digging beneath a quarter-century of accumulated intellectual detritus in my mind is as a kind of highfalutin entertainment, an embrace for the initiate, a coy extravaganza of pyrotechnics and puns and peculiarities. In a lecture room at the University of Chicago, Jacques Derrida drew an enormous circle on the blackboard. As he spoke, he dramatically added lines and curves, each signifying another form of textual interpretation, intersecting or glancing off the circle. A Venn diagram of Deconstruction seemed to be taking shape. And Deconstruction was, of course, Derrida's much-vaunted interpretive method of making sense out of non-sense (or vice versa). That diagram also turned out to be an enormous eye - complete, if I remember correctly, with pupil and cornea. A cartoon. But the eye, Derrida explained, as if mentally winking in our direction, was really an "I." And the "I" was how we come to see. Another cartoon, this time in words. Or was the point something else that I would be able to discern only by studying further, trying to pin down his mercurial weaving and wobbling while juggling allusions to Rousseau, the Talmud and Heidegger? It hardly seemed worth the effort, because by that time, despite the presence of the charismatic figure himself, despite the fact that his work still carried the promise of esoteric knowledge and that he had yet to reach his peak of influence in the American academy, the seductive lure was gone. But what a lure it was! And how many still feel its pull! Now, with Derrida's death last week and the promise of accumulating assessments and reconsiderations, I can almost summon up a bit of nostalgia for the initial encounter with the Algerian-born French philosopher's works, the thrill of learning his language, piecing together paradoxes to get at his idiosyncratic vision, his eye's "I." Here is a writer of almost impenetrable obscurity who nevertheless managed to overturn traditions in American literary teaching, feed the postmodernist maw of relativism, redefine the acceptable limits for academic prose and even give popular culture one of its most overused words: deconstruction. Derrida partly provided the thrill of sheer nerve: daring to write something that wouldn't just modify interpretations but challenge the entire philosophical and literary enterprise. His was an imperial ambition, one inherited from Nietzsche and Heidegger: don't reinterpret. Uninterpret. Show not just that some formulations are mistaken, but that all are. And that, moreover, they have to be. Show how all of Western thought is based on a type of ignorance or incompleteness, that everyone who claimed to get the point was missing the point. We have all learned that great works of art and literature may contain ideas and assumptions that their creators may not have been entirely aware of. There is the Freudian unconscious, the Marxist theory of superstructure, the learned dissections of metaphor and allusion in literary criticism. Who would be surprised to learn that things are seldom what they seem? But for Derrida, things can also never be what they say. Any attempt to explain or reason or demonstrate or communicate already contains the seeds of its undoing; any statement must conjure up its opposite. Pay close attention and it becomes clear how much energy is being expended on pretending to make clear what really cannot be. Look even more closely and there is always a small point in the text - a paradox, an unexplained word, a knotty phrase - that when properly probed can undermine the pretense, pull aside the curtain of ideology and show what indeterminacy and uncertainty lie beneath the surface. There is a great appeal in this promise, because it is, in part, a familiar part of ordinary experience. We already know that all cannot be as it appears. Perhaps it is also the case that it is impossible to make a seamless system. Perhaps there is no way to tie up all loose ends. We know that this is often the case: few human activities can be tidily organized by orthodoxies. Why not endorse a kind of radical suspicion, one that would be particularly useful in challenging traditions and orthodoxy? Such were the secrets and lures promised in Derrida's texts, a dizzying undermining of presuppositions. Take any received opinion, aesthetic judgment, historical analysis or cultural activity, find its hidden premises, its unacknowledged preferences, its knots and feints, and its authority is undone. Applying this method to the works of the West, Derrida became a kind of prophet for counter-Western thought. He found his intellectual liberation by closely reading works by Rousseau and L?vi-Strauss. If these works could seem to break down the pretense of Western civilization while heralding the virtues and values of a pre-civilized world, for Derrida they did not go far enough: they too embodied Western orthodoxy. But, of course, one reason for the extraordinary success of Derrida's ideas is that they also followed an orthodoxy in which rebellion is privileged over tradition and iconoclasm over authority. Independence is declared; obeisance is dismissed. This devotion to autonomy, accompanied by a spirit of play, is partly what gave Derrida a following in America far more enduring than that in France. His radical anti-authoritarianism and counter-Western ideas also gave him an empathetic reception on the international political left. But this orthodoxy, too, can be as ruthless and demanding as any other. This may have been why Derrida could often become mannered and puerile, endlessly turning rebellion on itself. And late in his life, Derrida, bristling at charges that he was a relativist, tried to find some sort of firm, unshakeable ground upon which to stand a notion of political activity and justice that might justify his triumphant orthodoxy. To no avail. In the recent book, "Philosophy in a Time of Terror," here is what he said about 9/11: "We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy - a name, a number - points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about." The rest is silence. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/arts/music/11derr.html From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 11 22:34:55 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 18:34:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Telegraph: (Dawkins) A Roadmap to the primeval slime Message-ID: A Roadmap to the primeval slime http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/10/03/bodaw03.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/10/03/bomain.html (Filed: 04/10/2004) Anthony Daniels reviews The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins is a man of the most formidable gifts. To his breadth of biological erudition he adds a brilliancy of prose style which is clearly the product of a wide literary culture. He is a spirited controversialist and a tub-thumping evangelist for evolution. He is the T. H. Huxley of our time. This book is far from the glossy, beautifully illustrated coffee-table production that it might at first appear. It contains vast amounts of information and considerable quantities of theoretical biology (always explained with the greatest possible lucidity). Instead of tracing evolution forward from the primeval slime to the emergence of homo sapiens, it traces it backwards, from homo sapiens to the primeval slime, via a series of branching points on the evolutionary tree, or rather bush, where we meet hypothetical common ancestors, or "concestors" in Dawkins's terminology. The first concestor is the creature from which both man and chimpanzee (man's nearest biological relative) were descended; the second concestor is the creature from which the first concestor and gorillas were descended; the third concestor is the creature from which the second concestor, the gorillas and orang-utans were descended; and so on and so forth, back to the origins of life itself. According to Dawkins, about 40 such concestors (each of which is the subject of a chapter) are sufficient to take us back to the origin of life itself. En route to the origin, we learn an astonishing number of facts about life on Earth. Dawkins is infectiously enthusiastic about its variety, past and present: spiders that spit glue to trap their prey, or extinct sea scorpions that were two yards long. I never even knew that many of the creatures he describes existed, and feel humbled by my own ignorance. Moreover, Dawkins is at home with molecular biology as well as with taxonomy and ethology. One of the strengths of his book is the ease with which he moves and establishes links between these different levels of biological thought and explanation. Dawkins is not a dry writer, and makes many asides. These vary between being charming, witty or wise, to being - at least to me - somewhat irritating. When, for example, he says that as an undergraduate he dreamed (as other young men dreamed of scoring a century for England) of discovering a live placoderm, an extinct kind of fish that had limbs, one is charmed. Another of his asides, almost an essay in itself, on the question of human races, is a model of its kind. But his repeated reference to the extinction of Tasmanian aborigines as a genocide or holocaust accepts uncritically what is a matter of great historical dispute. The fact that he refers to it at all demonstrates how quickly what is probably a falsehood can become an established truth among the right-thinking. As is well known, Dawkins is a ferocious opponent of religion. This sometimes gives him a smart-alec quality, rather like that of the first atheist MP, Charles Bradlaugh, who used to stride on to the stage, take out his pocket watch and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. Dawkins's obsession with proving that God does not exist makes me suspect that he cannot altogether disbelieve. When he writes at the end of his book, "My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world", he sounds not so very far removed from religion after all. Indeed, I half-expect a deathbed conversion in his case. His book, however, should be given to all intelligent young persons starting out on their exploration of the world. It will excite their curiosity and awe and prove to them that the world is inexhaustible in its fascination. Like most evolutionists, Dawkins overestimates the human significance of the theory of evolution. Explaining how we have come to be what we are is not the same as telling us how we should live from now on - which is a question of some importance. Dawkins sometimes give the impression that, in outline, everything is already known and only the details have to be filled in. I think he is mistaken: an essential mystery remains. Anthony Daniels is a practising doctor. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 11 22:36:36 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 18:36:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Medicine for Musicians Message-ID: Medicine for Musicians The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.10.15 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i08/08a05601.htm By KATHERINE S. MANGAN Denton, Tex. Listening to Michael Adduci play a haunting melody on his oboe with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, you might think he has a cushy job. But peer down his nose -- with the help of a fiber-optic cable and a computer screen -- at his vocal cords that pulsate with every breath, and the sounds he emits don't seem so effortless. "We say we're 'playing' our instrument, and we sit in comfortable chairs," the University of North Texas doctoral student and adjunct music instructor says as he looks up from an uncomfortable-looking contraption that includes a cable being laced into his nostril by a gloved researcher. Later, he will view the information projected onto a computer screen to analyze his playing technique and determine whether he is causing unnecessary strain on his vocal cords. "No one thinks about the risks involved," he adds. Researchers at the Texas Center for Music and Medicine are trying to change that. The joint project between the University of North Texas's medical and music schools treats musicians for injuries and illnesses that, if left untreated, could end their careers. And it is spreading the word to music schools across the country that playing music professionally doesn't have to be hazardous to your health. Most people probably don't know that an overzealous trumpet player can rupture his lip muscles or ruin his teeth or that more than a third of clarinetists suffer pain in their right wrists. A percussionist in a high-school marching band who hoists around a heavy drum for hours under a blazing summer sun can suffer heat stroke, while the same musician cooped up for hours in a small practice hall can suffer hearing loss. The risks are emotional as well as physical. Touring musicians whose lives are a blur of nightclubs and cheap hotels can succumb to drug and alcohol abuse and depression, while stage fright can strike both seasoned veterans and novices. The interdisciplinary center, which is supported by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (the organization that awards Grammies) and the National Endowment of the Arts, helps musicians change physical habits that lead to injuries and focuses on underlying psychological problems that can leave them vulnerable to drug abuse and depression. Music is more than a pastime for most students at this Dallas-area university, which has a renowned jazz program and more than 300 practice rooms and six performance halls for everything from opera to rock. It also enrolls hundreds of aspiring music teachers like Mr. Adduci, whose goal right now is to survive this lab experiment on him and his oboe. Dressed in jeans, a white Guayabera shirt, and sneakers, with close-cropped hair and black-rimmed glasses, he barely winces as an associate professor of speech pathology, Fang Ling Lu, inserts a quarter-inch fiber-optic cable up his right nostril and down into his throat. He continues playing a scale while the larger-than-life image of his vocal cords pulsates on the computer screen behind him. By examining the image, Ms. Lu can monitor how the muscles contract when he hits high or low notes and whether his throat is red or swollen. Looking on is Kris S. Chesky, director of research and education for the music and medicine center. A former professional trumpet player who played gigs ranging from cruise ships to smoke-filled bars, Mr. Chesky majored in music and engineering in college. For most of his career, he has been examining the intersections of music, medicine, and engineering. (He holds a patent on a stretcher that uses musical vibration to help ease postoperative pain.) Right now he is developing health-promotion curricula to introduce in music schools around the country and, earlier this month, played host to a national conference for music and medical professors to discuss ways to protect musicians' health. "The people who are teaching music were never told that, just like chemistry or shop class, there are risks involved with music," he says. "We're trying to change that culture." Other universities are helping out. A center at Vanderbilt University's medical school, for instance, provides treatment by ear, nose, and throat specialists to people who are seeking relief for their overstressed vocal cords, including preachers, lawyers, and Nashville's gospel, pop, and rock singers. Preventing hearing loss is a major focus of a multidisciplinary program at Michigan State University's School of Music. The school is testing the hearing of every faculty member and graduate student in music performance, along with percussion and ensemble players, by strapping on a device that measures the decibel levels they are exposed to in practice sessions and rehearsals. (Students who are exposed to excessively loud sounds are urged to practice in larger rooms or for shorter durations.) "If you're sitting in a jazz band in a small club, right in front of the timpani or the horns, it can be hair raising and ear splitting," says James Forger, director of the music school and a professor of saxophone. Exposing students to that kind of risk "is simply unacceptable." The school teaches a seminar in "Healthy Musicianship" and has a "wellness team" that includes professors of medicine, biomechanics, and music therapy. Team members treat injuries, recommend exercises to relieve strain, offer tips for improving posture, and refer students to off-campus medical experts, if needed. A similar team operates at the University of North Texas. Bernard Rubin, a professor of medicine at the university's Health Science Center, in Fort Worth, is also a clarinetist and medical director of the music and medicine center. He runs a clinic at the university for ailing musicians, like the drummer in a local jazz band who recently came to him with pain in his lower back and forearms. After watching the patient play his drums, Dr. Rubin, an arthritis expert, recommended a supportive chair, frequent breaks, weight loss, and abdominal exercises to strengthen and support his back. Previously he had suggested specific shoulder-strengthening exercises to reduce the amount of force the drummer would have to use on his drumsticks. Dr. Rubin sometimes finds that his best team-teacher is a cadaver in the anatomy lab. "When the music students are learning about carpal-tunnel syndrome, we show them the muscles and ligaments and tendons on a cadaver," he says. "They see where the nerve comes down on the arm and where it goes into the hand and fingers. They get an appreciation for where the numbness and tingling might occur and the complexity of the anatomy." As dean of music at the university, James C. Scott has seen his share of injuries that threatened to derail careers. "Violinists and pianists, especially, know that if they're going to be successful, they're going to have to play six hours a day," he says. He cocks his arm and scrunches his neck to hold an imaginary violin. "If you walked around like that for six hours or more a day, how long would you last? Yet they're staying in these unnatural positions for even longer." Teaching students how to relax tense muscles and avoid injuries is critical, Mr. Scott says. "People who are passionate about their work need to have coping strategies. And they need to know how much discomfort is normal and when they need to take a break or see a doctor." No one knows that better than Leon Fleisher, a world-renowned classical pianist whose overworked right hand was crippled nearly 40 years ago from a neurological disorder called focal dystonia. Mr. Fleisher, who teaches piano at the Johns Hopkins University's Peabody Institute of Music, continued to dazzle audiences long afterward with a left-hand-only repertoire. After trying numerous treatments, he finally got relief 10 years ago from Botox injections that relaxed the muscles in his right hand and allowed him to resume playing with both hands. He says efforts like those at the Texas Center for Music and Medicine could encourage young musicians to seek help for aches and pains before they become incapacitating injuries. "Young people recover from injuries and keep on playing, but as they get older it takes longer and longer to bounce back," says Mr. Fleisher, now 75. "It's a popular mantra for any kind of athlete to say 'play through the pain -- no pain, no gain,'" he adds. "Maybe that's true for football, but musicians are athletes of the small muscles. Pain is a sign that something is wrong and you need to stop." Unless, of course, it's all in the name of science. Mr. Adduci has inflicted his oboe experiment on three other oboe players, one of whom agreed to have his nostril wired for a second session. "Which makes me think, it can't be that bad," Mr. Adduci says. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 11 22:39:41 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 18:39:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] spiked-culture: Down with 21st century philistinism Message-ID: Down with 21st century philistinism http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA6F5.htm 4.9.22 Frank Furedi explains why his latest book calls for a new Culture War. by Brendan O'Neill 'Dumbing down' is often seen as being about the rise of reality TV and other dumb culture. In fact, says Frank Furedi, the problem is much bigger than Big Brother. 'Cultural institutions like universities and galleries no longer challenge us or encourage us to question what we know. Instead they flatter us. But flattery will get us nowhere.' Not content with having taken on risk-aversion, therapy culture and the paranoid parenting industry in his previous books, Furedi, a sociologist and prolific author who doesn't suffer faddish thinking gladly, lays in to dumbing down (or 'twenty-first century philistinism' as he prefers to call it) in his latest offering. Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, described by former Oxford don Terry Eagleton as a 'vitally important book', is a short and sharp critique of the way in which intellectual life has been degraded. Both inside and outside the university, argues Furedi, the pursuit of Knowledge and Truth is today looked upon with suspicion, at best as the pastime of the fusty, old, out-of-touch academic, at worst as an elitist project that seeks to impose outdated 'Western values' on to the rest of the world. Contemporary society seems to value knowledge (with a small k), culture and education only in as much as they can play a practical role in people's lives. 'Our society seems to have a big problem with the idea of art for its own sake, or knowledge for its own sake, or education for its own sake', he tells me. Instead, such things are deemed useful only if they serve some other sake - if they work as instruments of 'economic advance, social engineering, giving communities an identity, or providing therapy for the individual'. So a university education is no longer valued in its own right, as a means of pushing an individual to his or her intellectual limits; rather, universities are discussed as making an important contribution to the economic life of nations by providing young people with the necessary skills and know-how for their future careers. Even Oxford and Cambridge, those bastions of excellence, are praised primarily for 'the vital role they play in the United Kingdom economy' (that quotation coming from the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, no less). In both the UK and the USA, says Furedi, some see filling the universities as a means to the end of keeping the economy chugging along. Similarly, works of art tend to be valued less for any inner merit they might possess than for their (alleged) role in boosting the viewers' self-esteem, or even cohering fragmented societies. In his book Furedi cites Baroness Tessa Blackstone, Britain's former Minister of State for the Arts, who in a speech in 2001 posed the question: 'Can the arts be more than just frivolous, trivial, irrelevant?' She answered in the affirmative, claiming that the arts are important because they can improve employability, eradicate inequality and help prevent crime. She was also in 'no doubt' that the arts can 'contribute to improving health outcomes' too (1). 'When I use the term "dumbing down" Im primarily talking about institutions, not people' When arts and education are reduced to playing this merely functional role, says Furedi, we end up with cultural institutions more concerned with massaging individuals' self-esteem levels or striving to improve community relations than with providing people with an education or giving us stimulating exhibitions. He argues that 'flattering students is fast becoming the institutional norm in universities', where the role of academics is to 'support' students rather than to transform them, to hold their hands through to the end of the university experience. His book discusses the example of Tyne and Wear Museum in north-east England, which adopted policies that 'flatter its visitors'. The museum has an access policy that 'encourage[s] the display of works from the collections which may not necessarily be famous or highly regarded, but have been chosen by members of the public simply because they like them or because they arouse certain emotions or memories' (2). This is becoming widespread, says Furedi, where cultural institutions 'increasingly give us what they think is good for us, and what they think we can handle. They patronise us, spoonfeeding us culture and knowledge'. That's one reason why he doesn't like the phrase 'dumbing down'. His argument isn't that people are getting dumb and dumber; his is not an attack on 'Dumb America', the very popular idea that all Yanks are Bush-voting thickos, or on 'Dumb Britain' (the name of a regular feature in Private Eye magazine, which lists the stupidest answers given by members of the Great British public to quiz-show questions). 'When I do use the term "dumbing down" I'm primarily talking about institutions, not people. I'm talking about the elite, about the inability at the top of society to provide institutional support for the pursuit of scholarship, the arts or knowledge.' For Furedi, this is an 'institutionalised philistinism', written into government policy documents on the arts, and into universities' and museums' 'access' policies. It is this top-down philistinism that gives rise to what some refer to as our 'dumb society' - to the degraded state of public debate and the widespread sense of political passivity. So his book is not only for those angry academics who are disturbed by what is happening to their profession, but also 'for anyone who takes ideas and argument seriously'. Furedi's book has been welcomed by serious thinkers on both sides of the political divide, such as Eagleton on the left and philosopher Roger Scruton on the right. But it has also been accused of Grumpy Old Man-ism, described as a book for all those bitter and bespectacled intellectuals who hark back to the glory days when clever people like them were taken more seriously. Observer columnist David Aaronovitch argues that the likes of Furedi want to go back to 'Cambridge 1936, to that fabulous race of warrior dons who knew everything, to the days when intellectuals were intellectuals and women were their wives and mistresses' (3). For Aaronovitch, the 'inclusion' attacked by Furedi is really a 'new style of democracy', where universities and other institutions are being opened up to those who were previously kept at a safe distance. Professor Sally Munt of the University of Sussex wrote a letter to the Observer thanking Aaronovitch for his article and arguing that it was high time that people like Furedi were unveiled as 'grumpy old men'. (Professor Munt's letter also included the sentence, 'A radical social analysis should depend upon the recognition of, and respect for, the dexterity by which most people negotiate an active self in this world' - perhaps confirming Furedi's argument that some academics have become dislocated from public life....) (4). Furedi says that, fundamentally, his views have remained 'quite consistent' Furedi's having none of it. He says that he and others who share his concerns 'are not demanding a return to the past - that is the last thing we want. But we want to make sure that the future isn't just more of the same'. According to Furedi, the fact that those who criticise the present can so easily be discredited as nostalgic golden-agers suggests there is 'widespread complacency and even conformism today, a sense that you are not allowed to ask awkward questions'. He says that the cheap accusation of being in love with an imaginary past is really 'a call for conformism in the present'. As for the claim that 'inclusion' is a new kind of democracy.... 'I take a very traditional view of democracy', he says. 'When people want to be included they don't wait for an invitation; they kick the door down, they demand to be let in. The Suffragettes didn't wait to be included in the electoral system, and trade unionists didn't wait to be included in collective bargaining - they insisted on it. When working-class people wanted to learn they didn't wait around for an "inclusion policy"; they became autodidacts.' Something very different is happening today, says Furedi. People are being included for the sake of inclusion, rather than for anything worthwhile. It is the act of inclusion that matters, whether in the universities, art galleries or wherever, rather than the question of what kind of content the 'included' will receive. 'The elite is saying, in a very Victorian fashion, that we know what's good for you. To see this kind of "inclusion" as a democratic moment is fundamentally to misinterpret what is a state-driven project, which includes people into an inferior version of what existed before. It is an entirely paternalistic project, masquerading as anti-elitist and democratic.' How did Furedi get here? I first got to know Furedi when we both wrote for Living Marxism, the magazine launched and edited by spiked editor Mick Hume in 1988. It was published by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which was founded by Furedi and others in 1981 and which developed a reputation for its no-BS stance on everything from militarism to freedom of speech. In 1997 Living Marxism was relaunched as LM, which Furedi wrote for and I worked on. LM was forced to close in 2000 following a libel action brought by ITN, and some of the LM team went on to launch spiked, with Hume at the helm. How did Furedi, a man of the revolutionary left, become what you might call a 'cultural commentator', writing books on issues such as parenting, therapy and now the devaluing of knowledge? Some of his detractors claim it is all a ruse to get into the papers; they accuse him of picking sexy, trendy issues on which he can make a controversial point or two. In fact, argues Furedi, fundamentally his views have remained 'quite consistent'. 'Obviously ideas develop in relation to events, and some important political disruptions and breaks have occurred over the past 10 or 15 years', he says. 'So the way in which you express your ideas and make your arguments changes with changing times.' But he says he remains as committed as he ever was to human liberation and to freeing every individuals' potential - it is others who have changed. 'Classically the right was pro-state. Now it's the left that calls for state intervention' Furedi found himself feeling 'ever-more estranged' from the conventional left. He recalls three incidents in particular that suggested the left was moving in a troublesome direction. 'The first time I felt it was when there were all these demands for "No Platform" for fascists, that fascists should be censored. I have always been, and continue to be, vehemently anti-fascist, but I felt that was just a cop-out, a very anti-democratic way of avoiding debate. I argued that rather than saying "No Platform" we should take up the fascists' views and undermine them, instead of opting for this very authoritarian, censorious approach.' The second event was the miners' strike of 1984. A key issue in the strike was whether there should be a national ballot, which would allow all miners to vote on whether the strike should continue. In places like Yorkshire miners were striking hard, while other miners, in particular in Nottinghamshire, refused to strike on the grounds that there had not been a national ballot. The RCP campaigned for a ballot; just about everybody else on the left disagreed and the ballot was vetoed by Arthur Scargill, head of the National Union of Miners. 'I fully supported the strike', says Furedi. 'But I also called for a ballot, with a rank-and-file campaign to win the vote, for a strike that could be supported by everybody.' Thatcher supported a national ballot because she thought it would break the strike; the RCP supported a campaign for a ballot as a way of strengthening the miners. 'But others on the left wanted to prevent a ballot in case the vote went the wrong way. I thought this qualified approach to democracy on the left was a very big problem.' The third event that further estranged Furedi from the left was the Cleveland child abuse scandal of 1987, when a number of families in the industrial region in the north-east of England were falsely accused of abusing their kids - often by health and social workers who considered themselves part of the left. 'I felt very uncomfortable, very uncomfortable indeed', says Furedi. 'People who I had known on the left were going around saying that loads of working-class men are child abusers. This very negative view of human beings took me aback. The kind of panic about working-class behaviour that would traditionally have been triggered by the right was starting to become a fixture of the left.' Furedi says it is the left that has changed, rather than his own ideas or motivations. 'People who call themselves left-wing have become very different. So classically it was the right that was pro-state, now it's usually the left that calls for state intervention. Traditionally the right was anti-experimentation and anti-science, now the left is often at the forefront of that. Traditionally the right explained developments by conspiracy theory, talking about Jews or communists or whoever; now it's the left that seems to believe in conspiracies. In all this confusion, people need to rethink how they position themselves.' Furedi scoffs at the idea that he has taken up what appear to be cultural issues in order to become a media darling. Rather, he says he is continuing the work started by Living Marxism, in trying to make sense of 'the way in which social disengagement occurs today, the growing passivity of the public, the strong fatalistic cultural and social trends that we see all around us'. But we cannot hope to understand society, and more importantly how to change it, without defending the importance of ideas and knowledge against today's philistines, he says. 'That is what my new book is about.' Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? by Frank Furedi is published by Continuum. Visit Frank Furedi's website at www.FrankFuredi.com. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 12 13:48:36 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 06:48:36 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Medical Diagnosis of Bush: Presenile Dementia Message-ID: <01C4B027.8035D040.shovland@mindspring.com> (from a letter in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly) When George Meets John James Fallows's description of John Kerry's debating skills ("When George Meets John," July/August Atlantic) was interesting, but what was most remarkable was Fallows's documentation of President Bush's mostly overlooked changes over the past decade -- specifically, "the striking decline in his sentence-by-sentence speaking skills." Fallows points to "speculations that there must be some organic basis for the President's peculiar mode of speech -- a learning disability, a reading problem, dyslexia or some other disorder," but correctly concludes, "The main problem with these theories is that through his forties Bush was perfectly articulate." Diaries :: ira's diary :: I, too, felt that something organic was wrong with President Bush, most probably dyslexia. But I was unaware of what Fallows pointed out so clearly: that Bush's problems have been developing slowly, and that just a decade ago he was an articulate debater, "artful indeed in steering questions and challenges to his desired subjects," who "did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones." Consider, in contrast, the present: "the informal Q&As he has tried to avoid," "Bush's recent faltering performances," "his unfortunate puzzled-chimp expression when trying to answer questions," "his stalling, defensive pose when put on the spot," "speaking more slowly and less gracefully." Not being a professional medical researcher and clinician, Fallows cannot be faulted for not putting two and two together. But he was 100 percent correct in suggesting that Bush's problem cannot be "a learning disability, a reading problem, [or] dyslexia," because patients with those problems have always had them. Slowly developing cognitive deficits, as demonstrated so clearly by the President, can represent only one diagnosis, and that is "presenile dementia"! Presenile dementia is best described to nonmedical persons as a fairly typical Alzheimer's situation that develops significantly earlier in life, well before what is usually considered old age. It runs about the same course as typical senile dementias, such as classical Alzheimer's -- to incapacitation and, eventually, death, as with President Ronald Reagan, but at a relatively earlier age. President Bush's "mangled" words are a demonstration of what physicians call "confabulation," and are almost specific to the diagnosis of a true dementia. Bush should immediately be given the advantage of a considered professional diagnosis, and started on drugs that offer the possibility of retarding the slow but inexorable course of the disease. Joseph M. Price, M.D. Carsonville, Mich. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 12 14:32:52 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 07:32:52 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The bulge under the President's suit: was he wired? Message-ID: <01C4B02D.AFA01F60.shovland@mindspring.com> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 15452 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 12 21:05:51 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 17:05:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The bulge under the President's suit: was he wired? In-Reply-To: <01C4B02D.AFA01F60.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4B02D.AFA01F60.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: Steve, I watched the second debate for about an hour and decided that he spoke far too fast to have been wired. He will be reelected, since he has demonstrated to swing voters in swing states that he is not befuddled. This is what held back voters who like Bush's rhetoric and policies but had doubts about the man himself. I said as much the day after the second debate and warned that my record as a prophet is not great. Frank From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 12 21:21:43 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 17:21:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Chip Morningstar: How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure Message-ID: Chip Morningstar: How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html 1993 June [Thanks to Davdid for finding this article.] "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind than perhaps people in the field are accustomed to. Being a vulgar engineer I'm allowed to break a lot of the rules that people in the humanities usually have to play by, since nobody expects an engineer to be literate. Ha. Anyway, here is my tale. It started when my colleague Randy Farmer and I presented a paper at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace, held in Santa Cruz, California in April, 1991. Like the first conference, at which we also presented a paper, it was an aggressively interdisciplinary gathering, drawing from fields as diverse as computer science, literary criticism, engineering, history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and political science. About the only relevant field that seemed to lack strong representation was economics (an important gap but one which we don't have room to get into here). It was in turn stimulating, aggravating, fascinating and infuriating, a breathtaking intellectual roller coaster ride unlike anything else I've recently encountered in my professional life. My last serious brush with the humanities in an academic context had been in college, ten years earlier. The humanities appear to have experienced a considerable amount of evolution (or perhaps more accurately, genetic drift) since then. Randy and I were scheduled to speak on the second day of the conference. This was fortunate because it gave us the opportunity to recalibrate our presentation based on the first day's proceedings, during which we discovered that we had grossly mischaracterized the audience by assuming that it would be like the crowd from the first conference. I spent most of that first day furiously scribbling notes. People kept saying the most remarkable things using the most remarkable language, which I found I needed to put down in writing because the words would disappear from my brain within seconds if I didn't. Are you familiar with the experience of having memories of your dreams fade within a few minutes of waking? It was like that, and I think for much the same reason. Dreams have a logic and structure all their own, falling apart into unmemorable pieces that make no sense when subjected to the scrutiny of the conscious mind. So it was with many of the academics who got up to speak. The things they said were largely incomprehensible. There was much talk about deconstruction and signifiers and arguments about whether cyberspace was or was not "narrative". There was much quotation from Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Saussure, and the like, every single word of which was impenetrable. I'd never before had the experience of being quite this baffled by things other people were saying. I've attended lectures on quantum physics, group theory, cardiology, and contract law, all fields about which I know nothing and all of which have their own specialized jargon and notational conventions. None of those lectures were as opaque as anything these academics said. But I captured on my notepad an astonishing collection of phrases and a sense of the overall tone of the event. We retreated back to Palo Alto that evening for a quick rewrite. The first order of business was to excise various little bits of phraseology that we now realized were likely to be perceived as Politically Incorrect. Mind you, the fundamental thesis of our presentation was Politically Incorrect, but we wanted people to get upset about the actual content rather than the form in which it was presented. Then we set about attempting to add something that would be an adequate response to the postmodern lit crit-speak we had been inundated with that day. Since we had no idea what any of it meant (or even if it actually meant anything at all), I simply cut-and-pasted from my notes. The next day I stood up in front of the room and opened our presentation with the following: The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor. This bit of nonsense was constructed entirely out of things people had actually said the day before, except for the last ten words or so which are a pastiche of Danny Kaye's "flagon with the dragon" bit from The Court Jester, contributed by our co-worker Gayle Pergamit, who took great glee in the entire enterprise. Observing the audience reaction was instructive. At first, various people started nodding their heads in nods of profound understanding, though you could see that their brain cells were beginning to strain a little. Then some of the techies in the back of the room began to giggle. By the time I finished, unable to get through the last line with a straight face, the entire room was on the floor in hysterics, as by then even the most obtuse English professor had caught on to the joke. With the postmodernist lit crit shit thus defused, we went on with our actual presentation. Contrary to the report given in the "Hype List" column of issue #1 of Wired [2]("Po-Mo Gets Tek-No", page 87), we did not shout down the postmodernists. We made fun of them. Afterward, however, I was left with a sense that I should try to actually understand what these people were saying, really. I figured that one of three cases must apply. It could be that there was truly some content there of value, once you learned the lingo. If this was the case, then I wanted to know what it was. On the other hand, perhaps there was actually content there but it was bogus (my working hypothesis), in which case I wanted to be able to respond to it credibly. On the third hand, maybe there was no content there after all, in which case I wanted to be able to write these clowns off without feeling guilty that I hadn't given them due consideration. The subject that I kept hearing about over and over again at the conference was deconstruction. I figured I'd start there. I asked my friend Michael Benedikt for a pointer to some sources. I had gotten to know Michael when he organized the First International Conference on Cyberspace. I knew him to be a person with a foot in the lit crit camp but also a person of clear intellectual integrity who was not a fool. He suggested a book called On Deconstruction by Jonathan Culler. I got the book and read it. It was a stretch, but I found I could work my way through it, although I did end up with the most heavily marked up book in my library by the time I was done. The Culler book lead me to some other things, which I also read. And I started subscribing to alt.postmodern and now actually find it interesting, much of the time. I can't claim to be an expert, but I feel I've reached the level of a competent amateur. I think I can explain it. It turns out that there's nothing to be afraid of. We engineers are frequently accused of speaking an alien language, of wrapping what we do in jargon and obscurity in order to preserve the technological priesthood. There is, I think, a grain of truth in this accusation. Defenders frequently counter with arguments about how what we do really is technical and really does require precise language in order to talk about it clearly. There is, I think, a substantial bit of truth in this as well, though it is hard to use these grounds to defend the use of the term "grep" to describe digging through a backpack to find a lost item, as a friend of mine sometimes does. However, I think it's human nature for members of any group to use the ideas they have in common as metaphors for everything else in life, so I'm willing to forgive him. The really telling factor that neither side of the debate seems to cotton to, however, is this: technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me -- marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers -- none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I'm doing is worth having them pay for it. Contrast this situation with that of academia. Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don't really count. Graduate students are studying to be professors themselves and so are already part of the in-crowd. Undergraduate students rarely get a chance to close the feedback loop, especially at the so called "better schools" (I once spoke with a Harvard professor who told me that it is quite easy to get a Harvard undergraduate degree without ever once encountering a tenured member of the faculty inside a classroom; I don't know if this is actually true but it's a delightful piece of slander regardless). They publish in peer reviewed journals, which are not only edited by their peers but published for and mainly read by their peers (if they are read at all). Decisions about their career advancement, tenure, promotion, and so on are made by committees of their fellows. They are supervised by deans and other academic officials who themselves used to be professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They rarely have any reason to talk to anybody but themselves -- occasionally a Professor of Literature will collaborate with a Professor of History, but in academic circles this sort of interdisciplinary work is still considered sufficiently daring and risqu? as to be newsworthy. What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands -- an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected. What's more, it's not particularly important that they even be terribly comprehensible to each other, since the quality of academic work, particularly in the humanities, is judged primarily on the basis of politics and cleverness. In fact, one of the beliefs that seems to be characteristic of the postmodernist mind set is the idea that politics and cleverness are the basis for all judgments about quality or truth, regardless of the subject matter or who is making the judgment. A work need not be right, clear, original, or connected to anything outside the group. Indeed, it looks to me like the vast bulk of literary criticism that is published has other works of literary criticism as its principal subject, with the occasional reference to the odd work of actual literature tossed in for flavoring from time to time. Thus it is not surprising that it takes a bit of detective work to puzzle out what is going on. But I've been on the case for a while now and I think I've identified most of the guilty suspects. I hope I can spare some of my own peers the inconvenience and wasted time of actually doing the legwork themselves (though if you have an inclination in that direction I recommend it as a mind stretching departure from debugging C code). The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all. The broader movement that goes under the label "postmodernism" generalizes this principle from writing to all forms of human activity, though you have to be careful about applying this label, since a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism is to try to stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories. "Deconstruction" is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt G?del used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties. Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process that hardly merits the commotion that it has generated. However, like hack writers or television producers, academics will use a formula if it does the job and they are not held to any higher standard (though perhaps Derrida can legitimately claim some credit for originality in inventing the formula in the first place). Just to clear up the mystery, here is the formula, step-by-step: Step 1 -- Select a work to be deconstructed. This is called a "text" and is generally a piece of text, though it need not be. It is very much within the lit crit mainstream to take something which is not text and call it a text. In fact, this can be a very useful thing to do, since it leaves the critic with broad discretion to define what it means to "read" it and thus a great deal of flexibility in interpretation. It also allows the literary critic to extend his reach beyond mere literature. However, the choice of text is actually one of the less important decisions you will need to make, since points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance, although more challenging works are valued for their greater potential for exercising cleverness. Thus you want to pick your text with an eye to the opportunities it will give you to be clever and convoluted, rather than whether the text has anything important to say or there is anything important to say about it. Generally speaking, obscure works are better than well known ones, though an acceptable alternative is to choose a text from the popular mass media, such as a Madonna video or the latest Danielle Steele novel. The text can be of any length, from the complete works of Louis L'Amour to a single sentence. For example, let's deconstruct the phrase, "John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual." Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want, although of course in the case of a text which actually consists of text it is easier if you pick something that it really does say. This is called "reading". I will read our example phrase as saying that John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual. Step 3 -- Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort. This can be either something which is described or referred to by the text directly or it can be inferred from the presumed cultural context of a hypothetical reader. It is a convention of the genre to choose a duality, such as man/woman, good/evil, earth/sky, chocolate/vanilla, etc. In the case of our example, the obvious duality to pick is homosexual/heterosexual, though a really clever person might be able to find something else. Step 4 -- Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition" by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction. Since it's pretty much arbitrary, you don't have to give a justification for this assertion unless you feel like it. Programmers and computer scientists may find the concept of a hierarchy consisting of only two elements to be a bit odd, but this appears to be an established tradition in literary criticism. Continuing our example, we can claim homophobia on the part of the society in which this sentence was uttered and therefor assert that it presumes superiority of heterosexuality over homosexuality. Step 5 -- Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself. In particular, find a way to read it as a statement which contradicts or undermines either the original reading or the ordering of the hierarchical opposition (which amounts to the same thing). This is really the tricky part and is the key to the whole exercise. Pulling this off successfully may require a variety of techniques, though you get more style points for some techniques than for others. Fortunately, you have a wide range of intellectual tools at your disposal, which the rules allow you to use in literary criticism even though they would be frowned upon in engineering or the sciences. These include appeals to authority (you can even cite obscure authorities that nobody has heard of), reasoning from etymology, reasoning from puns, and a variety of other word games. You are allowed to use the word "problematic" as a noun. You are also allowed to pretend that the works of Freud present a correct model of human psychology and the works of Marx present a correct model of sociology and economics (it's not clear to me whether practitioners in the field actually believe Freud and Marx or if it's just a convention of the genre). You get maximum style points for being French. Since most of us aren't French, we don't qualify for this one, but we can still score almost as much by writing in French or citing French sources. However, it is difficult for even the most intense and unprincipled American academician writing in French to match the zen obliqueness of a native French literary critic. Least credit is given for a clear, rational argument which makes its case directly, though of course that is what I will do with our example since, being gainfully employed, I don't have to worry about graduation or tenure. And besides, I'm actually trying to communicate here. Here is a possible argument to go with our example: It is not generally claimed that John F. Kennedy was a homosexual. Since it is not an issue, why would anyone choose to explicitly declare that he was not a homosexual unless they wanted to make it an issue? Clearly, the reader is left with a question, a lingering doubt which had not previously been there. If the text had instead simply asked, "Was John F. Kennedy a homosexual?", the reader would simply answer, "No." and forget the matter. If it had simply declared, "John F. Kennedy was a homosexual.", it would have left the reader begging for further justification or argument to support the proposition. Phrasing it as a negative declaration, however, introduces the question in the reader's mind, exploiting society's homophobia to attack the reputation of the fallen President. What's more, the form makes it appear as if there is ongoing debate, further legitimizing the reader's entertainment of the question. Thus the text can be read as questioning the very assertion that it is making. Of course, no real deconstruction would be like this. I only used a single paragraph and avoided literary jargon. All of the words will be found in a typical abridged dictionary and were used with their conventional meanings. I also wrote entirely in English and did not cite anyone. Thus in an English literature course I would probably get a D for this, but I already have my degree so I don't care. Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself. This way it looks less like we are making things up. That's basically all there is to it, although there is an enormous variety of stylistic complication that is added in practice. This is mainly due to the genetic drift phenomenon I mentioned earlier, resulting in the intellectual equivalent of peacock feathers, although I suspect that the need for enough material to fill up a degree program plays a part as well. The best way to learn, of course, is to try to do it yourself. First you need to read some real lit crit to get a feel for the style and the jargon. One or two volumes is all it takes, since it's all pretty much the same (I advise starting with the Culler book the way I did). Here are some ideas for texts you might try to deconstruct, once you are ready to attempt it yourself, graded by approximate level of difficulty: Beginner: Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers this article James Cameron's The Terminator issue #1 of Wired anything by Marx Intermediate: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn the Book of Genesis Francois Truffaut's Day For Night The United States Constitution Elvis Presley singing Jailhouse Rock anything by Foucault Advanced: Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene the Great Pyramid of Giza Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa the Macintosh user interface Tony Bennett singing I Left My Heart In San Francisco anything by Derrida Tour de Force: James Joyce's Finnegans Wake the San Jose, California telephone directory IRS Form 1040 the Intel i486DX Programmer's Reference Manual the Mississippi River anything by Baudrillard So, what are we to make of all this? I earlier stated that my quest was to learn if there was any content to this stuff and if it was or was not bogus. Well, my assessment is that there is indeed some content, much of it interesting. The question of bogosity, however, is a little more difficult. It is clear that the forms used by academicians writing in this area go right off the bogosity scale, pegging my bogometer until it breaks. The quality of the actual analysis of various literary works varies tremendously and must be judged on a case-by-case basis, but I find most of it highly questionable. Buried in the muck, however, are a set of important and interesting ideas: that in reading a work it is illuminating to consider the contrast between what is said and what is not said, between what is explicit and what is assumed, and that popular notions of truth and value depend to a disturbingly high degree on the reader's credulity and willingness to accept the text's own claims as to its validity. Looking at the field of contemporary literary criticism as a whole also yields some valuable insights. It is a cautionary lesson about the consequences of allowing a branch of academia that has been entrusted with the study of important problems to become isolated and inbred. The Pseudo Politically Correct term that I would use to describe the mind set of postmodernism is "epistemologically challenged": a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves. But the tangle offers a safe refuge for the academics. It erects a wall between them and the rest of the world. It immunizes them against having to confront their own failings, since any genuine criticism can simply be absorbed into the morass and made indistinguishable from all the other verbiage. Intellectual tools that might help prune the thicket are systematically ignored or discredited. This is why, for example, science, psychology and economics are represented in the literary world by theories that were abandoned by practicing scientists, psychologists and economists fifty or a hundred years ago. The field is absorbed in triviality. Deconstruction is an idea that would make a worthy topic for some bright graduate student's Ph.D. dissertation but has instead spawned an entire subfield. Ideas that would merit a good solid evening or afternoon of argument and debate and perhaps a paper or two instead become the focus of entire careers. Engineering and the sciences have, to a greater degree, been spared this isolation and genetic drift because of crass commercial necessity. The constraints of the physical world and the actual needs and wants of the actual population have provided a grounding that is difficult to dodge. However, in academia the pressures for isolation are enormous. It is clear to me that the humanities are not going to emerge from the jungle on their own. I think that the task of outreach is left to those of us who retain some connection, however tenuous, to what we laughingly call reality. We have to go into the jungle after them and rescue what we can. Just remember to hang on to your sense of humor and don't let them intimidate you. References 1. mailto:chip at fudco.com 2. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/hypelist.html From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 12 21:24:15 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 17:24:15 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Larry D. Bouchard: Postmodern Tragedy, Contingency, and Culpability Message-ID: Larry D. Bouchard: Postmodern Tragedy, Contingency, and Culpability The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=203776&textreg=1&id=BouPost2-2 Larry D. Bouchard explores the question "Is the Postmodern Post-Tragic?," suggesting that the question implicitly asks: Are witnesses to suffering and evil in our days in continuity with others, past and future? Can terms like "tragedy" or "the tragic" continue to be resources for understanding and critical explanation? Can the category of the tragic still be used as a framework for responding to evil? He suggests that the contingencies of mystery and knowledge, and the contingencies of suffering and culpability, provide places to begin to think about such questions. Larry D. Bouchard, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University of Virginia, is the author of numerous articles, chapters, and books on the topics of evil, suffering, tragedy, negativity, and theodicy, including his book, Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought. Is the postmodern post-tragic? The question is both about our times and about our terms. It is not a new question, having been posed often since World War II and probably since Nietzsche, depending on when one thinks modernity began to end. When the question is posed seriously--when it asks whether witnesses to suffering and evil in our days are in continuity with other pasts and futures--then the question may help us respond to some of the fragments of art and testimony we encounter. The question simply asks whether "tragedy" and "the tragic" will continue to be resources for understanding and critical explanation. Although these terms resist essential definition, I generally reserve "tragedy" for a family of interrelated artistic forms. It includes Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, certainly, but extends to other forms and works that are "in dialogue" with the traditions of tragedy. "The tragic" will stand for the kinds of questions and experiences that tragedy poses and probes. Tragedy as art, then, is better defined not in terms of what it is but what it does. Among the things it does is inquire.[3]^1 Tragedy stages for communal inquiry questions of suffering and evil. Later I will reframe these questions in terms of configurations of "contingency" and "culpability." If tragedy speaks appropriately to postmodern times, it may well be in its witnessing and inquiring into such configurations. "After" Tragedy and the Tragic? Let us return to our opening question: Is the postmodern post-tragic? I can think of at least three kinds of reasons for saying "yes"--yes, ours is a post-tragic time, and hence the paradigms and very terms of tragedy are probably inappropriate signs. Firstly, we might follow those who caution that literary "tragedy" is a closed genre no longer capable of important innovation; if we attempt to repeat this genre, the results will be pale and distracting imitations of, or posturing toward, tragedy. Or, secondly, we might aver that "the tragic" usually has reference to religious or mythical views of suffering and evil that no longer obtain. They no longer speak to us, either because reigning western religious traditions have taken us "beyond tragedy," or because after modernity the mythic or religious traditions needed to sustain tragedy no longer reign. "The tragic" and even "evil," by such views, may be essentializing categories properly left only to antiquarian interests. Or, thirdly, we might judge that tragedy and the tragic have been eclipsed by the historical traumas that our century in particular has witnessed. By this view, literary tragedy never imagined genocide of such proportion and regularity; in our time, history has been far more efficient at imagining evil than art has been. To denominate genocide and the ensuing rupture of religious and humanistic structures of meaning as "tragic" would be to impose a form on that which has ruptured form, to project a definition on that which resists defining, to interpret and thus to violate that which defies interpretation. So the postmodern is post-tragic? Let us consider again. It is certainly possible to counter each of these warnings. One could argue that literary genres are not static forms, but rather pluralistic families of formal resemblance and difference. Some new students of genre would have us say that genres function to help us make art, and do not merely classify art.[4]^2 (This is part of why I said at the outset that tragedy is better defined through what it does, not what it is.) Moreover, genres can change, intersect, and ramify but need not finally close. Old tragedies are newly performed and innovative works, which may cogently be interpreted as tragedies, are still made.[5]^3 Or we might argue that "tragic experience" is not really a falsely essentializing or irrelevantly mythical category but can generate newer questions in continuity with older questions. Or we could simply notice that there are in fact contact points between the fragmentary traditions of tragedy and the kinds of evil and suffering witnessed in our time and the times of our parents and grandparents. What all three objections to tragedy suggest is that we are too late for tragedy, or that tragedy is a belated category. To this I want to respond that "tragedy" and "the tragic" have always been belated categories. The "tragic" is, and always was, a "post"-category of experience, discovered in interpretation. Likewise, the forms of literary-dramatic "tragedy" are and always were themselves post-tragic. Tragedy must be at some distance from the experiences it re-presents. At a distance, tragedy might name an experience or give it voice and currency (or else encumber it with inept language or images). Tragedy is and was a constructed spectacle, confession, or witness. Thus, if we think of tragedy mainly as an ideal type by which to classify art, we may well find it inappropriate now. Likewise, if we speak of it as a singular tradition, a fabric without frays, tangles, or seams--much less tears--it will be hard to find the continuities between it and the broken strands of our times, spaces, and lives. But we can think of tragedy pluralistically and heuristically: it can explore varieties of "tragic" experience. As to "the tragic," the effects or experiences identified and explored by tragedy (what are called "tragic visions") are also plural and shape our language and perceptions unexpectedly. In ordinary language, how we name experiences "tragic," though often denigrated as trivial, is shaped by the historical sediments of tragic art. Tragedy leaves us with language and images by which we recognize, name, and interpret a variegated range of experiences. In recent years, the tragic has frequently been interpreted under the aspect of tuch?, a Greek word for chance, luck, or "contingency"--in some contrast to the specters of moira (fate or destiny) or of "evil." There are a number of possible reasons for this turn. Fate can sometimes be viewed as less an independent cosmic force than an arrangement of circumstances, like the premises of a good plot. And the origins of culpable evil in Greek tragedy are often entangled with divine caprice and so are crucially indeterminate. Oedipus, for instance, has his faults, but they do not drive the plot or explain his story. Contemporary interest in contingency in tragedy also comes with a greater appreciation for the inherent limits of language, frameworks of meaning, and systems of thought. One of the more common definitions of postmodernism is sustained suspicion about foundations or "metanarratives."[6]^4 Tragic contingency correlates with what Martha Nussbaum would have us recognize as the plurality and "fragility" of the various goods that give direction to our lives (e.g., friendship, health, aesthetic pleasure, justice),[7]^5 and with what classicist James Redfield and others describe as the limits of virtue and cultural value, which are explored in tragedy.[8]^6 And recent associations of tragedy with contingency also correlate with a hesitancy to use the term "evil" as a moral and religious category. I would extend these views that tragedy teaches us to reflect on contingency. But I would also invite a return to understanding the tragic not only through the contingencies of life and thought but also in terms of their entanglement with ethical and religious questions of moral culpability. Contingencies The idea of contingency evokes a complex range of meanings, ranging from "what is the case but might not have been," to circumstances that accidentally threaten well-being, and even to the sense of unforeseen, surprising realizations of good. The various ways in which contingency and culpability become entangled (but not fused or equated) in tragedy can also evoke a sense of mystery, which reminds of its association with sacred festival. To the extent that tragedy and religion remain occasions of postmodern understanding and critique, their juxtaposition may continue to provide spaces for exploration. So I propose that tragedy can become compelling to us as it inquires into areas of contingency, many of which bear on the religious imagination. One might speak of the contingencies of selves and communities, even of what the biblical traditions might learn to call "the contingencies of grace."[9]^7 Here I will address the contingencies of mystery and knowledge and those of suffering and moral culpability. of Mystery and Knowledge In much religious discourse, mystery is a value-laden term, both when mystery is intrinsically valued--as in the mystery of divine election--and when the sources of values and virtues (such as justice, beauty, love, wisdom, integrity) are deemed not amenable to exhaustive or reductive explanation. Mystery corresponds, then, to an awareness of the inherent limits of knowledge, and yet points to possibilities of knowing beyond or within those limits. By contrast, exhaustive, reductive explanation might be a modern value that opposes the very notion of inherent mystery, as when E. M. Forster's Cyril Fielding opines in A Passage to India that there are no mysteries, only muddles. Tragedy may both encourage and chasten our desire to recover a sense of inherent mystery--not so much mysteries to be solved as mysteries that persist. Mystery may occur in some configurations that have surprising relevance for our self-understanding, or mystery may disrupt understanding altogether. The art of tragedy may muddle as well as disclose mystery. It is sometimes said that if Oedipus had simply ignored the fragmentary knowledge he received from oracles, memories, seers, and messengers, his ruin could have been avoided. But not only is it contrary to his nature to ignore such gnosis, his own ruin has already been entangled with that of Thebes--a city whose future his past threatens to annihilate. His mystery of origins is, for his adopted citizens, arbitrary, capricious, and finally unarguable. Their configuration in his lot simply is, as is his with theirs, and it displaces the conditions for understanding. In postmodern parlance, their near ruin is experienced as a rupture in the world. And the easing of the intensity of rupture, first by the exile of Oedipus and later by his near apotheosis at Colonus, does not finally heal it; for the rupture will continue to ramify in story after story. Tragedy usually inquires into mysteries that are not welcome. If there is welcome news in this, it may be that tragedy often alerts us to the idea of the "irreducible." To acknowledge that some questions--perhaps concerning the origins of the personality or of a historical catastrophe--are "irreducible" to a single framework of causal or functional explanation is to become open to a sense of mystery that might enrich our awareness of the range of that question. However, we should also say that what we discover to be irreducible is likely to be contingently so. Yesterday, we had no terms for explaining the Sphinx's riddle. Today, Oedipus arrives and answers it. Tomorrow, we will send him into exile. Then Freud will come. And so on. Sometimes some compelling question--perhaps of who is responsible for this good or this evil, or a question about the origin of consciousness--appears to us as not reducible to single explanatory strategies. And while this particular compelling question appears irreducible, it may well appear deeply so, completely so. But appearances can change with histories of knowing, and can change yet again. The history of oracular knowledge is as contingent as the history of persons. Tomorrow, we will know, then we won't, and later we may know again. of Suffering and Culpability It is easy to see why some see pluralistic culture as fragmentary. To some the stridency of our debates over ethical issues and frameworks signals the absence of any kind of cultural and moral consensus. To others, our shrill arguments obscure what moral agreements we may indeed share, even across the many cultures in our common life.[10]^8 But in any case, it may be quixotic to try to speak of "evil" in our cultural setting. The word is so tradition-laden as likely to be meaningless apart from particular religious or philosophical narratives. And yet to say that our time is without a sense of evil is at least paradoxical--inasmuch as the last century produced events as recognizably abominable as any history has known. And in some postmodernist commentary, it is the unprecedented magnitude and horrible particularity of these events that occasions the pervasive sense of rupture from past and future which I have mentioned. We may argue about whether we are really postmodern now. But the proposition remains compelling that Western culture's sense of its own possibilities has been sundered by moral and political catastrophes--those associated with totalitarianism, extreme economic inequity, war, and genocide--events which renew our doubts about the final humaneness of humanity. However, the mingling of boundless desire with fear, and especially the mingling of knowledge with great power, which has so enlarged our capacities for catastrophe, have indeed been explored throughout the history of tragedy and also of most religious communities. When students of western religious thought--especially those responsive to Augustine's belief that the telos and good of a human being is to reply to love with love--locate places for the tragic, they tend to move along either of two directions. They may consider the moral ambiguities of tragic choice to be ultimately a consequence of sin (forms of misdirected loving, which corrupt the good) or else that sin is a response to tragic suffering and contingency. These two trajectories for understanding the tragic only roughly correspond to the distinction between moral hubris and natural evil. Along the first direction, exemplified by the mid-twentieth-century American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the matters we may call the tragic in life (choices, dilemmas, and the suffering that follows from them) are interconnected and inseparable from their sources in prior sin. Here, the tragic includes sin, the psychological and social contexts for sin (e.g., anxiety, temptation, and the historical momentum of injustice), and the kinds of suffering that are the consequences of sin: structures of injustice, oppression, and reciprocal violence. Why is sin prior? For Niebuhr (as for Kierkegaard), our anxieties about the future tempt us to try to secure ourselves against contingency, no matter the cost. Sin, then, is seen as a deeply contradictory motivation to make oneself (or one's group) the infinite center of the world--a hubris that inevitably leads to others' (and one's own) suffering. The powerless slave suffers the effects of the sins of slavery; the culpable slaveholders are also slavery's victims. In short, as far back into a history of causes of injustice or resulting suffering as one wants to go, the tragic is a personal and social complex intractably rooted in sin.[11]^9 Along the other trajectory, exemplified by the contemporary theologians Edward Farley and Wendy Farley, tragic suffering precedes sin.[12]^10 The hubris, violent hatred, selfishness and greed, rationalized preference and privilege, and slothful resignation that can beset persons and groups are seen as bad responses to conditions of being finite: that is, to scarcity and other natural limits, to conflicting values and goods, and to the pervasive realities of death and pain. By this account, what is tragic in life is the priority of contingency and suffering, not the priority of sin. Sin, rather, is a deeply contradictory response to the tragic contingency. If, in the Bible, the stories of the Fall or the Tower of Babel are images of the first trajectory, whose source is sin, the stories of Job and perhaps of the clinically depressed King Saul are images of the second, whose source is a lack of fit between human well-being and the finite world. I do not claim that these two theological directions for understanding the tragic are mutually exclusive (for the terms are defined and distributed differently)--only that they are different and are not reducible to each other. Culpability and contingency are lines that tangle and cross each other in endlessly ramifying ways. And literary tragedy calls us to respond to particular tragic entanglements of culpability and chance. As far back as one traces the history of sin, Niebuhr and Kierkegaard tried to say, there is prior sin: "sin presupposes itself."[13]^11 Yet as far back as one presses this analysis of sin, contingencies also appear that are not reducible to sin-as-culpability. The complications of sin and historical chance are muddled together as far back as we can see or imagine. And the interpretation of such muddles as occasions of "mystery," with that word's connotations of both awe and perplexity, is among the perennial implications of tragedy. Bernard Williams recognizes that this entanglement of contingency with culpability runs counter to how we usually link moral responsibility to an agent's knowledge and intentions; so, typically, we do not want to hold Oedipus responsible for unwitting actions or forced choices. Indeed, Oedipus interprets his personal innocence in Oedipus at Colonus. But Williams' claim is that the tragic view offers a richer and more realistic description of the ethical environment--an environment we continue to probe along with our Greek (and, I would add, Hebraic) ancestors: "As the Greeks understood, the responsibilities we have to recognize extend in many ways beyond our normal purposes and what we intentionally do."[14]^12 So accustomed are we to treating mitigating circumstances only as reasons for pardon that some may assume that such readings of tragedy can only weaken moral accountability. On the contrary, the coarse mixing of contingency and culpability--which often cannot be sorted out and finally assessed, and which might well define the ethical character of "the tragic"--vastly enlarges our "accountability"--especially as witnesses. We are called to bear witness and become responsive--that is, "to give account"--to the appearing of moral evil implicated in: contingently related structures of nature, visible and invisible historical patterns of injustices, ideological distortion, and suffering. We find ourselves accountable witnesses to such mixes of contingency and culpability in ways that resist simple ascriptions of innocence or blame. ________________________ [15]^1 On how tragedy may be defined as an aesthetic mode of inquiry, with help from Aristotle and recent genre theorists, see my Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989) especially 8, 18-23. ] [16]^2 See Paul Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation," Philosophy Today 24(1973): 129-141. Mary Gerhart develops implications from Ricoeur and others in Genre Choices, Gender Questions (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1992). ] [17]^3 See my expansion of these reflections in "On Contingency and Culpability: Is the Postmodern Post-Tragic?," Evil After Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives, Ethics , ed. Jennifer L. Geddes (London: Routledge, forthcoming in 2001), where I discuss the 1996 productions in London of Sophocles' Oedipus plays, Goethe's Faust, and Robert Lepage and company's The Seven Streams of the River Ota. ] [18]^4 Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) xxiv. ] [19]^5 See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 3-7. ] [20]^6 See James Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), especially chs. 1-2; see also John D. Barbour, Tragedy as a Critique of Virtue: The Novel and Ethical Reflection (Chico: Scholars Press, 1984) and Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). ] [21]^7 Again, see my developement of these considerations in "On Contingency and Culpability." ] [22]^8 See James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991) and Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon, 1988) for two different views of moral disagreement in contemporary American religion and culture. ] [23]^9 See S?ren Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) and Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Volume I: Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941) chs. 1, 7-9. Niebuhr's view of the tragic should not be identified with the idea of Job's comforters, namely, that God simply wills suffering on persons as just punishment for sin. The view is rather that oppression, self-delusion, and eventually the fall of the powerful are structural consequences of the spiritual dynamic, sin, i.e., the hubristic imagining of infinite power or self-securing autonomy. ] [24]^10 See Edward Farley, Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), especially ch. 6; and Wendy Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1990). ] [25]^11 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 32. ] [26]^12 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 74. ] From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 12 21:46:00 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 14:46:00 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The bulge under the President's suit: was he wired? Message-ID: <01C4B06A.31B2A630.shovland@mindspring.com> Barring mishaps tomorrow, I think you are right. I'm not happy about it, but I don't think the current Democratic leadership is capable of running a winning campaign. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2004 2:06 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] The bulge under the President's suit: was he wired? Steve, I watched the second debate for about an hour and decided that he spoke far too fast to have been wired. He will be reelected, since he has demonstrated to swing voters in swing states that he is not befuddled. This is what held back voters who like Bush's rhetoric and policies but had doubts about the man himself. I said as much the day after the second debate and warned that my record as a prophet is not great. Frank _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Oct 13 04:29:58 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 21:29:58 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Grey days in American politics Message-ID: <01C4B0A2.A0AE6230.shovland@mindspring.com> It's easy to think that America has two elite parties these days: the Democratic elite on the left and the Republican elite on the right. The Democrats pander to the economic interests of the middle class, and the Republicans pander to the cultural prejudices of the middle class. Both elite parties ignore the lower class because they don't vote, and neither party seems to care about the alienation of those who don't participate. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Oct 13 18:13:58 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 11:13:58 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] tragedy In-Reply-To: <200410131800.i9DI0s000316@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041013181358.10884.qmail@web13422.mail.yahoo.com> >>Or, thirdly, we might judge that tragedy and the tragic have been eclipsed by the historical traumas that our century in particular has witnessed.<< --I think mass media exposure to mass trauma has made it more difficult for people to relate to suffering that doesn't occur outside their social circle. We're immunizing ourselves to suffering that doesn't directly affect us, and I'm not sure we have a choice. We'd be paralyzed if we had to be in constant mourning. Michael _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Oct 13 18:36:35 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 11:36:35 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] tragedy Message-ID: <01C4B118.E5B23750.shovland@mindspring.com> I'm reading Dean Ornish's latest book on Reversing Heart Disease. Part of his program is psychological, and he talks about the need to carefully modulate the openness of our hearts. We need to be open enough to be fully alive yet not so open that we are overwhelmed by negative inputs. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2004 11:14 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] tragedy >>Or, thirdly, we might judge that tragedy and the tragic have been eclipsed by the historical traumas that our century in particular has witnessed.<< --I think mass media exposure to mass trauma has made it more difficult for people to relate to suffering that doesn't occur outside their social circle. We're immunizing ourselves to suffering that doesn't directly affect us, and I'm not sure we have a choice. We'd be paralyzed if we had to be in constant mourning. Michael _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 13 20:06:34 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 16:06:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Snooze Alarm Takes Its Toll on a Nation Message-ID: Snooze Alarm Takes Its Toll on a Nation NYT October 12, 2004 By MARTICA HEANER When his clock-radio goes off at 7 a.m., David Epstein's latest wake-up strategy roars into high gear: he stumbles out of bed, walks across the room and pushes the snooze button. Then he climbs between the sheets. A few minutes later, his travel clock rings. He presses snooze and rolls over for more sleep - until the alarm on his BlackBerry goes off. Sitting up, he punches keys to reset it for 10 more minutes, then it's back to the pillow. The pattern repeats amid a cacophony of assorted rings until his real wake-up time, 8 a.m. In a nation that clocks around six to seven hours of sleep a night when an average of eight hours is recommended, it is a rare person who wakes up without an alarm. And because it is usually a struggle, pushing snooze to delay the day has become as much a part of the wake-up ritual as a cup of coffee. But is a bumpy arousal for 30, 60 or even 90 minutes a way to recoup much-needed sleep? Or is it a recipe for exhaustion? Although scientists have not specifically tackled the question, sleep researchers agree that short bouts of sleep are far from ideal. The restorative value of rest is diminished, especially when the increments are short, said Dr. Edward Stepanski, who has studied sleep fragmentation at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. And a teeter-totter effect of dozing and waking causes shifts in the brain-wave patterns. "Even a subtle noise that doesn't actually wake you up is disruptive enough to affect the sleep quality," Dr. Stepanski said. "That's why someone who falls asleep with the TV on may wake up exhausted. So, if a person is rousing themselves enough to reset a clock, there's likely to be an even more profound effect." It is an axiom of sleep research that not all sleep is equal. A night's sleep is divided into five continually shifting stages, defined by types of brain waves that reflect either lighter or deeper sleep. Toward morning, there is an increase in rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, when the muscles are relaxed and dreaming occurs, and recent memories may be consolidated in the brain. Sleep-deprived snooze-button addicts are likely to cut short their quota of REM sleep, impairing their mental functioning during the day. How tired a person is when the snooze-button frenzy begins is important, experts say. Someone who got a full eight hours of sleep may push the snooze button, but won't nod off again that easily, Dr. Stepanski said. And some people seem to be more tolerant of short-term sleep loss. But the person who has been getting too little sleep for too long may be a wreck, especially by Friday after racking up a large sleep debt during the week. To complicate matters, feeling alert is not just a matter of getting the right dose of different kinds of sleep. The body has its own alarm clock, a circadian rhythm in which fluctuations in hormones like cortisol, melatonin, ghrelin and growth hormone regulate sleepiness and alertness, as well as other body functions. And sleep patterns can run on a schedule different from a person's body clock. Trying to sneak in more sleep when someone is used to getting up early can cause the body to switch to an alert mode, making any extra sleep light and fragmented, said Dr. Timothy Roehrs, the director of research at the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. On the other hand, if someone's body is on a later cycle from habitually staying up late, waking up early is that much harder because the body is not yet pumping out peak levels of cortisol and other hormones that help wake people up. Still, most hard-working people cope, managing to live in what researchers agree is a perpetual sleep-deprived state. They mask fatigue by keeping themselves alert with a variety of stimuli, like caffeine, exercise or simply keeping busy. Some people with sleep debts do not consider themselves tired, believing that they are functioning normally, said Dr. David Dinges, chief of the sleep and chronobiology division at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. But evidence is mounting on the behavioral risks of long-term partial sleep deprivation. Not getting enough sleep day after day takes its toll. And it is not only medical interns and truck drivers doing double shifts who can suffer from serious mistakes at work because of it. In the August issue of the journal Sleep, Dr. Roehrs published one of the first studies to measure the effect of sleepiness on decision making and risk taking. Dr. Roehrs and his colleagues paid sleepy and fully alert subjects to complete a series of computer tasks. At random times, they were given a choice to take their money and stop. Or they could forge ahead with the potential of either earning more money or losing it all if their work was not completed within an unknown remainder of time. "The alert people were very sensitive to the amount of work necessary to finish and the risk of losing their money if they didn't," Dr. Roehrs said. "The more work they had, the more apt they were to stop. Without fail, the sleepy people chose to quit when it was optimal to continue, and they gambled losing it all by trying to finish the task for more money even when it was 100 percent likely that they would be unable to finish." Numerous studies have documented sleep impairments on memory, reaction time, comprehension and attention. Even emotional states can be affected. One of the first signs of sleep debt is irritability and increased depression, said Dr. Arthur Spielman, a professor of psychology and sleep researcher at City College of New York. "Creativity and a zest for life are also dampened," Dr. Spielman said. "You just don't feel like doing much." Moreover, there is a growing realization that chronic sleep loss affects health, from minor disturbances like a headache to an increased risk for obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. So what is a sleepy person to do? Start paying back sleep debt, for starters, experts say. Turn off David Letterman and get to bed half an hour earlier. Night owls who do not feel sleepy should cut off the stimulation: turn off the lights and television and lie in bed with closed eyes for one minute to unmask their sleepiness, Dr. Spielman recommended. He added that those who still found it hard to get to sleep early at night should wake up early and experience morning light to reset the body clock. After a couple of weeks, they will feel more tired in the evening and go to sleep earlier, making it easier to get up the next day, he added. And come morning, setting the clock for only 10 minutes earlier than the optimal wake-up time, allowing for only a single opportunity to press the snooze button, will provide the most restorative period of solid sleep. Of course, waking at the last possible minute requires a leap of faith. "I'm not convinced that this would work because I don't trust myself to get up," Mr. Epstein admitted. "Besides, I like to ease myself out of bed. When that alarm rings, I would sell my soul for an extra 15 minutes of sleep. "So, by setting my clocks an hour earlier, I get to wake up and know that I can go back to bed. It feels really good." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/12/health/12snoo.html From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 13 20:09:14 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 16:09:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] ABC News: John Allen Paulos: How to Prevent Nuclear Terror Message-ID: ABC News: John Allen Paulos: How to Prevent Nuclear Terror http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/print?id=140495 Author Spells Out Steps Required to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism Oct. 3, 2004 -- Nuclear terrorism is a horrifying possibility, but it needn't be a paralyzing one. That's the message of a new book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, by Graham Allison. He begins by sketching a realistic scenario in which as many as a million lives could be lost following explosion of a nuclear device in a large American city. Such a toll would be hundreds of times as great as that of Sept. 11. Understandably enough, most of us would rather talk about Kitty Kelley's book or possibly counterfeit memos than such a prospect. Unpleasant though it is, we should pay close attention to the feasible steps that Allison argues can greatly reduce the probability of such a nuclear terrorist attack. Compared to the cost in human life, financial resources and international goodwill of the Iraq war, Allison argues that these steps are almost cheap. Formerly dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans in the first Clinton administration, the professor backs up his dire warnings with considerable expertise. His outline of what must be done to avoid a calamity is comprised of three No's and seven Yeses. The heart of the book, however, is the Noes, which are: No loose nukes, No new nukes, No new nuclear states. The Three Noes The first and most important No requires that the United States help secure Russia's huge and poorly guarded stockpiles of fissile material (enriched uranium and plutonium) and nuclear weapons. Of particular concern is its supply of so-called suitcase nuclear bombs, an unhealthy fraction of which are unaccounted for. Securing the stockpiles is being done in a limited way under the auspices of the Nunn-Lugar Act, which was passed by Congress for this purpose. Allison argues, however, that it will take 13 years to secure all of Russia's fissile material at the rate we're going and that we should spend the money to help them do the job in four years. (This position, it should be noted, has been endorsed by the Kerry campaign, for which Allison serves as a consultant.) Obtaining fissile material is the primary difficulty facing those trying to make a weapon. No material, no bomb. But with enough enriched uranium or plutonium, some knowledge of physics, and a little Internet surfing, a crude weapon can easily be made in less than a year. And the unfortunate fact is that in Russia there is enough fissile material vulnerable to theft to make 30,000 additional nuclear weapons. Furthermore, though it contains 90 percent of all existing fissile material outside the United States, Russia is not the only worry. Allison writes that 32 other countries have some, and about 25 of the 130 nuclear research reactors in 40 countries contain sufficient fissile material to produce at least one nuclear bomb. The second No requires that we ensure that more fissile material is not produced by countries such as Iran whose generators' avowed rationale is the peaceful production of electricity. Easier said than done, but he recommends strengthening the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty's terms regarding these reactors. The deal that would be needed for this to work might include a program whereby countries with nuclear capabilities would sell enriched uranium to those countries that want or need electricity from nuclear reactors. Allison's third No requires that the so-called nuclear club (which ideally should have no members) should be limited to the present eight members (the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, Pakistan, India and Israel) or else the membership will mushroom (sorry) out of control. Both Iran and North Korea, which probably already has a couple of bombs, must be persuaded in one way or another to give up their nuclear aspirations, and this "persuasion" should not be a simplistic choice between ineffective pleading and counterproductive bombing. Pressure must continue to be carefully applied to Pakistan, whose black marketers have recklessly sold "nuclear starter kits" and personal consulting services to anyone willing to pay for them. Misplaced Priorities In fact, all three of these No's require "muscular diplomacy." Given the way the United States is viewed around the world today, however, this is going to be even more difficult than it otherwise would be. This fact is at the root of Allison's contention that the Bush administration has misplaced priorities and squandered opportunities to improve national security. (Instead of fixing the gaping hole in our roof in preparation for the upcoming hurricane, we're spending time and money sewing a rip in our umbrella.) Implementing the three No's will be expensive. Allison's estimate of the cost of securing all the fissile material in the world, for example, is $30 billion to $40 billion (although getting rid of the more extreme vulnerabilities would cost considerably less). Work must be done and money expended in this country as well -- very much less than the $200 billion authorized (though not all spent yet) in Iraq -- but still a substantial amount for a deficit-burdened budget. More containers coming into this country must be inspected and more radiation sniffers and detectors purchased. As Allison notes, 30,000 trucks, 6,500 rail cars and 140 ships bring in 50,000 cargo containers every day. Only one in 20 of them is screened, and even these screenings will not always detect nuclear weapons or enriched uranium or plutonium. The seven Yeses that Allison discusses are important, but rather standard proposals. In particular he stresses putting together global alliances with specific aims. The virtue of this is underlined by a telling comparison. Unlike the Iraq war with its ever-changing rationales (talk about flip-flopping!) and largely unilateral prosecution, the Gulf War had a clearly delineated goal and more than 90 percent of its cost was paid by our allies. His other Yeses include getting better intelligence, conducting a more humble foreign policy and pursuing a more focused policy against Islamic terrorists that does not produce more of them than it neutralizes. Allison credits the Bush administration for quickly recognizing the nexus between terrorism and nuclear weapons, but decries its "absence of urgency" in dealing with nuclear nonproliferation. "We've either been plodding along at a snail's pace or gone backward, way backward." Some of the book's premises, facts and conclusions may be questioned, but Nuclear Terrorism has a subtitle that everyone should take seriously: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. Professor of mathematics at Temple University, [2]John Allen Paulos is the author of best-selling books, including Innumeracy and A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market. His Who's Counting? column on ABCNEWS.com appears the first weekend of every month. References (they both work!) 1. http://www.math.temple.edu/paulos 2. http://www.math.temple.edu/~paulos/ From HowlBloom at aol.com Thu Oct 14 02:05:08 2004 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 22:05:08 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] (no subject) Message-ID: <65.361fbf59.2e9f38d4@aol.com> If you get a chance, take a gander at this: http://physicaplus.org.il/view_eng1.html. It's my article on "The Xerox Effect" in PhysicaPlus, the succulently-designed online publication of the Israeli Physical Society--the Israeli society of physicists. "The Xerox Effect" tells the story of the first ten billion years of cosmic history--the ten billion years before life began. It argues that this universe has been seized by Darwinian evolution ever since its first microsecond of existence. If you didn't fit, you died. If you DID fit you did things we think of as uniquely human. You socialized. Then you either dominated, subordinated, or were swallowed and digested by the metabolic machinery of a sun or a black hole. You followed Michael Waller's evolutionary dictum: "dominate, subordinate, or die". Actually the Waller Law may need an amendment: "dominate, subordinate, transform, or die". If you agree or disagree with the article, please comment on it in the discussion forum: http://physicaplus.org.il/forum_article_eng.html If PhysicaPlus sees that this article generates online activity, it will open itself to yet more articles taking big-picture points of view. All thanks--Howard By the way, if you can figure out how the discussion forum works, by all means let me know ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 14 03:08:00 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 20:08:00 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] (no subject) Message-ID: <01C4B160.57B2F820.shovland@mindspring.com> Didn't "cooperate" play a role too? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: HowlBloom at aol.com [SMTP:HowlBloom at aol.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2004 7:05 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; h-bd at yahoogroups.com; hbe-l at a3.com; David Sloan Wilson; Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin Cc: M.Waller at stigma.freeserve.co.uk; medialab_bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com; bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com Subject: [Paleopsych] (no subject) If you get a chance, take a gander at this: http://physicaplus.org.il/view_eng1.html. It's my article on "The Xerox Effect" in PhysicaPlus, the succulently-designed online publication of the Israeli Physical Society--the Israeli society of physicists. "The Xerox Effect" tells the story of the first ten billion years of cosmic history--the ten billion years before life began. It argues that this universe has been seized by Darwinian evolution ever since its first microsecond of existence. If you didn't fit, you died. If you DID fit you did things we think of as uniquely human. You socialized. Then you either dominated, subordinated, or were swallowed and digested by the metabolic machinery of a sun or a black hole. You followed Michael Waller's evolutionary dictum: "dominate, subordinate, or die". Actually the Waller Law may need an amendment: "dominate, subordinate, transform, or die". If you agree or disagree with the article, please comment on it in the discussion forum: http://physicaplus.org.il/forum_article_eng.html If PhysicaPlus sees that this article generates online activity, it will open itself to yet more articles taking big-picture points of view. All thanks--Howard By the way, if you can figure out how the discussion forum works, by all means let me know ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 14 03:20:10 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 20:20:10 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Time to move the model forward Message-ID: <01C4B162.0AE57DE0.shovland@mindspring.com> The cosmos may have begun with quarks and sparks, and certainly bacteria play an important role, but evolution didn't end there. Reptiles commonly eat their young, but mammals do not. Mammals introduced something new into the cosmic order- nurturing. Competition continues to play a role, but even bacterial colonies prosper mostly by cooperating with their fellow species members. The future survival of humanity now depends more on getting along than it does on fighting. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From HowlBloom at aol.com Thu Oct 14 04:52:56 2004 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 00:52:56 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Ashafar experiment - need help Message-ID: <55.639eba5b.2e9f6028@aol.com> Here's a quick and possibly ignorant interpretation of the Afshar experiment. Sometimes my mind thinks in English. Sometimes it thinks in French. When it thinks in French it thinks in ways that it can't think in English. Language has amazing properties--properties to constrict us and properties that set us free. Back to the Afshar experiment. We're asking a question based on metaphor. Which metaphor do the characteristics of a photon fit--the metaphor of a tiny crumb, a particle, or the metapor of a ripple in a pond, a wave. As the centuries roll on the number of metaphors in our vocabulary increase. And with new metaphors come new terms, new ways to use language to comprehend. Descartes could not think of things in terms of software versus hardware. There were no computers in his day. We use computers all the time. Software versus hardware thinking comes to us with ease. Our rapidly evolving technology has given us new metaphors and new language--a new vocabulary. Our problem is that we don't yet have a metaphor for something that "acts like a particle", a crumb, when we use one sort of detection contraption and "acts like a wave" of water when we use another detection device entirely. So let's make our own metaphor. Let's call it a "wavicle". A wavicle is a thing or a process (or both--as most things are). It is a thing or a process that shows the characteristics of a wave when viewed with one detection gadget and the characteristics of a particle when we switch to another gangle of gadgetry. Now let's shuffle our deck of metaphors and yank out that metaphorical wonder called the elephant. If the hairs on the tip of the tail act like particles and the trunk ripples like a wave, what does the elephant look like? The elephant whose shape we're seeking right now is the wavicle--or at least one wavicle, the photon. There may well be other wavicles out there. Is the invisible linkage between the scattershot bristles of the tail and the woobling wavery of the trunk simply still invisible because we haven't invented enough new detection devices with which to touch, test, and see photons--wavicles-- in their full glory? Or is the body of the wavicle in another dimension entirely? There's an old Bloom theory about non-locality. It says that when you part a stream of photons they still seem linked to each other because they ARE linked in a fifth dimension. Here's the sort of thing I mean. Imagine that you are of dragging a tuning fork sideways through Flatland. To the Flatlanders it looks as if your tuning fork is just one straight line. If the Flatlanders put an obstacle in the tuning fork's path, you, the tuning-fork dragger, can twist the tuning fork around 90 degrees. A tuning fork is shaped like an upside-down U. One arm of the tuning fork can go around the obstacle to the left. Another can go around the obstacle to the right. To the Flatlanders, it looks as if the tuning fork has split in two. If the branches continue to show the same characteristics, the Flatlanders might wonder how faster-than-the-speed-of-light communication between the two occurs. You wouldn't have to wonder. You'd see that the connection has never been broken. The right and left branches of the tuning fork, the upside-down U, are connected in a dimension the Flatlanders can't perceive. (I wish I could show you this with a flash animation.) I've just used a small barrage of metaphors on you: waves, particles, elephants, Flatlanders, and tuning forks. I can use them easily because you know their stories and their shapes. You know the tale of the five blind scientists arguing about the shape of the elephant. And you know the story of Flatland. They are part of your vocabulary. Now we have a new story--the story of the mystery thing--the story of the unknown what's-this that sometimes appears like a particle and sometimes appears like a wave. It's simply a wavicle. Now we have to determine what a wavicle is. New vocabulary and new metaphor, new way of asking questions and of solving them. New ways of seeing lead to new ways of being. And new ways of being lead to new ways of seeing. Perception is a collective thing that oscillates like a wave. Or does it oscillate like a wavicle? In a message dated 10/13/2004 3:23:32 AM Eastern Standard Time, Howl Bloom writes: Hopefully I can write more tomorrow. But here' the compilation I picked up by following your leads. It's very intriguing: Retrieved October 13, 2004, from the World Wide Web http://www.philosophersnet.com/magazine/article.php?id=819 Sci-Phi 28: Is the Copenhagen interpretation under threat? Click for a printer friendly version of this article Mathew Iredale Since it was first developed, some 70 years ago, the ?Copenhagen interpretation? of quantum theory has been the cause of significant disagreement amongst both physicists and philosophers. Its main architect, the physicist Niels Bohr, summed up the typical response to it when he said ?Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.? Einstein disliked it because of its probabilistic implications, but also because he believed that it was the task of science to provide us with knowledge of the world that is independent of observers and their acts of observation. And this is something that the Copenhagen interpretation expressly forbids. Bohr insisted that the only way to make sense of the mathematics of quantum theory is to assume that nothing really exists until it is measured. We cannot talk about an objective reality independent of observers because our observations make a difference to what we will see. Another of the architects of quantum theory, Erwin Schr?dinger, was unimpressed by this interpretation. He created a celebrated thought experiment, now referred to as Schr?dinger?s Cat, to make plain the absurdity inherent in it. He imagined a closed room, or box, containing a live cat and a tiny radioactive sample connected to a container of cyanide. The whole thing is set up in such a way that there is a fifty-fifty chance that the radioactive sample will trigger the release of the cyanide and kill the cat. Common sense tells us that the cat inside the box is either dead or alive, depending upon whether the radioactive trigger has fired. But according to the Copenhagen interpretation, one cannot say this until an observer actually looks into the box and sees that the cat is dead (or that it is alive). Until then, the cat is taken to be both dead and alive at the same time. Clearly, this is an extraordinary state of affairs and yet it has been part of scientific orthodoxy for the last 80 years. But perhaps not for much longer, if the results of a controversial experiment by the physicist Shahriar Afshar prove to be valid. One of the strange features of the fundamental building blocks of reality is that under some circumstance they behave as particles, whereas under other circumstances they have clear wave-like properties. This is most clearly shown in the ? double-slit? experiment, in which electrons are fired at a thin metal plate with two narrow slits in it. The electrons pass through one or other of the slits to arrive at a phosphor coated screen, where they produce a flash of light that is picked up by a detector. The experiment is carried out in three stages. In stage one, only one of the slits is open, and the electrons form a pattern on the screen similar to that which is seen when bullets are fired at a target. There is a concentration of ?hits? centred on one part of the screen which gradually fades as one moves away from this centre. In the second stage of the experiment the first slit is closed, the second slit is opened, and the electrons form a pattern on the screen similar to that observed in stage one, but with the concentration of ?hits? in a different position on the screen, corresponding to the different position of the slit on the metal plate. So far, so good. Nothing out of the ordinary here. The fun begins when you open both slits in the metal plate and fire electrons at the screen. If electrons always behaved like particles (as they did in stages 1 and 2) you would expect to see a combination of the results from stage 1 and stage 2. That is, the screen would have two concentrated areas of ?hits? corresponding to the electrons passing through the two slits, with the concentration of hits gradually fading away from each area of concentration. But this is not what you observe. What you observe is a classic interference pattern, such as that obtained when two water waves meet. That is, you observe a collection of peaks and troughs of ?hits? on the screen, inconsistent with the firing of simple particles through the two slits. The electrons appear to start out as particles when they are fired from the electron gun, and to end up as particles when they hit the phosphor screen, but to transform themselves into some sort of wave as they travel between the two. From such experiments it might appear as if electrons can be both waves and particles, but Bohr believed that it is more likely that they are something else entirely, something so novel that our ordinary, everyday experiences do not equip us to describe or understand them. [hb: a failure of metaphor?we need more tools in our kit of concepts.] Nor can our experimental equipment adequately capture them. When measured, a quantum entity will behave either like a particle or a wave. Bohr argued that it was the way in which you set up your experiment that determined which sort of behaviour you would observe and that you would never see both at the same time in one experiment. He called this the ?principle of complementarity?. Einstein objected to this, but was not able to refute it experimentally. It now appears as if Shahriar Afshar has done so. Afshar?s experiment, recently described in New Scientist, is a variation of the ?double-slit?experiment. Laser light falls on two pinholes in an opaque screen. On the far side of the screen is a lens that takes the light coming through each of the pinholes (another opaque screen stops all other light hitting the lens) and refocuses the spreading beams onto a mirror that reflects each onto a separate photon detector. In this way, Afshar gets a record of the rate at which photons are coming through each pinhole. According to the principle of complementarity, that means that there should be no evidence of an interference pattern. But according to Afshar, there is, as he has specifically designed the experiment to test for its presence. As he says, ?This flies in the face of complementarity?Something everyone believed and nobody questioned for 80 years appears to be wrong.? When he was invited to repeat the experiment at Harvard University earlier this year he got the same results and has now submitted his work for peer-reviewed publication. This is, of course, the acid test of his research and will determine whether his ideas are accepted or rejected by the wider scientific community, although a number of physicists have already voiced their support. Afshar is confident that his research will be accepted and that for many this will come as a relief. ?Many physicists have found Bohr?s ideas either vague or intolerable, but until now nobody has been able to show in an experiment that complementarity fails,? says Afshar. However, before anyone starts celebrating the apparent victory of common sense over quantum weirdness, it should be noted that, for example, we are still left with the situation in which a particle is a wave and a wave a particle. One part of the Gordian knot that is quantum theory may be slowly unravelling, but much of the rest remains as tightly bound as at any time in the last 80 years. Suggested reading The Quantum Universe , Tony Hey & Patrick Walters (Cambridge University Press) ?Quantum Rebel?, Marcus Chown, New Scientist 2457, 24 July 2004 Comment on this article here. Join our Mailing List Enter your email address into the box on your right and click on the button labelled 'Subscribe'.* *Note: we do not give out email addresses to third parties. Email Address TPM Online is The Philosophers' Magazine on the net It is edited by Dr Jeremy Stangroom ? The Philosophers' Magazine Contact Us ________ Retrieved October 13, 2004, from the World Wide Web http://www.analogsf.com/0410/altview2.shtml Analog Science Fiction The Alternate View John G. Cramer A FAREWELL TO COPENHAGEN? This column is about experimental tests of the various interpretations of quantum mechanics. The question at issue is whether we can perform experiments that can show whether there is an "observer-created reality" as suggested by the Copenhagen Interpretation, or a peacock?s tail of rapidly branching alternate universes, as suggested by the Many-Worlds Interpretation, or forward-backward in time handshakes, as suggested by the Transactional Interpretation? Until recently, I would have said that this was an impossible task, but a new experiment has changed my view, and I now believe that the Copenhagen and Many-Worlds Interpretations (at least as they are usually presented) have been falsified by experiment. The physical theory of quantum mechanics describes the behavior of matter and energy at the smallest distances. It has been verified by more than 70 years of experiments, and it is trusted by working physicists and regularly used in the fields of atomic, nuclear, and particle physics. However, quantum mechanics is burdened by a dismaying array of alternative and mutually contradictory ways of interpreting its mathematical formalism. These include the orthodox Copenhagen Interpretation, the currently fashionable Many Worlds Interpretation, my own Transactional Interpretation, and a number of others. Many (including me) have declared, with almost the certainty of a mathematical theorem, that it is impossible to distinguish between quantum interpretations with experimental tests. Reason: all interpretations describe the same mathematical formalism, and it is the formalism that makes the experimentally testable predictions. As it turns out, while this "theorem" is not wrong, it does contain a significant loophole. If an interpretation is not completely consistent with the mathematical formalism, it can be tested and indeed falsified. As we will see, that appears to be the situation with the Copenhagen and Many-Worlds Interpretations, among many others, while my own Transactional Interpretation easily survives the experimental test. The experiment that appears to falsify these venerable and widely trusted interpretations of quantum mechanics is the Afshar Experiment. It is a new quantum test, just performed last year, which demonstrates the presence of complete interference in an unambiguous "which-way" measurement of the passage of light photons through a pair of pinholes. But before describing the Afshar Experiment, let us take a backward look at the Copenhagen Interpretation and Neils Bohr ?s famous Principle of Complementarity. Quantum mechanics was first formulated independently by Erwin Schr?dinger and Werner Heisenberg in the mid-1920s. Physicists usually have a mental picture of the underlying mechanisms within theory they are formulating, but Heisenberg had no such picture of behavior at the atomic level. With amazing intuition and remarkable good luck, he managed to invent a matrix-based mathematical structure that agreed with and predicted the data from most atomic physics measurements. On the other hand, Schr?dinger did start from a definite picture in constructing his quantum wave mechanics. Making an analogy with massless electromagnetic waves, he constructed a similar wave equation describing particles (e.g., electrons) with a rest mass. However, it soon was demonstrated by Bohr and Heisenberg that while Schr?dinger?s mathematics was valid, his underlying mass-wave picture was unworkable, and he was forced to abandon it. The net result was that the new quantum mechanics was left as a theory with no underlying picture or mechanism. Moreover, its mathematics was saying some quite bizarre things about how matter and energy behaved at the atomic level, and there seemed no way of explaining this behavior. In the Autumn of 1926, while Heisenberg was a lecturer Bohr?s Institute in Copenhagen, the two men walked the streets of the ancient city almost every day, arguing, gesturing, and sketching pictures and equations on random scraps of paper, as they struggled to come to grips with the puzzles and paradoxes that the quantum formalism presented. How could an object behave as both a particle and a wave? How could its wave description spread out in all directions, then "collapse" to a location where it was detected like a bubble that had been pricked. Did an electron smoothly make the transition from one atomic orbit to another or did it undergo a "quantum jump", abruptly disappearing from one orbit and appearing in the other? How could the occurrence of seemingly random quantum events be predicted? The Copenhagen autumn phased into winter, and no solution was found. In February on 1927, Bohr went away on a skiing vacation, and while he was gone, Heisenberg discovered a key piece to the puzzle concealed in the mathematics of Schr?dinger?s wave mechanics. When one tried to "localize" the position of an electron by specifying its location more and more precisely, the mathematics required that the momentum (mass times velocity) of the electron must become less localized and more uncertain. One had to add more and more wave components with different momentum values to make the position peak sharper. Knowledge of position and momentum were like the two ends of a seesaw: lowering one raised the other. The product of the uncertainties in position and momentum could not be reduced below a lower limit, which was Planck?s constant. The mathematics required that any attempt to do so must fail. This became the essence of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, first published in early 1927. When Bohr returned to Copenhagen, he was presented with the new idea. At first he was skeptical, because of problems with Heisenberg?s "gamma ray microscope" example used in the paper, but he finally convinced himself that, example or not, the basic idea was correct. The Uncertainty Principle brought Bohr to a new insight into quantum behavior. Position and momentum were "complementary", in the sense that precise knowledge of one excluded knowledge of the other, yet they were jointly essential for a complete description of quantum events. Bohr extended the idea of complementary variables to energy and time and to particle and wave behavior. One must choose either the particle mode, with localized positions, trajectories, and energy quanta, or the wave mode, with spreading wave functions, delocalization and interference. The Uncertainty Principle allowed both descriptions within the same mathematical framework because each excluded the other. Bohr?s Complementarity and Heisenberg?s Uncertainty, along with the statistical interpretation of Schr?dinger?s wave functions and the view of the wave function as observer knowledge were all interconnected to form the new Copenhagen Interpretation. In Bohr?s words: ". . . we are presented with a choice of either tracing the path of the particle, or observing interference effects . . . we have to do with a typical example of how the complementary phenomena appear under mutually exclusive experimental arrangements." In the context of a two-slit welcher weg (which-way) experiment, the Principle of Complementarity dictates "the observation of an interference pattern and the acquisition of which-way information are mutually exclusive." By 1927 the Copenhagen Interpretation was the big news in physics and the subject of well-attended lectures by Bohr, Born, and Heisenberg. In the next decade, through many more lectures and demonstrations of the effectiveness of the ideas and despite the objections of Albert Einstein, it was canonized as the Standard Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it has held this somewhat shaky position ever since. The Afshar experiment was first performed last year by Shariar S. Afshar and repeated while he was a Visiting Scientist at Harvard. In a very subtle way it directly tests the Copenhagen assertion that the observation of an interference pattern and the acquisition of particle path which-way information are mutually exclusive. The experiment consists of two pinholes in an opaque sheet illuminated by a laser. The light passing through the pinholes forms an interference pattern, a zebra-stripe set of maxima and zeroes of light intensity that can be recorded by a digital camera. The precise locations of the interference minimum positions, the places where the light intensity goes to zero, are carefully measured and recorded. Behind the plane where the interference pattern forms, Afshar places a lens that forms an image of each pinhole at a second plane. A light flash observed at image #1 on this plane indicates unambiguously that a photon of light has passed through pinhole #1, and a flash at image #2 similarly indicates that the photon has passed through pinhole #2. Observation of the photon flashes therefore provides particle path which-way information, as described by Bohr. According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, in this situation all wave-mode interference effects must be excluded. However, at this point, Afshar introduces a new element to the experiment. He places one or more wires at the previously measured positions of the interference minima. In one such setup, if the wire plane is uniformly illuminated, the wires absorb about 6% of the light. Then Afshar measures the difference in the light received at the pinhole images with and without the wires in place. We are led by the Copenhagen Interpretation to expect that the positions of the interference minima should have no particular significance, and that the wires should intercept 6% of the light they do for uniform illumination. Similarly, the usual form of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics leads us to expect 6% interception and no interference, since a photon detected at image #1 is in one universe while the same photon detected at image #2 is in another universe, and since the two "worlds" are distinguished by different physical outcomes, they should not interfere. However, what Afshar observes is that the amount of light intercepted by the wires is very small, consistent with 0% interception. There are still locations of zero intensity and the wave interference pattern is still present in the which-way measurement. Wires are placed at the zero-intensity locations of the interference minima intercept no light. Thus, it appears that both the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many-Worlds Interpretation have been falsified by experiment. Does this mean that the theory of quantum mechanics has also been falsified? No indeed! The quantum formalism has no problem in predicting the Afshar result. A simple quantum mechanical calculation using the standard formalism shows that the wires should intercept only a very small fraction of the light. The problem encountered by the Copenhagen and Many-Worlds Interpretations is that the Afshar Experiment has identified a situation in which these popular interpretations of quantum mechanics are inconsistent with the quantum formalism itself. What about the Transactional Interpretation, which describes each quantum process as a handshake between a normal "offer" wave (_) and a back-in-time advanced "confirmation" wave (_*)? The offer waves from the laser pass through both pinholes and cancel at the positions of the zeroes in the interference pattern. Therefore, no transactions can form at these locations, and the wires can intercept only a very small amount of light. Thus, the Transactional interpretation is completely consistent with the results of the Afshar Experiment and with the quantum formalism. Does this mean that the Copenhagen and Many Worlds Interpretations, having been falsified by experiment, must be abandoned? Does it mean that the physics community must turn to an interpretation like the Transactional Interpretation that is consistent with the Afshar results? Perhaps. I predict that a new generation of "Quantum Lawyers" will begin to populate the physics literature with arguments challenging what "is" is and claming that the wounded interpretations never said that interference should be completely absent in a quantum which-way measurement. And most practicing physicists who learned the Copenhagen Interpretation at the knee of an old and beloved professor will not abandon that mode of thinking, even if it is found to be inconsistent with the formalism and with experiment. But nevertheless, the rules of the game have changed. There is a way of distinguishing between interpretations of quantum mechanics. It will take some time for the dust to settle, but I am confident that when it does we will have interpretations of quantum mechanics that are on a sounder footing than the ones presently embraced by most of the physics community. AV Columns On-line: Electronic reprints of over 120 "The Alternate View" columns by John G. Cramer, previously published in Analog, are available on-line at: http://www.npl.washington.edu/av. Electronic preprints of papers listed below are available at: http://arxiv.org. Reference: The Copenhagen Interpretation: Neils Bohr, Nature 121, 580 (1928). Neils Bohr, in: Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, P. A. Schlipp, Ed. (Library of Living Philosophers, Evanston, Illinois, 1949). The Transactional Interpretation: John G. Cramer, Reviews of Modern Physics 58, 647 (1986); http://www.npl.washington.edu/TI The Afshar Experiment Shariar S. Afshar, (submitted to Physical Review Letters, July, 2004); See also http://users.rowan.edu/~afshar In a message dated 10/12/2004 3:00:02 AM Eastern Standard Time, kurakin.pavel at gmail.com writes: Howard -- happy to hear You! Oh yes, You are right. Right is "Asfar", and here is what Google finds: http://users.rowan.edu/~afshar/ http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000674.html http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2004/Jul/hour2_073004.html http://www.analogsf.com/0410/altview2.shtml Not only this, but in fact this covers web-available information. No original papers, just discussions and\or advertisment to buy the hard-copy magazine. Here's the problem. Here's why I am so much excited. From web-discussions I've picked up that Prof. John Cramer is highly optimist about Ashfar results, since this experimant confirms (in some way! - in which exactly I can't find out) his transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics (TIQM), in preference to Copenhagen. And John Cramer's TIQM is one step from my (and Yours!) idea of "talks of particles". In short, a _talk_ (what we two You and me believe in) implies questions and answers, i.e. -- two-directional flow of information, two-sided waves. TIQM just introduces those 2-sided waves. And then, my "hidden time" idea, as I believe, makes such waves fully lawfull in physical sence. On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 02:35:45 EDT, howlbloom at aol.com wrote: > > > > Pavel-- Are you sure the spelling is correct? I couldn't find it in the NY > Public library computer system, in Questia, or in Google. Google will > usually return results on anything in this cosmos that has a name. But on > Ashafar it comes up blank. Onward--Howard > > In a message dated 10/11/2004 3:00:55 AM Eastern Standard Time, > kurakin.pavel at gmail.com writes: > May I ask Your help to find out what Ashafar experiment is. I have > found out that it is a kind of 2-slits experiment, but in some way it > falsifies Copenhagen interpretation of QM, which is widely discussed > in web-forums. > > > ---------- > Howard Bloom > Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of > History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to > the 21st Century > Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core > Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute > www.howardbloom.net > www.bigbangtango.net > Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic > of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: > The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American > Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, > Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, > International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: > Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. > For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: > www.paleopsych.org > for two chapters from > The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, > see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer > For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big > Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net > ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 47834 bytes Desc: not available URL: From paul.werbos at verizon.net Thu Oct 14 10:27:14 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 06:27:14 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] last night's debate In-Reply-To: <01C4B162.0AE57DE0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20041014052727.0205eec0@incoming.verizon.net> Last night's debate crystallized some of what has been going on, at a fundamental level, in US thinking. As did the first debate. It was clear that some statements were made more for effect -- and some were very serious and honestly expressed. For example, in the first debate, the point that Bush stressed most seriously and most repetitively was the point that: "A leader cannot flip-flop. He must always be steady. He must always stay the course. He cannot say things that might be harmful to His Cause..." Whenever Kerry tweaked him about the truthfulness of what he had been saying, he always came back to that point, and dutifully -- almost religiously? -- repeated the current party line. In the debate tonight, both candidates were asked about their faith. Bush made similar comments, and promised to Fight for the Cause. And at that moment, when Kerry replied... Perhaps at that moment, I might have responded very differently to the way he did. Yet I could fully understood how he did... And I certainly do not claim that I would have won votes any better than Kerry! In fact... I don't really know how I would have wordsmithed it. But I was thinking: "Isn't there something there in our faith about telling the truth? In these debates, Bush has consistently promised to say what is steady and what is safe and what advances his cause. He and his people clearly have more faith in the power of being good used car salesmen than anyone we have seen in a long time, if ever, in the US. You can see it in his face when he grins a vast grin about how he things he has painted me into a stereotype that he himself knows is not really true. He lives for the challenge of winning -- not for expressing the truth. But folks -- didn't someone once say that you shouldn't give up trying to tell the truth. Didn't someone say that you should have some faith - that even if it SEEMS in the short-term as if you are paying a price... that those who are persecuted in my name will be redeemed in the end? Mr. Bush pays very active lip service to his faith, and he talks about his faith a lot when it is politically convenient to him-- but he is not really trying so hard to LIVE what Jesus said. I cannot promise to you that I will succeed at all times in living up to those standards... but I can promise you that I will try as hard as I can. And it's clear that this Administration hasn't really been trying, and that their faith is in something else." But what did Kerry say instead? It was very interesting, in my view. At one level, what he said may have been more honest to the context. He remembered what Jesus REALLY said -- the true main thrust of the New Testament. He cited the 'Two Great Commandments." And he made a VERY similar point -- only instead of stressing the issue of the spirit of truth, he stressed the spirit of "love thy neighbor." I do wonder. Perhaps Kerry is more of a True Christian than Bush OR myself. It would perhaps be nice if we knew. It is not easy for a man to project his own deepest beliefs and motivations, while creating true comfort and tolerance for those of other beliefs. It was important that he tried in this debate -- but maybe it is worth working on more. And maybe we might ask how he manages that projection in his own thinking. But in the end... I have known some people I would tend to think of as true Christians. In the end, I am not one of them. In local Quaker meetings, maybe about half the people are true Christians or on the path to becoming such. Maybe half are what some call "Quaker Universalists," and that's how I label myself most of the time here lately. (People need labels...). "Universalist" basically means fully accepting... the fact (as I would see it)... that there is fundamental and valid spiritual inspiration lying behind ALL the major cultures of humanity... that we are not fundamentally divided up into Christian versus Heathen, or anything like that.. and in the end, that Jesus was unique more in a quantitative sense than in a qualitative sense... that we all partake of the same fundamental nature. In truth, I rebelled against modern Catholicism for good reason back when I was eight.. and in some sense the Spirit of Truth -- and rational foresight about the fate of humanity -- has been far more real to me than the Christian version of the Spirit of Love. And yet... with time... we learn and we mellow a bit. (As perhaps Kerry has too, in his way -- while Bush remains truly steadfast to things I remember from teen-age years. Even Bush's wife reminds me at times of the girl I might have married... and surely I would be richer today in monetary terms if I had... and she certainly had strong points I might understand better today than I did then...). I now understand that the Spirit of Love is something to be approached in a more active way... just as I have long understood that with the Spirit of Truth. And to me, I now see the two as more or less equal. The Spirit of Truth does not mean acting like a certain type of clever lawyer, for whom the definition of "truth" is "the out-of-bounds line, the most I can get away with under present circumstances." And indeed, the spirit of winning the baseball game animates much of Bush's inner team. For some of us, truth is an active struggle -- forgive me if I remember the phrase "the jihad within the self" used by those Moslems who are more sincere, and not like the baseball-playing Wahabis and ersatz jihadis -- and not just a constraint. We seek the truth, we seek more accurate understanding, both for ourselves and for others. We know that reality is so complex and our knowledge so constrained that we can never claim to have expressed the whole truth as yet.. but we keep trying to do better, not in saying Everything (though some would accuse us of trying too hard to say everything..).. but at least to accurately reflect Everything as it really is. To a true Christian, love is the same way... and perhaps I am vaguely beginning to realize the importance of trying to infuse my behavior with a bit more of that. OK -- so I would argue for trying to give equal time to the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Love, and would NOT draw a line in the sand about the unique divinity of Christ -- even though I would try to give him a bit more sincere respect than the used car salesmen who claim to speak in his name. I would agree with Kerry in stressing that we need to work hard to be truly cooperative with (and even loving towards) those who do not share the same basic faith. But based on some faith in the Spirit of Truth, as much as the Spirit of Love... and having NO FAITH in the spiritual power of used car salesmen, when there is a car that is overheating and badly needs a few valve replacements... well, with all due respect, you can see how I personally will vote, even as I respect friends who will vote otherwise. How can I still respect them, after all this? Well, life is very complex, and I have seen sincere Nobel Prize Winners choke over points that are simple from a truly detached and objective point of view... and it has often taken me years to see what should be obvious. Why should they be different? Yet still.. it does amuse me to look back and see how much I seem to have changed since I was a teenager utterly imbued in the Anglo-Saxon culture of wealthy Pennsylvania Republicans, identifying with a German father who had more resonance than you could believe with Ronald Reagan (in fact, I believe there was a real spiritual resonance there)... I remember going to the Goldwater Presidential campaign office in central Philadelphia about then, and being led by a kind of lawyer very different from the ones we hear about these days... who frustrated and disciplined all us overly enthusiastic and snide young teenagers and tried hard to teach us a more honorable path... too bad young George did not have more of those kinds of experiences. As for young Bush's faith... it reminds me a whole lot of piece in the New York Times magazine form LONG AGO (about 1970.. I actually dug up the reference in one of my papers, but don't have it handy right now)... "Are We a Nation of Mystics?" by Greeley. That is an EXTREMELY important piece, that really ought to be widely disseminated. (It was a report based on NSF-sponsored research, by the way.) It talks about people who have one very strong authentic experience.. and essentially fill themselves with:"OK, God, I'll be a good boy. But please don't let me see THAT ever again, I'm really not ready." Many of the worst perversions of organized religion (which Quakers do their best not to be) involve that sort of emotional decision... that they will try to "appease the Gods" by sacrificing young virgins or young unwed mothers ... so as to keep the Gods quiet, and avoid the discomfort of more authentic spiritual experience and commitment. For which the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Love are essential. (Equal time for someone else: there are also the Qi Gong folks who would add a third principle, a Spirit of Ren, for which there is no good quick translation.) My six-year-old empathizes with George Bush junior to a strange and embarrassing degree. I don't really believe in reincarnation in the usual way... but at times I wonder if he had a past life in those same parts of Philadelphia... it is so strong and uncanny. But maybe he is just responsive to his mother, who experienced Communism in Russia and understandably took some of the (valid) lessons seriously. So I am glad he is now getting deep into Star Wars (a very Zen-like set of movies and books). It is time for us all to work harder to resist the dark side of the force. And of course, the real truth is not any one of these cultures, or a fuzzy potpourri of them, but a crystal-like unity that can be seen from many angles. Best of luck to us all... Paul From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 14 13:22:05 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 06:22:05 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] last night's debate Message-ID: <01C4B1B6.20BB8160.shovland@mindspring.com> It wasn't as bad as the first debate, but the President's disordered thought processes did show up last night. I wonder if Americans aren't getting a little uneasy about what they see in him. Kerry has been consistently articulate throughout the debates, which is one reason why he has been the winner. I think he will be the winner again, but I don't know that it will determine the election. I regard Bush as the "Lemming in Chief," potentially leading our nation to destruction by telling us what so many want to hear. Bush obviously lied about his comments about Bin Laden, and Kerry corrected his lies about votes. We will see if Bush pays a price for that. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Werbos, Dr. Paul J. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2004 3:27 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] last night's debate Last night's debate crystallized some of what has been going on, at a fundamental level, in US thinking. As did the first debate. It was clear that some statements were made more for effect -- and some were very serious and honestly expressed. For example, in the first debate, the point that Bush stressed most seriously and most repetitively was the point that: "A leader cannot flip-flop. He must always be steady. He must always stay the course. He cannot say things that might be harmful to His Cause..." Whenever Kerry tweaked him about the truthfulness of what he had been saying, he always came back to that point, and dutifully -- almost religiously? -- repeated the current party line. In the debate tonight, both candidates were asked about their faith. Bush made similar comments, and promised to Fight for the Cause. And at that moment, when Kerry replied... Perhaps at that moment, I might have responded very differently to the way he did. Yet I could fully understood how he did... And I certainly do not claim that I would have won votes any better than Kerry! In fact... I don't really know how I would have wordsmithed it. But I was thinking: "Isn't there something there in our faith about telling the truth? In these debates, Bush has consistently promised to say what is steady and what is safe and what advances his cause. He and his people clearly have more faith in the power of being good used car salesmen than anyone we have seen in a long time, if ever, in the US. You can see it in his face when he grins a vast grin about how he things he has painted me into a stereotype that he himself knows is not really true. He lives for the challenge of winning -- not for expressing the truth. But folks -- didn't someone once say that you shouldn't give up trying to tell the truth. Didn't someone say that you should have some faith - that even if it SEEMS in the short-term as if you are paying a price... that those who are persecuted in my name will be redeemed in the end? Mr. Bush pays very active lip service to his faith, and he talks about his faith a lot when it is politically convenient to him-- but he is not really trying so hard to LIVE what Jesus said. I cannot promise to you that I will succeed at all times in living up to those standards... but I can promise you that I will try as hard as I can. And it's clear that this Administration hasn't really been trying, and that their faith is in something else." But what did Kerry say instead? It was very interesting, in my view. At one level, what he said may have been more honest to the context. He remembered what Jesus REALLY said -- the true main thrust of the New Testament. He cited the 'Two Great Commandments." And he made a VERY similar point -- only instead of stressing the issue of the spirit of truth, he stressed the spirit of "love thy neighbor." I do wonder. Perhaps Kerry is more of a True Christian than Bush OR myself. It would perhaps be nice if we knew. It is not easy for a man to project his own deepest beliefs and motivations, while creating true comfort and tolerance for those of other beliefs. It was important that he tried in this debate -- but maybe it is worth working on more. And maybe we might ask how he manages that projection in his own thinking. But in the end... I have known some people I would tend to think of as true Christians. In the end, I am not one of them. In local Quaker meetings, maybe about half the people are true Christians or on the path to becoming such. Maybe half are what some call "Quaker Universalists," and that's how I label myself most of the time here lately. (People need labels...). "Universalist" basically means fully accepting... the fact (as I would see it)... that there is fundamental and valid spiritual inspiration lying behind ALL the major cultures of humanity... that we are not fundamentally divided up into Christian versus Heathen, or anything like that.. and in the end, that Jesus was unique more in a quantitative sense than in a qualitative sense... that we all partake of the same fundamental nature. In truth, I rebelled against modern Catholicism for good reason back when I was eight.. and in some sense the Spirit of Truth -- and rational foresight about the fate of humanity -- has been far more real to me than the Christian version of the Spirit of Love. And yet... with time... we learn and we mellow a bit. (As perhaps Kerry has too, in his way -- while Bush remains truly steadfast to things I remember from teen-age years. Even Bush's wife reminds me at times of the girl I might have married... and surely I would be richer today in monetary terms if I had... and she certainly had strong points I might understand better today than I did then...). I now understand that the Spirit of Love is something to be approached in a more active way... just as I have long understood that with the Spirit of Truth. And to me, I now see the two as more or less equal. The Spirit of Truth does not mean acting like a certain type of clever lawyer, for whom the definition of "truth" is "the out-of-bounds line, the most I can get away with under present circumstances." And indeed, the spirit of winning the baseball game animates much of Bush's inner team. For some of us, truth is an active struggle -- forgive me if I remember the phrase "the jihad within the self" used by those Moslems who are more sincere, and not like the baseball-playing Wahabis and ersatz jihadis -- and not just a constraint. We seek the truth, we seek more accurate understanding, both for ourselves and for others. We know that reality is so complex and our knowledge so constrained that we can never claim to have expressed the whole truth as yet.. but we keep trying to do better, not in saying Everything (though some would accuse us of trying too hard to say everything..).. but at least to accurately reflect Everything as it really is. To a true Christian, love is the same way... and perhaps I am vaguely beginning to realize the importance of trying to infuse my behavior with a bit more of that. OK -- so I would argue for trying to give equal time to the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Love, and would NOT draw a line in the sand about the unique divinity of Christ -- even though I would try to give him a bit more sincere respect than the used car salesmen who claim to speak in his name. I would agree with Kerry in stressing that we need to work hard to be truly cooperative with (and even loving towards) those who do not share the same basic faith. But based on some faith in the Spirit of Truth, as much as the Spirit of Love... and having NO FAITH in the spiritual power of used car salesmen, when there is a car that is overheating and badly needs a few valve replacements... well, with all due respect, you can see how I personally will vote, even as I respect friends who will vote otherwise. How can I still respect them, after all this? Well, life is very complex, and I have seen sincere Nobel Prize Winners choke over points that are simple from a truly detached and objective point of view... and it has often taken me years to see what should be obvious. Why should they be different? Yet still.. it does amuse me to look back and see how much I seem to have changed since I was a teenager utterly imbued in the Anglo-Saxon culture of wealthy Pennsylvania Republicans, identifying with a German father who had more resonance than you could believe with Ronald Reagan (in fact, I believe there was a real spiritual resonance there)... I remember going to the Goldwater Presidential campaign office in central Philadelphia about then, and being led by a kind of lawyer very different from the ones we hear about these days... who frustrated and disciplined all us overly enthusiastic and snide young teenagers and tried hard to teach us a more honorable path... too bad young George did not have more of those kinds of experiences. As for young Bush's faith... it reminds me a whole lot of piece in the New York Times magazine form LONG AGO (about 1970.. I actually dug up the reference in one of my papers, but don't have it handy right now)... "Are We a Nation of Mystics?" by Greeley. That is an EXTREMELY important piece, that really ought to be widely disseminated. (It was a report based on NSF-sponsored research, by the way.) It talks about people who have one very strong authentic experience.. and essentially fill themselves with:"OK, God, I'll be a good boy. But please don't let me see THAT ever again, I'm really not ready." Many of the worst perversions of organized religion (which Quakers do their best not to be) involve that sort of emotional decision... that they will try to "appease the Gods" by sacrificing young virgins or young unwed mothers ... so as to keep the Gods quiet, and avoid the discomfort of more authentic spiritual experience and commitment. For which the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Love are essential. (Equal time for someone else: there are also the Qi Gong folks who would add a third principle, a Spirit of Ren, for which there is no good quick translation.) My six-year-old empathizes with George Bush junior to a strange and embarrassing degree. I don't really believe in reincarnation in the usual way... but at times I wonder if he had a past life in those same parts of Philadelphia... it is so strong and uncanny. But maybe he is just responsive to his mother, who experienced Communism in Russia and understandably took some of the (valid) lessons seriously. So I am glad he is now getting deep into Star Wars (a very Zen-like set of movies and books). It is time for us all to work harder to resist the dark side of the force. And of course, the real truth is not any one of these cultures, or a fuzzy potpourri of them, but a crystal-like unity that can be seen from many angles. Best of luck to us all... Paul _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 14 14:57:48 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 10:57:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: "Gay Genes" May Increase Fertility Message-ID: "Gay Genes" May Increase Fertility http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2004-10-13-4 Findings help resolve evolutionary paradox in supporting genetic basis of homosexuality Betterhumans Staff 10/13/2004 4:22 PM Genetic connection: Female relatives of gay men have been found more fertile, providing a solution to the evolutionary puzzle of "gay genes" Mothers of homosexual men and their female relatives appear to be more fertile, providing support for a genetic basis of homosexuality by explaining how "gay genes" survive. Italian researcher Francesca Corna and colleagues from the [1]University of Padova have found evidence that genetic factors underlying male [2]homosexuality also increase fertility in females. The findings help resolve an [3]evolutionary puzzle surrounding homosexuality's genetic underpinnings. According to evolutionary theory, traits that reduce an organism's reproductive success would gradually disappear as creatures with the traits die out. But if women carrying gay genes are more fertile, their increased reproduction could compensate for nonreproductive children and allow gay genes to survive. X marks the spot Since the early 1990s, research has strongly suggested underlying biological and genetic factors influencing homosexuality. In 1993, US researchers reported finding [4]evidence that homosexuality was passed from mother to son, although other researchers couldn't replicate the results and questioned the finding. Last year, researchers discovered [5]more than 50 genes linked to the organization of male and female brains, supporting the notion that homosexuality has biological origins. Findings have also suggested that [6]homosexual males tend to be younger siblings in families with many male children. Such findings have led researchers to suggest that after birthing many heterosexual males, some mothers may experience biological changes that cause them to birth homosexual males. Indeed, evidence has suggested that gay genes lie on part of the [7]X chromosome that mothers pass to their offspring. Relatively more reproductive For their study, Corna and colleagues looked at 98 homosexual and 100 heterosexual men and their relatives in a study that involved more than 4,600 people. They found that female relatives of the homosexual men's mothers had more offspring than female relatives of their fathers. This suggested that women who pass on gay genes to male offspring are more fertile. The theory was supported by the fact that female relatives of the heterosexual men's parents weren't as fertile. Still, the researchers estimate that the maternal effect accounted for just 14% of homosexuality and that birth order accounted for just 6.7%. This means that about 79% of homosexuality's origin is unknown, leaving room for many other influences, both biological and cultural. "It is clear that our findings, if confirmed by further research, are only one piece in a much larger puzzle on the nature of human sexuality," the researchers say. The research is reported in the journal [8]Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. References 1. http://www.unipd.it/ 2. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality 3. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution 4. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=8332896 5. http://www.betterhumans.com/News/news.aspx?ArticleID=2003-10-20-7 6. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=8540587 7. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_chromosome 8. http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/proc_bio_homepage.shtml From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 14 14:58:43 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 10:58:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: What Derrida Really Meant Message-ID: What Derrida Really Meant NYT October 14, 2004 By MARK C. TAYLOR Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines. Philosophers, theologians, literary and art critics, psychologists, historians, writers, artists, legal scholars and even architects have found in his writings resources for insights that have led to an extraordinary revival of the arts and humanities during the past four decades. And no thinker has been more deeply misunderstood. To people addicted to sound bites and overnight polls, Mr. Derrida's works seem hopelessly obscure. It is undeniable that they cannot be easily summarized or reduced to one-liners. The obscurity of his writing, however, does not conceal a code that can be cracked, but reflects the density and complexity characteristic of all great works of philosophy, literature and art. Like good French wine, his works age well. The more one lingers with them, the more they reveal about our world and ourselves. What makes Mr. Derrida's work so significant is the way he brought insights of major philosophers, writers, artists and theologians to bear on problems of urgent contemporary interest. Most of his infamously demanding texts consist of careful interpretations of canonical writers in the Western philosophical, literary and artistic traditions - from Plato to Joyce. By reading familiar works against the grain, he disclosed concealed meanings that created new possibilities for imaginative expression. Mr. Derrida's name is most closely associated with the often cited but rarely understood term "deconstruction." Initially formulated to define a strategy for interpreting sophisticated written and visual works, deconstruction has entered everyday language. When responsibly understood, the implications of deconstruction are quite different from the misleading clich?s often used to describe a process of dismantling or taking things apart. The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure - be it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious - that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably gets left out. These exclusive structures can become repressive - and that repression comes with consequences. In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists that what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems. As an Algerian Jew writing in France during the postwar years in the wake of totalitarianism on the right (fascism) as well as the left (Stalinism), Mr. Derrida understood all too well the danger of beliefs and ideologies that divide the world into diametrical opposites: right or left, red or blue, good or evil, for us or against us. He showed how these repressive structures, which grew directly out of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition, threatened to return with devastating consequences. By struggling to find ways to overcome patterns that exclude the differences that make life worth living, he developed a vision that is consistently ethical. And yet, supporters on the left and critics on the right have misunderstood this vision. Many of Mr. Derrida's most influential followers appropriated his analyses of marginal writers, works and cultures as well as his emphasis on the importance of preserving differences and respecting others to forge an identity politics that divides the world between the very oppositions that it was Mr. Derrida's mission to undo: black and white, men and women, gay and straight. Betraying Mr. Derrida's insights by creating a culture of political correctness, his self-styled supporters fueled the culture wars that have been raging for more than two decades and continue to frame political debate. To his critics, Mr. Derrida appeared to be a pernicious nihilist who threatened the very foundation of Western society and culture. By insisting that truth and absolute value cannot be known with certainty, his detractors argue, he undercut the very possibility of moral judgment. To follow Mr. Derrida, they maintain, is to start down the slippery slope of skepticism and relativism that inevitably leaves us powerless to act responsibly. This is an important criticism that requires a careful response. Like Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Mr. Derrida does argue that transparent truth and absolute values elude our grasp. This does not mean, however, that we must forsake the cognitive categories and moral principles without which we cannot live: equality and justice, generosity and friendship. Rather, it is necessary to recognize the unavoidable limitations and inherent contradictions in the ideas and norms that guide our actions, and do so in a way that keeps them open to constant questioning and continual revision. There can be no ethical action without critical reflection. During the last decade of his life, Mr. Derrida became preoccupied with religion and it is in this area that his contribution might well be most significant for our time. He understood that religion is impossible without uncertainty. Whether conceived of as Yahweh, as the father of Jesus Christ, or as Allah, God can never be fully known or adequately represented by imperfect human beings. And yet, we live in an age when major conflicts are shaped by people who claim to know, for certain, that God is on their side. Mr. Derrida reminded us that religion does not always give clear meaning, purpose and certainty by providing secure foundations. To the contrary, the great religious traditions are profoundly disturbing because they all call certainty and security into question. Belief not tempered by doubt poses a mortal danger. As the process of globalization draws us ever closer in networks of communication and exchange, there is an understandable longing for simplicity, clarity and certainty. This desire is responsible, in large measure, for the rise of cultural conservatism and religious fundamentalism - in this country and around the world. True believers of every stripe - Muslim, Jewish and Christian - cling to beliefs that, Mr. Derrida warns, threaten to tear apart our world. Fortunately, he also taught us that the alternative to blind belief is not simply unbelief but a different kind of belief - one that embraces uncertainty and enables us to respect others whom we do not understand. In a complex world, wisdom is knowing what we don't know so that we can keep the future open. In the two decades I knew Mr. Derrida, we had many meetings and exchanges. In conversation, he listened carefully and responded helpfully to questions whether posed by undergraduates or colleagues. As a teacher, he gave freely of his time to several generations of students. But small things are the measure of the man. In 1986, my family and I were in Paris and Mr. Derrida invited us to dinner at his house in the suburbs 20 miles away. He insisted on picking us up at our hotel, and when we arrived at his home he presented our children with carnival masks. At 2 a.m., he drove us back to the city. In later years, when my son and daughter were writing college papers on his work, he sent them letters and postcards of encouragement as well as signed copies of several of his books. Jacques Derrida wrote eloquently about the gift of friendship but in these quiet gestures - gestures that served to forge connections among individuals across their differences - we see deconstruction in action. Mark C. Taylor, a professor of the humanities at Williams College and a visiting professor of architecture and religion at Columbia, is the author, most recently, of "Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/opinion/14taylor.html From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 14 15:04:10 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 11:04:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Public Interest: Jonathan Rauch: Being well Message-ID: Jonathan Rauch: Being well http://www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article3.html 2004 Fall John Sperling, a man who has been called the Howard Hughes of biotechnology, has $3 billion and a dream: to retard aging and extend human longevity. According to a recent article in Wired magazine, he intends to found an endowment generating at least $150 million a year for biotech research. I am 100 percent for human enhancement! he told the magazine. The more you can get, the better! What do we want? To improve the quality of human life to maximize happiness, right? His dream is the worry of President Bushs Council on Bioethics, which is headed by Leon R. Kass. Worrying is this councils job description. The benefits from biomedical progress are clear and powerful, states the council in its recent report, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Human Happiness. The hazards are less well appreciated, precisely because they are attached to an enterprise we all cherish and support and to goals nearly all of us desire. The councils determination to peer relentlessly into the darker side of human biological enhancement might have made for 300 pages of the sort of grandiloquent droning for which federal blue-ribbon commissions are renowned. Instead, Beyond Therapy is a kind of miracle. Anyone who has worked in Washington, D.C.,knows that, upon receiving a government report, the first thing to do is flip to the end and read the angry minority dissent. But the councils report, the work of its 17 members and Kass, is unanimous. The second thing to do with normal government reports is skim the obligatory recommendations for reform. But this report includes not even one recommendation. Well, then, surely the report must be pabulum. But to the contrary, it is a work of uncommon distinction not least for literary merit. In its ability to turn a phrase, to touch profundity without pomposity, it astonishes time and again. Pleasure follows in the wake of the activity and, as it were, lights it up into consciousness. When was the last time you read a sentence like that in a government report? Read this passage aloud: A flourishing human life is not a life lived with an ageless body or an untroubled soul, but rather a life lived in rhythmed time, mindful of times limits, appreciative of each season and filled first of all with those intimate human relations that are ours only because we are born, age, replace ourselves, decline, and die and know it. If bureaucratic Washington can produce such eloquence, there is yet hope for us all. More impressive still is the reports intellectual audacity. The council brushes aside all three of Washingtons defining approaches to biotechnology. Libertarians think the only important issue is making sure that individuals, rather than the state, control the uses of biotech. As long as no one is coerced, whats the problem? Liberals think the only real issue is ensuring equitable access to biological enhancement. As long as the benefits are spread fairly, whats the problem? Lawyers and policy wonks believe it is process that counts most. As long as there are rules and lawsuits and 87 layers of appeal, whats the problem? But, as the authors of Beyond Therapy point out, individuals can make thoughtless or short-sighted decisions, and a dangerous technology can be all the more perilous for being broadly available, and we cannot regulate well without knowing what it is we should seek to do. So the report insists on drilling down, deep down, into the bedrock ethical questions and dangers that inhere in the technology itself. What, exactly, are those? The report takes up an assortment, but its varied worries share a common structure, one rooted in a particular notion of what being human means. The report turns out to be about not technology but humanity. To be human, for the council, is to cope with certain limits and tradeoffs. Human excellence or distinction is achieved in the encounter with lifes limits. Inherent in achievement, in living well, is the idea of doing things for and as yourself occasionally, with luck, surpassing yourself. And this is possible only if you are yourself. What matters is that we produce the given resultthe objects that we make in a human way as human beings, not simply as inputs who produce outputs. What matters is our best performance as human beings, not animals or machines. Our essential limits define us in many ways. For example, our physical abilities are limited. Athletes who modify their bodies, not through personal effort but as passive recipients of biological enhancement, become less like athletes and more like machines, receptacles of technology. Their accomplishments become less admirable even as they become more impressive. The council warns that already, in American sports, the line between person and equipment may be eroding. Another kind of limit is that we do not choose our children; they, so to speak, choose us. If parents intervene directly to select or enhance a child, they become less like parents and more like breeders or manufacturers, with potentially profound consequences for intergenerational relations. Human aging and mortality represent another important limit. Surely, everyone wants to add years to his life and life to his years. But what if half of life becomes old age: How would society change, and what would become of the natural rhythm of life? Alternatively, what if we slow the aging process and spend twice as many years reaching maturity? Then there is the question of our happiness and its limits. Suppose a drug could hand us happiness on a silver platter. That might seem wonderful, but it might blur or even obliterate the line between personality and medication. The pangs of conscience, the despondencies of failure, the reveries of grief, even personality itself might all become pathologies to be treated. Nothing hurts, warns the council, only if nothing matters. This is all quite troubling, but it is also only the beginning. One cannot understand the full extent of the potential hazards, according to Beyond Therapy, without appreciating the problems dynamic dimension. For there is a last crucial limit that biotechnology endangers: the limit on breaking all other limits. The trouble is that medical technology, individual aspirations, and social pressures may all interact to produce an accelerating flight from humanness. Competition for top schools and top jobs may make artificial enhancement seem indispensable for success, as it already is in some sports. At the same time, biotech companies, galvanized by new profits and markets (think of Prozac and Ritalin), will spend untold billions selling biological quick fixes. As enhancement becomes more widespread, even those who are reluctant will feel pressure to conform. Children may ask for growth hormone or memory enhancement the way they once asked for braces and bikes, and what doting parent would refuse? As the council puts it: Our desires to alter our consciousness or preserve our youthful strength, perhaps but modest to begin with, could swell considerably if and when we become more technically able to satisfy them. And as they grow, what would have been last years satisfaction will only fuel this years greater hunger for more. Some day humanity may awaken to find itself a changed species, without ever having stopped to understand what it was doing. We may enhance our performance by denuding our character; and then, finally, we may lose our grip on the very idea of character. We may, at last, become our own interventions. Instead of giving man control over his biological destiny, technology may steal it away. Again and again the councils report cautions that it is not predicting, only worrying. In offering our synopsis of concerns, we are not making predictions; we are merely pointing to possible hazards, hazards that become visible only when one looks at the big picture. Fair enough, and the report does indeed raise all the right questions. Yet those who are familiar with Kasss work and temperament know he is something of a pessimist, deeply influenced by Aldous Huxleys dystopic fantasy in Brave New World. That makes him the right man for the job he is doing. Mercifully, however, there are reasons to think the council may have overlooked a much more heartening prospect. At its core, the councils fear is that biotech is a slippery slope with no bottom. Yet there are already all kinds of enhancement tools that most people forgo. Cosmetic surgery is readily available and fairly inexpensive. But it remains very much a minority taste, showing no sign of becoming the norm. For that matter, Americans could live longer, look better and even feel happier by exercising vigorously for a few hours a week. Most dont. What is surprising is not how much people will do to make themselves better than normal, but how little. Is expense the obstacle? Probably not. Most people who could afford a face lift or tummy tuck still do not have one. Laziness or apathy? Are people less concerned about their health, happiness, and success than Beyond Therapy supposes? Also possible. But most people care a great deal about these things. The appeal of self-enhancement may be self-limiting for deeper reasons. One is that there is no free lunch. Exercise is tiring and time-consuming; plastic surgery is painful and risky. Likewise, all known biotechnological interventions cause side effects. Beyond Therapy mainly dismisses the problem of side effects. Over time, the council assumes, the technology will become more effective and less risky, until eventually side effects will be reduced to triviality. Geneticists and pharmaceutical companies will be able to offer what amount to magic bullets. In order to reach the ethical problems of biotechnology in their purest form, the council conjures up a perfect biotech: drugs that edit out bad memories without also smudging good or useful ones, or drugs that make their users feel better than normal without also making them feel less than themselves. But technology, like humanity, probably has its limits. Drugs and genetic therapies will improve, no doubt, but they will always entail trade-offs. The magic bullet will remain magic. Thus the market for artificial enhancement, like the market for regular exercise or cosmetic surgery, may remain self-limiting. Most people will not want to take the trouble or assume the risks that inhere in manipulating ones genes and body chemistry. Moreover, and more important: Instead of running out of control, biotechnology may be subject to a natural restraining principle, a natural equilibrium. That possible equilibrium is what we call wellness. The report makes brisk work of the notion of wellness, or, as the council calls it, the therapy vs. enhancement distinction. For one thing, people disagree on where therapy ends and enhancement begins. For another, many technologies that make people well (therapy) can also make people better than well (enhancement); and many people will want to be better than well; and as more people become better than well, they will redefine the baseline upward; and so the notion of wellness itself may tumble down the slippery slope. But most people do not in fact want to be better than well during most of their lives. (Professional football players are not most people, and the Olympics are not most of life.) People are happy to be well, and they know wellness when they see or feel it. In fact, as any public-health nag will confirm, persuading people to do anything that might make them better than well is like persuading a cat to swim. That is why so many people take up exercise only after their heart attack. Most people will do almost anything to become well, and practically nothing to become better than well. Wellness is not as hard to define as some claim. For most people wellness means, simply, the state of not thinking about how one feels. Of course, one could construct enjoyable paradoxes concerning hypochondriacs who do not feel well and cancer patients who do. But what most of us want is to get on with our lives without worrying about our health; and when we are well, that is what we do. A bodybuilder on anabolic steroids may be in some sense enhanced, but he is also likely to be obsessed with his health, spending a lot of time and money monitoring himself for side effects and modulating his drug regimen. In that respect, he resembles less a well person than a diabetic on insulin therapy. And, significantly, he will usually try to get off the juice as soon and as often as he can. Similarly, one hears often about people who did well on antidepressants but who nonetheless risked, and then experienced, serious relapse in order to try life without the drugs. Though they benefited from the medicine, they did not really like it; and though they felt better when medicated, they did not feel fully well. If it is true that most humans naturally seek wellness rather than perfection and know wellness when theyve got it, then we have much less to worry about than Beyond Therapy fears. Some people, like Michael Jackson, might stop at nothing to improve themselves; but those people would remain a minority, more pitied than envied, cautionary lessons rather than exemplars. The distinction between therapy and enhancement would hold for most people, most of the time. In fact, the weird effects of future biotechnological enhancementswhich could make Michael Jackson look normal in comparisonmight make wellness more appealing than ever. The idea of being better than normal may prove a bigger flop than the Edsel. That is where I would put my money. But let us count our blessings for the councils worrying, because it is wise and eloquent and humane. It is also a magic-bullet antidote for smugness. One sure way to enhance the human mind and characterguaranteed free of side-effectsis to read this report. It is a thing of wonder. Reagan Books. 328 pp. $28.95. Jonathan Rauch is a writer in residence at the Brookings Institution and a senior writer for National Journal. From david_mcfadzean at hotmail.com Thu Oct 14 15:54:28 2004 From: david_mcfadzean at hotmail.com (David McFadzean) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 09:54:28 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing References: <01C4AEA4.7FF5EEF0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: I agree, but Hanson never claimed it could. The next really big enormous thing can quite easily happen on this planet. The one after that may require space colonization, but that is pure speculation. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 9:38 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing > No. The best argument would be that > endless exponential growth cannot occur > on a finite planet. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > From david_mcfadzean at hotmail.com Thu Oct 14 16:06:59 2004 From: david_mcfadzean at hotmail.com (David McFadzean) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 10:06:59 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing References: <01C4AEA8.8C6F2710.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 10:07 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing > I think there are some errors of fact in this essay. > > He talks about increases in the size of animals. > We know that a long time ago there were many > animals that were larger than anything that lives > today. This points to a collapse phenomenon > that turned back progress dramatically. Not true. The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorqual > Is there any evidence that human brains are > increasing in size? It should be possible to > measure it from decade to decade if it is > actually happening. Hanson didn't claim that human brain size is increasing, and certainly not at a rate that would be measurable from decade to decade. > In terms of economic progress, we know that > in spite of the good life in first world countries, > much of the world's population lives in material > poverty. Our ability to distribute the output > of industry has not growth exponentially. There is an endless list of metrics that are not growing exponentially. How is this relevant? > At the moment we are all waking up to the > reality of Peak Oil. Pointing out that the current S-curve is flattening in no way shows that a higher S-curve is impossible. From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 14 16:50:02 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 12:50:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Civil Society and Democracy: A Conversation with Michael Walzer Message-ID: Civil Society and Democracy: A Conversation with Michael Walzer The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=230971&textreg=1&id=BreWalz2-1 Talbot Brewer, interviewer Citizenship: A Lost Ideal? In your early book, Obligations, you argue that the ideal of citizenship portrays our highest political possibility, the possibility of obeying only laws of our own making. You note, however, that this ideal is often invoked as if it were already realized, and then it becomes the worst sort of ideological mystification. Still you find something redeeming in this ideology. As you put it, "Ideology is the social element in which ideals survive, and this may well be true even when the ideology is perfectly hypocritical. For if hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then it serves at least to sustain the social recognition of virtue" (213). What sort of political potency do you think the ideal of citizens as self-rulers has today? Michael Walzer is a Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has written numerous articles and over fifteen books, among them On Toleration; Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad; The Company of Critics; Interpretation and Social Criticism; and Just and Unjust Wars. Talbot Brewer is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. His first book, The Bounds of Choice: Unchosen Virtues, Unchosen Commitments, is forthcoming from Garland Publishing Company. It's not so easy to talk about those ideals and to talk about citizenship in a country where, in the last presidential election, less than half the people bothered to vote, and where rates of political participation in state and local and municipal elections run even lower. The old democratic vision, the Rousseauian vision, of a society of active citizens where people "fly" to the assemblies, where as Rousseau says, they derive a larger proportion of their happiness from their public commitments and activities than from any private concerns--that vision of democratic self-rule just doesn't seem evocative now in an American setting. And maybe it's worth speculating on the different meanings of "democracy" in a society that is also as committed as we are to liberal and individualistic values and to the pursuit of happiness or the development of private life. It may be that American citizenship is going to involve a fairly low scale of routine political activity interrupted occasionally by upsurges of popular feeling like the civil rights movement of the `60s, and that we can't hope within a liberal and individualistic environment to sustain the upsurges, so the aim should be to keep the routine engagement as high as you can and then to cultivate the opportunities for participatory eruptions on specific issues when those seem urgently necessary or simply properly motivated. Some people thought that environmentalism and feminism, the new social movements of the `70s and `80s, would produce a sharp increase in participation of the kind we saw in the `60s and the `30s. So far they haven't, but they have sustained themselves above the routine of citizen engagement and so they have also sustained the possibility of a larger-scale engagement on specific sets of issues. But the Rousseauian ideal, I think, is lost to us and I'm not sure that an effort to reproduce it--that is, to get 85% of the people to "fly" to the assemblies and to vote--is at all the right thing to do. When you get sudden increases in participation that don't arise out of new organizations and movements, then you have a dangerous influx of--I'm not sure what the right word is--of uneducated voters. The role of parties, movements, and the associations of civil society is to educate and to produce competent citizens. If you don't have organizations of that sort and you get an upsurge of new people who haven't voted before, who haven't participated before, the outcomes are more likely to be ugly than democratically beneficial. I think, for example, of the Nazi vote in the early `30s as the product of lots of new voters, people who hadn't voted before and hadn't worked through the union movement and the Social Democratic party or the Catholic parties, but were raw and open to demagogic appeals. The best protection against demagogy in democratic life is associational richness, and if you're lacking that, then it's not clear to me that your goal should be very high levels of participation. Perhaps our ideal of citizenship is different from Rousseau's ideal--more like citizen as recipient of benefits from the state--and the aspiration to self-rule has dropped out of our picture of what the status of citizen involves. Or, perhaps the public holds on to the aspiration to self-rule, but finds current political practices and structures resistant to their influence or will in a politically de-energizing way. It sounds as if you're favoring the first diagnosis. I think both are true, which isn't a very bold statement. Certainly the sense of citizenship as entitlement is now very powerful in American life. But the fact is that we still have a fairly large-scale engagement in the associations of civil society and in various kinds of single-issue political movements and organizations that come out of civil society, right now many of them on the right--anti-abortion, pro-capital punishment, prayer in the schools. These are issues around which people do mobilize, and even someone who disagrees with their goals has to recognize that those mobilizations are acts of engagement. So, the question is: Why isn't there more citizen engagement of that sort across the political spectrum, and particularly--where it used to be so strong--on the left? The standard response is the one you gave: Well, nobody is giving them something to vote for. That may be true, but it can't be the whole story because there are, in fact, organizers out there, some of them left over from the `60s, some of them newly mobilized by the revivalist leadership of the AFL-CIO; there are organizers in the field, and they are encountering a degree of resistance among people who ``objectively''--as we used to say--need to organize themselves. Why that is so is not at all clear to me. Hasn't the mobility of capital and the globalization of the economy objectively reduced the bargaining power of labor workers in this country to a degree where there may be some rational basis for being suspicious of organization as a strategy? Could that be part of an account of demobilization on the left? Economists disagree fairly radically about the impact of globalization, and the extent to which it undermines sovereignty and the ability of a single government to shape its own economy. Of course, I would like to believe those economists who say that it's still possible for a political movement in a country as powerful as the United States to shape the economy significantly. I hope they're right. But the most successful strike in the last couple of years was a strike in a non-globalizable industry, that is, UPS. They can't deliver packages in Mexico City. They've got to deliver them in New York. So that was an industry that couldn't threaten to leave, and it did produce the biggest union victory in recent years. Whereas in industries that are more mobile and more globally organized, unions have so far been less successful. Still, a stronger AFL-CIO would have produced a different NAFTA Treaty, and one which would have served the interests of both the American workers and Mexican workers better than the actual Treaty. So I'm not sure the rationale is gone, but something is gone. I think the factors are, in part, historical and cultural. The old working class was culturally distinct--perhaps less so in the United States than in Europe but here too--in its language, in its dress, in the cohesiveness of its neighborhoods, in the patterns of self-help, in the religious culture. There was a working class world, and it was the often-unacknowledged foundation of a great deal of political activity. That seems to have disintegrated with the impact of mass culture, of a certain degree of affluence, of geographic even more than social mobility. Reinvigorating Civil Society In your recent book, On Toleration, you lament the fact that the poorest and politically weakest members of our polity have, as you say, "come to be spoken for and also exploited by a growing company of racial and religious demagogues and tin-horn charismatics" (98-9). I wonder if you could say a bit more about how this has come to be, and what the prospects for improvement might be. I probably wrote those lines in the aftermath of the so-called Million Man March organized by Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Since I grew up politically in part with the civil rights movement in this country, and went South a number of times to write about it in 1960, I have a vision of what the mobilization of Americans committed to racial justice ought to be like--in part because I have a sense of what it was like. Now, what caused the collapse of the civil rights movement in the `60s? Some people on the right say its success caused its collapse. It achieved much of what it aimed for and so it slowly disappeared, which is the right thing for political movements to do after they have achieved most of what they aimed for. There is a grain of truth, but only a grain of truth, in that. The more visible legal forms of discrimination were eliminated from American life, and we see the beginnings of a black middle class of a different kind than existed before. But in fundamental ways the movement didn't achieve what it aimed for. It didn't produce the mobilization among black Americans that it aimed for, or it didn't sustain that mobilization. It didn't produce the multiplicity of organizations that were a feature of working class mobilization in the 19th century. I think there was a clear aim of sustaining a whole organizational structure alongside the churches out of which many of the civil rights leaders came. They wanted better schools, they wanted newspapers of their own, they wanted magazines, they wanted drama societies, they wanted summer camps, they wanted athletic associations--the same kind of richness that social democracy produced for the European working class. They wanted all of that for black Americans and didn't achieve it. And the result was an increasingly radical polarization among black Americans between those who made it into the new middle class, and the larger mass, especially of urban blacks, and the emergence of new patterns of alienation from whites, which only looked like they were being overcome in the `60s movements. So it's in that context--it's in the context of the decline of cities; of black political leaders taking over cities at the depth of their decline, so that they were without the resources that office is supposed to bring and did bring to successive generations of ethnic immigrant politicians; the rise in crime; the drug culture; the weakening of the hold of the black churches in many communities--all this produced the situation that I described in the quotation with which you began. And I thought that there was an obligation on the part of black intellectuals to talk about what had happened, to acknowledge the failures, to speak out against some of the visible consequences of those failures, like Farrakhan, and to search for ways of redeeming the `60s vision. At the beginning of On Toleration, you write that toleration is "the work of democratic citizens." But on completing the book, it seemed to me at least that you were calling for something more demanding than toleration. You believe that we ought to use political means self-consciously to reinvigorate a diverse civil society. This involves not merely toleration of diverse political voices but an active effort to promote associational membership, ethnic and religious affiliation, unions, neighborhood groups, youth centers, charter schools, community arts, and so forth--many of the things that you just named as original goals of the civil rights movement. I can imagine some critics objecting that this would represent a deep strain on the public political culture, not to mention an abandonment of the liberal ideal of neutrality. What do you think of such worries? Let's begin with the worry that led to this argument before we get to the worries produced by the argument. Toleration is supposed to be the solution to a problem posed by seemingly irreconcilable differences--religious, cultural, ethnic, whatever. So the original structure of the argument is: "difference requires toleration." I have, so to speak, been born into a highly successful regime of toleration, within which difference has begun to be blurred, and the argument now takes not the form "difference requires toleration" but "toleration requires difference." If you're to have a liberal regime of toleration, there have to be diverse groups--with significantly different conceptions of the world, the good life and the good society--to be tolerated. If the regime of toleration is so bland that it blurs all the differences, or if difference comes to name individual idiosyncrasy rather than group culture, then there's nothing to tolerate. I think the ideal of a liberal regime of toleration, one that makes it possible to live with significant differences and in a single political community, is very attractive. And looking at the decline of difference, and the decline of the organizations--cultural and religious--that have sustained it, I'm led to the proposal that you just described: Maybe we need now consciously to support difference, and to support the organizations that sustain it. Take, for example, the argument of Robert Putnam's very famous article--every American social scientist dreams of writing an article that becomes that famous--"Bowling Alone," a description of associational life in the United States. Many of its details are disputed quite fiercely, and it's possible he got some things wrong. But it's a description of associational life accompanied by a series of graphs, and all the graphs have the same straight line moving down from left to right on the page. There are something like 16 graphs and they all look the same. They describe membership in unions, attendance at meetings of parent-teacher associations, participation in the old fraternal organizations--Kiwanis, Lions, Elks, and those kinds of groups--reading a daily newspaper, voting; and it's the same line. A study of that sort simply documents the anxiety that I was feeling that the kind of associational life that sustains cultural difference and gives it potency is in decline. Now, exactly how radical a decline we can argue about, but it's in decline. It seemed to me that there were already some precedents for remedies. The public subsidy of the civil/social realm, the public subsidy of associational life, including religious life, in the United States (despite the so-called wall between church and state) is already very well advanced. It provides, in fact, a model for what we should be doing, but doing more extensively and more self-consciously, because there is so much denial in the United States, so much pretending. When the Republicans came to power in `94 and started cutting the welfare budget, the loudest screams of protests went up from the religious organizations--the Catholic charities, the Jewish federations, and so on--and The New York Times ran an extraordinary article with graphs showing the portion of the budget of Catholic charities and of Jewish and Lutheran charities that came from tax money, and the percentages were very high. I think close to 60% of the money Catholic charities spend is tax money, and it comes in all kinds of ways. For example, we have a voucher plan for nursing homes. We've rejected vouchers so far for parochial schools, but we have vouchers for parochial nursing homes. My wife's mother is in a Jewish nursing home near Trenton. The budget must be 60% tax money because people bring in Medicare benefits, and Medicare entitlement is a voucher. You can bring it to a Jewish or a Catholic or a Lutheran nursing home, and it's perfectly all right that a rabbi comes on Saturday, and they celebrate the Jewish holidays, and there's a kosher kitchen. The tax money flows in. I think it does mean you couldn't turn away a non-Jewish applicant, but you don't get many non-Jewish applicants for a nursing home of that kind. So in effect, we are sponsoring, with federal money, religious welfare organizations. Now, if you look closely, you will immediately see that the communities that get the most federal money are the best organized, already the strongest politically in the United States. Black Baptists get some federal money and run some programs, but they get a lot less than white Lutherans, say, because they are politically weaker and have fewer trained professionals who know how to get at the available money. So if you want a vibrant associational life, and one that sustains cultural difference--that means it also has to provide life-cycle services, because that's the crucial way that you sustain cultural difference, from day care centers to nursing homes. They have to be provided in a universal fashion for everybody. But there also has to be a capacity within civil society to provide them in a more particular way. And this has to be subsidized. In a society where all of the communities are dispersed and lack the coercive power to tax--and they also lack, because of their dispersion, the forms of social pressure that once existed within these communities--they have to be helped, and I don't see anything wrong with helping them. Liberal and Communitarian Fears I want to talk in general terms about the liberal-communitarian debate in which you've been a key figure for many years. One way to characterize the wellspring of this controversy is as a conflict of intuitions about what is most to be feared. The primary fear of communitarians seems to be that we might lose our capacity for worthy and life-animating convictions in a swamp of consumerism, careerism, television addiction, etc. The primary liberal fear seems to be that our life-animating convictions might be so thoroughly at odds with those of others, and have such a strong grip on us, that we'll be unable to sustain any common life at all, or to find any common ground for political decisions. If we view the debate in this way, it does alter what some have taken to be its fixed points, since it portrays the communitarians as rebels against an increasingly widely-shared but debased common culture, rather than as champions of a common culture, and it portrays liberals as would-be forgers of a not-yet-established political community, even though this would be a very thin one. You seem to understand both of these fears and to have an interest in both of these projects. I have a nest of questions here. Do you think that the liberal/communitarian categorizations are useful? Where would you locate yourself in the context of these debates? I'm sympathetic to both of these anxieties, and I feel them differently in different times and places. The issue, exactly the way you posed it, was best expressed for me by an Israeli friend at a conference in Jerusalem, who said to an American communitarian political theorist (not me but a friend): "For you community is a dream; for us it is a trauma." Living in Israel with ultra-orthodox political parties--not just religious communities but politically mobilized religious communities--I think the vision that you attributed to liberals, the fear of the loss of any kind common culture, is very powerful. And there's another fear that liberals also express, which is also justified, that communities of that kind (I've just spent six months in Jerusalem, so I have a very vivid conception of a mobilized ultra-orthodox hard-core fundamentalist community) are not only a threat to the unity or the civic culture of the country; they are also oppressive to the weakest of their own members, and above all to women. So, many liberal critics of communitarianism are simply supporters of the individual rights that these communities trample on. And increasingly feminist critics of communitarianism are, so to speak, driven to where perhaps they didn't want to be--that is, to a liberal politics--in order to defend women who have no chance to defend themselves in these communities. So those fears are very real. One of the questions that any communitarian has to address, and many of them don't, is the question: "At what point do you call for state intervention to protect individual rights?" It's a small version of the larger question of intervention in international society, and I would not want to turn away from that question. I think that at a minimum--maybe we should not stay at the minimum, but at a minimum--you've got to preserve the right of exit from these communities. I'm not exactly sure how to do that, but there has to be a way of getting out. Would you say further that the way of getting out has to be relatively palatable or not very costly? I take it you don't think it's sufficient for apostasy not to be a crime. No, that's not sufficient. Since leaving these communities commonly means a complete break with family and friends, you can't make it costless. It'll always be costly, but you have to make sure that there are no civil penalties, no disabilities, no discrimination after the fact of leaving--in all those ways you've got to protect the people who break away. Now the harder questions--we've so far avoided these--are the questions of schools. You can protect people who leave, but those are going to be grown-ups or at least adolescents. But what about children? There are some of these communities that teach the boys how to pray and something of the religious culture, but teach the girls nothing at all. So what do you do? Do you refuse to pay for the schools? Do you insist on regulating the schools? Do you enforce a certain curriculum? You can prescribe a curriculum, but if you don't go in and teach it, it will be taught with a nod and a wink. In the Israeli case, the religious schools do not teach secular history. They don't teach anything about democratic government, although these kids are going to grow up to vote. They are taught nothing about democratic values or the right of opposition. That's where the hardest questions arise, it seems to me, in the degree of control over cultural reproduction that the state is going to exercise, or parents are going to exercise. This issue is addressed in the Supreme Court case Wisconsin v. Yoder, where Justice Burger argues that Amish children ought to be exempted from certain mandatory school requirements, in part because of the distinctiveness of the Amish belief system and the presence in the public schools of an "hydraulic pressure towards conformity" with an alien mass culture. Increasingly, it seems, this is becoming not merely an Amish problem but a general problem: mass culture has a grip on the socialization of our children that significantly infringes on the capacities of parents to shape their children's conception of the good. I'm sympathetic to that Supreme Court decision. I think that was an example of judicial wisdom, though possibly not of principle. It may be that they effected a compromise, which is not what courts are supposed to do, on the Dworkin model that distinguishes what courts do from what the legislatures do. But it was a wise decision. One of the things that made it possible is the general Amish withdrawal from political life. It's much safer to accept the exemption in the case of the Amish because these children are not going to vote in our elections. They're not going to determine, along with our children, the general fate of the country. If they were, we might be a little more insistent on shaping their education and making sure that they know at least some of the things that we think citizens ought to know. Now, the general weakness of American cultural communities is partly a consequence of liberal culture, and of social and geographic mobility, and of the nature of immigrant communities cut off from the territorial base that turns out to be very important in sustaining a common culture. The weaknesses of these communities are, I think, a peculiar feature of American life. It's not a universal feature. It's a particular problem, it seems to me, of immigrant societies and of large-scale states spread across vast distances. This gives rise to the communitarian anxiety about the loss of cultural particularity and the thinness of the common culture. What young people educated in this world of mass culture, commercial culture--what they're going to be like is unclear to me. I think that the short-term impacts are probably exaggerated. We have good reason to believe in the capacity of families to sustain religious and other particularist cultures over very long periods of time, without the support or even against the pressure of mass media and commercialism. So I just don't know how great the danger is. But what we see is weakness in cultural communities, high levels of intermarriage, low levels of participation in the core activities of the communities. You may know John Higham's image of the ethnic communities in the United States as having a core and kind of spreading periphy. The core struggles to hold the periphery. The periphery rides free on the work of the core. The core will often sustain, for example, religious services that people on the periphery will use at birth and death and maybe once or twice in between; they count on the core to provide those services, but they're not willing to pay for them. Participation in the core seems to be less than it used to be. More and more people live on the periphery, and the peripheries are spread wide and they overlap with the peripheries from other cores. And there's general confusion about identity. All that leads me to look for some sort of remedy in the strengthening of associational life--and because of the free-rider problem, in subsidizing the cores. But exactly how great the danger is, and what's really happening out on the peripheries, where the peripheries overlap, I don't know. Post-Modern and Cosmopolitan Selves You've used the phrase "the post-modern self" as a place-holder for whatever's happening on the peripheries. And this idea of free ridership surfaces in your discussion of the rise of post-modern selves. You argue that it can be fulfilling for isolated individuals to pick and choose amongst elements of cultures that aren't their own, incorporating bits of cultures into a cosmopolitan identity, but that cosmopolitanism can only be vibrant where it is free riding. That is, the elements that the cosmopolitan self picks out of traditional cultures would be pallid if the cores weren't holding. So universal cosmopolitanism is not nearly as attractive as isolated cases of cosmopolitanism. Right. I was once involved in a public debate with a strong defender of cosmopolitanism, who described his own life. He was a cosmopolitan intellectual, born in one place, educated in another, now living in a third, and continuing to visit the three places and celebrating his peripheral engagement in all three--and, it seemed to me, forgetting that his peripheral engagement in all three was dependent, was parasitic, on other people sitting still in each. He could not enjoy his cosmopolitanism without the parochialism of some other people. There's a lot that is very attractive in cosmopolitan intellectual life, but I find it less attractive when it doesn't acknowledge the value of the particularisms that make it possible. So when it celebrates itself as an exemplar of autonomy and denigrates embeddedness in traditional ways of life as instances of failure to be autonomous or something of that sort, then this is when you find it unpalatable? Right. I become most communitarian in the face of that version of cosmopolitanism. From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 14 16:52:53 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 12:52:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Google Introduces Search Program for Hard Drives Message-ID: Google Introduces Search Program for Hard Drives October 14, 2004 Filed at 10:04 a.m. ET MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) -- Online search engine leader Google Inc. is setting its sights on the computer desktop with a new software program that promises to scour through the clutter of documents, e-mails, instant messages and other files stored on hard drives. The free desktop search program, unveiled Thursday at http://desktop.google.com, marks Google's latest attempt to become even more indispensable to the millions of people who entrust the company to find virtually anything on the Web. It's a not surprising step into a crucial realm. Managing infoglut is an increasing challenge for computer users, and the program gives Google an important head start on Microsoft Corp., which is working on a similar file-searching tool that it recently said would not be ready for the next version of its Windows operating system promised for 2006. ``We think of this (program) as the photographic memory of your computer,'' said Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products. ``It's pretty comprehensive. If there's anything you once saw on your computer screen, we think you should be able to find it again quickly.'' The may give Mountain View-based Google, the industry leader in Internet search, a significant competitive advantage in luring traffic from chief rivals Microsoft's MSN. and Yahoo Inc., both of which have been improving their technology. Although the program can be used exclusively offline to probe hard drives, Google designed it so it will meld with its online search engine. Google.com visitors who have new program installed on their computer will see a ``desktop'' tab above the search engine toolbar and all their search results will include a section devoted to the hard drive in addition to the Web. ``The integration with the search engine is the key to this product and what makes it pretty fantastic,'' said Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li, who previewed the new product. Google is betting the program will expand its search engine audience and encourage even more online searches than it already processes -- a pattern that would yield advertising revenue, the company's main moneymaker. The company's financial success already has turned its stock into a hot commodity. Google's shares closed Wednesday at $140.90, a 66 percent gain from their initial public offering price of $85 less than two months ago. Leery of raising privacy concerns that have shadowed its recently introduced e-mail service, Google is emphasizing that the desktop search program doesn't provide a peephole into the hard drive, even when the product connects with the online search engine. ``It's totally private,'' Mayer said. ``Google does not know what happens when the hard drive is searched.'' Pam Dixon, executive director for the World Privacy Forum, said she will withhold judgment until she thoroughly reviews the new program. ``The key question will be if this thing ever phones home to the mother ship.'' Despite her reservations, Dixon expects Google's desktop search program to have mass appeal. ``I think most people think of their computer hard drives as these black holes of information, so this could be of some real value,'' she said. `` Other desktop search programs are already available, such as X1 Search from X1 Technologies Inc. of Pasadena, but Google is the first company among high-tech's household names to try to make it easier for people sift through the mishmash of files, e-mails, and instant messages on personal computers. Google began working on the program, code named ``Fluffy Bunny,'' about a year ago, Mayer said, in response to a familiar refrain: ``Why can't I search my computer as easily as I can search the Web?'' In addition to Microsoft, AOL is reported to also be working on a desktop search program and most industry analysts believe Yahoo Inc. will develop something similar. Google is allowing people to download its program for free. Currently compatible only with the Windows operating system, it requires about 10 minutes to download on a dial-up connection and takes some five or six hours to index a computer's hard drive. Each program user can select the types of information to be indexed and searched. The product can pore through the files using Microsoft Office applications and several types of e-mail programs, including Microsoft's Outlook and Hotmail and Yahoo. Google's desktop search still isn't compatible with the company's new e-mail service, called Gmail. If desired, the program automatically saves all AOL instant message conversations and all Web pages stored on a computer. Google's desktop search program is so powerful, Li said, that computer users should carefully consider what kind of material they want indexed, particularly if they're sharing a computer with family, friends or office colleagues. ``People are going to have to think pretty carefully about this,'' Li said. ``There are some things that you probably don't want indexed on a computer.'' http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Google-Desktop.html From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 14 17:00:50 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 13:00:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: What Do Women Game Designers Want? Message-ID: What Do Women Game Designers Want? NYT October 14, 2004 By KATIE HAFNER DENISE FULTON spent much of her childhood playing computer games. At 8, while growing up in Ohio, she was already playing Zork, Adventure and other text-based games. And the fascination continued into her adult years. So it is not surprising that today Ms. Fulton, 34, is an executive producer at Ion Storm, a video game company in Austin, Tex., where she is overseeing the next installment in the popular Deus Ex series. The surprising part is how rare Ms. Fulton is. Behind the computer screen, as in front of it, video games are a man's world. Informal estimates put the percentage of women in the industry at around 10 percent, and even then, most tend to be in jobs in customer service, marketing and quality assurance. Relatively few women work as game designers and producers, and even fewer are programmers. "It's not so much that women look at the industry and discard the idea," said Sheri Graner Ray, a senior game designer at Sony Online Entertainment. "It's that the game industry just never even comes up on their radar." The reason has to do with a truism about the computer game industry. Those who work in the industry tend to enter their jobs as avid gamers. And playing video games, especially those loaded with graphic violence, has been a male pursuit. According to the NPD Group, a market research firm based in New York, some 81 percent of video-game players are male. "It's a chicken-or-egg thing," said Ms. Fulton, who sees a lot of r?sum?s in her job, almost all from men. "If more women were playing games, they might get interested in games as a medium and might choose to pursue that as a career. But it's still stigmatized as a boy thing." Now, though, manufacturers are starting to think about making games that are more appealing to women, like the Sims, a role-playing game that is viewed as one of the most popular games among women. "Do women not play games because the games that are out there are designed for men, or is it just that women really don't like computer games?" said Elizabeth Sweedyk, an assistant professor of computer science at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif. "My guess is they don't like the games that are out there." Manufacturers understand there is a huge untapped portion of the market. "They've realized they have to appeal to women," said David Riley, senior manager at NPD. And as more games are marketed to, and played by, girls and women, more women eventually may end up choosing a career in the industry. Until then, though, people like Ms. Fulton, and like Nicky Robinson, a programmer, will be the exceptions. Ms. Robinson, 44, is accustomed to being one of few female programmers who works on games. She grew up playing board games of all kinds and then, in ninth grade, was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing fantasy game that used dice, pen and paper. "That completely captured my imagination," Ms. Robinson said. College led to Rogue, a dungeons-and-dragons-type adventure game played on a computer. She entered the game industry when she was 23, and has worked on more than a dozen games through the years, including some unequivocally male-oriented titles like Battle Tanx and Army Men. Ms. Robinson said she felt an obligation to make games more appealing to women. To that end, she said, she has worked to make the user interfaces more intuitive. "I personally loathe interfaces that are cluttered," she said. "I've heard this as a common complaint from women." Ms. Robinson also dislikes the atmosphere at some game companies. There are the constant sports metaphors she has heard used in the course of developing and shipping products, for instance. "Does everything need to be expressed in terms of 'fourth and goal?' " she asked. "How about a nice literary allusion?" Then, she said, there is the testosterone-fueled attitude among upper management that she believes pervades many game software companies. "They all have to prove that they are tougher and more macho than the guys in the other department or at the other company," she said. Now Ms. Robinson is director of technology at LimeLife, in Menlo Park, Calif., whose goal is to make mobile phone applications especially for women. Ms. Robinson had the chance to air some of her frustrations last month in Austin at the Women's Game Conference, held in conjunction with a more broader industry gathering, the Austin Game Conference. The women's event was attended by about 150 women, most of them designers, marketers, educators and students. Some of the sessions were devoted to brainstorming about ways to entice more women into the gaming industry. The process starts, most agreed, by designing video games that appeal more to women. But what do women want in a video game? Not, many participants agreed, a lot of graphic violence. They said that first-person shooter games, especially those with female characters that are depicted in sexually suggestive ways, are offensive. "The more abstracted the violence the better I feel about it," said LaMaia Cramer, a game designer and programmer in Albuquerque. Ms. Robinson said that while producing Army Men, a game featuring plastic army figures, she argued that women were more likely to like a game based on plastic figures. "The violence of melting or blowing up a plastic figure was something we'd done, so it wasn't going to turn women off," she sad. "And indeed, the game was played by far more women than similar games with realistic human figures." Some women said they wanted to see more characters they can relate to, as well as "instant immersion" in a game's story line. "I know I'm opening a can of worms," said one young attendee. "But I'd like to see more romance." Dr. Sweedyk, who also attended the conference, said The Sims is popular among women because of the social interaction among the game's custom-built characters. With a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Sweedyk is developing a course designed to encourage women to build computer games for women. The course, which Dr. Sweedyk believes is the first of its kind of the United States, will be offered beginning next semester. For Ms. Fulton, one of the things she appealed to her about designing the new Deus Ex game is that players are given the option of a less violent version. As a producer, she said, she is drawn to work on games that draw a wider audience. "I definitely want to continue to work on titles that are more than the standard, violence-based, shoot-and-kill play style," she said. But the reality of her job at Ion Storm, she added, demands that she maximize the potential success of the titles she works on. "I can encourage the development of features that might have a broader appeal, but ultimately need to fulfill the expectations of publisher and market," she said. Like Ms. Robinson and Ms. Fulton, Laura Fryer, 36, grew up playing games more readily associated with boys. An avid Dungeons and Dragons fan while in high school, Ms. Fryer went on to work at Microsoft nearly 12 years ago in a game-testing division, and gradually worked her way up. Now an executive producer, Ms. Fryer supervises a group developing games for the Xbox. Ms. Fryer said she sees a difference from when she was younger. "A lot more women are playing games" than when she was in high school, she said. Ms. Fryer said she recently had two teenage girls as houseguests, and was surprised by how much they knew about games. She took them to Microsoft and watched them play Halo, MechAssault and other shooter games in the lobby. She was surprised to see that, against stereotype, they were completely comfortable with the games. "That opened my eyes," she said. Ms. Ray of Sony said that the challenge remains first to get women interested in playing games, then interested in making them. "We know they're there and they're tech savvy," she said. "It's a matter of raising their awareness. As we do that, and get more women into the industry, the games they make will have much broader appeal." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/technology/circuits/14wome.html From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 14 19:03:34 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 12:03:34 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing Message-ID: <01C4B1E5.D5316DB0.shovland@mindspring.com> good points Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: David McFadzean [SMTP:david_mcfadzean at hotmail.com] Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2004 9:07 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 10:07 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing > I think there are some errors of fact in this essay. > > He talks about increases in the size of animals. > We know that a long time ago there were many > animals that were larger than anything that lives > today. This points to a collapse phenomenon > that turned back progress dramatically. Not true. The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorqual > Is there any evidence that human brains are > increasing in size? It should be possible to > measure it from decade to decade if it is > actually happening. Hanson didn't claim that human brain size is increasing, and certainly not at a rate that would be measurable from decade to decade. > In terms of economic progress, we know that > in spite of the good life in first world countries, > much of the world's population lives in material > poverty. Our ability to distribute the output > of industry has not growth exponentially. There is an endless list of metrics that are not growing exponentially. How is this relevant? > At the moment we are all waking up to the > reality of Peak Oil. Pointing out that the current S-curve is flattening in no way shows that a higher S-curve is impossible. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 14 19:28:31 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 12:28:31 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing Message-ID: <01C4B1E9.516DC060.shovland@mindspring.com> What's your candidate for the s-curve that comes after the oil curve? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: David McFadzean [SMTP:david_mcfadzean at hotmail.com] Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2004 9:07 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 10:07 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing > I think there are some errors of fact in this essay. > > He talks about increases in the size of animals. > We know that a long time ago there were many > animals that were larger than anything that lives > today. This points to a collapse phenomenon > that turned back progress dramatically. Not true. The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorqual > Is there any evidence that human brains are > increasing in size? It should be possible to > measure it from decade to decade if it is > actually happening. Hanson didn't claim that human brain size is increasing, and certainly not at a rate that would be measurable from decade to decade. > In terms of economic progress, we know that > in spite of the good life in first world countries, > much of the world's population lives in material > poverty. Our ability to distribute the output > of industry has not growth exponentially. There is an endless list of metrics that are not growing exponentially. How is this relevant? > At the moment we are all waking up to the > reality of Peak Oil. Pointing out that the current S-curve is flattening in no way shows that a higher S-curve is impossible. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 15 21:09:42 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2004 17:09:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Truth stranger than 'Strangelove' Message-ID: Truth stranger than 'Strangelove' http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=543243.html by Fred Kaplan NYT Wednesday, October 13, 2004 Dr. Strangelove," Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film about nuclear-war plans run amok, is widely heralded as one of the greatest satires in American political or movie history. For its 40th anniversary, Columbia TriStar is releasing a two-disc special-edition DVD next month. One essential point should emerge from all the hoopla: "Strangelove" is far more than a satire. In its own loopy way, the movie is a remarkably fact-based and specific guide to some of the oddest, most secretive chapters of the cold war. As countless histories relate, Kubrick set out to make a serious film based on a grim novel, "Red Alert," by Peter George, a Royal Air Force officer. But the more research he did (reading more than 50 books, talking with a dozen experts), the more lunatic he found the whole subject, so he made a dark comedy instead. The result was wildly iconoclastic: Released at the height of the cold war, not long after the Cuban missile crisis, before the escalation in Vietnam, "Dr. Strangelove" dared to suggest that our top generals might be bonkers and that our well-designed system for preserving the peace was in fact a doomsday machine. What few people knew, at the time and since, was just how accurate this film was. Its premise, plotline, some of the dialogue, even its wildest characters eerily resembled the policies, debates and military leaders of the day. The audience had almost no way of detecting these similarities: Nearly everything about the bomb was shrouded in secrecy back then. There was no Freedom of Information Act and little investigative reporting on the subject. It was easy to laugh off "Dr. Strangelove" as a comic book. But the film's weird accuracy is evident in its very first scene, in which a deranged base commander, preposterously named General Jack D. Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden), orders his wing of B-52 bombers - which are on routine airborne alert, circling a "fail-safe point" just outside the Soviet border - to attack their targets inside the U.S.S.R. with multimegaton bombs. Once the pilots receive the order, they can't be diverted unless they receive a coded recall message. And only General Ripper has the code. The remarkable thing is, the fail-safe system that General Ripper exploits was the real, top-secret fail-safe system at the time. According to declassified Strategic Air Command histories, 12 B-52s - fully loaded with nuclear bombs - were kept on constant airborne alert. If they received a Go code, they went to war. This alert system, known as Chrome Dome, began in 1961. It ended in 1968, after a B-52 crashed in Greenland, spreading small amounts of radioactive fallout. But until then, could some loony general have sent bombers to attack Russia without a presidential order? Yes. In a scene in the "war room" (a room that didn't really exist, by the way), U.S. Air Force General Buck Turgidson (played by George C. Scott) explains to an incredulous President Merkin Muffley (one of three roles played by Peter Sellers) that policies - approved by the president - allowed war powers to be transferred, in case the president was killed in a surprise nuclear attack on Washington. Historical documents indicate that such procedures did exist, and that, though tightened later, they were startlingly loose at the time. But were there generals who might really have taken such power in their own hands? It was no secret - it would have been obvious to many viewers in 1964 - that General Ripper looked a lot like Curtis LeMay, the cigar-chomping, gruff-talking general who headed the Strategic Air Command through the 1950s and who served as the Pentagon's Air Force Chief of Staff in the early '60s. In 1957 Robert Sprague, the director of a top-secret panel, warned LeMay that the entire fleet of B-52 bombers was vulnerable to attack. LeMay was unfazed. "If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack," he said, "I'm going to knock the [expletive] out of them before they take off the ground." "But General LeMay," Sprague replied, "that's not national policy." "I don't care," LeMay said. "It's my policy. That's what I'm going to do." Kubrick probably was unaware of this exchange. (Sprague told me about it in 1981, when I interviewed him for a book on nuclear history.) But LeMay's distrust of civilian authorities, including presidents, was well known among insiders, several of whom Kubrick interviewed. The most popular guessing game about the movie is whether there was a real-life counterpart to the character of Dr. Strangelove (another Sellers part), the wheelchaired ex-Nazi who directs the Pentagon's weapons research and proposes sheltering political leaders in well-stocked mineshafts, where they can survive the coming nuclear war and breed with beautiful women. Over the years, some have speculated that Strangelove was inspired by Edward Teller, Henry Kissinger or Werner Von Braun. But the real model was almost certainly Herman Kahn, an eccentric, voluble nuclear strategist at the RAND Corporation, a prominent Air Force think tank. In 1960, Kahn published a 652-page tome called "On Thermonuclear War," which sold 30,000 copies in hardcover. According to a special-feature documentary on the new DVD, Kubrick read "On Thermonuclear War" several times. But what the documentary doesn't note is that the final scenes of "Dr. Strangelove" come straight out of its pages. Toward the end of the film, officials uncover General Ripper's code and call back the B-52s, but they notice that one bomber keeps flying toward its target. A B-52 is about to attack the Russians with a few H-bombs; General Turgidson recommends that we should "catch 'em with their pants down," and launch an all-out, disarming first-strike. Such a strike would destroy 90 percent of the U.S.S.R.'s nuclear arsenal. "Mr. President," he exclaims, "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10-20 million killed, tops!" If we don't go all-out, the general warns, the Soviets will fire back with all their nuclear weapons. The choice, he screams, is "between two admittedly regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable postwar environments - one where you get 20 million people killed and the other where you get 150 million people killed!" Kahn made precisely this point in his book, even producing a chart labeled, "Tragic but Distinguishable Postwar States." When Strangelove talks of sheltering people in mineshafts, President Muffley asks him, "Wouldn't this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they'd, well, envy the dead?" Strangelove exclaims that, to the contrary, many would feel "a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead." Kahn's book contains a long chapter on mineshafts. Its title: "Will the Survivors Envy the Dead?" One sentence reads: "We can imagine a renewed vigor among the population with a zealous, almost religious dedication to reconstruction." In 1981, two years before he died, I asked Kahn what he thought of "Dr. Strangelove." Thinking I meant the character, he replied, with a straight face, "Strangelove wouldn't have lasted three weeks in the Pentagon. He was too creative." Those in the know watched "Dr. Strangelove" amused, like everyone else, but also stunned. Daniel Ellsberg, who later leaked the Pentagon Papers, was a RAND analyst and a consultant at the Defense Department when he and a mid-level official took off work one afternoon in 1964 to see the film. Ellsberg recalled that as they left the theater, he turned to his colleague and said, "That was a documentary!" Fred Kaplan is a columnist for Slate and the author of "The Wizards of Armageddon," a history of the nuclear strategists. From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 16 02:49:08 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2004 19:49:08 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Truth stranger than 'Strangelove' Message-ID: <01C4B2F0.096585C0.shovland@mindspring.com> These days the generals are sane and the civilians are loopy :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Friday, October 15, 2004 2:10 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Truth stranger than 'Strangelove' Truth stranger than 'Strangelove' http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=543243.html by Fred Kaplan NYT Wednesday, October 13, 2004 Dr. Strangelove," Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film about nuclear-war plans run amok, is widely heralded as one of the greatest satires in American political or movie history. For its 40th anniversary, Columbia TriStar is releasing a two-disc special-edition DVD next month. One essential point should emerge from all the hoopla: "Strangelove" is far more than a satire. In its own loopy way, the movie is a remarkably fact-based and specific guide to some of the oddest, most secretive chapters of the cold war. As countless histories relate, Kubrick set out to make a serious film based on a grim novel, "Red Alert," by Peter George, a Royal Air Force officer. But the more research he did (reading more than 50 books, talking with a dozen experts), the more lunatic he found the whole subject, so he made a dark comedy instead. The result was wildly iconoclastic: Released at the height of the cold war, not long after the Cuban missile crisis, before the escalation in Vietnam, "Dr. Strangelove" dared to suggest that our top generals might be bonkers and that our well-designed system for preserving the peace was in fact a doomsday machine. What few people knew, at the time and since, was just how accurate this film was. Its premise, plotline, some of the dialogue, even its wildest characters eerily resembled the policies, debates and military leaders of the day. The audience had almost no way of detecting these similarities: Nearly everything about the bomb was shrouded in secrecy back then. There was no Freedom of Information Act and little investigative reporting on the subject. It was easy to laugh off "Dr. Strangelove" as a comic book. But the film's weird accuracy is evident in its very first scene, in which a deranged base commander, preposterously named General Jack D. Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden), orders his wing of B-52 bombers - which are on routine airborne alert, circling a "fail-safe point" just outside the Soviet border - to attack their targets inside the U.S.S.R. with multimegaton bombs. Once the pilots receive the order, they can't be diverted unless they receive a coded recall message. And only General Ripper has the code. The remarkable thing is, the fail-safe system that General Ripper exploits was the real, top-secret fail-safe system at the time. According to declassified Strategic Air Command histories, 12 B-52s - fully loaded with nuclear bombs - were kept on constant airborne alert. If they received a Go code, they went to war. This alert system, known as Chrome Dome, began in 1961. It ended in 1968, after a B-52 crashed in Greenland, spreading small amounts of radioactive fallout. But until then, could some loony general have sent bombers to attack Russia without a presidential order? Yes. In a scene in the "war room" (a room that didn't really exist, by the way), U.S. Air Force General Buck Turgidson (played by George C. Scott) explains to an incredulous President Merkin Muffley (one of three roles played by Peter Sellers) that policies - approved by the president - allowed war powers to be transferred, in case the president was killed in a surprise nuclear attack on Washington. Historical documents indicate that such procedures did exist, and that, though tightened later, they were startlingly loose at the time. But were there generals who might really have taken such power in their own hands? It was no secret - it would have been obvious to many viewers in 1964 - that General Ripper looked a lot like Curtis LeMay, the cigar-chomping, gruff-talking general who headed the Strategic Air Command through the 1950s and who served as the Pentagon's Air Force Chief of Staff in the early '60s. In 1957 Robert Sprague, the director of a top-secret panel, warned LeMay that the entire fleet of B-52 bombers was vulnerable to attack. LeMay was unfazed. "If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack," he said, "I'm going to knock the [expletive] out of them before they take off the ground." "But General LeMay," Sprague replied, "that's not national policy." "I don't care," LeMay said. "It's my policy. That's what I'm going to do." Kubrick probably was unaware of this exchange. (Sprague told me about it in 1981, when I interviewed him for a book on nuclear history.) But LeMay's distrust of civilian authorities, including presidents, was well known among insiders, several of whom Kubrick interviewed. The most popular guessing game about the movie is whether there was a real-life counterpart to the character of Dr. Strangelove (another Sellers part), the wheelchaired ex-Nazi who directs the Pentagon's weapons research and proposes sheltering political leaders in well-stocked mineshafts, where they can survive the coming nuclear war and breed with beautiful women. Over the years, some have speculated that Strangelove was inspired by Edward Teller, Henry Kissinger or Werner Von Braun. But the real model was almost certainly Herman Kahn, an eccentric, voluble nuclear strategist at the RAND Corporation, a prominent Air Force think tank. In 1960, Kahn published a 652-page tome called "On Thermonuclear War," which sold 30,000 copies in hardcover. According to a special-feature documentary on the new DVD, Kubrick read "On Thermonuclear War" several times. But what the documentary doesn't note is that the final scenes of "Dr. Strangelove" come straight out of its pages. Toward the end of the film, officials uncover General Ripper's code and call back the B-52s, but they notice that one bomber keeps flying toward its target. A B-52 is about to attack the Russians with a few H-bombs; General Turgidson recommends that we should "catch 'em with their pants down," and launch an all-out, disarming first-strike. Such a strike would destroy 90 percent of the U.S.S.R.'s nuclear arsenal. "Mr. President," he exclaims, "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10-20 million killed, tops!" If we don't go all-out, the general warns, the Soviets will fire back with all their nuclear weapons. The choice, he screams, is "between two admittedly regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable postwar environments - one where you get 20 million people killed and the other where you get 150 million people killed!" Kahn made precisely this point in his book, even producing a chart labeled, "Tragic but Distinguishable Postwar States." When Strangelove talks of sheltering people in mineshafts, President Muffley asks him, "Wouldn't this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they'd, well, envy the dead?" Strangelove exclaims that, to the contrary, many would feel "a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead." Kahn's book contains a long chapter on mineshafts. Its title: "Will the Survivors Envy the Dead?" One sentence reads: "We can imagine a renewed vigor among the population with a zealous, almost religious dedication to reconstruction." In 1981, two years before he died, I asked Kahn what he thought of "Dr. Strangelove." Thinking I meant the character, he replied, with a straight face, "Strangelove wouldn't have lasted three weeks in the Pentagon. He was too creative." Those in the know watched "Dr. Strangelove" amused, like everyone else, but also stunned. Daniel Ellsberg, who later leaked the Pentagon Papers, was a RAND analyst and a consultant at the Defense Department when he and a mid-level official took off work one afternoon in 1964 to see the film. Ellsberg recalled that as they left the theater, he turned to his colleague and said, "That was a documentary!" Fred Kaplan is a columnist for Slate and the author of "The Wizards of Armageddon," a history of the nuclear strategists. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sat Oct 16 08:11:56 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 04:11:56 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Truth stranger than 'Strangelove' In-Reply-To: <01C4B2F0.096585C0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20041016035351.00bf6a88@incoming.verizon.net> At 07:49 PM 10/15/2004 -0700, Steve Hovland wrote: >These days the generals are sane and the civilians are loopy :-) Some people tell me that Strangelove was a fictionalized caricarture of someone's negative opinion of John Von Neumann, about as accurate as Bush's portrayal of Kerry. There is a sort of typical Hegelian pattern in the undercurrents here. Von Neumann was almost ... an archetype of logical, rational thinking, as per the Spirit of Truth as I discussed it in that last comment on presidential debates. And in a way, he was an antithesis of older fuzzy lost-in-space thinking. As in a typical antithesis, he aroused nutty defensive reactions from the old paradigm folks, such as the folks who believed that good intentions were enough to justify big government programs even in cases where their execution yields no results at all. But, also as in typical antitheses, he represents a swing of the pendulum which would be too far if it were anything but a tiny minority. It is said that his views of how to handle the potential US loss of nuclear monopoly.. were based on very blunt logic which, while appearing straightforward (and being motivated as such), led to policy opinions too horrifying even to consider at that time. Perhaps he, like Teller, was biased by what Russia had done to his homeland of Hungary. But then in the late 60's, when China was joining the Club, Russia almost acted... Kissinger/Nixon took the decisive actions that prevented that, in my opinion... and people got used to the idea that it doesn't matter how many people can blow up the entire world. But now some people have begun to realize that the answer is not quite that simple, either. >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >Sent: Friday, October 15, 2004 2:10 PM >To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Truth stranger than 'Strangelove' > >Truth stranger than 'Strangelove' >http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=543243.html >by Fred Kaplan NYT > Wednesday, October 13, 2004 > > Dr. Strangelove," Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film about nuclear-war plans > run amok, is widely heralded as one of the greatest satires in > American political or movie history. For its 40th anniversary, > Columbia TriStar is releasing a two-disc special-edition DVD next > month. > One essential point should emerge from all the hoopla: "Strangelove" > is far more than a satire. In its own loopy way, the movie is a > remarkably fact-based and specific guide to some of the oddest, most > secretive chapters of the cold war. > As countless histories relate, Kubrick set out to make a serious film > based on a grim novel, "Red Alert," by Peter George, a Royal Air Force > officer. But the more research he did (reading more than 50 books, > talking with a dozen experts), the more lunatic he found the whole > subject, so he made a dark comedy instead. The result was wildly > iconoclastic: Released at the height of the cold war, not long after > the Cuban missile crisis, before the escalation in Vietnam, "Dr. > Strangelove" dared to suggest that our top generals might be bonkers > and that our well-designed system for preserving the peace was in fact > a doomsday machine. > What few people knew, at the time and since, was just how accurate > this film was. Its premise, plotline, some of the dialogue, even its > wildest characters eerily resembled the policies, debates and military > leaders of the day. The audience had almost no way of detecting these > similarities: Nearly everything about the bomb was shrouded in secrecy > back then. There was no Freedom of Information Act and little > investigative reporting on the subject. It was easy to laugh off "Dr. > Strangelove" as a comic book. > But the film's weird accuracy is evident in its very first scene, in > which a deranged base commander, preposterously named General Jack D. > Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden), orders his wing of B-52 bombers - > which are on routine airborne alert, circling a "fail-safe point" just > outside the Soviet border - to attack their targets inside the > U.S.S.R. with multimegaton bombs. > Once the pilots receive the order, they can't be diverted unless they > receive a coded recall message. And only General Ripper has the code. > The remarkable thing is, the fail-safe system that General Ripper > exploits was the real, top-secret fail-safe system at the time. > According to declassified Strategic Air Command histories, 12 B-52s - > fully loaded with nuclear bombs - were kept on constant airborne > alert. If they received a Go code, they went to war. This alert > system, known as Chrome Dome, began in 1961. It ended in 1968, after a > B-52 crashed in Greenland, spreading small amounts of radioactive > fallout. > But until then, could some loony general have sent bombers to attack > Russia without a presidential order? Yes. > In a scene in the "war room" (a room that didn't really exist, by the > way), U.S. Air Force General Buck Turgidson (played by George C. > Scott) explains to an incredulous President Merkin Muffley (one of > three roles played by Peter Sellers) that policies - approved by the > president - allowed war powers to be transferred, in case the > president was killed in a surprise nuclear attack on Washington. > Historical documents indicate that such procedures did exist, and > that, though tightened later, they were startlingly loose at the time. > But were there generals who might really have taken such power in > their own hands? It was no secret - it would have been obvious to many > viewers in 1964 - that General Ripper looked a lot like Curtis LeMay, > the cigar-chomping, gruff-talking general who headed the Strategic Air > Command through the 1950s and who served as the Pentagon's Air Force > Chief of Staff in the early '60s. > In 1957 Robert Sprague, the director of a top-secret panel, warned > LeMay that the entire fleet of B-52 bombers was vulnerable to attack. > LeMay was unfazed. "If I see that the Russians are amassing their > planes for an attack," he said, "I'm going to knock the [expletive] > out of them before they take off the ground." > "But General LeMay," Sprague replied, "that's not national policy." > "I don't care," LeMay said. "It's my policy. That's what I'm going to > do." > Kubrick probably was unaware of this exchange. (Sprague told me about > it in 1981, when I interviewed him for a book on nuclear history.) But > LeMay's distrust of civilian authorities, including presidents, was > well known among insiders, several of whom Kubrick interviewed. > The most popular guessing game about the movie is whether there was a > real-life counterpart to the character of Dr. Strangelove (another > Sellers part), the wheelchaired ex-Nazi who directs the Pentagon's > weapons research and proposes sheltering political leaders in > well-stocked mineshafts, where they can survive the coming nuclear war > and breed with beautiful women. Over the years, some have speculated > that Strangelove was inspired by Edward Teller, Henry Kissinger or > Werner Von Braun. > But the real model was almost certainly Herman Kahn, an eccentric, > voluble nuclear strategist at the RAND Corporation, a prominent Air > Force think tank. In 1960, Kahn published a 652-page tome called "On > Thermonuclear War," which sold 30,000 copies in hardcover. > According to a special-feature documentary on the new DVD, Kubrick > read "On Thermonuclear War" several times. But what the documentary > doesn't note is that the final scenes of "Dr. Strangelove" come > straight out of its pages. > Toward the end of the film, officials uncover General Ripper's code > and call back the B-52s, but they notice that one bomber keeps flying > toward its target. A B-52 is about to attack the Russians with a few > H-bombs; General Turgidson recommends that we should "catch 'em with > their pants down," and launch an all-out, disarming first-strike. > Such a strike would destroy 90 percent of the U.S.S.R.'s nuclear > arsenal. "Mr. President," he exclaims, "I'm not saying we wouldn't get > our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10-20 million killed, > tops!" > If we don't go all-out, the general warns, the Soviets will fire back > with all their nuclear weapons. The choice, he screams, is "between > two admittedly regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable postwar > environments - one where you get 20 million people killed and the > other where you get 150 million people killed!" > Kahn made precisely this point in his book, even producing a chart > labeled, "Tragic but Distinguishable Postwar States." When Strangelove > talks of sheltering people in mineshafts, President Muffley asks him, > "Wouldn't this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished > that they'd, well, envy the dead?" > Strangelove exclaims that, to the contrary, many would feel "a spirit > of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead." Kahn's book contains a > long chapter on mineshafts. Its title: "Will the Survivors Envy the > Dead?" One sentence reads: "We can imagine a renewed vigor among the > population with a zealous, almost religious dedication to > reconstruction." > In 1981, two years before he died, I asked Kahn what he thought of > "Dr. Strangelove." Thinking I meant the character, he replied, with a > straight face, "Strangelove wouldn't have lasted three weeks in the > Pentagon. He was too creative." Those in the know watched "Dr. > Strangelove" amused, like everyone else, but also stunned. > Daniel Ellsberg, who later leaked the Pentagon Papers, was a RAND > analyst and a consultant at the Defense Department when he and a > mid-level official took off work one afternoon in 1964 to see the > film. Ellsberg recalled that as they left the theater, he turned to > his colleague and said, "That was a documentary!" > > Fred Kaplan is a columnist for Slate and the author of "The Wizards of > Armageddon," a history of the nuclear strategists. >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 16 15:25:29 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 08:25:29 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] What is jojoba? Message-ID: <01C4B359.B29CAC90.shovland@mindspring.com> It's a plant that can grow in many semi-arid regions of the world, requires little water and maintenance and yields a crop of seeds that have many uses. The seed-oil has been used in lubricants, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and as a replacement for sperm oil in manufacturing of inks, varnishes, waxes, detergents, resins and plastics. In this era of dwindling natural resources and increased concern for the environment, maybe jojoba's time is now. From david_mcfadzean at hotmail.com Sat Oct 16 20:16:56 2004 From: david_mcfadzean at hotmail.com (David McFadzean) Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 14:16:56 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robin Hanson: The Next Really Big Enormous Thing References: <01C4B1E9.516DC060.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" > What's your candidate for the s-curve that comes > after the oil curve? I think the oil curve will last another 30 years (assuming a consumption rate increase of 5%/year, and assuming that the world's tar sands reserves will become economic to produce and double the current world oil reserves). After oil I'm guessing nuclear (emphasis on "guessing"). David From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 16 21:41:32 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 17:41:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Times of India: In Modi's Gujarat, Hitler is a textbook hero Message-ID: I sent this to the owner of a transhumanist list just a moment ago, but it's certain so apt for this one that I needn't worry about sending it. Hope we don't get too heated over who's the most admired person in the world. Yeah, Jesus and Mohammed for religious leaders. But who else is ahead of Hitler? Frank ---------- James, I'm fearful of sending this, as it might start a storm. What do you think? I'll do whatever your say. This comes from Education Week's series of international links. Frank ---------- A storm was set off a few weeks ago when someone compared Hitler unfavorably to Gandhi. So here's the opposite view. You'll have to click to get the rest of the article, if you're really interested. Hitler is easily one of the ten most people people, living or dead, in the world today, esp. in the third world. He's viewed as someone who started out from an unprivledged background, made is way to the top, and took revenge on his enemies. Revenge is near the bottom of my own ranking of Steve Reiss' 16 Basic Desires, but it's near the top for a good many people. They are not very concerned about what Hitler's policies were or whether their image of him corresponds to the fact: what matters is that he stuck it to the other guy. Hitler might even be no. 1, except for certain religious leaders. He's probably no. 1 among politicians. (Uncle Joe is still admired in Russia, since he would not brook nonsense. I don't think Chairman Mao is remembered fondly by very many people. Castro is admired throughout Latin America for sticking it to the Yanquis. Kennedy is also admired in Latin America, for being a Catholic. This is more positive. But I digress. We do not like this, but we should know the world as it is. In Modi's Gujarat, Hitler is a textbook hero http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-868469.cms 4.9.30 AHMEDABAD: Gandhi is not so great, but Hitler is. Welcome to high school education in Narendra Modi's Gujarat, where authors of social studies textbooks published by the Gujarat State Board of School Textbooks have found faults with the freedom movement and glorified Fascism and Nazism. While a Class VIII student is taught 'negative aspects' of Gandhi's non-cooperation movement, the Class X social studies textbook has chapters on 'Hitler, the Supremo' and 'Internal Achievements of Nazism'. The Class X book presents a frighteningly uncritical picture of Fascism and Nazism. The strong national pride that both these phenomena generated, the efficiency in the bureaucracy and the administration and other 'achievements' are detailed, but pogroms against Jews and atrocities against trade unionists, migrant labourers, and any section of people who did not fit into Mussolini or Hitler's definition of rightful citizen don't find any mention." They committed the gruesome and inhuman act of suffocating 60 lakh Jews in gas chambers" is all the book, authored by a panel, mentions of the holocaust. Continued... [spacer.gif] [65]Next >> References 65. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-868469,curpg-2.cms From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 17 00:18:50 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 20:18:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Jonathan Rauch: Caring for Your Introvert Message-ID: Jonathan Rauch: Caring for Your Introvert The Atlantic Monthly, March 2003 v291 i2 p133-4 Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice? If so, do you tell this person he is "too serious," or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands--and that you aren't caring for him properly. Science has learned a good deal in recent years about the habits and requirements of introverts. It has even learned, by means of brain scans, that introverts process information differently from other people (I am not making this up). If you are behind the curve on this important matter, be reassured that you are not alone. Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world. I know. My name is Jonathan, and I am an introvert. Oh, for years I denied it. After all, I have good social skills. I am not morose or misanthropic. Usually. I am far from shy. I love long conversations that explore intimate thoughts or passionate interests. But at last I have self-identified and come out to my friends and colleagues. In doing so, I have found myself liberated from any number of damaging misconceptions and stereotypes. Now I am here to tell you what you need to know in order to respond sensitively and supportively to your own introverted family members, friends, and colleagues. Remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts. It pays to learn the warning signs. What is introversion? In its modern sense, the concept goes back to the 1920s and the psychologist Carl Jung. Today it is a mainstay of personality tests, including the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say "Hell is other people at breakfast." Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring. Extroverts are energized by people, and will or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on" we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay--in small doses." How many people are introverts? I performed exhaustive research on this question, in the form of a quick Google search. The answer: About 25 percent. Or: Just under half. Or--my favorite--"a minority in the regular population but a majority in the gifted population." Are introverts misunderstood? Wildly. That, it appears, is our lot in hfe. "It is very difficult for an extrovert to understand an introvert," write the education experts Jill D. Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. (They are also the source of the quotation in the previous paragraph.) Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping, Are introverts oppressed? I would have to say so. For one thing, extroverts are overrepresented in politics, a profession in which only the garrulous are really comfortable. Look at George W. Bush. Look at Bill Clinton. They seem to come fully to life only around other people. To think of the few introverts who did rise to the top in politics--Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon--is merely to drive home the point. With the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, whose fabled aloofness and privateness were probably signs of a deep introverted streak (many actors, I've read, are introverts, and many introverts, when socializing, feel like actors), introverts are not considered "naturals" in politics. Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place. As Coolidge is supposed to have said, "Don't you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?" (He is also supposed to have said, "If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it." The only thing a true introvert dislikes more than talking about himself is repeating himself.) With their endless appetite for talk and attention, extroverts also dominate social life, so they tend to set expectations. In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. "People person" is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like "guarded," "loner," "reserved," "taciturn," "self-contained," "private"--narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality. Female introverts, I suspect, must suffer especially. In certain circles, particularly in the Midwest, a man can still sometimes get away with being what they used to call a strong and silent type; introverted women, lacking that alternative, are even more likely than men to be perceived as timid, withdrawn, haughty. Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. "Introverts," writes a perceptive fellow named Thomas P. Crouser, in an online review of a recent book called Why Should Extroverts Make All the Money? (I'm not making that up, either), "are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don't outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness." Just so. The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books--written, no doubt, by extroverts--regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts' Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say "I'm an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush." How can I let the introvert in my life know that I support him and respect his choice? First, recognize that it's not a choice. It's not a lifestyle. It's an orientation. Second, when you see an introvert lost in thought, don't say "What's the matter?" or "Are you all right?" Third, don't say anything else, either. From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 17 00:23:19 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 20:23:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reuters: New Pope Book Says Communism Was 'Necessary Evil' Message-ID: New Pope Book Says Communism Was 'Necessary Evil' http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&u=/nm/20041007/ts_nm/pope_communism_dc_1&printer=1 Thu Oct 7, 6:24 AM ET By Philip Pullella VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Communism was a "necessary evil" that God allowed to happen in the 20th century in order to create opportunities for good after its demise, Pope John Paul says in his new book. "Memory and Identity," which is due to be published early next year, is the ailing 84-year-old pontiff's latest and perhaps last book intended for a mass circulation audience. All of his previous books have been international bestsellers. In one chapter, the pope, who lived through both Nazism and Communism in his native Poland, reflects on the meaning of evil in life and in history. "I have personally experienced the reality of the 'ideologies of evil'. It remains indelibly fixed in my memory," he says in the book, which is a series of conversations he had in Polish with fellow philosophers in the summer of 1993. Excerpts of the book, which was announced Wednesday at the Frankfurt Book Fair, were made available by the Italian publisher Rizzoli. The pope, who has been credited with helping bring about the fall of Communism after his shock election in 1978, reveals that even an optimist like him had moments of pessimism during his life under Communist oppression. "To me it was quite clear that Communism would last much longer than Nazism had done. For how long? It was hard to predict," he writes. "There was a sense that this evil was in some way necessary for the world and for mankind. It can happen, in fact, that in certain particular human situations, evil is revealed as somehow useful inasmuch as it creates opportunities for good." Many historians believe it was his support for Poland's free trade union Solidarity after he became pope in 1978 that helped the union go on to form the East Bloc's first free government. NAZI "BESTIALITY" The pope, whom Jews have credited with improving Catholic relations with them more than any pontiff in history, also reflects on Nazism, which he calls a "bestiality." "The Lord God allowed Nazism 12 years of existence ... evidently this was the limit imposed by Divine Providence upon that sort of folly," he says. "The full extent of the evil that was raging through Europe was not seen by everyone, not even by those of us who were living at the epicenter. We were totally swallowed up in a great eruption of evil," he says. "Both the Nazis during the war and, later, the Communists in Eastern Europe, tried to hide what they were doing from public opinion. For a long time, the West did not want to believe in the extermination of the Jews," he writes. The pope's royalties from "Memory and Identity" will go to charity as have his previous titles. From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 17 00:27:39 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 20:27:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Howard Bloom: Xerox Effect: On the Importance of Pre-biotic Evolution Message-ID: Howard Bloom: Xerox Effect: On the Importance of Pre-biotic Evolution PhysicaPlus - Online magazine of the Israel Physical Society http://physicaplus.org.il/view_eng1.html Abstract Hamilton, Trivers, and their successors made brilliant contributions to scientific insight. But it's time to put the selfish gene in its place. Evolution is less dependent on genetic difference and similarity than is generally perceived. In fact, evolution's most potent trait--the genesis of novelty--depends less than is usually imagined on organism and life. DNA replication is but a special case of something that began with the big bang-- the Xerox Effect--the tendency of this cosmos to cough up copies in almost infinite abundance. Natural selection--the need to fit the environment's constraints--appeared in the Big Bang's earliest nanoseconds. Evolutionarily Stable Strategies have flourished since the first quarks joined in triumvirates. Variation and competition arose between gaseous macro-clusters long before the first ignition of the stars. Even proto-sociality and large-scale networking are long-standing cosmic legacies. Hamiltonian arithmetic is based on shared heritage, on family. When viewed in terms of protons, suns, and macromolecules, all bioforms are cousins in a single family tree. Planets, dust, and life-forms are all children of the Big Bang. Every living microbe, plant, or animal on Earth is a cousin in the clan of DNA. Every organism that ever was is a relative of its antagonists, of its food, and of the inanimate forces of complexifigenesis and catastrophe. A new way of framing questions and answers emerges when one sees Darwinism, the arithmetic of self interest, and the patterns of the human psyche in the broader context sketched by cosmology, astrophysics, particle physics, microbiology, and paleontology. In this light, it's time to reevaluate. What traits have we inherited from previous forms of life, and what traits have been bequeathed us by our pre-biotic ancestry? [view\howard_front.jpg] Astronomers refer to the heart of galaxies as nuclei. Is this an appropriate use of biology's vocabulary? Or, to put it differently, which aggregation of billions of constituent elements evolved the principle of central control we call nucleation first-galaxies or cells? Can A Cosmos Evolve? Evolution is a term used constantly these days by a breed of scientists who seldom if ever deal with the stuff of life-cosmologists, physicists, astrophysicists, and astronomers. They use it to refer to galaxies, suns, and stars. The word "evolution" appears 191,787 times in NASA's Astrophysics Data System, The Digital Library for Physics, Astrophysics, and Instrumentation hosted by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In other words, physicists and astrophysicists use the word evolution almost four times as often as they use the word "planet" (58,001 times). Are today's "hard scientists" applying the concept of evolution metaphorically? Are they misappropriating and misusing a term that rightfully belongs to only one form of cosmic interaction-the complex tangle we call life? No, Not at all. Evolution depends on four factors-reproduction, competition, variation, and natural selection. All four factors existed in some form in the pre-biotic universe. All four started their twisting long before life began. The universe started with a Big Bang, not a whimper. Most of us acknowledge that by now. What few of us realize is the capacity for duplication that this universe revealed literally within the first nano-flash of a second after its conception. The cosmos sprang from a convergence of infinities, a twist of crisscrossed nothings physicists call a singularity. A sliver of a second later more than 1088 protons popped into being. Every one of these protons, no matter where or when it had appeared, was identical to every other-totally interchangeable. The same duplication happened with neutrons, electrons, positrons, and photons-or as the early families of particles are known-with all baryons and leptons. Swarms so numerous they defy the human number system cascaded from a spreading sheet of space, time, and energy. All paid tribute to a dead-ringer-generating, identimorphic process of uncanny precision, a process churning out the very same pattern almost everyplace there was a place to be. Was this reproduction? No proton, so far as modern theory knows, ever begat another proton. Nor was this copycat imitation-the mechanism to which theorists like Susan Blakemore attribute the reproduction of memes. In our terms it was parallel or convergent evolution. Evolution-isn't that an inappropriate, vitalistic term for the primordial plasma of an abiotic cosmos--one that wouldn't host a hint of life for another eleven billion years? The mistake, it seems, is made by the biocentric. Once again, evolution's essence as Charles Darwin saw it boils down to reproduction, variation, competition, and natural selection. Only one of these-reproduction--is a biological monopoly. And even that is a shade less clear-cut than it seems. Let's examine the pre-biotic cosmos for evolution's remaining trio, its triad of propulsive algorithms--variation, competition, and natural selection--one element at a time. Natural Selection in the Primordial Stew We have strong hints that natural selection has been with us since the earliest second of the Big Bang. Modern physics regards a universe as the product of a set of laws tweaked by roughly 20 variables. What are natural laws? They dictate the way things can and cannot be. Violate the elemental laws, and you can't succeed. Even if you get away with overstepping the bounds for a picosecond or two, other products of natural law may eradicate you. As of 1999, atom smashers had generated roughly 300 forms of hopeful monsters-subatomic particles. Most disappeared within a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Only a handful could survive the rigors of this particular cosmos at this point in time. This destruction of what doesn't fit is the ultimate punishment for "unnatural" crime. It's also the severest form of natural selection. What if the flash of the Big Bang had topped a particle accelerator in inanimate variation, in abiotic fecundity? What if it had precipitated 3,000, or three million hopeful genera of particles in its crack-up splat of energy? How many of these early species of proto-matter have survived the fourteen billion years or so since the instant that kick-started time? Only 72. These 72 have made their way through a slew of natural selection's slings and arrows unparalleled by anything that breathes. They've endured the catastrophe of cosmic expansion, the disasters of galactic recompression, the eruption of stellar-center hells, the frigid chill of space, collision, contusion, explosion, intrusion, and the vagaries of ten billion years more time than any thing that ever rose from a mere twitch of RNA. Natural selection worked with extreme ferocity in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang and in the 300,000 years that followed. The cataclysm physicist Alan Guth refers to as expansion hit with a force that dwarfs the torment at the heart of a nuclear blast. Compression waves repeatedly crushed would-be particles together in a squeeze that makes the mash at the heart of our sun seem like a day at the beach. The heat was beyond belief-it reached 1028 degrees Kelvin, 1021 degrees hotter than the heart of the sun. Heat is a measure of speed. Which means that nanobits of primordial matter slammed each other with a destructive force that makes a collision of bullets seem like a polite meeting of snails for tea. Only 72 forms of elementary particle survived these ricochet-collisions. Only 72 abiotic species made it through this natural selectivity. Even in this harshest of environments, the Xerox Principle worked its ways. Social aggregations by the sesquiviginquintillions gathered in identical patterns and showed their power to stay. They emerged as what Maynard Smith calls Evolutionarily Stable Strategies. The triumphant micro-communities were protons, neutrons, and mesons. ? Protons were trios of a down quark and two up quarks. ? Neutrons had the opposite population-one up quark and two down. ? Mesons were quark duos-quarks in bonded pairs. Despite crashes, smashes, violations, and attacks of outrageous kinds, these huddles of two and three have remained together since the first ten minutes of time. That's a form of fitness far beyond anything biomass has yet achieved. But perhaps these aggregations' strangest quality was is its strict adherence to precision and to the Xerox Principle-to identicality. Do Particles Socialize? Another form of congregation made it through the brutal natural selectors that both early and recent environments tossed their way. A duplicative rain of neutrons precipitated in uncountable numbers during the first slice of a second that formed the cosmos' first EEA. Anthropocentric as it sounds, these neutrons were subjected to a critical social need. A neutron that paired with a proton could last almost eternally. A neutron that failed to find a proton partner in 10.6 minutes was doomed to disintegrate permanently. The forces of physics had literally built an apoptotic timer-a self-destruct mechanism-an internal selector-into these wee monads of pre-life. The result? Three forms of nano-tribe or inanimate micro-family- ? Huddles of one or two neutrons around a single proton (progenitors of deuterium and tritium) ? Clutches of two protons accompanied by one or two neutrons (the ancestors of helium) ? And clenches of three protons flanked by four neutrons (the future cores of lithium). These monomorphic social coveys, too, made it through the slam-dance jam that physicists call plasma-the superheated smash-em-up that filled the exploding space-time manifold like quivering molten lava for its first 300,000 years. These duos and foursomes showed a power to succeed despite the pounding natural selection meted out even to pre-biotic breeds. Variation-The Formal Dance of Difference [view\howard3.jpg] A proton is a very social place. According to one current theory, a proton is a trio of quarks (left). According to another, it's more like a crowd of students in a phone booth-containing not only a quark threesome, but a pack of gluons and quark-antiquark pairs. More to the point, despite the proton's intricacy, the early universe spat out 10^88 identical protons in less than a second. This cosmic habit of spontaneous-and often simultaneous--duplication is The Xerox Effect. Then there's variation, the force of evolution Darwin admired the most and found it hardest to comprehend. That too appeared in the Big Bang's pre-biotic burst. Differentiation carved a chasm Between highly distinctive forms: ? The matter-stuff called baryons (protons, neutrons, and their anti-matter counterparts) ? The smaller matter-bits called leptons (electrons, muons, tau particles, electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos) ? And the force-carriers, the radiating, transporting, binding, and repelling particles (some of which are still quite hypothetical)-photons, gluons, W and Z particles, and gravitons. Tossing another twist of variation into the early mix was yet another cleavage between kinds. This separation, this variation, is based on something we in psychology think of as a property that only biomass possesses-behavior, stimulus and response, action based on who's around you and on what your environment cues you to do. Fermions follow one rulebook of inanimate etiquette-that mapped out by Fermi-Dirac statistics. The cosmic directive fermions obey with strict obedience is this: if one fermion discovers that a nearby other has occupied a given quantum state, it may not crowd into the same quantum niche staked out by its companion. Instead it must assume a different quantum position. The counterparts of fermions are bosons. These follow a different set of social do's and don'ts. The imperatives of bosons are described by Bose?Einstein statistics. These say that a flock of bosons can hop into the same quantum state and crowd together there quite comfortably. The stimulus-response proclivities of fermions and bosons would not reveal their choreography until the universe was 300,000 years old. But with these social rules there would arise yet another critical evolutionary engine-competition. For at the year 300,000 ABB (After the Big Bang) the environment altered, and it altered drastically. Things cleared up and things slowed down. This was the second cosmic EEA. The scalding soup of bump-and-bash spread out. Particles downshifted from a slashing speed to a relative mosey of energy. Space opened in between the trios, duos, and quartets that formerly had crowded in a mash. Photons were no longer trapped in ricochet and for the first time were able to discover their propensity to travel in straight lines. When humans would probe the cosmos fourteen billion years later, they'd sense these straight streams of photons as a subtle radiation, a glow that warms but sheds no light. Bosons were suddenly moved by new social cues. Protons found themselves reeled in by a force of a kind that had never shown itself in quite this way before. They were tugged toward nano-bits one 1,800th their mass. And those tiny particles, electrons, responded to the tugging too. This led to a new circle-dance, a new form of nano-tribe or family. Electrons settled into shells around proton/neutron cores. And these orbiting electrons, being fermions, were polite to each other. No two crowded into the same quantum state. They aggregated yet kept a proper distance, revealing their obedience to the rules of inanimate politesse later traced by the mathematical courtesies mapped by Fermi and Dirac. Thus did particles discover something observers-had there been some--would have found unbelievable. They gathered in the inanimate community we now take for granted and call "atoms." Once again, the Xerox Principle held sway. More identical gang-ups sprang up than our words for numbers-from trillions and octillions to duodecillians-can conveniently convey. And they did so not just one-by-one, but yoked in simultaneity. If this were a random universe, innumerable social bundlings should have taken place-particle circles of five, ten, 20, or 30 protons and their neutron sidekicks. Theoretically there should have been mixes and matches-permutations and combinations-of all kinds. On the other hand, if this were the disintegrative universe of the entropists or the progress-less cosmos of the late Stephen Jay Gould, there should have been no social bundlings at all. But for the next few hundred million years, six and only six cluster patterns would thrive in the co-evolving environment of their time. Only six would be generated by what Darwin labeled "variation." Only six would be favored by inanimate duplication. And only six would make it through the sieves of natural selection. The lucky winners were: 1. The perpetual swing of a single electron around a single proton-a tango held together by inanimate fascination. This is the particle dance that we call hydrogen. Add a neutron to the center and the swirl's deuterium. Put a second neutron in, and the frisk is tritium. 2. The swish of two electron circlers around the pivot of two protons and one or two neutrons. These are the particle gavottes we know as helium. 3. The whip of three electrons around a hub of three protons and four neutrons. This is the whisk called lithium. So evolutionarily stable were two of these atom-strategies, so mighty were their powers to overcome potential destroyers like the harsh smack of gamma rays, so hardened to bombardments of natural selectors-- that hydrogen and helium atoms passed the ultimate test of fitness-they make up 98% of the matter in this cosmos to this day. Gravity Triggers Competition-Big Eat Small Communal intersects of behaviors-of influenced-actions-were behind the startling new emergent properties atoms would display. Since this universe began there had been a mere three forces on display: the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic. Yet there was another great bond-maker, one so weak that in the thickness of a plasma it had never once revealed its possibilities. To an observer accustomed to what nature had been like for 300,000 years, it would have seemed a myth, a ghost, a fairy tale, a fantasy. This new emergent power would add to the Darwinian pistons of variation and selection another crucial evolutionary driver-competition. The force that slowly unveiled its strength now that the cosmos had calmed down a bit was the weakest of the four repellers and compellers. It was the subtlest, yet the grandest of the basic socializers--gravity. Atoms existed but not substances. How could this be? No tug had yet emerged to pull atoms together in a wisp, a tad of dust, a heap. Let's put it bluntly. Without groups, there would have been no gravitational influence. And without gravity, there would have been no atom mobs, no atom crowds and aggregations, and nothing to compete about. Cannibalism is the word astrophysicists and cosmologists use to describe the new, competitive gravity game. Numbers were power-the more recruits you could attract, the more reinforcements you could dragoon. If your loosely flowing flock of hydrogen or helium atoms had more mass than that of a neighboring gas, you could swallow the wisp whole and add it to your atom congregation. If the multitude of atoms in your dust speck outnumbered the host in a rival fleck, you could haul in the less-populated squad then consume it using gravity's traction beam. The larger you got, the more neighbors you could attract or shanghai into your pack. When the big felt the attraction of the small, the large swept in the tiny and took all. When wisps and specks were still brand new, the predatory impact of their gravity would have seemed a piffle. But as atom-masses grew they changed the face of darkness, space and time. Long trails of queer, phantasm-stuff-matter-- threaded through the black of time and space. Where they crossed they battled to survive each others' tug. Some hung together through sheer compromise. They swung in ellipses and spirals around fattening hubs of gravitational stuff, protected by their speed-by centrifugal force. They discovered yet another evolutionarily stable survival tactic-orbit-a stratagem whose loops speckled the cosmic map. [view\howard4.jpg] An act of what astrophysicists call galactic "cannibalism" and "predation." This was the compromise. The atom-clots that stayed intact as circling captives added their tug to their motion-master's center of gravity. They upped the grasping power of the globular giant at the heart of their orbital course. The larger the gatherings of circlers and swallowers, the more new niches gravity carved out, and the more new forms and shapes its marauding masses showed. The globular atom-legions that reeled in rival squadrons turned to disks and whorls. Pinprick specks evolved as pinwheels 100,000 light years across. These were the cinder-dark swirls of atoms we call galaxies. Groups of these megadishes duked it out for dominance. Tens of billions of galaxies were drawn together in superclusters that continue to attract and gorge on weaker neighbors to this day. Competing clusters swept the space between them in their capture-matches. This lateral inhibition gave the new clumps spacing. The mega-shapes of circle-laced-with circle turned into an astro-froth, a bubble-stuff of mega-foam whose particles are galaxies. Gravitational sumo matches re-landscaped the flat plain of Einsteinian space/time. They gouged and raised the Van-Gogh patterns in our night-time sky. Gravity was the great aggregator, the great integrator, the great pattern-maker of inanimate sociality. But as yet the sky was dark. Cosmic evolution hadn't yet discovered the secret of the spark. FIRE! Variation is a word too tame when something like surprise pops up and changes the very nature of the self-assembling game. The crowding of atoms in the winning gravity centers created an atom smash. Gravity balls grown overfat ignited. They stripped their atom-inhabitants of electrons, mashed proton-neutron groups together-and forced these tortured families of particles to let go of energy. The loss flooded out as photons, and the radiating scatter of debris made light. Roughly 200 hundred million years after the Big Bang, gravity's variation, natural selection, and competition had pricked through nature's blackness and had caused stars to ignite. The Xerox effect-mass duplication-continued to adhere. The hulks that cracked their atoms and spilled photonic refugees were suns. Evolution cookie-cut them by the zillions, each in the shape of a sphere. The swirls in which hundreds of billions of suns were wheeled together by gravity were so profoundly similar that they're easily seen as galaxies. Thousands of herds of galaxies were corralled by gravity. Yet despite their fantastic number, these clusters had a disk-shaped contour that remained at heart the same. Stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters all are evolutionarily stable strategies. All have proven their ability to endure nature's nightmares, her selectors, her evolution-honers, her gestation razors. All have triumphed over an environment of star-eat-star and galaxy-eat-galaxy. And all have trillions of lookalikes. All have doppelgangers to the nth degree. [view\howard5.jpg] A foam of galaxies. The spaces opened in this lace by gravitationally-powered lateral inhibition are between 60,000,000 to 150,000,000 light-years across. Cosmic Death, Birth, and Transfiguration Repetition remained the rule for the next six billion years. Then once again the force Darwin calls variation coughed up a saltative change. Stars spun through developmental phases--youth, maturity, and, finally, old age. The leaping, rebel-jamming, atom-slam that powered stars ran out of energy. The liquid-like inferno at many a star's heart was squeezed. The core of the star shrunk down, grew cold, and balled up like a fist. Atomic nuclei at the heart grew sluggish and lost the energy to keep their distance, to stay apart. The stellar death-grip multiplied density and, in the presence of trapped nuclei, gave that old attractive force new emergent properties. Catastrophe is opportunity in the world of evolution. Destruction spreads the seeds of new construction. During the years before the first stars died there had only been three basic atom-forms-hydrogen, helium, and lithium. All star-power, no matter where, had come from munching on hydrogen and helium nuclei. The stellar death-squeeze forced these ancient proton-neutron families to accept new social norms, to reluctantly ally in 89 new tribal forms. Four protons forced together would be beryllium. Five protons tortured to unite would be boron. Six would be a wonder at match-making-carbon. Seven would be carbon's eventual sidekick, nitrogen. Eighty-eight would be the strange and flickery clan called radium. These were proton-neutron tribes created in the midst of supernova devastation. They were huddles, social strategies that would prove their stability in the worst starburst catastrophe this cosmos could toss at them. They were victors on the battlefield of natural selection. The Xerox Effect-synchronicity, duplicative-evolution-the pre-biotic cousin of reproduction-still reigned. So much creativity, and yet so little change. So much novelty and yet so much constraint. Eighty-nine new atom-centers...yet in a world of 1077 protons, so few. Why for every new atomic core would there be roughly 1055 carbon copies, 1055 dupes? While old stars were dying, new stars were aborning-evolving by the trillions, yet self-assembling so identically they were indistinguishable as sheep. Star-wannabes self-seeded in patches where the matter-scraps were plenty, and battled nearby rivals gravitationally. Each scoured the dead-star bone yard for more-than-its-fair-share of debris. In the clutter that they sucked up there was something new--a smattering of the novel newborn atoms. These were the 89 freshly-scrunched crews of protons and of neutrons-the new elements the rules of duplicative generation, competition, gravitation, and selection had sutured in new forms of sociality. In the new stars' wakes, inanimate evolution produced another newness unknown in this cosmos' first few hundred million (and possibly even billion) years-radical new molecules. Raucous jumbles of atom-combinations explored their possibilities. They spat out biomolecules in multitudes, the product of chance and of emergent opportunity. Yet hydrogen and helium were still the rule. Hydrogen and helium, the oldsters in the evolutionary match of slam, crash, join-together, and dance, have shown a hardiness, a fitness, an ability to take on comers of all kinds and stick together. They are still 98% of all we know as gas and matter. The epoch of new-star-and-matter-birth was the third great era of the EEA. All throughout the cosmos nucleic acids, ammonia, and sugars crystallized on spicules of amorphous ice, clumped in slush-and-dustball comets, and discovered their fraternity while mix-and-matching in the stuff of meteorites. Without replication there was iteration. Carbon-copy molecules precipitated with precise identicality billions of light years from each other in the emptiness of space. If any found a planet or a moon with liquid water they could do a dance of conjugation and gather in a bubble, in an empty pocket that invited filling. Yes, when plunked into a puddle of water, meteorite-born polyols, dihydroxyacetones, glycerols, sugar acids, and sugar alcohols automatically swarm together in the lipid-like-bubble we now call a membrane. Self-Replicating Dust? On one planet that we know of, these new proton-neutron-and-electron aggregations flocked in yet far larger mass confederations-complex, varied, polyglotted atom-leagues, knotted ropes of atoms stitched by strange affinities. Repetitious cables of atom-squadrons seduced and recruited nitrogenous and hydrogenous outriders to join on their periphery. These were the shockingly "unnatural" new mass behaviors, the whole new ways of hanging out together, the whole new strategies in which particles by the millions joined to make it through a rain of insults-heat and ice balls, ultraviolet rays, the shock of planetesimals splattering the globe on which they rode, and high-speed particles slammed down from space. In the flick of less than 750 million years, these new strings, new tangles, rings, and triangles of particles uncovered a bizarre new opportunity-the ability to fuse and flicker in the huge self-replicating armies of atom-scavengers that we call DNA. Every living creature, from bacteria to salamander and to all of us now in this room-is a child of this history. We are the offspring of this self-creating, self-evolving cosmos that's crawled upward despite the grand disintegrator, entropy. We are mounds of quarks in trios, we are proton-and-electron families. We are children of a repetition, an iterative churning that cookie-cuttered with identical precision long before there was a thing called breathing or the spasm of 100 trillion human cells we call a sneeze. [view\howard6.jpg] Fission and fusion started in the big bang. They appeared in the formation of baryons, in the disintegration of neutrons, in the birth of proto-galaxies, and in the ignition and death of stars. They've led to aggregations as small as protons and atoms and as large as galaxy superclusters. Fission and fusion also took place among biomolecules, bacteria, plants, animals, and human clans, and led to aggregations as small as proteins and as large as empires and nations. Which first pioneered fission and fusion strategies--protons and galaxies, or bacteria, chimps, and human beings? Are fission and fusion examples of evolutionarily stable strategies, or are they simply sloppy similes? (Illustrations clockwise from upper left: nuclear fission, the fission of The United States of America from its parent body, Britain, a moment of fusion among chimpanzees, and a moment of fusion between two clusters containing several thousand galaxies.) We Are Family-Cousins In The Clan of DNA Evolution has crept forward since the first twitch of inflation from a singularity. And so have social strategies. We are the Big Bang's children. We are containers of the Xerox Principle's legacy. There is only one life-process on this planet, not the 30 or 3,000 we'd expect if evolution had proceeded in blind randomness. This cosmos can create but is constrained. There are only 92 natural forms of atoms, not the millions that a random cosmos would gestate. There is but a single family on this planet, just one life form stretching out its tendrils, testing possibilities as dust and stars did once upon a time. Face it; we are all in this together, microbes, seaweed, starfish, salamanders, humans, every strange extrusion of nucleic acid chains. We are the kin of yeast, the brothers of cockroaches, the sisters of sugar beets, and the cousins of maize. We share a common birthright born of ancient gene-and-membrane teams. All of us are children in the clan of DNA. _________________________________________________________________ Suggested further reading: Among other things NASA's Astrophysics Data System provides a reference to the 35 top journals in astrophysics and astronomy. The NASA Astrophysics Data System: The Digital Library for Physics, Astrophysics, and Instrumentation Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. From the World Wide Web: [2]http://adsabs.harvard.edu [3]Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century Lee Smolin, "The Life of the Cosmos", New York: Oxford University Press (1997) Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer", Santa Barbara: Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California (1997) Retrieved June 1999 from the World Wide Web: [4]http://www.clark.net/pub/ogas/evolution/EVPSYCH_primer.htm Edward L. Wright, "Brief History of the Universe", Astronomy Department, UCLA Retrieved May, 2002, from the World Wide Web: [5]http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/BBhistory.html Peter Coles, "The end of the old model Universe", Nature, 393, 741 - 744 (1998) Jack O. Burns, "Stormy Weather in Galaxy Clusters", Science, Vol. 280, No. 5362, 400 - 404 (1998) J. L. Bada, "The transition from abiotic to biotic chemistry: When and where?" American Geophysical Union, abstract #U51A-11 (2001) _________________________________________________________________ About the Author: Howard Bloom ([6]howard at paleopsych.com), a visiting scholar at the Graduate Psychology Department at New York University and a Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute, is the author of two books: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History ("mesmerizing"-The Washington Post) and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century ("reassuring and sobering"-The New Yorker). This article is derived from one of his upcoming books, The Big Bang Tango: Quarking In the Social Cosmos. Bloom is the founder of the International Paleopsychology Project, executive editor of the New Paradigm book series, a founding board member of the Epic of Evolution Society, a founding board member, The Darwin Project, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the National Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, The International Society of Human Ethology, and the Academy of Political Science. He has been featured in every edition of Who's Who in Science and Engineering since the publication's inception. Bloom's writings have appeared in The Washington Post, Wired, Knight-Ridder's Financial News Service, The Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, Omni Magazine, New Ideas in Psychology, The Independent Scholar, Across Species Comparisons and Psychopathology, and in two book series: Research in Biopolitics and the Disinformation Company's series of three books: You Are Being Lied To, Everything You Know is Wrong, and Abuse Your Illusions. References 1. http://physicaplus.org.il/view_eng1.html#author 2. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/ 3. http://howardbloom.net/Expert%20opinions%20on%20Global%20Brain.htm 4. http://www.clark.net/pub/ogas/evolution/EVPSYCH_primer.htm 5. http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/BBhistory.html 6. http://physicaplus.org.il/howard at paleopsych.com From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 17 00:29:07 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 20:29:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CNETAsia: Australia vulnerable to Korean hacking army Message-ID: Australia vulnerable to Korean hacking army http://asia.cnet.com/news/security/printfriendly.htm?AT=39197226-39037064t-39000005c By [3]Munir Kotadia, Special to CNETAsia 13/10/2004 An army of more than 500 hackers hired by the North Korean military could find Australian businesses a "softer target" than their U.S. or European-based counterparts, according to security experts. The hacking armys mission is to break into South Korean, Japanese and American corporate networks to gather intelligence and steal trade secrets, according to reports. But security experts are concerned because although Australian-based firms hold the same intellectual property as their U.S. and EU-based offices, they are not as paranoid about security. A U.S. security expert who requested anonymity said Australia could provide a "back door" into corporate networks and provide the North Koreans with intellectual property worth billions of dollars. "Countries like China and North Korea are not exactly poster children for copyright enforcement. North Koreas economic position is not favorable and that makes it more dangerous. They want the ability to manufacture goods better and cheaper," the security expert said. Terry O'Keeffe, Leader of the Asia Pacific Cyber Attack Tiger Team at telecommunications giant Cable and Wireless, said Australia could be seen as a softer target than the U.S. "We are a trusted ally--along with the UK, Canada and New Zealand--but we are not quite as paranoid as the Americans," said OKeeffe. A spokesperson from the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), which is responsible for warning the government of any potential threats to national security, admitted to ZDNet Australia that electronic espionage attacks "happen all the time". The spokesperson said the ASIO is aware of the problem and is taking an interest in it, but would not be able to comment on anything not specifically mentioned in its annual report. However, Mikko Hypp?nen, director of anti-virus research at European security firm F-Secure, is skeptical. "This is probably more boasting than a real threat. In the past we have seen similar claims from the Taiwanese and the East Timorese," said Hypp?nen. Munir Kotadia of [5]ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney. References 3. http://ups.asia.cnet.com/c/as.ql.feedbackstory/asia.cnet.com/news at asia.cnet.com 4. http://asia.cnet.com/news/security/0,39037064,39197226,00.htm 5. http://www.zdnet.com.au/ From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 17 00:31:04 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 20:31:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Human Lie Detectors Almost Never Miss, Study Finds Message-ID: Human Lie Detectors Almost Never Miss, Study Finds http://www.reuters.co.uk/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=6506170 Thu October 14, 2004 05:18 PM ET By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As he lies, the young man shrugs, flutters his eyelids and shakes his head. Another, on a witness stand, grimaces for a millisecond as he answers a question. Most people believe they could easily detect such lying behavior, but in fact most miss a good 50 percent of lies, says deception expert Maureen O'Sullivan of the University of California San Francisco. But O'Sullivan says she has found a special group -- just 1 percent of those she has tested -- who catch a lie nearly 90 percent of the time. "We call them wizards," O'Sullivan told a briefing sponsored by the American Medical Association on Thursday. "Wizardry is a special skill that seems magical if you don't have it." These wizards have a special ability to ferret out little tics that show when a person is lying. She and her colleagues have so far screened 13,000 people for their ability to catch a liar on videotape. "We found 14 people who we called ultimate experts," she said. They could tell when people deliberately lied about feelings, committing a crime or their own opinions. Another 13 were good at detecting specific types of lies. For example, she said, "There was a group of cops who got very good scores -- they got 80 percent or more on crime but none of them did well on the video about feeling." Now O'Sullivan is trying to find out how they do it. She finds they have little in common so far, except a motivation to catch liars. Some have advanced degrees, some only a high school education. About 20 percent had alcoholic parents. "They are located all over the country. We sit down and go over the ... videotapes. I ask them to think aloud. I tape record them thinking aloud," she said. While most people know to look for certain cues as a person lies, these wizards intuitively find an individual's peculiar cues. One may shrug when lying, and another may make fleeting expressions of disgust or even amusement. "There are lots of clues. The problem is how do you put them together and how to you make any sense of them?" O'Sullivan said her findings could help train better lie detectors -- for instance, federal agents or therapists who need to know when someone is telling the truth. She is not sure about other real-world applications. "We have made an offer to the federal government that it might be interesting to have them as sort of panel when they have high profile investigations," she said. What about analyzing the presidential debates between President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry? O'Sullivan just laughed. From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 17 15:54:39 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2004 11:54:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Science Blog: Northwestern researchers pinpoint how false memories are formed Message-ID: Northwestern researchers pinpoint how false memories are formed http://scienceblog.com/community/article4372.html False memories are the controversial subject of hotly contested arguments about the validity of repressed memories that can surface years after a traumatic event and about the credibility of eyewitness accounts in criminal trials. Because memories are imperfect under ordinary circumstances -- forming, storing and retrieving them, with great variations in factors influencing those processes -- it is unlikely that a one-answer-fits-all will settle those controversies soon. But a group of researchers from various disciplines at Northwestern University literally have peered into the brain to offer new evidence on the existence of false memories and how they are formed. Published in the journal Psychological Science, the new study used MRI technology to pinpoint how people form a memory for something that didn't actually happen. ''Our challenge was to bring people into the laboratory and set up a circumstance in which they would remember something that did not happen,'' said Kenneth A. Paller, professor of psychology and co- investigator of the study. (Brian Gonsalves, who was a doctoral student of Paller's and who now is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, is the first author of the paper.) ''We measured brain activity in people who looked at pictures of objects or imagined other objects that we asked them to visualize. Later we asked them to discriminate what they actually saw from what they imagined,'' Paller said. Extending upon considerable Northwestern research on what happens in the brain when people remember versus forget, the researchers were interested in what happens differently in the brain when false memories are produced. ''We learned that the particular parts of the brain critical for generating visual images are highly activated when people imagine images such as those we presented to our study participants,'' said Paller. Many of the visual images that the subjects were asked to imagine were later misremembered as actually having been seen. ''We think parts of the brain used to actually perceive an object and to imagine an object overlap,'' said Paller. ''Thus, a vividly imagined event can leave a memory trace in the brain that's very similar to that of an experienced event. When memories are stored for perceived or imagined objects, some of the same brain areas are involved.'' Take a real life example in which a police interrogator asks if you saw a particular person at a crime scene. That induces putting that person in your imagination and possibly corrupts later questioning. ''Just the fact of looking back into your memory and thinking about whether an event happened is tantamount to imagining that event happening,'' Paller said. ''If I ask you if something happened, you imagine it happening. Later on -- a day or a year later -- if I ask about that event, you have the tough judgment of deciding what happened and what was imagined.'' It is important to know that memory is fallible, Paller said. ''We know that we forget quite a bit, but we're not always in touch with the idea that our memories can sometimes can be misleading.'' For this procedure of measuring brain activity, people lay down in an MRI machine as they looked at a screen with a series of words, all concrete nouns, and pictures, and they wore head phones to hear what was being said. They were instructed to generate a visual image corresponding to each object that was named. For half the words, a photographic image of the object was presented. The subjects were told to make no response to photos, but only to look at each one while waiting for the next word. They were told to make a size judgment about the objects they were to imagine. For example, if the word was cat, they were told to imagine the cat and decide if a cat is generally bigger or smaller than a video monitor. The memory test was administered outside the scanner and began approximately 20 minutes after the scanning. Subjects heard a randomly ordered sequence of spoken words. One-third corresponded to photos they had seen, one-third to objects they had only imagined and one-third they had neither seen nor imagined. For each word, subjects decided whether or not they had viewed a photo of the named object during the study phase. Three brain areas (precuneus, right inferior parietal cortex and anterior cingulate) showed greater responses in the study phase to words that would later be falsely remembered as having been presented with photos, compared to words that were not later misremembered as having been presented with photos. The words leading to false memories also tended to be slightly more concrete, on average, than those that did not. Presumably, people could generate a visual image more easily for the more concrete words. ''At any rate, the remarkable finding is that brain activity during the study phase could predict which objects would subsequently be falsely remembered as having been seen as a photograph,'' Paller said. The flip side is that memory for viewed photographs was often correct. People gave many correct responses for objects they indeed viewed. Brain activity produced in response to viewed pictures and measured with functional MRI also predicted which pictures would be subsequently remembered. Two brain regions in particular -- the left hippocampus and the left prefrontal cortex -- were activated more strongly for pictures that were later remembered than for pictures that were forgotten. These two brain areas have previously been understood to play a central role in memory. The new findings directly showed that different brain areas are critical for accurate memories for visual objects than for false remembering -- for forming a memory for an imagined object that is later remembered as a perceived object. The neuroanatomical evidence furthermore sheds light on the mental mechanisms responsible for forming accurate memories versus false memories. ''In the case of the false remembering emphasized here, the false memories were created when vivid visual imagery was engaged and a mental image was produced,'' Paller said. ''These mental images left a trace in the brain that was later mistaken for the trace that would have been produced had that object actually been seen.'' Listed as on the study, the co-investigators are Brian Gonsalves, post- doctoral fellow, Stanford University, and Northwestern researchers Paul J. Reber, associate professor of psychology, Darren R. Gitelman, associate professor of neurology, Todd B. Parrish, associate professor or radiology, M. Marsel Mesulam, Ruth and Evelyn Dunbar Professor, and Kenneth A. Paller, professor of psychology. The Northwestern researchers are affiliated with the department of psychology, the Institute for Neuroscience, the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center, the department of neurology, the department of radiology and the Feinberg School of Medicine. From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 17 15:58:31 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2004 11:58:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Thomas Cushman: The Sociology of Evil and The Destruction of Bosnia Message-ID: Thomas Cushman: The Sociology of Evil and The Destruction of Bosnia The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=306861&textreg=1&id=CusBosn2-2 In sociology, the subject of evil has been avoided, argues Thomas Cushman, but the events of the twentieth century call for a sociological grappling with the term. Cushman argues for looking at evil as a form of social action, as something that human agents do, and employs such a theory of evil in examining the war in Bosnia. He focuses on the actions of Slobodan Milosevic, and the ways in which Milosevic created an identity for himself that obscured the evil for which he is responsible. Thomas Cushman is Associate Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at Wellesley College, General Editor for the series "Post-Communist Societies and Cultures," and Editor of Human Rights Review. He has published numerous papers and books on Soviet society and the Balkans and has co-edited, with Stjepan G. Mestrovic, This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia. I There is an apocalyptic quality to much writing on Bosnia, a certain awestruck "homage to the extreme" as Michael Bernstein calls it, which presumes that the answers to the question "why did this evil happen?" lie outside the ken of normal human knowledge.[4]^2 Rather than assume that events in Bosnia reveal some greater metaphysical truth about evil or about some presumed stage of regression or apocalypse in Western culture, I suggest that there might be a way to offer at least some answer to the question of why those events occurred and that such an answer lies in the analysis of the discrete actions and interactions of specific agents within the contours of the social time and space in which such agents exist. In this essay, I would like to render the rhetorical question "why did it happen?" into a sociological one: "what brought individual agents to do such things and how were their acts facilitated by their social and cultural environments?" The answer to this question requires a sociology of evil that does not really exist, or if it does, only exists inchoately in a few explicitly sociological works that attempt to present the logic of evil and cruelty. My central purpose here is to work toward the provision of such a theory. There are, to be sure, problems that immediately arise in such a task. As a moral concept, evil is an "ancient, and heavily freighted term."[5]^3 The freight, in this case, is the baggage of morality, metaphysics, emotions, essentialism, psychology--in short, all of the things that sociology has defined itself against in the course of its development as an autonomous discipline. Sociology is grounded in philosophy. But if philosophy prior to the twentieth century seemed inordinately concerned with the question of evil (as can be seen, for example, in the works of Hegel, Kant, Hume, and Schopenhauer), sociology is characterized by a conscious distancing of itself from the term and a selective appropriation of ideas that fit the nascent discipline's idea of human nature and the positive telos of human evolution. Indeed, evil is sociology's Doppelg?nger, always present, but unwelcome, haunting the discipline and its quest for enlightenment by calling to mind questions of metaphysics, agency, and the "dark side" of human progress. If evil appears at all in mainstream sociological theory, it does so as a "falling away" from the good. Evil is always "not-A" rather than "A." This moral stance--the idea that immorality, deviance, and evil are "fallings away" from the good--is deeply embedded in the history of sociological thought and has worked to disestablish the ontological reality of evil in social theory and, by way of that, to elide the presence of evil in social life. If evil does appear as an autonomous and independent reality, it does so as a sense of something negative about this or that social force rather than as an explicit quality of social forces. While sociology aimed to set itself apart from the question of evil (a question that was central to philosophy), its concepts often convey a sense that, even if evil is not specifically addressed, it is still present in the world. The first step in a sociology of evil, then, is to establish the ontological status of evil. Without such a status, there is only an emergent sociological evil or a purely relativistic conception, which makes it impossible to make any statements about the actual existence of something that we call evil.[6]^4 Pragmatic philosophy and "social theory in the pragmatic mode" decry the effort to fix an idea of evil over and above the language which is used by human beings to describe the sensations they have of extreme phenomena. Yet after all that such philosophies and theories have said and done to distance themselves from the reality of evil, we are left--especially in consideration of the brutal facts of the twentieth century--with a sense that there are still things on earth that are not dreamt of in the philosophies of those whose business it is to know the world. To do evil is to intentionally inflict excessive pain and suffering on someone else. What is evil about human actions is, in Abigail Rosenthal's words, "that aspect of them that intentionally obscures, disrupts, or deflects the ideal thread of plot in human lives" and which does so in a way that is, from a normative standpoint, excessive, cruel, or aberrant.[7]^5 Neil Smelser notes that evil is "most appropriately applied to situations when force, violence, and other forms of coercion exceed institutional or moral limits."[8]^6 John Kekes sees evil actions as those which "cause serious and morally unjustified harm to other human beings. [The] harm is serious if it interferes with the functioning of a person as a full-fledged agent."[9]^7 The second step in the sociology of evil is to raise the study of evil to a level on par with those of other phenomena usually studied by social scientists. Given the definition of evil offered above, it is easy to see why it is important to establish an operational idea of evil into the vocabulary of analysis of the destruction of Bosnia. It was a particularly cruel and ferocious event, one that was unimaginable in the context of late twentieth-century Europe. Yet, in the dominant discourse on the war, economic disparities, nationalism, historical precedent, and other background factors are usually offered as the explanatory variables that caused the war. These factors in and of themselves, though, cannot explain some of the most salient aspects of the war: the specific acts of barbarism and cruelty that characterize evil. Why did soldiers rape and kill wives and children in front of husbands and fathers and then leave the latter to live with the memory? Why did soldiers destroy beautiful and ancient architectural monuments which had no strategic value? Why were 12,000 people 1,800 of whom were children--intentionally murdered in Sarajevo? The answers to these questions can never be found purely in the analysis of political, economic, or even cultural factors because, in the first instance, politics, economics, and culture never do anything by themselves. It is individuals who are enmeshed in politics, economics, and culture who do things through or in relation to politics, economics, and culture. That is to say, the true character of cruelty in Bosnia and Herzegovina (and I think of cruelty in general) is to be found in the acts of agents in relation to the structures that enable and constrain them. At base, evil is action, and as such the theory of evil that I present here is a theory of action. It presents a view that contrasts with those accounts that rely on some kind of historical or cultural determinism to explain social outcomes in the Balkans: "The war was caused by age-old hatreds." "The Serbs are products of a cruel culture." "The Croats have a natural affinity for Nazism and genocide." These views constitute the main parameters of both popular and social science discourse on the war. They not only rely on crude stereotypes and errors of fact, but also fail to capture the sense of agency that is necessary in order to understand the specific qualities of evil and cruelty. It was individuals who destroyed Bosnia, and they did so not as automatons or dupes of historical or cultural forces, but as willful agents who reflexively responded to the contours of both local and global history, who reflexively adapted themselves to the exigencies and contingencies of the unfolding present, and who reflexively presented an ideal vision of the future that their actions would, ideally, bring about. II While I want to develop a sociology of evil by way of reclaiming what is important from the philosophy of evil, I do want to distance myself from the idea of essential evil. The basis for a sociology of evil is not metaphysics, but theories of social action. Evil is not an essential quality of human beings, but is intentional action, the result of the conscious reflection of actors and the willful decision to do something severe to someone else. If evil is agentic and intentional action that is reflexively chosen, it should be fairly easy to account for it from the standpoint of existing sociological theories of action and agency. We could just adapt the latter to interpret actions that we consider evil. Yet, sociological theorists of agency have, like sociological theorists in general, displaced evil. This displacement has much to do with the unbridled political optimism of the progenitors of the pragmatic theories of social action. Action and reflexivity was, for these thinkers and their later followers, always considered as progressive. This development was ironic since such theories developed in a world historical context in which it was rather evident that agents used the infrastructure of modernity for nefarious rather than progressive ends. There is no logical or empirical reason to assume that reflexivity is fundamentally oriented to optimistic, progressive, Enlightenment ends. Indeed, if we are interested in looking at the ways in which agency is enabled by the infrastructures of modernity, we are likely to find our best examples in those whose acts would be classified as "transgressive." The archetypal, ideal-type model of the evil agent is to be found in the fictional characters of James Bond stories: brilliant geniuses who have mastered modern technologies in the service of grand anti-Enlightenment schemes. Such characters are highly reflexive agents, perhaps even hyperreflexive. But the ends of their agency and reflection are to maximize the pain and suffering of others, to deliberately obscure the plot lines of others' lives through creative intervention. This conception, of course, involves a break with the view that reflexivity and moral progress go hand in hand: reflexivity, in my view, is neither moral nor immoral, progressive nor regressive, modern nor barbaric by nature. Rather, evil is reflexive, creative, imaginative, adaptive, and cunning, whatever its axiological ends, and especially so in relation to the more technologically complex condition of modernity. To miss or underestimate the reflexivity of evil is, I think, to fail to capture the most important quality of evil. So what we need is a conception of agency that allows us to examine evil as a form of social action. Such a conception can be found in an imaginative article on the nature of agency by Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mirsch, in which they note that agency always proceeds in relation to past, present, and future: Actors are always living simultaneously in the past, the future, and present, and adjusting to the various temporalities of their empirical existence to one another (and to their empirical circumstances) in more or less imaginative or reflective ways. They continuously engage in patterns and repertoires from the past, project hypothetical pathways forward in time, and adjust their actions to the exigencies of emerging situations.[10]^8 This "relational pragmatics," as the authors refer to it, allows us to conceive of agency as a function of a reflexive consciousness that is oriented toward three temporal planes: past, present, and future. The latter constitute a kind of "chordal triangle" which actors "play" as they engage in reflexive social action. In stressing the temporal bases of action, Emirbayer and Mirsch's approach is much more sophisticated than that found in most theories of agency and offers an imaginative basis for examining the specific actions of agents under specific conditions of social time and space. Their view is also especially useful for understanding agency in the postmodern world in which past, future, and present are made manifest to actors in many more ways, through many different media. Curiously, though, the authors note that their analysis only delineates the "analytical space within which reflective and morally responsible action might be said to unfold."[11]^9 There is no inherent reason why "relational pragmatics" should be considered inherently positive and morally responsible. Indeed, it is the central point of the present analysis that pragmatics are oriented in what might be called, to invert Emirbayer and Mirsch's terminology, "morally irresponsible ways." The connection between agency and moral responsibility is not grounded in an empirical assessment of the range of human activities, but rather is a product of the homage to the idealism of pragmatic social theory. It is, in fact, deceiving to restrict the analysis of action to those projects that are thought to be morally constructive and progressive. The destruction of Bosnia is only one recent case that illustrates that the forging of un-democratic politics, the perpetration of cruel and ferocious acts, and the masking of all the latter by the perpetrators and social science interpreters is the product of highly reflexive agents who insert themselves into the past, adapt to the present, and imagine a future. Such cruelty does not just happen; it is made. III There is a saying in the Serbo-Croatian language: "riba se truje od glave nadolje," which means that "fish rots from the head down." The principle architects of the destruction of Bosnia--Serbian elites--set into motion a whole process, a whole machinery of agents who, in toto, effected the destruction of Bosnia. The Bosnian war was perhaps the most widely covered war in history; phalanxes of journalists were constantly on the scene to capture events as they unfolded. The presence of these journalists was a major factor in the reflexive considerations of the perpetrators of violence, and it is through these media that we witnessed the destruction of Bosnia and the reflexive accounts of the agents who effected that destruction and provided a rationale for them. My data is the actual footage of these figures by Western journalists and the "presentations of self" that these elites put forth through local and global media. The words of these agents provide indications of the ways in which they consciously and reflexively played the past, present, and future as the basis for their ongoing social actions. In this essay, I will focus on the principal agent in the dissolution of Bosnia, Slobodan Milosevic. Slobodan Milosevic did not create himself as a nationalist, but actually inserted himself into an existing historical current of Serbian concern about the encroachment of national minorities on Serbs, particularly in the autonomous region of Kosovo. The special importance of Kosovo as the place where the Serbs suffered defeat at the hands of the "Turks" in 1389 is quite well known. But all through Serbian history, Kosovo has been a special site of tension between Albanians and Serbs; this tension had been exacerbated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by patterns of out-migration of Serbs and in-migration of Albanians. This motif of Serbian nationalism ran through twentieth-century Serbian history and found expression and intensification in later pronouncements of Serbian intellectuals. In January 1986, two hundred prominent Belgrade intellectuals signed a petition to the Yugoslav and Serbian national assemblies.[12]^10 This petition laments the "genocide" of the Serbian people and demands the right to spiritual identity, to defense of the foundations of Serb national culture and to the physical survival of our nation on its land. We demand decisive measures, and that the concern and will of all Yugoslavia be mobilized in order to stop the Albanian aggression in Kosovo and Metohija.[13]^11 The petition was signed by notable intellectuals, including former "Marxist humanist" editors of the prominent Yugoslav Marxist journal Praxis: Zaga Golubovik, Mihailo Markovik, and Ljubomir Tadik. The alignment of these prominent intellectuals with aggressive nationalism not only puzzled left acolytes of Yugoslav Marxism, but also pointed to a close connection between the latter and nationalism that has often been elided in contemporary accounts. In a later pronouncement on February 26, 1987, the three editors published a rejoinder to a criticism by Michele Lee of their support of nationalism.[14]^12 While claiming to continue to uphold the principles of democratic socialism in the journal and the general rights of all minorities, the three editors stress that, as Serbs, they are also defending the "Serbian victims of oppression."[15]^13 They refer to the Albanian people as the "little David" which always had the upper hand most of the time because it was amply supported by overwhelming allies: the Islamic Ottoman Empire during five centuries until 1912; Austria Hungary which occupied the entire territory during World War I; fascist Italy and Germany which did the same during World War II; the Soviet Union and China after 1948; eventually a dominating anti-Serbian coalition itself over the last twenty years.[16]^14 Notice in this description the highly relational articulation of Serbian victimization: it emerges through the long dur?e of the history of domination by foreign peoples, by enemies of all ideological stripes and continues to this day, ostensibly embodied in the nascent movements for autonomy taking place in other parts of Yugoslavia. The past is always present and all the more so in the most reflexive elements of the population, namely, the intellectuals. These contours of Serbian history formed the central aspect of the more general cultural milieu in which political leaders in the disintegrating Yugoslavia existed. Serbian history really was characterized by the series of oppressions named. What was decisive for the fate of Bosnia was the ways in which this history was "played" by politicians in the present. No one was a more skillful player than Milosevic; his very power depended fundamentally on his exploitation and intensification of these anti-Albanian sentiments and the perception of the danger posed by Albanians to the Serbs. Indeed, what is remarkable about the tense situation in Kosovo, both in the late 1980s and now, is the way in which the present-day Albanians are seen as "Turk-surrogates," symbolic stand-ins for the real Turks who defeated Prince Lazar 600 years before in 1389 at the Battle of Kosovo. In terms of the temporal plane of history, what distinguishes so much of the social action in the Balkans is the way in which history resides so close to the surface, always ready to be taken into consideration as the justification for this or that act in the present. Milosevic set the stage for this contemporaneization of history in a famous speech to Kosovo Polje on April 24, 1987. Milosevic used the tensions in Kosovo to effect a transformation of his own political identity from a communist apparatchik to nationalist "savior of the Serbian people." This was a highly intentional act, and while it no doubt "brewed" for some time, we have actual footage that shows the exact moment when Milosevic recreated his identity. The Kosovo gathering shows the volatile mix of crowd dynamics, political calculations, the construction of charisma, and conscious insertion of the self into history that comprise acts of agency in the Balkans. While it is clear that Milosevic emerged victorious at this time, what is not often commented on is the high degree of contingency and unpredictability of this event. Like other reflexive interactions in situations of co-presence, the interactions of a political leader with masses is a precarious endeavor, even more so perhaps since the reflexivity of the "masses" is not highly developed and, thus, the leader is forced to play to the mob rather than the other way around. Milosevic might well have emerged a villain rather than a hero, and the contingency of the event is evident in the way the situation played itself out. While the event was highly orchestrated, the leader seemed ever conscious of the precariousness of the situation and only "struck" when he was sure that the identity he had chosen would resonate with the crowd. Milosevic's declaration, "You will not be beaten again," is an utterance which places him, at once, in the past, present, and future: the reference to "again" does not refer to the immediate past of the staged and contrived attack on Serbs outside the lecture hall just a few moments ago, but to the long-standing beating of the Serbs by Albanians which has occurred since 1389. The utterance itself is a reflexive orientation to the audience which, in the present, demands something immediate of Milosevic, and the use of the future tense means that Milosevic has defined a vision of the future in which the Serbs will be safe from other threats. While I would not like to make too much out of one utterance, I would say that the pattern of "playing" the chordal triangle of past, present, and future which is so evident in this utterance was to establish itself as the principle grounding for destructive acts in Bosnia. Milosevic continued this playing of past, present, and future as he assumed more power. On May 8, 1989, Milosevic assumed the presidency of Yugoslavia. The next month, on June 28, again at the very battlefield where the "Turks" had defeated the Serbs, a mass rally of over one million people was staged. Milosevic as the transformed Serbian nationalist leader played the key role in the spectacle, which took place at Gazimestan, at the actual site of the battle of Kosovo. Mass audiences were convened to greet Milosevic who, just as Hitler had descended to Nuremberg sixty years before in an airplane, descended to the field in a helicopter to greet the people. This spectacle continued Milosevic's reflexive transformation of his own identity. I want to stress this because, for the purpose of my general argument here, history is not simply a background force that caused the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the attendant destruction of Bosnia: it was a force that was activated by agents to refashion their identities and, by way of that, to alter the specific contours of the present and future. The consideration of Milosevic as a reflexive agent is not meant to decide the question about whether or not Milosevic is actually "evil" in some essential sense, although the case could be made philosophically that he is wicked, that is, he is an individual who is an "habitual evildoer."[17]^15 The point is that in his actions we see a strong intersection between the reflexive remaking of Milosevic's self and the investing of that self into a series of social actions that had a specific effect on the present and Serbian future. If it is the case that Milosevic's actions in the beginning of the war were the pretext for the destruction of Bosnia, it is also the case that his own actions enabled others who were the executors of his plans for the forcible repression of newly independent states of the former Yugoslavia. While Milosevic's transformation set the ball in motion, there is a seeming inconsistency between Milosevic's rather dispassionate and bureaucratic demeanor and the events that have come to characterize the war in ex-Yugoslavia: the brutal rapes, the acts of torture and mutilations, the killing of civilians and non-combatants. It is very easy to see Machiavelli rather than Rousseau in him. Yet Milosevic's own transformation set in motion a general movement away from pure Machiavellianism to a more "fragrant," contractual, and aestheticized version of transgression--transgression that manifested itself almost as a kind of Durkheimian ritual of negative solidarity. We can move from the analysis of the reflexive self of a former communist party leader who turned nationalist for his own benefit to the analysis of the true believers who precipitated acts of cruelty in the name of the nation, the self-defense of the victimized Serbian people. In such a movement, we see manifestations of an autonomous evil, in which agents such as Milosevic are well aware of what they are doing, and what John Kekes calls non-autonomous evil, in which actors perpetrate evil acts, but are convinced that what they are doing is good, righteous, or just.[18]^16 Whether autonomous or non-autonomous, like Milosevic, these same actors played the chordal triangle of past, present, and future as they committed their acts of transgression. IV In his work Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel noted, quite rightly, that "it is in world history that we encounter the sum total of concrete evil." He was wrong, however, to surmise that the ultimate design of the world has been realized and that "evil has not been able to maintain a position of equality beside it."[19]^17 Nowhere is the fact that we have not approached the "end of history" more evident than in Bosnia: the postmodern world, with its swirl of accounts, each circulating through the plethora of media outlets and each sounding as plausible and true as the other, has actually set the stage for the enabling of extreme behavior. The late twentieth century became, in David Rieff's terms, the age of genocide, a period in which we witnessed a particularly volatile reemergence of evil that is troubling precisely because we have perhaps lost not only the moral ability, but also the cognitive ability to recognize it or even name it. Social theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman and Norbert Elias have noted, each in their different ways, that modern civilization is a condition in which good and evil present themselves together. To the Enlightenment minds, there was a troubling aspect to the pairing of good and evil, for part of the "grand design" of the Enlightenment project was that, through the march of time, the former was supposed to displace the latter. Yet it is the very technologies that are supposed to eradicate evil--the media, the rise of systems of mass education, more refined and differentiated political systems--that have also contributed to the emergence of new forms of cruelty and, ironically, to the maskings of their painful truths. Hegel was wrong to assume a telos of good or evil in world history; modernity is an engine that drives good and evil and if, indeed, we live in a postmodern era, it is an era in which new engines drive the history of good and evil in different directions. Barbarism lurks beneath the veneer of civility and not so much as a foreign body, but as an integral part of the very constitution of modernity. Its existence itself is troubling to the modern consciousness, but even more troubling is its unpredictability: we simply do not know when or where it will emerge. This unpredictability, as much as the existence of evil itself, is a constant source of consternation for the liberal mind. No one predicted that Sarajevo would be transformed from a metaphor of human cooperation into an abject symbol of hell on earth. Bosnia itself became a metaphor of how far we could fall so fast, of the existence of evil, geographically only hours away and in the media only nanoseconds away from the comforting "good" of capitalist, liberal democracy. The evil that supplanted the good in Bosnia was, however, near the "surface" of present time, inchoate and unseen, waiting to be put into play by specific agents in particular times and places who, through their actions, make history. Perhaps there is a new logic of evil in postmodernity. Agency exists in a cultural context of swirling simulacra in which claims for some kind of truth about the world seem absurd or simply naive. Agency exists in relation to new forms of global media and information flows that allow agents to more easily excavate history, manipulate the present, and construct futures in new and even more creative--but not necessarily progressive--ways. This dialectic is likely to yield new expressions of evil that, at present, we can only imagine. ________________________ [20]^1 This essay was written before the atrocities committed in Kosovo and the subsequent NATO war against Yugoslavia. As such, I have not dealt with that case at length, although the general model articulated here could be applied to interpret that case. This paper has benefited from remarks by John Kekes, John Rodden, and William Cain. ] [21]^2 Michael Bernstein, "Homage to the Extreme: The Shoah and the Rhetoric of Catastrophe," The Times Literary Supplement (6 March 1996): 6. ] [22]^3 Nevitt Sanford and Craig Comstock, "Sanctions for Evil," Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness, ed. Sanford, Comstock, and Associates (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973) 5. ] [23]^4 One of the key works to recognize that the character of evil acts is to be found in the acts themselves and in subjectivity is Jack Katz's Seductions of Crime: The Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil (New York: Basic Books, 1988). Katz establishes the basis for the sociology of evil when he notes that crime is not just a "fall from grace, but an act of 'genuine experiential creativity'" (8). ] [24]^5 Abigail Rosenthal, A Good Look at Evil (Philadelphia: Temple, 1987) 3. ] [25]^6 Neil Smelser, "Some Determinants of Destructive Behavior," Sanctions for Evil, 16. ] [26]^7 John Kekes, "The Reflexivity of Evil," Social Philosophy and Policy 15.1 (1998) : 217. ] [27]^8 Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mirsch, "What is Agency?," American Journal of Sociology 103: 1012. ] [28]^9 Emirbayer and Mirsch, "What is Agency?," 1012. ] [29]^10 The document is reprinted in its entirety in Branka Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up 1980-92 (London: Verso, 1993) 49-52. ] [30]^11 Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, 51. ] [31]^12 This document is reprinted in its entirety in Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, 55-61. ] [32]^13 Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, 57. ] [33]^14 Magas, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, 57. ] [34]^15 John Kekes' definition of a wicked person is one who is ruled by his or her vices and who is an habitual evildoer. ] [35]^16 Kekes, "The Reflexivity of Evil," 218. ] [36]^17 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, Reason in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 42-43. ] From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 17 16:27:15 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2004 09:27:15 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Science Blog: Northwestern researchers pinpoint how false memories are formed Message-ID: <01C4B42B.7E903570.shovland@mindspring.com> That does not rule out the reality of real memories of past traumas that have been suppressed. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Sunday, October 17, 2004 8:55 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Science Blog: Northwestern researchers pinpoint how false memories are formed Northwestern researchers pinpoint how false memories are formed http://scienceblog.com/community/article4372.html False memories are the controversial subject of hotly contested arguments about the validity of repressed memories that can surface years after a traumatic event and about the credibility of eyewitness accounts in criminal trials. Because memories are imperfect under ordinary circumstances -- forming, storing and retrieving them, with great variations in factors influencing those processes -- it is unlikely that a one-answer-fits-all will settle those controversies soon. But a group of researchers from various disciplines at Northwestern University literally have peered into the brain to offer new evidence on the existence of false memories and how they are formed. Published in the journal Psychological Science, the new study used MRI technology to pinpoint how people form a memory for something that didn't actually happen. ''Our challenge was to bring people into the laboratory and set up a circumstance in which they would remember something that did not happen,'' said Kenneth A. Paller, professor of psychology and co- investigator of the study. (Brian Gonsalves, who was a doctoral student of Paller's and who now is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, is the first author of the paper.) ''We measured brain activity in people who looked at pictures of objects or imagined other objects that we asked them to visualize. Later we asked them to discriminate what they actually saw from what they imagined,'' Paller said. Extending upon considerable Northwestern research on what happens in the brain when people remember versus forget, the researchers were interested in what happens differently in the brain when false memories are produced. ''We learned that the particular parts of the brain critical for generating visual images are highly activated when people imagine images such as those we presented to our study participants,'' said Paller. Many of the visual images that the subjects were asked to imagine were later misremembered as actually having been seen. ''We think parts of the brain used to actually perceive an object and to imagine an object overlap,'' said Paller. ''Thus, a vividly imagined event can leave a memory trace in the brain that's very similar to that of an experienced event. When memories are stored for perceived or imagined objects, some of the same brain areas are involved.'' Take a real life example in which a police interrogator asks if you saw a particular person at a crime scene. That induces putting that person in your imagination and possibly corrupts later questioning. ''Just the fact of looking back into your memory and thinking about whether an event happened is tantamount to imagining that event happening,'' Paller said. ''If I ask you if something happened, you imagine it happening. Later on -- a day or a year later -- if I ask about that event, you have the tough judgment of deciding what happened and what was imagined.'' It is important to know that memory is fallible, Paller said. ''We know that we forget quite a bit, but we're not always in touch with the idea that our memories can sometimes can be misleading.'' For this procedure of measuring brain activity, people lay down in an MRI machine as they looked at a screen with a series of words, all concrete nouns, and pictures, and they wore head phones to hear what was being said. They were instructed to generate a visual image corresponding to each object that was named. For half the words, a photographic image of the object was presented. The subjects were told to make no response to photos, but only to look at each one while waiting for the next word. They were told to make a size judgment about the objects they were to imagine. For example, if the word was cat, they were told to imagine the cat and decide if a cat is generally bigger or smaller than a video monitor. The memory test was administered outside the scanner and began approximately 20 minutes after the scanning. Subjects heard a randomly ordered sequence of spoken words. One-third corresponded to photos they had seen, one-third to objects they had only imagined and one-third they had neither seen nor imagined. For each word, subjects decided whether or not they had viewed a photo of the named object during the study phase. Three brain areas (precuneus, right inferior parietal cortex and anterior cingulate) showed greater responses in the study phase to words that would later be falsely remembered as having been presented with photos, compared to words that were not later misremembered as having been presented with photos. The words leading to false memories also tended to be slightly more concrete, on average, than those that did not. Presumably, people could generate a visual image more easily for the more concrete words. ''At any rate, the remarkable finding is that brain activity during the study phase could predict which objects would subsequently be falsely remembered as having been seen as a photograph,'' Paller said. The flip side is that memory for viewed photographs was often correct. People gave many correct responses for objects they indeed viewed. Brain activity produced in response to viewed pictures and measured with functional MRI also predicted which pictures would be subsequently remembered. Two brain regions in particular -- the left hippocampus and the left prefrontal cortex -- were activated more strongly for pictures that were later remembered than for pictures that were forgotten. These two brain areas have previously been understood to play a central role in memory. The new findings directly showed that different brain areas are critical for accurate memories for visual objects than for false remembering -- for forming a memory for an imagined object that is later remembered as a perceived object. The neuroanatomical evidence furthermore sheds light on the mental mechanisms responsible for forming accurate memories versus false memories. ''In the case of the false remembering emphasized here, the false memories were created when vivid visual imagery was engaged and a mental image was produced,'' Paller said. ''These mental images left a trace in the brain that was later mistaken for the trace that would have been produced had that object actually been seen.'' Listed as on the study, the co-investigators are Brian Gonsalves, post- doctoral fellow, Stanford University, and Northwestern researchers Paul J. Reber, associate professor of psychology, Darren R. Gitelman, associate professor of neurology, Todd B. Parrish, associate professor or radiology, M. Marsel Mesulam, Ruth and Evelyn Dunbar Professor, and Kenneth A. Paller, professor of psychology. The Northwestern researchers are affiliated with the department of psychology, the Institute for Neuroscience, the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center, the department of neurology, the department of radiology and the Feinberg School of Medicine. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 17 16:33:47 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2004 09:33:47 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Energy Shift: A Partial Overview of Possibilities Message-ID: <01C4B42E.50E6BA10.shovland@mindspring.com> Transport: Air: Shift to lighter-than-air craft Use of high-end computing for more flexible and efficient schedules Ground freight: Re-emphasis on trains. Micro-factories to produce goods closer to the point of use Advanced scheduling systems to reduce movement of empty vehicles Personal: Hybrid vehicles Biodiesel vehicles Tiny cars like you see in Europe Jitney systems Reconfigured bus systems New light rail systems Intercity rail renewal- bullet trains to replace aircraft Living closer to work to reduce need for commuting Increase in tele-commuting Electric-motor-assisted bicycles, tricycles etc Mental health initiatives to reduce therapeutic shopping Water transport: Wind powered or wind-assisted freight and passenger ships- you can put a wind turbine or savonius rotor on top to drive the propeller in the water. Food Production: Shift away from grain-fed meat, which mainly increases fat content and kills us by clogging our arteries. Replace petroleum-based nitrogen fertilizers with crop rotations that use nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Use of ground rock rather than high-processed minerals to provide other plant nutrients. At home, replace ornamental plantings and vast expanses of lawn with food gardens. Preserve space at the edge of cities for people-food production, and shift to seasonal eating patterns. Integrated pest control and toleration of some level of cosmetic damage. Shift away from simple-minded emphasis on increasing output per acre, toward emphasis on ROI based on many factors. Building Operation: Super-insulation. Passive and active solar heating and cooling. Re-emphasize use of natural light in building design. Turning off many of those lights you see when you drive around late at night- signs etc. Chemical Feedstocks: Jojoba oil. Cottonseed oil. Flaxseed oil. Soybean oil. Corn oil. Lignin from wood. A huge opportunity, or a huge catastrophe, lies ahead. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 17 22:43:32 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2004 15:43:32 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] BIG DROP IN CEO CONFIDENCE Message-ID: <01C4B460.0EF083C0.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.chiefexecutive.net/ceoindex/0904/results.asp Still, Executive Outlook Remains Optimistic. Poll Finds Market Fundamentals, Not Politics, Affect Hiring. MONTVALE, N.J... The Chief Executive CEO Confidence Index dropped 10 full points this month, settling in at 159.7 from a high of 177.4 two months ago. This drop was the second biggest in the history of the Index, only outdone by the 11.2 drop in February, 2003, right before the start of the Iraqi conflict. In the wake of a sluggish stock market and rising energy prices, executive confidence dropped for the second month in a row. Back in July, the Index dropped 7.7 points. However, executives are still optimistic about business fundamentals like employment, capital spending, and overall business conditions. 89.5% of CEO's said current business conditions were normal or good, compared to only 33.4% optimism back in the spring of 2003. Similarly, 80.2% of CEO's felt that employment conditions were normal or good, compared to 36.8% back in spring, 2003, too. In light of the blossoming political season, this month Chief Executive Magazine conducted additional polling to better understand the issue of job creation. From the poll, CEO's do not support the tenet that political officeholders fuel job growth. The three most agreed upon reasons affecting job growth, according to 324 CEO's polled this past month, are expected sales growth (22%), expected profitability (16.8%), and outlook for the economy in general (13.7%). These market fundamentals completely dwarf the bottom two reasons CEO's listed as affecting job growth. Those reasons are uncertainty about the presidential election (4.3%) and outsourcing (4.6%). "CEO's clearly believe that company fundamentals determine job growth, not which candidate wins the November election or how many jobs are outsourced," says Edward M. Kopko, chairman and CEO of the Chief Executive Group. "Of ten possible reasons, market-related fundamentals were the top three reasons CEO's listed as affecting job growth, and political issues were the bottom two. The message from CEO's couldn't be more clear on this issue." The fact that CEO's explain job growth by the workings of the market is reinforced by the fact that executive confidence in employment has been increasing over the past year. This has translated into the recently reported lows in unemployment rates. "Although recent months have caused some uncertainty for CEO's, resulting in the second biggest drop in the history of the CEO Confidence Index, their optimistic outlook seems to be the real headline," says William J. Holstein, editor-in-chief of Chief Executive magazine. "Their overwhelming faith in current employment and business conditions, as well as their faith in future employment and capital spending conditions really speaks to this fact." From paul.werbos at verizon.net Mon Oct 18 12:51:01 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 08:51:01 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Energy Shift: A Partial Overview of Possibilities In-Reply-To: <01C4B42E.50E6BA10.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20041018084539.02a89e28@incoming.verizon.net> Someone said "Don't worry about oil and gas; the market will probably take care of it by shifting us to nuclear..." Having limited time, I could not go over old ground again at length. But very simply... when we stop being able to afford gasoline for our cars, what DOES happen? Who on this list will really take a rickshaw to work? (Me, I will walk, but I know I am part of a VERY small group that has that option. Something like 4 percent of the workforce. And the good stores all require driving for me anyway.) Will private industry truly shine and come up with instant little nuclear cars for people to drive in in the Middle East? It gives new meaning to the idea of a car bomb... or of Columbine. Woolsley -- who ran CIA under Clinton -- gave a very refreshing speech on this stuff a couple of weeks ago. See www.iags.org. We can do about twice as well as he suggests... but his strategy is about as hundred times as real as today's faith-based policy. Faith is fine, but blind faith is causing some difficulties all over the world. If we do not open our eyes -- and accept that what we see is more complex and baffling than what we see with eyes shut -- we may feel less fear but may have more reason to feel fear objectively... From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 14:01:22 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 07:01:22 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Energy Shift: A Partial Overview of Possibilities Message-ID: <01C4B4E0.476D5CC0.shovland@mindspring.com> As I recall, many of the nuclear plants that are operating in the US should have been decommissioned years ago. They are rotting from the inside and there is a real chance of having an incident much worse than Three Mile Island, if not as bad as Chernobyl. But recent administrations have allowed them to continue operating because we can't shut down 20% of our electric power production. On top of that we haven't even figured out HOW to safely take them apart or how to safely store the radioactive junk that will be left. We haven't even been able to handle the spent fuel rods. It's hard to imagine a bright future for a technology we can't actually manage. In their TV ads, we can see the direction proposed by the petroleum industry: gas, coal, tar sands- the stuff they are familiar with. In spite of the individual voices being raised in Congress, the Federal Government is in a state of paralysis and denial over this. On the other hand, there were no imaginary technologies in the list I wrote. All of those possibilities were based on things I have seen one place or another over the years. I do not think we should measure our possibilities by what we see in the mass media. And I do not think we should pin in our hopes on any sort of top-down solution. >From what I hear, this winter's heating bills are going to be a wakeup call for a lot of people, and mass consciousness will be pushed further during next summer's vacation season when people find themselves paying $3 for gas. There are many possiblities for doing things differently, and every idea has it's own advocacy group, which will be greatly empowered by the events of the next year. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Werbos, Dr. Paul J. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 5:51 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list; paleopsych at paleopsych. org (E-mail) Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Energy Shift: A Partial Overview of Possibilities Someone said "Don't worry about oil and gas; the market will probably take care of it by shifting us to nuclear..." Having limited time, I could not go over old ground again at length. But very simply... when we stop being able to afford gasoline for our cars, what DOES happen? Who on this list will really take a rickshaw to work? (Me, I will walk, but I know I am part of a VERY small group that has that option. Something like 4 percent of the workforce. And the good stores all require driving for me anyway.) Will private industry truly shine and come up with instant little nuclear cars for people to drive in in the Middle East? It gives new meaning to the idea of a car bomb... or of Columbine. Woolsley -- who ran CIA under Clinton -- gave a very refreshing speech on this stuff a couple of weeks ago. See www.iags.org. We can do about twice as well as he suggests... but his strategy is about as hundred times as real as today's faith-based policy. Faith is fine, but blind faith is causing some difficulties all over the world. If we do not open our eyes -- and accept that what we see is more complex and baffling than what we see with eyes shut -- we may feel less fear but may have more reason to feel fear objectively... _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 14:04:28 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 07:04:28 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] FORMER CIA DIRECTOR R. JAMES WOOLSEY JOINS CLEAN ENERGY SYSTEMS, INC. EXECUTIVE ADVISORY BOARD Message-ID: <01C4B4E0.B5BC3160.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.cleanenergysystems.com/WhatsNew/cia_director_eab.html -Jan 28, 2004 Rancho Cordova, CA: Clean Energy Systems, Inc. (CES) announced today the addition of former CIA Director R. James Woolsey to the company's Executive Advisory Board. Ambassador Woolsey joins a board consisting of world-renowned experts from industry, government, and the environmental arenas, and will assist the company as it focuses on full commercialization of its groundbreaking technology. CES is a privately held energy technology innovations firm, working to produce power without pollution. The company has developed technology allowing for the combustion of fossil or biomass fuels to produce electricity with zero emissions. Ambassador Woolsey is currently a Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton. He previously served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1993-1995 and as a presidential appointee in two Democratic and two Republican administrations. Mr. Woolsey is currently the Chairman of the Board of Freedom House, the Chairman of the Advisory Boards of the Clean Fuels Foundation and the New Uses Council, and a Trustee of the Center for Strategic & International Studies. He also serves on the National Commission on Energy Policy. "We are greatly looking forward to Jim's participation in our company and assistance as we bring this technology to the market," said CES President Brian C. Griffin.. "We plan to have the first demonstration power plant using our technology operational this year, which will be an important step toward reducing global air pollution while increasing national energy security." From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 14:10:59 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 07:10:59 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] A page from Chile on industrial uses of animal and vegitable fats and oils Message-ID: <01C4B4E1.9F5BA080.shovland@mindspring.com> 15 "ANIMAL OR VEGETABLE FATS AND OILS AND THEIR CLEAVAGE PRODUCTS; PREPARED EDIBLE FATS; ANIMAL OR VEGETABLE WAXES" http://www.prochile.cl/servicios/ue/codigo2.php?id=15 Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 14:13:34 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 07:13:34 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The little high tech jitney that can... Message-ID: <01C4B4E1.FC23EA70.shovland@mindspring.com> Jitney Rolls on to the Hamptons, Wirelessly The Hampton Jitney gets a cell data uplink to hook its passengers up via Wi-Fi (reg. required): In a short piece by your editor in Thursday's New York Times, I describe the Wi-RAN (Rolling Area Network) developed by CEDX and Best Mobile Computing, and in trials with the Hampton Jitney. The Jitney is the high-class way to commute between your summer home or just plain Long Island residence and Manhattan. Some people commute--and I kid you not--every day, clocking in 3 or 4 hours roundtrip or more. In that environment, as on trains and planes, people don't have just quiet time to contemplate but empty time that's worth filling. Some of the Jitney coaches also have electrical outlets, meaning that you don't have to worry about discharging your battery, either. While the service runs today at 100 Kbps, the New York metro area will certainly be one of the first to see higher-speed cell offerings or even other forms of mobile wireless (cue Craig McCaw's entrance) allowing the service to expand its speed over time. Service runs $8 per trip or $40 per month for unlimited usage. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 17:03:43 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:03:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis Message-ID: Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis sent 4.10.18 The principal left-right political axis is going to change from central planning vs. free market in the earlier part of the twentieth century and equality vs. inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. universalism in the current century. There are several minor axes, to wit, secular vs. sacred, self-expression vs. self-restraint, change vs. tradition, cooperation vs. competition, tender-minded vs. tough-minded, relativism vs. absolutism, and many more, some perhaps subsumed by others. (The left tends to be less interested in virtue and moral education generally than the right, and we should reconceptualize how children should be brought up in a world of mass unemployment, how moral education will instill other habits besides those of being a productive member of society. Here's hoping that his next book will address the matter.) There is a general clustering, not at the level of any high theory that reduces political preferences to a single dimension, but a clustering in fact. Left-wingers tend, albeit often quite incompletely, to be on the left side of each axis, not always because they have thought out each opinion, but because their co-left-wing friends also have them. Right-wingers do likewise. For myself, I am a left-wing secularist, moderately to the right as far as self-restraint goes, much to the left in favoring change, mixed on cooperation, tough-minded more in rhetoric than in practice, and fairly much an absolutist (evolution limits the feasible *pace of change* quite a bit). For the major axes, I am a twentieth-century rightist for both the free market and inequality. What's more important is that I am decidedly a *twenty-first* century leftist in favor of pluralism. Indeed let us hope that there has been so much culture-gene coevolution, even along racial lines, that there will be major *internal* resistance to a universal culture, thus keeping the world safe for pluralism. To recapitulate, and I leave it to each one of you to say where you lie on the left-right continuum. Again, we badly need a factor analysis study to group these dimensions and, better still, a grounding in evolutionary psychology, such as Steve Reiss has done with his 16 Basic Desires. Major Axes pluralism vs. universalism (emerging) equality vs. inequality (dying) central planning vs. free market (dead) Minor Axes (several others added) secular vs. sacred international vs. national (left was nationalistic during the first half of the 19th century, though) self-expression vs. self-restraint relativists vs. absolutists in morals tender-minded vs. tough-minded great vs. small concern over the physical environment (each with its own studies to support his view) state vs. individual change vs. tradition centralized state vs. decentralized state dependence vs. self-reliance small vs. great concern over character and virtue small vs. great concern over chastity, divorce, family outs vs. ins cooperation vs. competition regulation vs. freedom labor vs. capital populist vs. elitist rural vs. urban essentialism vs. nominalism [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and spread them.] From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 17:04:28 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:04:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 035: War on Terrorism: Blessing in Disguise Message-ID: Meme 035: War on Terrorism: Blessing in Disguise sent 4.10.18 The war on terrorism can never be won, but the amount of damage Moslem terrorists can inflict on the United States is quite limited. The attack on the World Trade Center doubled the death rate in the United States for all of twelve hours. The real fear is the Chinese. They are competent, while the attacks on the WTC could have been done by the students in any engineering class in the United States. They could have found out flight schedules, gotten training as pilots, and so on. The 9/11 Commission said the total cost was $175,000. What allowed the attacks was biological: an excess of high testosterone males who do not lead satisfactory lives. They can and will turn anything into a legitimate grievance. Here's what Sam Huntington stated in _The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order_ (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996) on pp. 117-119: "The youth of Islam have been making their mark in the Islamic Resurgence. As the resurgence got under way in the 1970s and picked up steam in the 1980s, the proportion of youth (that is, those fifteen to twenty-four years of age) in major Muslim countries rose significantly and began to exceed 20 percent of the total population. In many Muslim countries the youth bulge peaked in the 1970s and 1980s; in others it will peak early in the next century. The actual or projected peaks in all these countries, with one exception, are above 20 percent: the estimated Saudi Arabian peak in the first decade of the twenty-first century falls just short of that. These youth provide the recruits for Islamist organizations and political movements. It is not perhaps entirely coincidental that the proportion of youth in the Iranian population rose dramatically in the 1970s, reaching 20 percent in the last half of that decade, and the Iranian revolution occurred in 1979 or that this benchmark was reached in Algeria in the early 1990s just as the Islamist FIS was winning popular support and scoring electoral victories. Potentially significant regional variations also occur in the Muslim youth bulge. While the data must be treated with caution, the projections suggest that the Bosnian and Albanian youth proportions will decline precipitously at the turn of the century. The youth bulge will, on the other hand, remain high in the Gulf sates. In 1988 Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia said that the greatest threat to his country was the rise of Islamic fundamentalism among its youth. According to these projections, that threat will persist well into the twenty-first century." Maybe some of the grievances Moslems have against the United States are legitimate. Maybe they are not. It does not matter. Frustrated, high testosterone males will find grievances, renew old grievances from the days of the Crusades, exaggerate grievances. It is a fact that Moslems find grievances wherever they live and blow things up. But they are a small threat, while the coming 30 million or so surplus males in Red China, as a result of the one-child policy (as Sarah reminds me), could be a major threat the United States. They are competent, and I most fear that they could take down the Internet, possibly by flooding it with denial of service attacks. Whether the National Infrastructre Protection Center is more competent than the average Federal agency, I don't know, but the design of its site, http://www.nipc.gov, suggests not. What the United States should do is try to get these surplus Chinese to join us in the war on terror by sending soldiers to the Middle East and Central Asia. There are Moslems bordering China, and incidents could be provoked or simulated. These things have been known to happen before, even by Americans. If managed properly, the war on terror could be a blessing in disguise, though everyone will count the running costs of the war on terror, blame neo-cons for provoking or manufacturing incidents, and descrying empire, while no one will notice the much worse war that was averted. Far less likely is heeding the report of Isaiah (1:18): "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." ----------- Here's the part of Howard Bloom's book I remember best. Keeping it in the back of my mind all these years, it is worth bringing forth to show how easily it will be to rope the Chinese into the war on terror. (Howard thanked me for keeping him and his group up on the news and for sending thoughtful articles, since he was too busy trying to save the world. Well, Howard, your job is to stimulate thought. It stimulated these thoughts, and maybe this meme will save the world. I append an earlier meme I wrote shortly after the 9/11 attacks that is quite pertinent here, entitled "SCRUPPIES: Scripture-Pounding Yuppies." -------------- "THE CHINESE CULTURAL REVOLUTION," chapter 4 (pp. 12-20) from _The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History_ by Howard Bloom (NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995). http://www.ukpoliticsmisc.org.uk/usenet_evidence/revolution.htm "The men who are the most honored are the greatest killers. They believe that they are serving their fellow men." Henry Miller "It's getting uncommonly easy to kill people in large numbers, and the first thing a principle does-if it really is a principle-is to kill some body." Dorothy L. Savers In the mid-sixties, Mao Tse-tung tore the fabric of Chinese society apart. In doing so, he unleashed emotions of the most primitive kind, the true demons of the human mind. These primordial motivators ripped across the face of China, bringing death, destruction, and pain. But the frenzy Mao had freed was not some freak child of Mao's philosophies; it was the simple product of passions that squirm every day inside you and me. In 1958, Mao had decided to throw China violently into the future. His catapult was the Great Leap Forward, an economic plan designed to harness China's manpower in a massive modernization program. Billboards carried pictures of a Chinese worker astride a rocket. The slogan read, SURPASS ENGLAND IN FIFTEEN YEARS! Students, senior citizens, intellectuals, and farmers labored ceaselessly to build steel furnaces. They collected iron pots and tore brass fittings off the ancient doors of their houses to provide the scrap metal required for the construction of those furnaces. Peasants left their homes in mass mobilizations, slogged to communal dining halls, and threw themselves into their work with tremendous enthusiasm. After all, says Gao Yuan, one Chinese schoolboy who lived through it, "people were saying that true communism was just around the comer." Unfortunately, somewhere along the line the Great Leap Forward stumbled and fell on its face. The communal dining halls closed. House holders who had taken their pots to the furnaces were forced to find new ones. Ration coupons appeared for grain, oil, cloth, and even matches. The little boys who had thrown themselves so enthusiastically into making an economic miracle grew faint from hunger as they sat in school. They learned to catch cicadas on poles with glue-coated tips, then forced themselves to swallow the still-squirming insects. They scoured the hills for edible grass and weeds. Their mothers baked bread with flour augmented by willow and poplar leaves. During three long years of heroic "prog-ress," millions died of starvation. The Great Leap Forward had crippled the economy, throttling the production of even the simplest things. And the architect of the brave blunder-Mao himself-lost power. He retired into ideological matters, leaving the day-to-day running of the state to a bureaucratic nest of lesser officials. Those officials looked at a citizenry racked with malnutrition and quickly changed gears. They abandoned theoretical rigor and worked to boost production of the household necessities that had all but disappeared. Highest on the priority list was raising food - lots of it. Doctrine took a back seat to the simple task of putting meals on Chinese tables. The further the new policy proceeded, the more the officials responsible for implementing it felt that they were the real powers controlling China. Their swelling pride told them that they were the new bosses, the men who had taken over the helm of history. Mao was a relic, an antique, a figurehead. When Mao tried to issue orders, his underlings treated him politely but shrugged him off. The commands of China's Great Leader went unheeded. Mao Tse-tung did not enjoy being led to pasture. And he wasn't the sort of man to take forced retirement lying down. So this demigod of the Revolution contrived a plan to reassert authority, a plan that would be even more devastating to China than the Great Leap Forward. His scheme would not just starve people, it would torture them, beat them to death, and force them into suicide. It was the Cultural Revolution. Mao took advantage of a simple peculiarity of human nature: the rebelliousness of adolescents. The defiant attitude of teenage punk rockers and heavy metal head bangers may seem like a rage spawned by the unique disorders of Western culture, but it is not. Adolescence awakens defiant urges in nearly all primates. In chimpanzees, it inspires a wanderlust that forces some young females to leave the cozy family they've always known and go off to make a new life for themselves among strangers. In langur monkeys, it triggers a restlessness that's much more to the point. Adolescent langur males kick loose the bonds of their childhood family life and cluster in unruly, threatening gangs. Then they go on the prowl, looking for some older, well-established male they can attack. The adolescents' goal is to dislodge the respectable elder from his cushy home and take over everything he owns - his power, his prestige, and his wives. As we'll see later, humans are driven by many of the same instincts as our primate relatives. Consequently, many adolescents of our species also resent the authority of the adults over their heads. Their hormones have suddenly told them that it is time to assert their individuality and to challenge the prerogatives of the older generation. Mao didn't address himself to the adults of China. Those comrades saw the good sense of the officials who had shuffled Mao to the side and focused on producing food to fill the stomachs that had ached with emptiness ness for three long years. Mao turned elsewhere for help in recapturing authority. He turned to the country's teenagers. Mao started his campaign to regain the reins of China innocently enough. Under his orders, the major papers began a literary debate. They attacked a group of authors who called themselves the "Three Family Village." These essayists were government officials, key figures in the phalanx of bureaucrats resisting Mao's orders. One was vice-mayor of Beijing. Another, the editor of the Beijing Evening News, was propaganda director for Beijing's Party Committee. A third was a propagandist for the Beijing city government. Over the years, the articles of these three had been regarded as entertaining diversions, models of witty style. Now official editorial writers "discovered" that the writings of the Three Family Village were hidden cesspools of secret meanings. And what did those meanings amount to? An assault on the sacred precepts of the party. The attack on the Three Family Village quickly moved from the papers to the schools. Students were encouraged to pen their own excoriations of the traitors, as one newspaper put it, opening "Fire at the Anti-Party Black Line!" Pupils made posters vilifying the scoundrels' names and plastered them over every available wall. Thus they carried out their duty to "hold high the great banner of Mao Tse-tung thought!" The banner of Mao's thought soon wrapped itself around the necks of more than just the Three Family Village. School children were encouraged to find other literary works rotting with revisionism and antirevolutionary notions. The children leapt avidly to their homework assignment. But they became even more enthusiastic a few months later when a new directive came from above: ferret out bourgeois tendencies and reactionary revisionism among your teachers. The new task was one to which any youngster could apply himself with gusto. That teacher who gave you a poor mark on your last paper? He's a bourgeois revisionist! Humiliate him. The pedagogue who bawled you out for being late for class? A capitalist rotter! Make her feel your wrath. Revenge had nothing to do with it. This was simply an issue of ideological purity. Students examined everything their teachers had ever written. In the subtlest turns of innocent phrasing, they uncovered the signs of reactionary villainy. At first, they simply tacked up posters reviling the teachers as monsters and demons. Then all classes were suspended so that pupils could work on sniffing out traitors full-time. Instructors who had fought faithfully with Mao's revolutionary forces were suddenly reviled. Others who considered themselves zealots of Maoist thought were pilloried as loathsome rightists. Some couldn't take the humiliation. Gao Yuan, son of a party official in a small town, was a boarding student at Democracy Street Primary School in Yizhen at the time. At Gao Yuan's school, one teacher attempted to slit his throat. Other pedagogues tried to placate the students. They "exposed" their colleagues and wrote confessions, hoping to get off the hook. It didn't work. The students at Democracy Street Primary School created a new form of school assembly. Its star attraction was ' 'the jet plane.'' A teacher was interrogated at great length in private and forced to "admit" his crimes Then he was taken onstage before a student audience and kicked in the back of the knees until he fell down. One student grabbed him by his hair and pulled back his head. Others lifted his arms and yanked them behind him. Then they held the hapless instructor in this contorted position for hours. When it was over, most teachers couldn't walk. To make the humiliation a bit more lasting, students shaved their erring teachers' heads. Among their teachers, the diligent students "discovered" the vilest of the vile. Gao Yuan says that they uncovered "hooligans and bad eggs, filthy rich peasants and son-of-a-bitch landlords, bloodsucking capitalists and neo-bourgeoisie, historical counterrevolutionaries and active counter- revolutionaries, rightists and ultrarightists, alien class elements and degenerate elements, reactionaries and opportunists, counterrevolutionary revisionists, imperialist running dogs, and spies." The students armed themselves with wooden swords and hardware. At night, they imprisoned their teachers in their bedrooms. Another instructor at the Democracy Street Primary School was driven past endurance and hung himself. Now that they had practiced on their teachers, the students were urged to take their cultural cleansing further and form organized units, Red Guards, to root out revisionism in the towns. Like young monkeys raiding an elder's domain, ten- and fifteen-year-olds rampaged into the cities looking for officials who had strayed from the strict Maoist line. They sniffed out "ox ghosts and snake spirits" among the municipal authorities; subjected magistrates, mayors, and local party heads to interrogations, beatings, and head-shavings; and marched miscreants through the streets wearing dunce caps that were sometimes thirty feet high. Needless to say, the officials under attack had provided the foundation of support for the bureaucratic powers who had ignored Chairman Mao not long ago. The more the Red Guards attacked that foundation, the more the bureaucratic resistance to the Glorious Chairman crumbled. The Red Guards did not let their enthusiasm stop there. Urged on by Mao's speeches, they went on a campaign against "The Four Olds"- the remnants of pre-Revolutionary style. The students pulled down store signs, renamed streets, slit the trouser legs of anyone wearing tight pants, stopped women entering the town gates to cut off their braids, pulled down ancient monuments, broke into homes, and smashed everything that carried the hated aura of tradition. Then the Red Guards turned on each other in what started as a debate over the true Maoist line. Behind the argument about Mao's thought, however, was another issue. Class warfare is a central concept of Maoism. As a result, each citizen of Mao's China was categorized according to the class from which his parents or grandparents came. If your family in the distant past had belonged to an unacceptable social category, you were a pariah. What was acceptable? The poor peasants and soldiers. Middle peasants and intellectuals were beneath contempt. Upper peasants, capitalists, or landlords were beyond the pale. just to keep things straight, the descendants of these hated social strata were sometimes forced to wear black armbands with white letters broadcasting their status. In Gao Yuan's school, one student declared categorically that only those whose class background was "pure," those whose parents had come from the Red categories-poor peasants and soldiers-should be allowed in the Red Guard. And what of the children whose parents came from the Black categories-middle-class peasants, wealthy peasants, landlords, and capitalists? Keep them out, said the snobbish student. A parent's class has nothing to do with children, protested Gao Yuan. "All our classmates were born and brought up under the five-star red flag. We all have a socialist education." Not true, snarled the boy determined to keep the Red Guard an exclusive club, "a dragon begets dragons, a phoenix begets phoenixes, and a mouse's children can only dig holes." In the coming months, belonging to the Red Guard would be a matter of vital importance. The Red Guard would take over the administration of the cities and the schools. If you belonged, you'd have power. If you didn't, every petty grudge against you could be turned into a political charge. And the slightest accusation of ideological sin could be used to make your days worse than your most appalling nightmare. The debate over who should be allowed in and who should be kept out was not an innocent children's game. Eventually, there would be two different Red Guards in Gao Yuan's school. One would embrace the children of the favored classes. The other would harbor the rejects-the children of the forbidden castes. At first, the two factions were content to squabble over which one upheld Mao's true line. Each accused the other of right-wing revisionism. Both shouted torrents of Mao's quotations, determined to prove the rival faction wrong. Soon, they turned from citations to taunts and insults. Then they graduated to throwing rocks. The two sides armed themselves. They made slingshots and clubs, then wove helmets from willow twigs soaked in water. The helmets were so hard you could smash them with a hammer and barely make a dent. A few lucky kids found old swords. Others made sabres and daggers out of scrap metal. Everyone in Gao Yuan's town had grown up knowing how to mix gunpowder from scratch, since children traditionally crafted their own firecrackers for annual holidays. Now, the students of Democracy Street Primary School put that skill to a new use: they built arsenals of homemade hand grenades. Some even found ways to get guns. It wasn't long before the two rival gangs of Red Guards at Gao Yuan's school were engaged in full-scale warfare. Each occupied a separate group of buildings on the campus. And each began a series of raids to unseat the other from its newly established headquarters. In those armed forays, students were wounded with stones, blades, and explosives. The more the blood flowed, the angrier each side became. One Red Guard faction came across a lone member of the rival gang on campus, dragged him to an empty dormitory room, tied him up, and interrogated him, searching for secrets to their adversaries' weak points. The captured student at first refused to talk. The interrogators beat him with a chair leg. They snared another student and hung him from the ceiling of the room for days, and bludgeoned yet another with a poker. This time, they made a mistake. The poker had a sharp projection at the end that punctured their prisoner's skin every time it struck. When the questioning session was over, the victim's legs were bleeding profusely. He died a few hours later. Why had the tormentors used so much force? Their captive was a traitor to the precepts of Chairman Mao. The Chairman himself had said that revolution is not a dinner party. Sometimes it was hard to remember that the person hanging from the rafters had sat three chairs away from you in homeroom since the two of you were little kids. The commitment of students on both sides to the words of Mao was passionate. They spat phrases from the Great Leader like machine-gun bullets, ferocious in their devotion to "dialectic truth." But, in reality, the Maoist ideology, with its noble goal of liberating humanity, was being used by one Red Guard faction to seize power from another. Idealism's rationalizations transformed the rapacity of the students into a sense of selfless zeal. The Cultural Revolution threw China into chaos. Finally, the military took control of the country and restored order. The Red Guard members were drafted as they came of age. The teenagers who had fought each other went their separate ways. Gao Yuan entered military service, then studied in Beijing. He met an American girl, moved to the United States, and wrote a book about his experience, Born Red. Not long after, others who had suffered through the Cultural Revolution would pen memoirs revealing even greater horrors. Meanwhile, the head of the class-purity-oriented group that had systematically tortured Gao Yuan and his friends for over a year became a member of a trucking company. The leader of Gao Yuan's more liberal Red Guard brigade disappeared fur many years. He resurfaced only when China began the modern economic reform that allows a measure of entrepreneurial freedom. Today, the former Red Guard leader once again uses the ability to organize others that helped him marshal his fierce young army of students: he founds successful capitalist enterprises. Only one person really got what he wanted from the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Mao Tse-tung. When it was all over, he had driven his opponents from their roosts and regained control of China. But the Chinese Cultural Revolution had unleashed the most primitive and appalling human instincts, providing a clue to the biological machinery that leads us into war and violence. The formerly shy and well-behaved teenagers caught up in the Chinese Cultural Revolution pulled together in tight clusters. The signal that drew them together was the altruism of ideology. Once their groups had been formed, ideology served a second purpose. It became a weapon, an excuse for lashing out at rival groups, a justification for murder, torture, and humiliation. Within their tight gangs, the Chinese teenagers loved each other. Their loyalty to their comrades and to their master, Chairman Mao, was ferocious. But when they turned their attention to outsiders, the folks they labeled as counterrevolutionaries, their feelings were different. Toward those beyond their tiny circle, they radiated only hatred. And they treated those they despised with remorseless brutality. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was a microcosm of the forces that manipulate human history. It showed how the insubstantial things we call ideas can trigger the loftiest idealism and the basest cruelty. And it demonstrated how under the urge to heroism and the commitment to the elevation of all mankind there often ties something truly grotesque-the impulse to destroy our fellow human beings. How do mere fragments ot thought turn to concepts that kill? Why do groups so readily congeal, face off, and fight? To answer these questions, we have to look at the forces that gave us birth. ----------- Meme 019: SCRUPPIES: Scripture-Pounding Yuppies 1.10.24 Fundamentalism is characteristic, not of aging conservatives so much as young, urbanizing populations undergoing great change. Fundamentalism eases their road to modernization. What they do is find a high-price faith that demands strict adherence and commitment and then go through their scripture and carefully select passages that emphasize clean living, strict obedience, and *making money*. They then insist on taking these passages infallibly and literally (and ignoring the rest). They are scripture-pounding Yuppies, and I call the Scruppies. This is described, in the case of the Moslems, in Samuel Huntington's _Clash of Civilizations_, where he notes that fundamentalist beliefs are highest in medical and professional schools. Scruppies are also characteristic of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam (http://www.finalcall.com), and it was true of the first Protestant Ethic described by Max Weber in 1904/5. The terrorists are *failed* Scruppies. Get too many failed males of the high testosterone years, fill *them* up with fundamentalism and they emphasize, not the money- making elements but the strict adherence. Huntington shows how the fine correlation between peak of 15-24 year old youth bulge in Moslem countries and fundamentalist take-overs. [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and spread them.] From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 17:05:55 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:05:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Joseph E. Davis: Identity and Social Change: A Short Review Message-ID: Joseph E. Davis: Identity and Social Change: A Short Review The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=343405&textreg=1&id=DavBibl1-1 Issues of self and identity have been a preoccupation in the social sciences now for several generations. This short review of the extensive literature touches on some of the most influential early writers and then briefly discusses the several directions in which more contemporary scholarship on identity has traveled. Points of Departure Up through the late 1960s, a considerable body of literature was produced on personality and the self-concept, on the conflict between individual needs and social demands, and on the effects of this conflict and rapid social change for the adapting person. The principal figures during this period were psychologists, including Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow, and Harry Stack Sullivan; sociologists and anthropologists, such as Ruth Benedict, Erving Goffman, Helen Lynd, David Riesman, and Georg Simmel; and philosophers and existentialists, including R. D. Laing, Herbert Marcuse, George Herbert Mead, and Alfred Schutz. In this older literature, the self-society nexus was a central problem, along with a concern over the disruptions in self-concept and personality brought about by significant social dislocations and transformations--urbanization, bureaucratization, the rise of a consumption ethic, technological advances, the decline of major institutions, and so on. For many writers, these disruptions were seen to lead to painful uneasiness and destructive alienation and instability. For others, however, the effects of change were considered more salutary, leading to experimentation with new and adaptive ways to meet social demands and efforts to break free from narrow and restrictive social roles. The following titles are a sampling: Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934. Erikson, Erik H. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton, 1968. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, (1930) 1961. Fromm, Erich. Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. New York: Rinehart, 1947. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Baltimore: Penguin, 1965. Lynd, Helen Merrell. On Shame and the Search for Identity. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon, 1964. Maslow, Abraham H. Toward a Psychology of Being. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1962. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934. Riesman, David, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Schutz, Alfred. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967. Simmel, George. On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1903-1921) 1971. Sullivan, Harry Stack. The Fusion of Psychiatry and Social Science. New York: Norton, 1964. Persisting Concerns and Lines of Theorizing Continuations More recently, studies of self and identity have moved in a number of diverse directions. However, two primary sociological texts that continue the discussion of the older concerns with the self-society connection and the impact of larger social forces on consciousness are: Berger, Peter L., Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner. The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Vintage, 1973. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Individualism and Self-Fulfillment Among others, two works that continue the concern with the self spurred by Maslow, Carl Rogers, and others in the Human Potential Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and address the contemporary "identity crises" and "tribulations of the self" are: Cushman, Philip. Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Lasch, Christopher. The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. New York: Norton, 1984. For explorations of the changes in the ways people structure their sense of self and/or pursue an ethic of self-fulfillment, see: Bellah, Robert N., et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Clecak, Peter. America's Quest for the Ideal Self: Dissent and Fulfillment in the 60s and 70s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Hewitt, John P. Dilemmas of the American Self. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Russell, Cheryl. The Master Trend: How the Baby-Boom Generation is Remaking America. New York: Plenum, 1993. Veroff, Joseph, Elizabeth Douvan, and Richard A. Kulka. The Inner American: A Self-Portrait from 1957 to 1976. New York: Basic, 1981. Yankelovich, Daniel. New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down. New York: Random House, 1981. Personality, Character, and Social Change Many works trace the emergence of a new personality type or character, shaped by or adapted to the changing social, cultural, and economic conditions of postindustrial or postmodern life. The new personality type has been variously categorized as an "antinomian" personality (Adler), a boundaryless self (Bell), a narcissistic personality (Lasch, Sennett), a "subject-directed" character (Leinberger and Tucker), a protean self (Lifton), a therapeutic personality (Rieff), and a "postmodern" (Wood and Zurcher) or "mutable" self (Zurcher). As with observers of an earlier generation, changes in personality or character are alternatively characterized as destructive or liberating, as a sign of cultural decline or a potentially fruitful adaptation to contemporary social conditions of flux and fragmentation. See: Adler, Nathan. The Underground Stream: New Life Styles and the Antinomian Personality. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic, 1976. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectation. New York: Norton, 1979. Leinberger, Paul, and Bruce Tucker. The New Individualists: The Generation after the Organization Man. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Lifton, Robert Jay. The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. New York: Basic, 1993. Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism. New York: Knopf, 1977. Wood, Michael R., and Louis A. Zurcher, Jr. The Development of a Postmodern Self: A Computer-Assisted Comparative Analysis of Personal Documents. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Zurcher, Louis A., Jr. The Mutable Self: A Self-Concept for Social Change. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977. Technology and Identity Finally, recent studies also continue a concern with the impact of technology on consciousness and identity, though new technologies have raised new issues. Some works focus on how new communications technologies, including the Internet, which free interaction from physical co-presence, are affecting the experience of the self as unified and coherent and changing the context in which identity is constructed. For instance: Gergen, Kenneth J. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic, 1991. Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Reeves, Byron, and Clifford Nass. The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Televisions, and New Media as Real People and Places. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Another emerging interest concerns the new psychopharmacology. For a provocative examination of the effects of mood-altering drugs on the experience of self, see: Kramer, Peter D. Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self. New York: Viking, 1993. New Issues and Directions In addition to broad thematic continuities, recent identity studies have also departed from the older literature in significant ways. The most consequential of the new developments has been to shift attention away from a concern with the individual's sense of self to issues of collective identity and political action. Constructionism, Collective Identities, and the Body One stream of the new scholarship, the social constructionist, has concentrated on identities of race, ethnicity/nation, gender, and sexuality. In these studies, collective identities are treated not as some primordial property of a group's members, but as interactional accomplishments that must be continually renegotiated. The following are a few notable examples: Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. New York: Verso, 1991. Waters, Mary. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Nagel, Joane. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. A notable subset of the constructionist literature questions the meaning of biological distinctions, such as the inscription of gender on the body and the growing importance of the body to individual and collective identities. For example: Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon, 1991. Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage, 1993. Identity Politics Following on the politicization of identity by the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, another, and closely related, stream of research has emerged on the constitution of collective identities and the political implications that result from group struggles to self-characterize and claim social franchise. This is the literature on "identity politics," which has been principally, though not exclusively, concerned with identities of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and social class. For instance: Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, 1991. Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity. Vol. 2, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997. Dudley, Kathryn Marie. The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Academic Postmodernism Finally, the academic discourse of postmodernism has also been centrally concerned with an erosion of the belief in an essence or substantial identity defining the person. In fact, Robert Dunn argues that "the concept of the postmodern itself was an attempt to articulate a growing sense of the problematization of identity as a generalized condition of life in postwar Western society" (Identity Crises, 2). The literature on the politics of identity, itself a version of postmodernism, involves a critique of social hierarchies and emphasizes the negotiated and contingent nature of identity, difference, and the rules of inclusion and exclusion. Academic postmodernism, by contrast, influenced by French poststructuralism, involves an epistemological critique and abandonment of the rational and unified subject of Enlightenment philosophy. The many works of such prominent postmodern theorists as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, all attempt in their various ways to "decenter" the subject and deconstruct established identity categories and their accompanying power-discourse formations. For examples of this type of postmodern theorizing and helpful discussions, see: Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford, 1991. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Dunn, Robert G. Identity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989. Lyotard, Jean-Fran?ois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 17:10:19 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:10:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Julian Edney: Greed Message-ID: Julian Edney: Greed http://www.g-r-e-e-d.com/GREED.htm. An essay concerning the origins, nature, extent and morality of this destructive force in free market economies. Definitions. Paradoxes and omissions in Adam Smith's original theory permit - encourage - greed without restraint so that in a very large society over two centuries it has become an undemocratic force creating precipitous inequalities; divisions in this society now approach a kind of wealth apartheid, and our values are quite unlike Smith's: this is an immensely wealthy society but it is not a humane society. Wealth and poverty are connected, in fact recent sociological theory shows our institutions routinely design inequality in, but this connection is largely avoided in texts and in the media, as is the notion that greed is a moral wrong. Problems created by greed cannot be solved by technology. We are also distracted by already-outdated environmental rhetoric, arguments that scarcities and human suffering follow from abuse of our ecology. Rather, these scarcities are the result of what people do to people. This focus opens practical solutions. Sign the tab in certain Midtown eateries and your neighbors' eyes slide over. Is that a $48,000 Michel Perchin pen? What's on your wrist - a $300,000 Breguet watch? In Palm Springs and Bel Air, $100,000 twin-turbo Porsches and $225,000 Ferraris buzz the warm streets. In New York at an exclusive Morell & Company auction last May, a single magnum of Dom Perignon champagne was sold for $5,750. And there are the paintings of course - one evening at auction two Monets sold for $43 million (2). Hotel rooms, anyone, at $10,000 a night? Estate agents in suburbs of Dallas and Palm Beach have advertised baronial homes for sale at over $40 million (3). These are prices paid by the exceptionally wealthy, the folks who skim the pages of the Robb Report (average annual salary of subscribers: $1.2 million) in whose glossy pages are reviewed the best of everything. In a recent issue a southern plantation is advertised, "everybody's dream," at $8.5 million. Robert Reich points out that the superrich live in a parallel universe to the rest of the country: much of the time we don't see them because they live in walled estates, travel in private limousines and use different airports from the rest of us (4). There's lots of them. There are now more than 200 billionaires. Some five percent of American households have assets over $1 million. And we're back to levels of extravagant consumption not seen for 100 years (5). By historical accounts this is a nation of persistent and resilient people with an unshakable mission: the pursuit of happiness. This idea of happiness is largely connected with wealth (and this connection has long philosophic roots). It is a nation of ambitious people with notions of unfettered future growth, a nation that celebrates abundance. There seems to be no reason anyone should be deprived of luxury, if he works hard. Indeed with this country's aggregate wealth, there should be no reason anyone should ever go hungry or suffer. People are going hungry in America. A Los Angeles survey found more than a quarter of low income residents, many working, are not getting enough food to meet basic nutritional needs. And 10% are experiencing hunger (6). Estimates are that 3 out of 10 Americans will face poverty sometime in their lives (7). Misery is a word seldom applied to the contemporary scene. Like wretchedness it seems antique, an Old World term. But many Americans live in cold, dank slums; many do not earn enough for shelter, many sleep outside. In America's inner cities and at its lowest levels, under freeway bridges and in tubercular alleys, in stained and broken rooming houses and in torn-apart schools, misery exists and persists. All our largest cities contain neighborhoods where some people live day to day in apartments that could be mistaken for closets, some fearing to leave home on gang-terrorized streets, some sharing bus seats with people with drug-scarred arms. Every great metropolis has its skid row mired in fecal gutters, where whole blocks are awash in narcotics and violence, its inhabitants despised and flatly abandoned. America is once again a nation of extremes. Sealed Off As this society grows, it becomes more unequal. As aggregate wealth goes up, equality goes down. Our population has soared 13.2% in the last decade alone to 281 million (8), and the wealth has been concentrating in fewer hands (it has since the 1770s (9)) and the difference between the richest and the poorest is now immense. While the wealthiest individuals count their assets in the tens of billions, the lowest classes are falling. Americans' earnings are more unequal today than they have been any time in the past 60 years (10). Some corporations' CEOs have been making over 400 times the hourly rate of their lowest worker (11) but this inequality is not just a feature of businesses, it spans a variety of professions, perhaps to include my favorite musicians and your favorite athletes. For example, shortstop Alex Rodriguez's $252 million 10 year baseball contract pays him $170,000 per game (12). To a person receiving the average allocation of $83 per month in food stamps, the inequality is astronomical, and the chances of closing it so small it doesn't feel like a real freedom. If the best-off are sealing themselves off, the worst-off are also doubly fenced about, this time by the distrust and aversion of those above. Around 20% of American children are living in poverty. An estimated two million are homeless some time during the year (13), including whole families and people who have full- or part-time jobs (14). This is a flamboyantly optimistic and self-congratulatory society, and the puzzle is why it allows this suffering. The inequalities are stunning, but a frequent attitude is a shrug - so what?. These days it is hard to plumb a concern. Frequently I survey acquaintances with this touchstone question, attributed to Rawls (15): Suppose there are people living on one side of a big city who throw weekly parties so lavish that afterwards they are throwing out meat, while on the other side of the same town are people so poor they cannot afford to buy meat at all. Is this a moral problem? I get a spectrum of answers: "No problem" to "Yes, of course" and in between "Technological, but not ethical problem," and "Maybe, but (horrified look) what solution are you pushing?" - as well as some yawns, as if these questions were so old fashioned. I believe the variety of these responses eventually leads to the question of what kind of society we live in. Winner Takes All My first point is that these extremes of wealth are connected. While the rich are growing richer, the poor are growing poorer (16), and this is no coincidence. But we largely deny the connection. This is a society which, as the divide between the happy and the abject grows, tries, now by education, now by medication, now by paradox, now by distraction, to avoid the inhuman consequences of its collective actions, and in the end - because none of those strategies is effective - it is one that uses specific strategies for vacating reality. Defenders, of course, argue that the rich getting richer benefits all, and that in an economy that is an unlimited, growing, open system, all can rise, that (once we get through temporary difficulties) we will find a full and abundant world. In fact these are not so much arguments as swollen cliches. There is indeed a problem, and it has a history. I will sift the philosophy of utilitarianism and Adam Smith's founding economics theory for origins. Smith's 1776 treatise, we recall, tied the growth of wealth to the work of common entrepreneurs. It refused the inherited inequalities of aristocracy and with the Enlightenment's notion of reason, a quality accessible to Everyman, it promptly democratized the economy. This philosophy was exported whole cloth to the new America, and it has since grown to dominate our economic policies, its influence is now worldwide. But despite its original claims, we will find it woven with mystical filaments and contradictions. I will show that as the theory is commonly related, it is hard to separate rationality from dogma. Competition is a fundamental good in utilitarian economics. Competition is a process which results in inequalities - winners and losers. It cannot be, in a society of free competitive units, that competition among all is good for all. Modern analysts Cook and Frank show free market competition has become so stark that we are becoming a winner-takes-all society (17). In a giant economy, aggressive acquisition, greed, where so widespread and popular as to be celebrated, has resulted in colossal differences, so that, as much as we are accustomed to reproaching the Europeans for their inequalities, we are now caught in a lie. We have become more unequal. The United States is the wealthiest nation. But its 20.3 percent child poverty rate ranks worse than all European nations (18). Historians Will and Ariel Durant (19) estimated in their survey that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest in America has become greater than at any time since Imperial plutocratic Rome. Paradoxes Inequality is a non-issue to the defenders of Smithian economics. The pursuit of excellence makes it inevitable and, they argue, the pursuit of excellence benefits all. So we are hostage to a paradox. As powerfully as we struggle for wealth and happiness we fling ourselves on the axiom that we all are equal, leaving some damage to the national psyche. The whispered truth is that this nation bent on the pursuit of happiness is not so happy. Suicide afflicts all classes, and suicide rates are now so high as to eclipse homicide rates with three suicides for every two murders. Surgeon General Satcher partially blamed the media (20). Clinical depression is at its highest rate in decades (21). There are unprecedented rates of anxiety, companionship itself is receding, trust is fading (22). Tens of millions are using prescription mood elevators. Scarcity oppresses. And the worst signs of unhappiness cluster in the lowest cuts: we have among the highest national rates of imprisonment, and the Administration concedes there are 5 million hard-core drug users in America (23) and millions of alcoholics, all disproportionately among the poor. Resonating with the battle cry of the French Revolution, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, the American Constitution was written with promises of human liberty and equality. Freedom and equality qualify as the fundamental political virtues. They are the two legs upon which democracy walks. The second of the promises is broken. So we first have a philosophical problem: There are many reasons for inequality, but it is ensured in an unfettered materialistic society by a celebrated style of acquisition we call greed. Greed is not just the whimsical excess of the individual. Its most virulent forms are displayed by business groups and corporations - but aggregated, it is an antidemocratic force. Greed demolishes equity. Simply, you cannot have both unrestrained greed and equality. Apartheid Economy The principle of freedom always comes first, argues the Smithian capitalist. But in America, freedom has become something else, a wild individualism (24) with a strange amnesia - a disconnect between parts of our culture. A kind of sociopathic haze is settling, helped by mood-altering drugs and television, and appearing in the fashionable cluelessness and chic ignorance - so ubiquitous they have aerated society to numbness. Another facet is the narcissism (to rival one of Dostoevsky's characters so narcissistic he cared more about an ounce of his own body fat than the lives of 100,000 of his own countrymen (25)). What the free individual chooses to do is now paramount., and the poor understand that detachment is the pivot. Detachment allows the paradox that you can both compete with others but not be involved with what results. The concept of "the common good" has almost disappeared, and nobody is his brother's keeper. Neither are these inequalities an unfortunate by-product of the healthy struggle. Competitive acquisition for the sake of exhibition is again in vogue - and it seems television repeatedly flaunts that on the way to wealth, there are no principles competitors won't compromise. Besides hunger and fear, lack of health care, decent education and housing shortages, which make living hard, the poor live with brash opulence in their faces. People in decaying buildings daily watch glittering television scenes of shining cars, ocean yachts, and overflowing parties of the rich and famous. Owned by these images, a poor person cannot but feel the differences, and year by year these images add a sedimented frustration, resentment, sense of failure and inferiority which they cannot avoid. Poverty is also punitive. The poverty-struck family is not just paying the price of its own failure: it is also paying the price of others' success. Still, many regard these problems as if they were no more than the economy's stubble, moles, and split ends. Second, we have a practical problem. The Durants show a cycle repeating through history. Great social inequality creates an unstable equilibrium. The swelling numbers of the poor and resentful come to rival the power of the rich. As grievances and restlessness grow, government worsens, becoming tyrannical. Eventually a critical point arrives. Wealth will be redistributed, either by politics, or by revolution. Denying the Shadow Could it happen in America? To some analysts, it is already beginning. A survey released by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation attributes our enduring levels of violence to "vast and shameful inequality in income, wealth and opportunity among urban poor" who are often "trapped in places of terror" (26) - inequalities which are simply un-American, opines C. Murphy (27). Troubling studies exist, but we surround this research with technicians questioning methodology and politicians arguing the study represents no reality. There is denial: "Forget the data," asserts one newspaper columnist on poverty issues, ".things have gotten better."(28) Finally, this issue is no longer the environmentalist's concern about scarcity of natural resources, nor the population expert's warnings about Earth's limits to growth. These scarcities are man made, the result of what people do to people. The fact is, far from being an abundant world, it is a world of scarcity because we calibrate it so. And yet the moral connection is absent. Currently our aggregate wealth is like a high tide, covering many unpleasant things on the ocean floor. When there is full employment, we all seem happily raised. But a few years ago the Harvard Business Review carried an article daring to look down: Richard Freeman (29) warns that under the surface America is becoming dangerously segregated, forming an apartheid economy, and the lowest are not free to move up. Freeman adds a shadow. He sketches in a huge new group of Americans, the economically sinking workers who are trailing their counterparts in other advanced countries. Sociologist Derber's point is that where people are homeless, starving, or jobless, civil society has failed (30). But these demographics will not reverse, because we are a society busily denying its own shadow. In this essay I will pull back the curtain on the irrational in this driving, powerful economy. Instead of an overarching machinery running on smooth technical devices, we shall see a clutter of denial, rationalization, visionary statements and internal contradictions. And the quietness around this topic has another reason. Perhaps we had better be quiet. If we look up, we see Goliath. Definitions Greed vastly predates Smithian economics, of course. It is one of the Bible's Seven Deadly Sins. Contemporary dictionaries define it as intense acquisitiveness of (usually material) goods or wealth. To dilate: Greed is the acquisition of a desirable good by one person or a group beyond need, resulting in unequal distribution to the point others are deprived. Competitive greed is the same type of acquisition deliberately to create that inequality. Punitive greed is the same type of acquisition deliberately to leave the deprived suffering, powerless or disabled. Sometimes it takes fine grained analysis of circumstance and motive to distinguish these, but all the preceding involve overt behaviors, and the measure is the resulting inequities. Simple greed does not require intention, for instance while continuing to acquire in the face of others' deprivation a person denies greed explaining he is unaware of results; it is still greed, the measure being the resulting inequity. Next, passive hoarding which perpetuates extremes of inequity previously created is also greed. Next, greed is not always impulsive. It may be planned and calibrated; sustained effort and greed are not incompatible. Next, greed can be exhibited by person, group, corporation, even government. Common observation also shows personality differences. Not everybody exhibits the extremes of greed; but I believe all people act on the impulse at some time in their lives. Separately, greed can be purely mental, a longing, or craving, akin to obsession and addiction, not acted upon, but this is the province of the psychologist. In practice, as James Childs points out, greedy individuals usually hoard both wealth and power (31). The origins of greed are not mysterious. Like the origins of the drive for power the seeds are everywhere, and if a little bit feels good, more must be better. Previous lack is not necessary to start greed any more than fire is started by lack of fire, but like fire greed expands where it can, it has no internal homeostatic mechanism and the bigger it gets, the faster it grows. Its spread is also quickened by social imitation, akin to panic spreading through a crowd. Greed is not a rational force. As a concept greed has largely lost its moral sting. Few contemporary dictionaries include that it is reprehensible. The modern fashion not to sound judgmental, situation ethics, and the habit of social scientists to use past deprivation, social pressure, low self esteem, background, entitlement and myriad extenuating circumstances to explain the behavior, make the moral question so complex, all has crumbled into uncertainty. This essay resurrects the moral dimension. If the consequences of greed are harm and pain, it is immoral. If greed is flaunted, when the pain is known, it is also sociopathic. These situations are quite common. Anyone doubting the concept of punitive greed should recall that the ancient book by Sun Tzu The Art of War is required reading in top corporate circles. Not all wealth is created by greed, and not all inequalities are caused by greed, but if you could start with a society of complete equals, unrestrained greed will be sufficient to quickly render that society unequal. It is also the purpose of this paper to suggest repairs, for which we need to know how our present problems started. Our founding economic theory is tangled. You had to be Bold The ordinary test of a philosophy is whether it makes people better and happier, whether it results in prosperity, cooperation and peace. Utilitarianism seemed a swaggering success because it dismantled the smothering pessimism of the Middle Ages, when a social caste system shackled your life chances, church dogma shrouded attitude and thought. Hobbes's dictum at the time was that life for Everyman was solitary, nasty, poor, brutish and short . Our current economic theory is based on a radically different idea. You had to be bold bringing out new ideas in the European 1700s but they were revolutionary times and philosophers risked their necks pushing some new arguments that people were created equal and each had the liberty to create his own destiny. The French Revolution opened with its violence for equality. In England these ideas took shape as utilitarianism, a put-together philosophy that is neither profound nor poetic, but which was brazenly inclusive, and it confronted a national system of unbearably elaborate dogma and ancient ritual. Jeremy Bentham, Henry Sidgwick,. J.S. Mill and Adam Smith drew the footings. Inverting the Problem Rather than religious, utilitarianism uses secular, psychological motivators to explain human behavior, the emotions of pleasure (happiness) and pain. Pleasure is a good. Its ethics: units of pleasure and pain can be summed and compared, and we should choose the act that results in the greatest good for the greatest number, calculations that any person can do. Utilitarianism is practical, astonishingly democratic, and astonishingly rule-free. The utilitarians bluntly advised governments, let the people alone. Let them be human, doing what they do naturally. So instead of having high priests and nobility dictating values, utilitarianism promotes the values of science, which are truth, practicality and factuality. Adam Smith's contribution was a step further, to give happiness a mercantile slant. In the new philosophy there is no conspicuous concern with sympathy, compassion, honesty, courage, grace, generosity, altruism, charity, beauty, purity, love, care nor honor. It accepts that humans are fundamentally selfish and egoistic and that they don't care about society-as-a-whole. So how does utilitarianism reconcile the selfishness of individuals with the common good - a problem no other social philosophy had solved? Adam Smith's breakthrough was inverting the problem. He simply declared that the selfishness of man and the good of society go together. The general welfare is best served by letting each person pursue his own interests. Each unit egoistically strives to better his own lot and maximize his own pleasures. In exerting himself so, he looks for efficiency, for better ways to make money. He'll invent a better way to cure hides or find a quicker delivery route, for entirely personal gain. But these are soundly rational moves from an economic point of view, and when everybody does this, it sums and spreads through the community, which is improved as if lifted by an invisible hand because no individual intended that end. And we note all of this is achieved without the value of justice, because justice, like the preceding list of noble values, is not a natural quality. It requires rules, and utilitarianism is fundamentally to be rule-free. Its writers were bold. Utilitarianism pitched a very big tent. As far as theories go, it is fabulously inclusive, reaching down from intrahuman emotions all the way up to prescriptions for nations. For Smith, a country is its economics. Exported raw to America, this principle spread like wildfire, melding with the American philosophy of Pragmatism. Old morality withered, except where it became an instrument of economic progress. Little of value existed outside of usefulness, and a means-to-ends consciousness became urgent. It also emerged in the national consciousness that this pursuit was unlimited - this was the spirit of freedom. At the end of the 1800s, enormous business and enormous acquisition was understood as heroic. It still is. We still believe in the invisible hand, and that the outsize wealth of the topmost benefits all. These are the footings of our contemporary capitalistic society and our progress in national wealth has been the awe of other countries. Lost in the Rout The typical high school textbook teaches a skimmed version of Adam Smith's argument that as the rich get richer, it's good for everybody. Not until he gets to college does the student find complications in Smithian capitalism, such as the persistence of inequalities, and of poverty. If the student pursues the study of economics he will eventually read texts containing "Indifference Curves" which show the economy actually does better with social inequality (32). The original ideal of equality is tainted, the pursuit of happiness is full of conditions. Utilitarianism runs into trouble with some simple counterexamples. If we should judge an act by what brings the greatest good to the greatest number (the 'hedonic calculus') then, for instance, in setting up a factory to make cheap clothes, the pain caused to employees doing tedious work for low wages is offset by the greater benefit to the greater number of customers who benefit from cheap clothes, and the factory is a good idea. This example shows how the hedonic calculus is a sum of pleasure units weighed against units of pain. It is a simple additive economics, held to be rational. But in each example, there is no provision for the minority caught offside. Why don't we have public executions? - the pain to the victim would be more than offset by the summed satisfactions of all the spectators. A second counterexample, in different circumstances: suppose, on a battlefield, a hand grenade is tossed in on five soldiers in a trench. If one of them throws himself on it, saving the lives of the others, the hedonic calculus makes this a good act. But utilitarian ethics is also satisfied if one of the soldiers is pushed or ordered onto the grenade because four lives are still saved at the cost of one. Other philosophical systems would consider that an entirely different act. The usual explanation for these counterexamples is that utilitarianism includes an understanding that we are all enlightened people with civilized motives. Selfish, yes; competitive, yes. But we would never take pleasure from the suffering of another human, and we are not cruel - we are simply not that kind of people. We are a species of competitives, and each person is inclined to do what benefits him and utilitarianism does not recognize greed nor avarice as moral wrongs. It regards self promotion as rational. It does not list equality as a social virtue. The problem is, utilitarianism is a philosophy with no ideals to offend anybody - just what works. In the 1800s, through its industrial stage, Smithian economics consumed whole cities, and in the rout, gentlemanly civilities were lost. Some people got prodigiously wealthy, others suffered. But Darwinism was also rising and the robber-baron acquired allies among the Darwinists who held that inequality is an unavoidable fact of nature, so in capitalism's results, no guilt. It held, there are only the strong and the weak. Historically, it took more than a century after Adam Smith for the western democracies to question child labor. Until that time, the invisible hand justified the misery of legions of ragged and barefoot children whose lives were ruined in dank mills and deep mines, whose profits made Britain and America so powerful (33). Squeezes In fact there are many ways to crack Adam Smith's theory and John Nash's (34) famous mathematical rebuttal is only one. An elementary rule of logic is that when there is a contradiction anywhere within a theorem, the whole theorem is false. The center of Adam Smith economics is a paradox. It says, what's good for the selfish individual is also the common good. Secondly, it says, when you and I are in competition, what's good for me is also good for you. Those two by fiat. Next paradox: utilitarianism does have an indirect gesture at equality. The notion is that when many units compete under the same rules of market exchange, the ever-circulating of goods and money keeps the whole system fluid; units are free to enter and exit this system at will. There is only one system, the free market, so we are all in the same boat, so we all must be the same. In practice, of course, history shows us a boat or ship of state with sweating galley rowers down on benches in the bilge, and with people up on deck all dressed in colorful finery, their faces upturned into the glorious sun. Yes, we are all in the same boat. And what is different is supposed to be the same. The fourth self-contradiction is that free market capitalism is supposed to rectify past inequalities by allowing free competition, which is something that results in inequalities. Further, Smith's system cannot be regulated at the extremes where self-interest becomes the greed of not-so-well intentioned entrepreneurs, profiteers in cartels, and of corners, squeezes, and monopoly makers. All of these also want wealth but they are for the common bad. But here is the most obvious point. Try to fit greed into the hedonic calculus and watch the ethics. Greed is the outstanding moral wrong because it reverses the utilitarian ethic, with greatest happiness for the smallest number. The most popular way to handle paradoxes are to ignore them, of course. They take thought, and I'll argue later this is discouraged by our culture of bombastically bright entertainment. Another way is to repair them with rationalizations. Historically, the contradiction between the Constitution's talk of happiness and justice, and what was visible to the naked eye, that most workers' lives were still nasty, brutish and short, was rationalized by saying actually pain and suffering are good because they goaded the poor into greater efforts, thus the economy is energized. And this rationalization thrives today. Since the promise of upward mobility is axiomatic in Smithian economics, we should take a closer look. Present inequality is vast enough, the chances for the poor to work to close up the gap are long gone. Inequalities of this magnitude tend to become hereditary (35) and by and large, the descendants of the American poor will be poor. Upward mobility is a sacrosanct notion in Smithian economics, very widely held because the freedom to move up represents hope - in some people's minds, this freedom rebuts all criticism of the system. Let's measure this myth. While there is freedom to move up adjacent classes (a stock hand may rise to supermarket manager in a lifetime), the same freedom allows many people also to fall, which is called downward mobility, and which occurs in similar numbers. But the chances of a person born poor climbing all five classes into the top ("making it"), while occurring in a few widely publicized instances, are too small to constitute a real freedom. (Remembering that the top is an extremely thin, long tip to a pyramid (36), one sociologist puts the upper class at roughly 3 percent of the population. About 7.7% of that has moved in from below - a minute, and historically persistent, figure (37). The argument that everyone is free to rise to the top is dismantled in most introductory sociology textbooks - although a student must usually wait until college to read this. But the trick of flaunting possibility to mask actual probability is not a casual device. These paradoxes are no less nonsensical because they are cross-stitched into the writings of professional economists. Economists have been building on Adam Smith's examples of pin factories and canal barges for more than two hundred years. Our libraries contain shelf upon creaking shelf of intellectual embroidery around these basics. But the end result is that today all we have is a long, groping slavery to principles which don't work; can't work; because some of Adam Smith's axioms don't even rise to the level of common sense. Mystique A historical detail: one of the popular distractions of Smith's era was spiritualism. The vernacular was everywhere. Rawls has unearthed a minor book in utilitarianism, F.Y. Edgeworth's Mathematical Psychics. In that era, leisure time for the upper classes was spent at seances. Sidgwick was president of a Society for Psychical Research and actually conducted experiments to evoke mysterious forces. Science was in its infancy. And Smith's "invisible hand" is not a scientific principle. It is a mystical concept. Marx's principles were once the major rebuttal, but now that communism has largely collapsed (of the world's 260 countries only 5 now are communist) Adam Smith's doctrine appears to emerge again, as if the winner, a victorious truth. If size is success, the showcase example is today's megacompany, the corporation "overweeningly powerful and accountable to no one" (38), almost magical, because the belief also lives that once a certain high level of anything is achieved, you are invulnerable and above the law. This is a place where heroes live - the Neitzschean mystique - where big things get done, where no one is slowed down by theoretical contradictions. Money Happiness Recently, psychologists have provided a decimating argument against Smithian theory. Ryan and Deci (39) have summarized a whole literature in psychology on the antecedents of human well-being. Psychologists have always wondered what makes people feel good, and for decades they have quizzed people on the intricacies of happiness. The general answer, all the more reliable because it is based on voluminous and cross cultural research, is that money is not a reliable route to happiness. Happiness is based on other, internal factors. The relation of wealth to well-being is tenuous; only below the poverty line does money bring well-being, above it, increases in personal wealth do not bring increased happiness. A corollary finding is that the more people focus on financial and materialistic goals, the lower their feeling of well-being. Finally, certain people tenaciously believe that money does bring happiness; they are the unhappy. Together, these findings largely dismantle Smithian theory of human motivation. For the present essay it also means that the motivation behind greed, pursuit of material wealth to extremes, cannot be for the happiness it brings. There is nothing heroic about greed. It is closer to obsession. In fact, after the fall of communism, most of the original problems of industrial capitalism have reemerged too - in different guise. Instead of local factories and mills, we have transnational corporations, just as indifferently employing hordes of unprotected labor, including children, for egregiously low wages in foreign countries. All notable developments for a philosophy that was invented against privilege and tyranny. Making It If we are to build up a system with paradoxes, we must promote contradiction as we go. This begins with the contradictory myths we are teaching our children. We are currently teaching our young two incompatible morality tales. Horatio Alger's children's books from the 1800s tell the story of a boy from ragged tenement origins who struggles from poverty up to riches in an urban odyssey of unflagging effort, single-minded ambition, determination, tenacity and hard work. The boy hero meets tyrannical employers, jealous competitors, wily criminals, prejudice and derision of the poor. He defeats mountainous odds to emerge finally on top, financially successful, pulling his own mother up out of poverty, and this all with his good character intact, in a world where the good guys always win. The youngest minds get molded around the idea that this sort of ambition makes a person invincible. This myth instills a trust in long term, hard work . Yet in the same semester our schoolchildren learn the opposite value: how to turn a quick profit using cunning and slick chatter. A contemporary of Alger's, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), wrote luminous country tales, regularly read to children. In one, Tom Sawyer, a juvenile in a mid-nineteenth century American small town, is ordered to complete a wearying chore one beautiful Saturday morning, to whitewash a long fence. But our Tom is a gifted talker, and he figures a way out of the task. As each of his friends comes walking by, Tom plays the work up to be a magically rare opportunity, and his friends, persuaded, compete for a chance to try it, actually paying Tom their toys to let them paint the fence. More friends come by and Tom gets rich from all their prize possessions while getting them to do the work for him until the task is done. The story is imagetic and funny, but it values slyness over effort, and it makes a clear point of getting ahead by exploiting one's friends. Despite the phosphorescent prose, this tale is about skimming and suckers in a world where the good guys do not win. In it, winners are people who subtly know how to manipulate the wants of others (40). It would be nice if children generalized from Alger and colored themselves all industrious, righteous, honest, rational and forward thinking. But growing up, some of us have absorbed the point that hard work is for dupes, and that that out of the sleeve of ambition comes the hand of greed. Distraction The topic of greed battles with a powerful distracter. Poverty, I have argued, is partly a product of unfettered greed. But since the 1970s we have been captured in the orbit of a certain kind of argument, that we have poverty and scarcity because our planet Earth has limits and we are running out of food and raw materials. Actually there is a new consciousness on this point. Analysts Mark Sagoff (41) and Bjorn Lomborg (42) head this argument. Since the 1970s environmentalists have been predicting energy will be dangerously short because we consume too much. These predictions are framed in phrases of standard economic theory, in material terms, with mathematical projections of dire depletion and collapse of the ecosystem if we continue at present rates. They state we will imminently see starvation among industries for materials, accompanied by starvation among people. But these predictions simply haven't turned out. Both analysts document that since the 1970s the world's most basic resources have actually become more abundant and cheaper. There are ultimate planetary limits, of course, but we are nowhere near. Malthusian arguments that starvation exists because there are 'too many people' don't compute. In far too many places where the absolute level of food supply is adequate, there is famine. The world now produces enough food for everyone to have an adequate protein-rich vegetarian diet if the food was equally distributed. But, says Sagoff, neither technology nor economics can address the major causes of starvation which are corruption, mismanagement, ethnic antagonism, war, trade barriers, and social conflict. Absolute levels of raw resources are not getting worse; what is getting worse is the difference in income between the wealthy and the poor. Technological methods will not bring solutions. Not until we try a solution that turns on the moral will we begin to see improvement. Scarcity is man made. The whole debate needs a new pivot. There is a lot of misery worldwide, and the argument that there is abundance for all who would only try is false. We need a new paradigm to explain life-threatening scarcity in the face of plenty. The Pivot What drives this society? We proudly answer that what fuels people in this nation is a competitive drive to be better. The obvious result is inequality, because the intention is inequality. Competition deserves a closer look. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict summarized her overseas work saying the most obvious difference among societies was whether the living was cooperative or competitive. This was the 1930s. She used the term synergy. A high synergy society is socially cohesive, cooperative and unaggressive - one person's acts at the same time serve his own advantage and that of the group, his gain results in a gain for all. But cultures with low synergy are highly competitive and the individual gains advantage only at the expense of another, aggression is prized, indeed humor originates from one person's victory and another's demolition. Low synergy eventually threatens the social fabric. Her example was the Dobu of New Guinea, whose daily atmosphere of ill will and treachery among all made it a showcase of Hobbesean nastiness, and feared among its neighboring tribes. The Dobu have no chiefs, no government, no legalities and live very close to the "state of nature" philosophers propose. Danger is at its height within the tribe, not from without, and the attitude lives that it is prudent and right to inflict pain on losers to protect your win. Hierarchy is based on ruthlessness which is admired, and inequality and injustice are believed to be in the nature of things (43). Benedict pointed out the world's societies can be arranged on a continuum from those with the highest synergy to those with the lowest. In our own society, we love competition and we promote inequality. A team of sociologists headed by C.S. Fisher (44) has recently tightened this argument with a treatise that first attacks the Bell Curve explanation that inherited differences in IQ and natural talent can be used to explain our unequal fortunes. They summarily deny the economist's claim that inequality fosters economic growth. Third, they state, our inequalities are by design, and they are growing. The result is that in the last twenty years we have become a steeply hierarchical society, and this is with popular support. We are choosing inequality through government economic policies that chronically distributed wealth unfairly. Clearly our own society has lower synergy than we boast - and it's falling. Simply, any free market culture that would rather create a market in a resource than have abundance for all is creating inequality as it goes. But so long as we can attribute unhappiness to global limits, or to inherited individual differences, then nature is to blame. We can hoist a paradox. We can both have our levels of misery and congratulate ourselves on our modern attitudes and on a humane society. Manipulation of Hope That last hypocrisy is researched by two Yale scholars, Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt (45) who argue we practice inequality everywhere while pretending to equality (it is so close to our notion of justice). This subversion requires a nest of contradictory customs, a shell game designed to help us avoid and deny the moral consequences. And a retreat to other standards: sometimes, conceding inequalities, we will go through contortions to show that at least we are humane. The cost of all this, of course, is honesty. Calabresi and Bobbitt argue that instead of universal abundance, there is perpetual scarcity. We calibrate it so. Society oscillates between two kinds of decisions. A first order decision is how much to produce or allow of a desirable good, and a second order decision is who shall get it. If this process were obvious, we would be outraged at the insight that there is needless suffering, because the scarcity is man made. Whether the desirable good is shelter, life-saving medical treatment, an education, or decent treatment by the police, we simultaneously manage the perception that all is well when in fact it is well with only a fraction of the population. Seeing certain medications or (in war) draft-deferments only go to the rich, or seeing that with our aggregate wealth, poverty need not exist, we search for reasons that suffering comes to some people but not others. The focus becomes methods of allocation. The central insight is to see that allocation by itself is an act signifying inequality. We realize certain methods of allocation are "acceptable," meaning they do not morally offend, for instance, the free market method acceptably allocates hunger because it decentralizes choice into individual decisions, and we can blame the hungry person. So this distracts from the scarcity itself. And hope is preserved. But each allocation method is rather arbitrary. We wonder if, keeping the same overall percentages, poverty could just as well be allocated by lottery. The market does not acceptably allocate the draft, so we have to shift to another method of allocating that inequality. Mistakes in choosing allocation method pull back the curtain on the fact of the original scarcities, creating fear and outrage. But the reality is, the scarcity of doctors, on whom lives depend, is a result of a human decision how many to train - and not a limitation of Earth's carrying capacity. Sensation-hungry Press While we are uncomfortable with the fact that the market runs an "acceptable" number of auto deaths, cancer fatalities, or hungry four-year-olds, it allows us to explain each case as personal misfortune. It will appear there is no other choice, and our morality is preserved. So while we believe in a strong, happy society, brimming with progress and good for all its people, we get daily news hinting at our less-civilized status. The facts are, shelters for battered women are always crowded, fear permeates some schools, barbarism spreads in our prisons, and in some precincts it is becoming harder to distinguish police behavior from that of criminals. Calabresi and Bobbit continue this argument describing a societal device we use in huge efforts to preserve this contradiction. The perception of humaneness is crucial. It tells us our system is both strong and good; otherwise glimpses of inhumanity are a dangerous hint that things are not working. Two examples: some years ago, a million dollars was spent on the rescue of a single downed balloonist in a dramatic, highly publicized race of helicopters and boats. The drama proved our humanity. We make massive efforts for someone in distress. What was never publicized was the chronic underbudgeting of the Coast Guard which otherwise would make such rescues routine. In a second example, heroic amounts were spent to rescue prisoners from a fire in a penitentiary. But what was never revealed is that the prison's scarce medical resources meant hundreds of others routinely went without treatment or died at other times. This type of rare and heavily publicized humane event, fed to a sensation-hungry press, creates a "sufficiency paradox", an "illusion of sufficiency" (46) that the goodness is there for us all. Generalized, this creates the illusion of abundance. The media deal in demonstrations of sudden and spectacular humanity. But for every person who gets the rare benefit, many others do not. A life-saving kidney goes to one of several people in need, and the life-taking decision about the others is not publicized. The "illusion of sufficiency" device massively confuses possibility with probability but on a societal level, it is a media-promoted and effective manipulation of hope. We too use Potemkin villages. Kafkaesque What about all the people who lose to scarcity? People hate themselves for failing, but unless society is honest, they must absorb the original scarcity plus the anguish of not knowing how they failed and not knowing what to do. To the loser the frustration and humiliation of not knowing why, creates "the Kafkaesque cost of being in a process without knowing how to help oneself" (47). If people compared our national inequities in wealth with the insight that, through decided levels of scarcity, the aggregate amount of suffering is controlled, public emotion could erupt. Calabresi and Bobbitt's point is that we must keep examining our values. Equality and honesty are prime values. But in these machinations, they are chronically opposed. We must chose honesty, then we can begin the struggle to reclaim our real humanity. Corporations Next we bring into this mix the vastly wealthy American transnational corporation. Businesses exist to make profit. Corporations are a type of business association, ones with special legal powers and durability. They have been a usual part of the business environment since the fifteenth century. International corporations were the muscle behind European colonization in the second half of the last millennium, but in that era of horse and sail, their power was a fraction of what it is today. Some corporations have now grown gigantic, actually becoming global forces with more power and resources than some countries. Actually the largest corporations derive power not only from wealth but because they can fluidly migrate to whichever nation offers the least legal restraints, the cheapest labor, the most amenable economies and the friendliest politics. In this sense they float above the world's constraints. But as a rule American corporations differ sharply from the nation which hosts them. They are alien to the notion of democratic responsiveness, internal or external. In the universe of corporations everything focuses on the acquisition of resources, labor, and markets. These are the sources of power. Inside corporations Equality hides her face. Corporations are not elected, so they are concerned with nobody's approval. Aside from occasional shareholder meetings, they never ask the public for ideas or permission. Nor do the workers elect their leaders. Inside, most business corporations are steeply hierarchical structures, in which employees' freedom to do what they want is openly bought for the wage. They are not responsive to the will of those they employ; some have inner dynamics that are feudal; some of their hierarchies are also jungles of dysfunction. In democratic America most corporations are iridescent examples of autocracy, thriving on soil where the Constitution guarantees everybody's freedom and equality. Nevertheless, the overwhelming portion of our population denies any problem. Charles Derber, among several writing on this topic, believes there are specific reasons we don't even think about corporations. First, we are all educated to look elsewhere, for instance to unchecked government, as the primary threat to freedom. Second corporations make and sell our creature comforts, so we can't tamper with them without threatening our prosperity. Third, we feel powerless. The concentration of corporate power is inverse to people's feelings of personal power. Fourth, we see no alternative (48). Powers without Obligation If wealth is the only standard we use to judge, then we have to admit corporations are staggering successes and everything to venerate. They absorb people's lives. We consume their products daily, use their services hourly, rely on them for information. We are dependent. We compete to work in them. What protects them is that we are taught the system is rational. We are also taught that the goodness of a society depends on how well its topmost members are doing, so the higher our topmost members, the more they are discussed with awe. The natural foe of corporations is government. But international corporations are so wealthy they slide over governments. They have become like tourists in their own country. As they lose national loyalties, they come close to becoming powers without obligation. As the largest transnational corporations grow, they become sovereign and untouchable (49). The Corporate Personality Roughly there are, I suppose, two kinds of people. The first divides the world into Good versus Bad. The second divides the world into the Strong versus Weak. These two types never can communicate. Among the latter, the concern is never to be caught weak because hell takes the hindmost, and among them all talk about goodness and ethics is irrelevant, and every effort is given to staying strong. This second type infests corporations. They are refractory to talk of humanity and you can shout all you want and they will not listen; every ounce of their attention is given to their competition. Their rules of engagement are Darwinian. Large scale competition among these massive corporations is what upgrades greed from whimsical excess to lethal force. Two Areas of Corporate Control First, Christopher Lasch points out that private universities depend on corporations, through investments, grants, or otherwise; and wherever their money is used, corporations influence state universities too. Consequently you will find free discussion on university campuses on almost any topic but one. Academic debate is not used to deconstruct the corporations that feed them. The News The second important area of control is corporation ownership of the media. Through corporate competition, we now live in a system in which a few colossal media conglomerates dominate the news outlets. A typical conglomerate owns film studios, television studios, publishing houses, retail outlets, theaters, newspapers, music studios, cable channels, and in some cases, amusement parks. This oligopoly of conglomerates is small. It has overwhelming financial power, and it is not responsive to the will of the public. Corporations exist for profit, so the news has become a commercial product. Largely, the same mentality making decisions about entertainment is now making news decisions (and the two, according to Neal Gabler, are increasingly difficult to tell apart (50)). Analyst Robert McChesney (51) says commercialization of the news has been a slowly growing process, starting in the 1840s when it was realized that selling news could actually make an entrepreneur money. Greed rather than journalistic standards took journalism astray in the era of the Yellow Press when stories were written for what sold and all the money came in from readers. Later on, newspaper owners started getting bigger money from advertisers. Nobody objected, because then as now, the myth is that the prime enemy of a free press was the government, that competitive free market capitalism would always keep the media unbiased and democratic. Missing Topics We do have some control over which media programs we watch. We still can choose among television channels, but the overwhelming majority of channels are commercial, and corporations exert fine-grained control over the consumer's viewing diet. And unlike Canada's and Britain's, America's noncommercial channels are not guaranteed by the government. They depend on grants, charity and viewer contributions. They cannot hope for the stability, size and power of their commercials rivals. The result? Television news viewers are carpet-bombed with advertising. Advertisers actually survey for the kind of news that is interesting to the viewers who have money to buy products. Advertising firms are so influential that current journalism avoids antagonizing them and politicians avoid antagonizing them. McChesney says their control extends to blacking out certain topics. So while education, drug testing, gay rights, religion are mentioned on commercial television, other topics such as the representativeness of the media system is a topic that is never aired. Social class issues are avoided. If we live in a society of inequality, then we can wonder, every time the television shows us the upper reaches of abundant success, which scenes of poverty have been excised. Programs about the poor are rare. In effect, says McChesney,"media firms effectively write off the bottom 15-50 percent of society."(52 ) All of which, he continues, is undermining democracy. Among McChesney's remedies: first, make how the media are used a political issue. Second, a separate 1% tax on advertising would raise substantial revenues (he estimates $1.5 billion annually) which could be used to subsidize the nonprofit media. Advertising We absorb from the television, and that is what advertisers want. We take advertising seriously. Over a hundred billion dollars is spent annually on advertising. Its goal is to occupy the drive and psyche of the nation with wants, so that the nation will spend. But the media are doing much more. It is decided not to show on television the varieties of fear in our rooming houses and alleys where people reach the lowest reaches of poverty. It is decided not to show our hungry people living in tilting rural shacks. Nor the ranks of exhausted faces in city sweatshops. Lost, abject, hostile, desperate, these peoples' glances are pulled aside by complicit belief that failure is the lot of the damned. These people are quite available for filming and quite imageable. Instead, television is filled with cacophonous distraction. Contradictions are withheld in the news. For instance, new technology is lionized in commercials. But technology itself is amoral. For example, it is also making torture easier. No one would mythologize the kind of free market where people made profits marketing whips and thumbscrews, but a recent Amnesty International investigation reports that currently more than fifty U.S. companies manufacture equipment like stun belts and shock batons designed specifically for use on humans (these devices inflict great pain but leave little physical evidence) (53). Difficult topics encourage thought, and they take time away from commercials. War on Logic Somehow the painful gap that exists between poverty and abundance must be anesthetized. Television is the means. We stuff television reality in the gap. Twenty-four hours every day commercial television is an ongoing polychromatic display of games, short dramas with gunplay and florid sex, perpetually interrupted by iridescent advertisements. Television both provokes fear and promises ecstasy in ultra short attention spans. It feeds a national obsession with beauty, teasing with glossy bodies, glossy cars, luscious scenery. What is shown in commercials is overflowing abundance, specifically in terms of climactic moments. Now a race is run and now a prize is taken; now a man works for all of a second and a half, then it's time for beers; now all the cooking has been done, and a sumptuous meal is ready (54). The troubling theme is that human effort is noisily trivialized in commercials. This is the narcotic. Television lathers a bright, noisy blur over anything like sustained effort, perseverance, focused long term goals, and over a society with chronic stresses. The evening news systematically distorts normal time. Downtown riots in Seattle are given less than a minute (some of which is the reporter's talking face), shift to shots of a dog frolicking in a fountain, shift to minutes of a freeway chase. The picturesque is pursued, the serious is trivialized. These are moves in a war against logic. And if you watch television, you are having your thinking disrupted. The busy-ness of rapid shifts of focus, the effervescent color, the edgy, dramatic music, all make it difficult for viewers to build independent ideas. Neuroses But instead of asking what the frenetic distraction is about, we follow suit, with impulse. It's not just that advertisers say, you can solve your problems by drinking our wines or wearing this underwear. It's not just that each product is introduced as if it was the future of mankind. It's that the commercial saturation has been effective. No one mentally argues with the advertising. The real loss is that advertising is now accepted as if it was information. As with any other drug, we need increasing strengths. The only way to find out what television is doing to you after years of watching is to turn it off for a month. Turn it on again after abstinence, and it seems like a television's bid for our attention is like repeatedly shooting a pistol into a chandelier. Television also grows neuroses in the corners of its watchers. It grows invidious comparisons in us. Comparison shopping, comparison socializing - eventually we live life by the method of comparisons. Television is carefully producing hordes of viewers who are good at one judgment, namely, whether the neighbor or the person sitting across the room is a little better or a little worse off. This powerful judgment, 'I'm a notch better than he; I'm not quite as attractive as she', is what Alfred Adler diagnosed as a neurotic style (55), with powerful motives to compensate. Television grows envy in us, and the fix is to acquire. The result is a powerful narcissism, and an increase in the rates of depression (56) among watchers who cannot keep up, unable to match their lives to television's perfection. Greed, like many addictions, is all about the sudden and spectacular. Advertising is passionately decorative, if thin as a billboard. It serves the sudden and spectacular. Against images of poverty, fear and hunger, television also churns routine optimism into its daily programming. All is delivered in a happy, chatty style. More, each day, television will be noisily emptied out and reinstalled the same. Sum In a free society, some people's greed inevitably means deprivation for others. This does not require environmental limits, it only requires persistent and competitive self-promotion, and in a vast nation whose economy is two hundred years devoted to these principles, we now inhabit a society with a small fraction of astronomically wealthy individuals towering over a growing mass in poverty. America is arguably now more unequal than any of the original European cultures, yet we cling to and proselytize a horribly outdated economic theory which implies equality but actually delivers more inequality. Greed is the outstanding wrong because it reverses the utilitarian ethic. It produces the greatest good for the smallest number. Democracy's founding virtues are freedom and equality, so greed without restraint, producing great inequalities, becomes an undemocratic force. This is an amazingly complex economy but we still still raise our young on sleeveless country myths. They never explain a market's preferences for ensured scarcities, designed inequalities, and increasingly segregated economic classes. Our schoolbooks teach, after the demise of communism, that there is no superior alternative to Smithian economics. Adherents believe that free market capitalism is the end of history. Remedies The reflexive defense, of course, is that we already have remedies. That we protect our poor with aid and support, that our government provides a safety net for the least fortunate in the form of welfare and food stamp programs. These programs are a shambling failure. Reports detail the thin efforts of our sprawling agencies to get food to Americans who are now hungry. In California, of the millions who need aid, only 45% of the eligible are able to get food stamps even when they qualify. The other largest states show similar agency breakdowns. The hungry are trying other sources, so demand at food banks is rising (57). But Americans turning to emergency facilities are too often rebuffed. Cities are failing to meet an average of 26 percent of requests for emergency shelter, 30 percent of requests by homeless families. Government safety nets are simply broken, and at this writing some states are cutting back further (58). We do not properly protect our poor. Decades-long efforts in the Great Society program and the War on Poverty have failed to improve opportunities for the poorest Americans. As an index of our current concern, consider the national allocation for Food Stamps. It stands at 0.0017 of the Federal Budget (59). Already tiny, Federal food assistance allocations actually declined from 1995 to 1999 (60). I'll sketch other options that don't work. What about private charity? Since droves of homeless people (one quarter of whom are children) still roam the big cities, since we have unfed hungry, and since it has been that way for a long time and is not getting better, private charity has obviously been ineffective. It is too little, or sporadic and unreliable. What about the churches? Their purpose for existence includes helping the weak and needy. Curious for numbers, I divided the number of homeless (conservatively estimated at 700,000 on any given night, 2 million sometime during the year) by the number of Christian churches. This nation is filled with churches: the World Almanac lists over 330,000 Christian houses of worship (61). If each church took in 6 homeless, there would be no more homelessness. (We are taught that God and money don't mix. But actually the struggle between church and capitalism has always been subtle.) What about positive thinking? With enough love and trust and hope and unity and sensitivity and inclusiveness, will antisocial greed disappear? Well, we might hope that goliath profiteering corporations will desist in their exploiting, voluntarily come to their knees and want to be part of godly world harmony. But they will not. Universal tolerance will not stop transnational corporations wringing their profit from the sweat of laborers' faces. And these bromides do not create change, just a lot of weary smiles from well wishers. On the topic of attitude, we'll treat smiling rationalizations the same, such as the rationalization that 'greed is the sin that's good for the economy'. This sort of solution is just a delay which will float us over relatively good times. At present we have relatively high employment, so the vast majority of Americans are at least earning some amounts of money. But this is like a tide risen high, which covers all manner of unsightly things on the sea floor. They are not gone. Should the tide go out, they will reappear. Opines business professor Jim Johnson, "If you ask where all this could be heading, in the event of an economic downturn, we could see another 1992 civil unrest."(62). Stopping the Gap from Becoming Wider Harvard's John Rawls (63) has a way to repair a whole society skewed into these inequalities. Rawls asserts the misery of some is simply not made acceptable by having a greater good, as proposed by utilitarianism, because that violates the principle of justice. First Rawls insists that in addition to freedom and equality, there must be a prior value in democracy, justice. And that economic rationality and justice should forever be opposed. Rawls insists on a shift in focus. We should not judge a culture by how its topmost members are doing, but by how it treats its lowest. His solutions follow. First, this society should decide how low any member can go. That establishes minimum rights. It requires we identify the least-advantaged person in society, and draw focus to him. Next, the very top and the very bottom of society should be (and all intermediate levels should be) connected, as if by a loose linked chain. Then if the top rises, it pulls the bottom up with it. If the bottom moves up, that closes the gap toward equality. This arrangement does not prevent any upward rise; but it establishes consequences on movements at the top. Other Remedies We must look down. Even Business Week pointed out that if the current wave of prosperity recedes, America's many social ills, with hunger and homelessness, could return with a vengeance, editorializing that the Federal Reserve and Congress should be guided in their policy actions by what's happening at the bottom of society, not by the bubble at the top (64). The mystique of poverty has to be cracked. A television series 'Lifestyles of the Broken and Hungry' would not top the popularity charts, but my point is that if media paid attention to the bottom rungs with one-tenth the insistence in our commercial advertising, remedial changes would occur. Further, public service messages resurrecting the concept of the common good, would be a beginning. Actually remedies for greed do not have to be expensive, nor big, organized programs. Primary education depends on the skills of individual teachers, and if talented educators can reinstall the Golden Rule (Do as you would be done by) in their primary classrooms, some of the damage could be reversed. We need preventatives. Greed has to be reinstalled as a moral wrong, and in religious circles, as a sin. Up the educational ladder, remedies will be resisted. Here lives the fashion for nonjudgmentalism. An extension of moral relativism, this trend to universal acceptance is a couple of decades old and "Who am I to judge?" is now the standard of the gentle classes and educated elite, even spreading to exotic healing practices and 12-Step programs where it is thought that to suspend judgment of self and others is for the betterment of society. This is nonsense. Comfort only brings inaction, nonjudgmentalism is moral vacuum (65), and eventually we will have no conscience to stop what is happening. High on the academic ladder, of course, is economics but our best economic theory has delivered us contradictions and reverses. Volumes produced by economists, all written with graphite dispassion, seem to promote opposites, and you wonder if a coup was carried out by those adept at complicated thought. Just drive through any big city, you will see newsstands sporting magazines with glossy coverage of billionaires, these newsstands adjacent to people living among girders and sewage drains, alleys, scaffoldings and grates. Among the social sciences, psychology may provide a specific remedy. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV)(66) is a standard used by all psychotherapists. It is a compendium of all mental illnesses and it is used as a diagnostic tool in training psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and social workers. This book has been expanding through succeeding editions as more and more mental conditions have been described (which has expanded the domain of clinicians so far it is now said that about half America's population could be diagnosed with some mental pathology or other (67)). It is time that greed be listed in DSM IV. With well directed psychological research of course greed will turn out to be a personality trait with a distribution in the population, and personality tests will be able to screen for extremes. Moral Inertia So there is a moral cause here. But the average person hangs back from active protest. The problem is, even if we are not personally greedy, we have connections to corporations that are. We are happy consumers. Challenging the company we work for - would that be hypocrisy? Second, activism, we think, is radical action, and what about all that street rant "if you're not with us, you're against us!" - but we cannot rebel because our corporation is also our rent, and we enjoy the good living we make, and we're not giving that up. Perhaps that explains why our most articulate writers are so quiet on this topic. They also look within. So, bluntly, we need a whole new strategy for change, in which a person who feels he is part of the problem may also be part of the solution. Enter some new thinking. Max Bruinsma is a sharp critic of the damage wrought by contemporary advertising in the service of relentless acquisition. But times have changed, he says, and he argues the polarizing slogans of past social revolutions (you're either with us or against us) don't apply. We're in a historical shift. The modern activist is different. The rationale: culture today is driven by commercial advertising. In it, a particularly worrisome new trend is for advertisers to soften up our thinking with billboard-size paradoxes. Building-size ads fill our view and state that a buying a very mainstream computer (Mac) is 'thinking different'. Across the street another billboard shouts that acquiring a glossy SUV is a singular act of rebellion. Bruinsma quotes more examples: "Sometimes you gotta break the rules," (Burger King), "Innovate, don't imitate" (Hugo Boss), "Be an original" (Chesterfield cigarettes). The central insistence of these is that conforming = rebelling. And we remember the Orwellian slogans, Peace = War, Slavery = Freedom which, in 1984, reduced a future society's minds to value-free mush. Well, we can follow suit. We can generate our own examples of contradictions. So, perhaps, commercial success and social responsibility are not incompatible anymore. Everything is possible if you use self-contradiction; you are able to both work for a company, and rebel against it. Corporate rebellion = loyalty. This leads to a technique a 'Sixties activist, Rudy Dutschke, once called "the long march through the institutions." It is a long term and less bloody strategy: Go in, behave - and take over. The new culture agent is stylishly dressed, well paid, and works in an plush ad agency, designing resplendent ads which promote the return to honesty and social justice, humaneness, equity and the common good (68). The next revolution will be inside corporations. Conclusions As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer we drop our pretenses to humanitarian democracy, instead salute material excess, accept Darwinian business ethics, and pin up as our national polestar the most powerful corporations. Money and effort maintains a particular way of seeing and evaluating our society; we focus on the topmost members, cover current inequalities with a rotating blur of nearly a trillion dollars of advertising a year, and by not paying attention to the lowest, we deny them. But they are there. Inevitably, as our economic tree reaches up, its roots grow further down. It is not enough to say hopefully we accumulate layers of experience from error and progress. Technology will not deliver us equity. Logic has not delivered us equity. We want our morality back. Nuts For readers thinking these themes overwrought, I'll describe a small game in which you can watch greed in the person sitting next to you. Three people sit around a kitchen bowl. You, the fourth person, with a timer, start off placing ten small items in the bowl - quarters, dollar bills, or nuts. Tell the three players the goal is for each of them to get as many items as they can. Tell them one other thing before they start: every ten seconds (you have your watch ready) you will look in the bowl, and double the number of items remaining there, by replenishing from an outside source ( a separate pile of quarters on the side). In the original Nuts Game, I used hardware nuts, and the players were college students. You would think the players would figure out that if they all waited, and didn't take anything out of the bowl for a while, then the contents of the bowl would soon get very big, automatically doubling every ten seconds. Eventually they could each divide up a pot that had grown large. But in fact, sixty percent of these groups never make it to the first 10-second replenishment cycle. They each grabbed all they could as soon as they could, leaving nothing in the bowl to be doubled, and each player wound up with none or a few items. This can be an energetic game. I've seen the bowl knocked to the floor and I've seen broken fingernails in the greedy melee. In the original game, players are not allowed to talk. Even when they are allowed to talk, not all groups collaboratively work out a patient, conserve-as-you-go playing style, necessary for eventual big scores. They don't trust each other. This makes a good classroom demonstration of what greed can do. Actually mathematicians have designed a variety of these games, microcosms of the free economic process (69). Behind them all is a problem always nagging at Adam Smith economics. In the short run, what is good for the individual is bad for the group. The game is a microcosm of a community sharing a slowly regenerating resource (clean water, timber, whales) and individual greed can actually destroy the common good. The game involves two opposing rationalities: what is rational for the individual vs. what is rational for the group. And the resolution has less to do with reason than building a shared morality. NOTES 1. Julian Edney Ph.D. is based in Los Angeles. (Contact at bottom of this page.) 2. "Fine wines are hot lots at auctions in New York." 2002, New York Times, May 27, P. A 12. 3. Forbes.com Magazine, 12 April 2001. 4. Reich, Robert B, 1991. "Secession of the successful." New York Times Magazine, January 20, p. 16. 5. Galvin, J. "Wretched excess." 2000, Ziff Davis Smart Business for the New Economy, August 1, p. 122. 6. "Many miss out on food stamps." 2001, Los Angeles Times, June 23. Section B p.1. 7. "3 in 10 Americans face poverty, study says." 1998, Los Angeles Times, August 10, Section A p. 15 8. "State picks up house seat as Sunbelt grows." 2000, Los Angeles Times, December 29, Section A p.1. 9. Converting old wealth into modern terms is tricky but it appears in 1774 the top 1% owned 14.6% of he national wealth. By 1989 it owned 36.3%. In Gordon J.S. "Numbers game," 1992, Forbes, October 9 p 48. 10. Murphey, C. "Are the rich cleaning up?" 2000, Fortune, 24 September. p. 252 11. See for example: Childs, J.M. 2000. Greed. Minneapolis, Fortress Press, p.36 12. Los Angeles Times, 2000, December 12. Section A. p. 1. 13. Profile of the nation: An American portrait. 2000, Farmington Hills, MI., Gale Group. P. 180. 14. "Families total 43% of homeless, survey reports." 1993, Los Angeles Times, December 22. Section A p. 1 15. Rawls, J. A theory of justice. 1971. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. 16. "Study finds widening gap between rich, poor." 2000, Los Angeles Times October 20. Section B p.3. 17. Cook, P.J. and Frank, R.H. The winner-takes-all society: Why the few at the top get so much more han the rest of us. 1995. New York. Viking Books. 18. Vleminckx, K. and Smeeding, T.M. (Eds) Child well-being, child poverty and child policy in modern nations. 2001. Bristol, U.K.: The Policy Press. (Available from the University of Toronto Press.) 19. Durant, W. and Durant, A. The lessons of history 1968, New York: MJF Books. 20. Surgeon General aims campaign at rising suicide rate. 2001, Los Angeles Times May 3. Section A p. 14. 21. Lasn, K. and Grierson, B. "America the blue." 2000, Utne Reader. September. P.74 22. Lane, R.E. The loss of happiness in market democracies. 2000. New Haven: Yale University Press. 23. America Online News, 2001, by Scott Lindlaw. 10 May. 24. Derber, C. The wilding of America. 2002. New York. Worth Publishers. 25. Dostoevsky, F.M. Notes from underground. 1864/1992. New York: Bantam Books. 26. "US crime study sees society in trouble." 1999. Los Angeles Times. 6 December. Section A p.22 27. Murphy, C. "Are the rich cleaning up?" 2000, Fortune 24 September. P. 252. 28. "Is America the land of the poor?" Investor's Business Daily 1999, 27 December P. A.1. 29. Freeman, R.B. "Toward an apartheid economy?" Harvard Business Review 1996. Sept-Oct p. 114-121 30. Derber, C. Ibid. 31. Childs, J. Greed. 2000. Minneapolis, Fortress Press. P. 24. 32. Rawls, J. Ibid ,p.33. 33. Bly, R. The sibling society. New York: Vintage Books. 1977. 34. Kuhn, H. and Nasar, S. (Eds) The essential John Nash. Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press. 2002. 35. Lasch, C. The revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy. 1995. New York: Norton. 36. Rose, S.J. Social stratification in the United States. 2000, New York: The New Press. 37. McGuire, C. Social stratification and mobility patterns. American Sociological Review. 1950, v. 15, p.200. A historical study cited by Gabler found that in 1850, 2 per cent of the wealthy of that period had been born poor while 90 percent were descended from families of affluence and social position: Neal Gabler, Life: The movie. 1998. New York: Vintage Books. p. 30. 38. Attributed to Robert Monks, quoted in H. Scutt, The trouble with capitalism. New York: Zed Books 1998. P. 176 39. Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudiamonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology. 2001, 52, 141-166 40. Mark Twain is listed as a caricaturist and a satirist but this does not change my point because the very young do not know enough to distinguish satire (some adults can't either). 41. Sagoff, M. "Do we consume too much?" Atlantic Monthly, June 1997, p. 80. 42. Lomborg, B. The skeptical environmentalist. 2001. New York: Cambridge University Press. 43. Benedict, R. Patterns of culture. 1934/1989 Boston: Houghton Mifflin. The concept of synergy appeared in unpublished lectures Benedict gave in 1941 and all references are derivative, such as M.M. Caffrey: Ruth Benedict, 989 University of Texas Press. p. 308-309 44. Fisher, C.S., Hout, M., Jankowski, M.S., Lucas, S.R., Swidler, A., Voss, K. Inequality by design. 1996, Princeton .J. Princeton University Press. 45. Calabresi, G. and Bobbitt, P. Tragic choices. 1978. New York: Norton & Co. 46. Ibid, p. 134 47. Ibid. p. 132 48. Derber, C. Corporation nation. 2000. New York: St Martin's Griffin. 49. Lasn, K. and Grierson, B. American the blue.Utne Reader , September 2000. p.74. 50. Gabler, N. Life: the movie . 1998. New York :Vintage Books. 51. McChesney, R.W. Corporate media and the threat to democracy. The Open Media Pamphlet Series. 1997. New York, Seven Stories Press. 52. Ibid. p. 23 53. "Torture is accelerating globally, report says." Los Angeles Times. October 18, 2000. Part A. p. 10. 54. Leonard, G. Mastery. 1991. New York: Penguin Books. 55. Adler, A. The neurotic constitution. 1926/1998. North Stratford, N.H., Ayer Company Publishers, Inc. 56. See footnote 18. 57. "Foodstamp program is failing in California." Los Angeles Times 28 April 2001. p. A 15. A second report is "Many miss out on food stamps" Los Angeles Times 23 June 2001. p. B 1. The second article quotes the average food tamp allocation at $73 per person per month. 58. "States cut back coverage for poor." Los Angeles Times. 25 February 2002. p. A 1. 59. Food aid programs are administered by the Department of Agriculture. In 2000 total Federal receipts were $1,956,252 million of which $274,448 million went to all food programs, of which the Food Stamp program is one, for which the outlay was $3,392 million. Statistical Abstracts of the United States. U.S. Census Bureau, 2000. 60. U.S. Food Assistance (domestic) The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2000. Mahwah, N.J. Primedia Reference, Inc. 2000. 61. The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2000. 2000. Mahwah, N.J. Primedia Reference, Inc. 62. Quoted in "Study finds widening gap between rich, poor" Los Angeles Times October 20, 2000. Part B p.3 63. Rawls, J. A theory of justice. 1999. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Revised edition. (The first edition is better, in my opinion.) 64. "The poorest are again losing ground." Business Week 23 April 2001, p. 130. 65. "If I'm OK and you're OK, are there any bad guys?" Los Angeles Times, 27 January 2002 p. E 1. 66. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th. Ed.) Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994. 67. J.W. Kalat, Introduction to psychology. 6th Ed. Pacific Grove, CA: Wadsworth. 2002. 68. Bruinsma, M. "Culture agents: For closet rebels in the inside game, it's time to speak out." Adbusters , Sept/Oct 2001. (Adbusters is unpaged). 69. More recent experimental work focuses on the effects of personal reputation among players: (1) C. Wedekind and M. Milinki, "Cooperation through image scoring in humans," Science, 2000, 288, 850-852, and (2) M.A. Nowak, K.M. Page, K. Sigmund, "Fairness versus reason in the Ultimate Game," Science, 2000, 289, 1173-1175. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 17:22:04 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:22:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] MEQ: (Patai) Norvell B. De Atkine: The Arab Mind Revisited Message-ID: Norvell B. De Atkine: The Arab Mind Revisited Middle East Quarterly - Summer 2004 http://www.meforum.org/article/636 Editors' preface: In the spring of 2004, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal drove headlines in the United States and the Middle East. Journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a report in The New Yorker, entitled "The Gray Zone," describing the abuse of prisoners as the outcome of a deliberate policy. Hersh also made reference to a book, The Arab Mind, by the cultural anthropologist Raphael Patai (1910-96): The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind, a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. The Patai book, an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged"one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."[25][1] This mention of Patai's book (on the sole authority of "an academic [who] told me") sent journalists scurrying to read itand denounce it. Brian Whitaker, writing in The Guardian, called it a "classic case of orientalism which, by focusing on what Edward Said called the otherness' of Arab culture, sets up barriers that can then be exploited for political purposes." He quoted an academic as saying, "The best use for this volume, if any, is for a doorstop."[26][2] Ann Marlowe, in Salon.com, called it "a smear job masquerading under the merest veneer of civility."[27][3] Louis Werner, in Al-Ahram Weekly and elsewhere, embellished Hersh's account with a made-up detail: The Arab Mind, he wrote, "was apparently used as a field manual by U.S. Army Intelligence in Abu Ghraib prison."[28][4] (Hersh made no such claim.) Only Lee Smith, writing in Slate.com, suggested that critics had misread Patai, whom he described as "a keen and sympathetic observer of Arab society," a "popularizer of difficult ideas, and also a serious scholar."[29][5] No one took the trouble to crosscheck Hersh's academic source on the supposed influence of Patai's book as the "frequently cited bible of the neocons.'" A more accurate description of The Arab Mind would be a prohibited book. Edward Said had denounced Patai twenty-five years earlier, in Orientalism;[30][6] in academe, The Arab Mind long ago entered the list of disapproved texts. It was easy to point an accusing finger at the book (again). Patai himself was also a convenient target. A Hungarian-born Jew and lifelong Zionist, he lived in British-mandated Palestine from 1933 to 1947, and in 1936, earned the first doctorate ever awarded by the Hebrew University. He edited Theodor Herzl's complete diaries and served as the first president of the American Friends of Tel Aviv University. For many antiwar conspiracy theorists, the idea of someone like Patai as intellectual father of the Abu Ghraib scandal proved irresistible. The only concrete evidence for the book's use in any branch of government appeared in the foreword to the most recent reprint (2002) of The Arab Mind, by Col. (res.) Norvell B. De Atkine, an instructor in Middle East studies at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School. De Atkine wrote that he assigned the book to military personnel in his own courses because students found its cultural insights useful in explaining behavior they encountered on assignment. While critics skimmed Patai's book for generalizing quotes, they skirted the book's premise, as restated by De Atkine: culture matters and cultures differ. The realization by Americans that culture counts explains the commercial success of several cultural handbooks, addressing the very issues that concerned Patai.[31][7] And while there is no reason to believe that The Arab Mind had the specific influence Hersh attributed to it, the resulting publicity has sent its sales soaring, further extending the life of the book. The following is De Atkine's foreword to The Arab Mind, reprinted here in full. Incurable Romanticism It is a particular pleasure to write a foreword to this much-needed reprint of Raphael Patai's classic analysis of Arab culture and society. In view of the events of 2001including another bloody year of heightened conflict between Palestinians and Israelis and the horrendous terrorist assault on the United States on September 11there is a critical need to bring this seminal study of the modal Arab personality to the attention of policymakers, scholars, and the general public. In the wake of the September 11 attack, there was a torrent of commentary on "why" such an assault took place, and on the motivation and mindset of the terrorists. Much of this commentary was either ill-informed or agenda-driven. A number of U.S. Middle East scholars attributed the attack to a simple matter of imbalance in the American approach to the perennial Arab-Israeli conflict. This facile explanation did nothing to improve the credibility of the community of Middle East scholars in the United States, already much diminished by their misreading of the Arab world and their reaction to the U.S. response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. To begin a process of understanding the seemingly irrational hatred that motivated the World Trade Center attackers, one must understand the social and cultural environment in which they lived and the modal personality traits that make them susceptible to engaging in terrorist actions. This book does a great deal to further that understanding. In fact, it is essential reading. At the institution where I teach military officers, The Arab Mind forms the basis of my cultural instruction, complemented by my own experiences of some twenty-five years living in, studying, or teaching about the Middle East. Raphael Patai prefaces his 1973 edition of The Arab Mind with the sentence, "When it comes to the Arabs, I must admit to an incurable romanticism." So it is with me. I first became interested in the Arab world in an elective course at the United States Military Academy many years ago, and my military career thereafter was divided between assignments with regular army artillery units and tours in the Middle East. It was during my preparatory study at the American University of Beirut that I was introduced to the writings of Raphael Patai. In a sociology class we used his book, Golden River to Golden Road: Society, Culture and Change in the Middle East.[32][8] Since that time, I have read a number of his books and admired his careful scholarship, lucid writing style, and empathetic approach to his subject matter. Over the past twelve years, I have also briefed hundreds of military teams being deployed to the Middle East. When returning from the Middle East, my students, as well as the members of these teams, invariably comment on the paramount usefulness of the cultural instruction in their assignments. In doing so they validate the analysis and descriptions offered by Raphael Patai. The officers returning from the Arab world describe the cultural barriers they encounter as by far the most difficult to navigate, far beyond those of political perceptions. Thinking back on it, I recall many occasions on which I was perplexed by actions or behavior on the part of my Arab hostsactions and behavior that would have been perfectly understandable had I read The Arab Mind. I have hence emphasized to my students that there must be a combination of observation and study to begin a process of understanding another culture. Simply observing a culture through the prism of our own beliefs and cultural worldview leads to many misconceptions. More often than not, this results in a form of cultural shock that can be totally debilitating to a foreigner working with Arabs. Less common, but equally non-productive, is the soldier who becomes caught up in a culture he views as idyllic and "goes native." Inevitably there will come a time (usually during a political crisis) when the cultural chasm will force unpleasant reality to resurface. Mines and Warts In writing about a culture, one must tread a sensibility minefield, and none is more treacherous than that of the Middle East. In pursuit of intellectual honesty and a true-to-life depiction of a people, some less-than-appealing traits will surface. All cultures and peoples have their warts. One trait I have observed in Arab societywhich has become more pronounced over the yearsis an extreme sensitivity to any critical depiction of Arab culture, no matter how gently the adverse factors are presented. In his postscript to the 1983 edition of The Arab Mind, Patai mentions a spate of self-critical assessments of Arab society by Arab intellectuals in the wake of the "new Arab" said to have emerged after the 1973 war; but this tendency to self-criticize proved to be illusory. While we in the United States constantly criticize our society and leadership, similar introspection is rarely seen in the Arab world today. When criticism is voiced, it is usually in terms of a condemnation of Arab acceptance of some aspect of Western culture. Criticism also often emanates from outside the Arab region and, despite the so-called globalization of communication, only the elite have access to it. This is particularly true when political systems or ideology are discussed. In no small way, this tendency has led to the current state of affairs in the Arab world. For this reason, as well as the fact that Patai was not an Arab, some scholars are dismissive of The Arab Mind, terming it stereotyped in its portrayal of Arab personality traits. In part, this stems from the postmodernist philosophy of a recent generation of scholars who have been inculcated with the currently fashionable idea of cultural and moral relativism. Much of the American political science writing on the Middle East today is jargon- and agenda-laden, bordering on the indecipherable. A fixation on race, class, and gender has had a destructive effect on Middle East scholarship. It is a real task to find suitable recent texts that are scholarly and sound in content, but also readable. In fact, some of the best and most useful writing on the Arab world has been by outsiders, mostly Europeans, especially the French and British. Many of the best and most illuminating works were written decades ago. The idea that outsiders cannot assess another culture is patently foolish. The best study done on American societyto take one famous examplewas written some 160 years ago by the French visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville, and it still holds mostly true today. The empathy and warmth of Raphael Patai toward the Arab people are evident throughout this book. There is neither animus nor rancor nor condescension. Arabs are portrayed as people who, like all people, have virtues and vices. Patai's description of his relationship with the Jerusalem sheikh, Ahmad Fakhr al-Khatib, is indicative of the esteem in which he held his Arab friends. It is a lamentable fact that friendships such as this one would be almost impossible to conceive of at the present time. Along with his empathy for and understanding of Arab culture, Patai has a powerfully keen faculty for observation. In a passage in his autobiographical Journeyman in Jerusalem,[33][9] he describes in minute detail an Arab date juice vendor and the way he dispenses his juice. It is this ability to observe and appreciate detail that enables Patai to grasp the significance of the gestures, nuances of speech, and behavior patterns of Arabs. To most Americans, the subtlety of Arab culture is bewildering and incomprehensible. Yet, if one is to work productively in the region, one must have an understanding of these cultural traits. It might legitimately be asked how well Patai's analysis bears up in today's world. After all, it has been about thirty years since the majority of The Arab Mind was written. The short answer is that it has not aged at all. The analysis is just as prescient and on-the-mark now as on the day it was written. One could even make the argument that, in fact, many of the traits described have become more pronounced. For instance, Islamist demagogues have skillfully used the lure of the Arabic language, so carefully explained by Patai as a powerful motivator, to galvanize the streets in this era of the Islamic revival, in a way even the great orator Abdul Nasser could not achieve. Blustery Arabic Patai devoted a large portion of this book to the Arabic language, its powerful appeal, as well as its inhibiting effects. The proneness to exaggeration he describes was amply displayed in the Gulf war by the exhortations of Saddam Hussein to the Arabs in the "mother of all battles." This penchant for rhetoric and use of hyperbole were a feature of the Arab press during the war. The ferocity of the Arab depiction of Iraqi prowess had American experts convinced that there would be thousands of American casualties. Even when the war was turning into a humiliating rout, the "Arab street" was loath to accept this reality as fact. More recently, the same pattern has been seen in the Arab adoption of Osama bin Laden as a new Saladin who, with insulting and derogatory language in his description of American martial qualities, conveyed a sense of invincibility and power that has subsequently been shown to be largely imaginary. Saddam Hussein used similar bluster prior to the 1990 Gulf war. Patai traces this custom, which continues to the present era, back to pre-Islamic days. It is also an apt example of the Arab tendency to substitute words for action and a desired outcome for a less palatable reality, or to indulge in wishful thinkingall of which are reflected in the numerous historical examples Patai provides. This tendency, combined with Arabs' predilection to idealize their own history, always in reference to some mythic or heroic era, has present-day implications. Thus the American incursion into the Gulf in 1990 became the seventh crusade and was frequently referred to as another Western and Christian attempt to occupy the Holy Land of Islama belief galvanizing the current crop of Middle Eastern terrorists. Meanwhile, Israel is frequently referred to as a "crusader state." Patai's discussion of the duality of Arab society, and of the proclivity for intra-Arab conflict, continues to be revalidated in each decade. The Arab-against-Arab division in the 1990 Gulf war is but one example of a continuing Arab condition. Juxtaposed against the ideal of Arab unity is the present reality of twenty-two divided states, each with the self-interest of its ruling family or elite group paramount in policy decisions. In the 1960s, it was the "progressive states" versus the "reactionary states," which pitted Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Libya against Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco. Today it is secular forces versus the Islamists, a conflict to one degree or another being played out in every Arab state. Even when facing a common enemyusually Israel in this era, but also Iran or Turkeymutual distrust and intra-Arab hostility prevail. In the Iraqi-Iranian war, for example, Arab support was generally limited to financial helpwith provisions for repayment, as the angry Saddam Hussein learned after the war. In [1998], when Turkey threatened Syria with armed conflict if the leader of the nationalistic Kurdish movement in Turkey continued to be supported by Syria, it was very clear that Syria would find itself standing alone. Thus the Asad regime was forced to make a humiliating submission to Turkish demands. Perhaps the most telling validation of Patai's insight into the conflictual nature of Arab society relates to the Palestinians. While their conflict with Israel has been a bloody one over the years, it cannot approach the level of death and destruction incurred in Palestinian wars against Lebanese, Syrians, and Jordanians. Despite this great violence, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict retains its place as the primary galvanizing issue for the "Arab street." Sinister West Perhaps the section of this book most relevant to today's political and social environment is the chapter on the psychology of Westernization. After centuries of certitude that their civilization was superiora belief evolving from the very poor impression the European crusaders made on the Arabs and fully justified by the realitythe Arab self-image was rudely shattered by the easy French conquest of Egypt in 1798. A declining Middle East had been far surpassed by a revitalized Europe. The initial shock among the Arab elite was followed by a period of limited emulation, at least in the form of Western political and social values. As the Western political hold on the Arabs receded, Western cultural influence increased, which in many ways was even more irritating to the Arab eliteparticularly in terms of the technology invasion that at every level was a daily reminder of the inability of the Middle East to compete. Patai's assessment of the Arab view of technology has been amply supported over the last decades. Clearly enthusiastic users of technology, particularly in war weaponry, the Arabs nevertheless remain a lagging producer of technology. Partially, as Patai demonstrates, this is a reaction to the "jinn" (devil) of Western culture as it appears to the Arab of the twenty-first century. While recognizing the superiority of Western technology, the traditional Arab sees Western culture as destructive to his way of life; hence the ever-present battle between modernity and modernism: Can a society modernize without the secular lifestyle that appears to accompany the process? Adherents of the Islamist ideology, espousing a politicized, radical Islam, see no contradiction between a seventh-century theocracy and twenty-first century technology and would answer yes; however, history does not support such a view in the Middle Eastern context. As a Muslim coworker put it, "We want your TV sets but not your programs, your VCRs but not your movies." This will be the battleground of every Arab nation for the coming generation. In his section on the "sinister West," Patai gets to the heart of the burning hatred that seems to drive brutal acts of terrorism against Americans. Despite its lack of a colonial past in the Middle East, America, as the most powerful representative of the "West," has inherited primary enemy status, in place of the French and British. Patai points out the Arabs' tendency to blame others for the problems evident in their political systems, quality of life, and economic power. The Arab media and Arab intellectuals, invoking the staple mantras against colonialism, Zionism, and imperialism, provide convenient outside culprits for every corrupt or dysfunctional system or event in the Arab world. Moreover, this is often magnified and supported by a number of the newer generation of Western scholars inculcated with Marxist teaching who, unwittingly perhaps, help Arab intellectuals to avoid ever having to come to grips with the very real domestic issues that must be confronted. The Arab world combines a rejection of Western values with a penchant for carrying around historical baggage of doubtful utility. At the same time, there is a simplistic, if understandable, yearning for return to a more glorious and pristine past that would enable the Arabs once again to confront the West on equal terms. This particular belief has found many Arab adherents in the past decade. Patai also delves into the extremely sensitive issue of the nature of Islam in a particularly prescient manner. He views the fatalistic element inherit in Islam as an important factor in providing great strength to Muslims in times of stress or tragedy; in normal or better times, however, it acts as an impediment. Given their pervasive belief that God provides and disposes of all human activity, Muslims tend to reject the Western concept of man creating his own environment as an intrusion on God's realm. This includes any attempt to change God's plan for the fate of the individual. Certainly one can point to numerous exceptions. But, having worked for long periods with Arab military units, I can attest to their often cavalier attitude toward safety precautions, perhaps reflecting a Qur'anic saying, heard in various forms, that "death will overtake you even if you be inside a fortress." Just observing how few Arabs use seat belts in their automobiles can be a revelation. This manifestation of Arab fatalism is often misconstrued as a lesser value put on human life. In the all-important area of Muslim relations with other religions, Patai sums up the differences between Christianity and Islam as being functional, not doctrinal. The proponents of fundamentalist Islam do not fear Christianity. They fear that Westernization will "bring about a reduction of the function of Islam to the modest level on which Christianity plays its role in the Western world." The quarrel is not so much with Christianitywhich most Muslims see as a weak religion of diminishing importanceas with the secularism that has replaced it. Frequently in the Arab world one hears references to the [singer] "Madonna" culture and its manifestations of drugs and sexual promiscuity. Today, while Western military power has become much less of a threat, the inroads made by Western cultural values have become more of one. My special area of interest has been the impact of culture on military structure, strategy, and operations,[34][10] and in this regard the assessments of Patai, although not aimed at this area, are particularly informative. As he wrote, "despite the adoption of Western weaponry, military methods, and war aims, both the leaders and the people have kept alive old Arab traditions." The observations and studies of military specialists continue to support his conclusion. The Arab military establishment's ineffectiveness in the past century has never been a matter of lack of courage or intelligence. Rather, it has been a consequence of a pervasive cultural and political environment that stifles the development of initiative, independent thinking, and innovation. This has been commented on by a number of Middle East specialists, both Arab and non-Arab, but none explains it as well as Patai, who suggests that Arabs conform not to an individualistic, inner-directed standard but rather to a standard established and maintained rigidly within Arab society. As I noticed among the officers with whom I worked, there was a real reluctance to "get out front." The distrust of the military's loyalty to the regime reinforces a military system in which a young, charismatic officer with innovative ideas will be identified as a future threat to be carefully monitored by the ubiquitous security agencies. Family Cohesion Patai also carefully illuminates the many virtues of Arab society. The hospitality, generosity, and depth of personal friendships common in the Arab world are rarely encountered in our more frenetic society. The Arab sense of honor and of obligation to the familyespecially to the family's old and young memberscan be contrasted to the frequently dysfunctional family life found in our own country. Within Arab culture, old people are seen as a foundation for family cohesion, and children are welcomed as gifts from God rather than as burdens. Daughterswho traditionally are valued less than sonsremain the responsibility of their families, carrying their honor even after marriage (and it is this sense of family cohesion and honor that, in its negative aspect, results in the restrictions and controls placed on women). The idea that the state should bear responsibility for the welfare of their family would be considered insulting to most Arabs. Finally, in his 1983 edition, Patai takes an optimistic view of the future of the Arab world but adds a caveat to his prediction with the comment that this could happen "only if the Arabs can rid themselves of their obsession with and hatred of Zionism, Israel, and American imperialism." In the eighteen years since those words were written, none of these obsessions has been put to rest. In fact, they have increased. The imported 1960s and 1970s Western ideologies of Marxism and socialism have given way to Islamism, a synthesis of Western-style totalitarianism and superficial Islamic teachings, which has resurrected historical mythology and revitalized an amorphous but palpable hatred of the Western "jinns." Nevertheless, many astute observers of the Arab world see the so-called "Islamic revival" with its attendant pathologies as cresting and beginning to recede. Ultimately, the Arabs, who are an immensely determined and adaptable people, will produce leadership capable of freeing them from ideological and political bondage, and this will allow them to achieve their rightful place in the world. Col. Norvell B. De Atkine (ret.) served eight years in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt (in addition to extensive combat service in Vietnam). A West Pointer, he holds a graduate degree in Arab studies from the American University of Beirut. He teaches at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The opinions expressed here are strictly his own. Reprinted from The Arab Mind (Hatherleigh Press, 2002), by permission, all rights reserved. [35][1] Seymour Hersh, "The Gray Zone," The New Yorker, May 24, 2004. [36][2] The Guardian (London), May 24, 2004. This, despite the fact that Whitaker himself, a year earlier, had quoted an authoritative Arab source on "the Arab mind." As coalition forces encircled Baghdad, he wrote a piece on the "sense of humiliation" among Arabs and brought a quote from a Kuwaiti spokesman that could have come straight from Patai's book: "In the Arab world, there is a classical, traditional enemy. This traditional enemy has always been the west or the Americans. This is one vision that always existed in the Arab mind." The Guardian, Apr. 9, 2003. [37][3] Ann Marlowe, "Sex, Violence, and The Arab Mind,'" Salon.com, at [38]http://www.salonmag.com/books/feature/2004/06/08/arab_mind/index_n p.html. [39][4] Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), July 1-7, 2004. [40][5] Lee Smith, "Inside the Arab Mind," Slate.com, at [41]http://slate.msn.com/id/2101328/. [42][6] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 308-9. [43][7] Most notably, Margaret K. Nydell, Understanding Arabs: A Guide for Westerners (Yarmouth, Me.: Intercultural Press, 1996), reviewed in Middle East Quarterly, [44]June 1997, p. 90. [45][8] Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962, and subsequent editions. [46][9] Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992. [47][10] Norvell De Atkine, "Why Arabs Lose Wars," Middle East Quarterly, [48]Dec. 1999, pp. 17-27. [52]Other items from the Summer 2004 Middle East Quarterly [53]Other items by Norvell B. De Atkine [54]Other items in category Middle East patterns References 25. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftn1 26. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftn2 27. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftn3 28. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftn4 29. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftn5 30. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftn6 31. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftn7 32. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftn8 33. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftn9 34. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftn10 35. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftnref1 36. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftnref2 37. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftnref3 38. http://www.salonmag.com/books/feature/2004/06/08/arab_mind/index_np.html 39. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftnref4 40. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftnref5 41. http://slate.msn.com/id/2101328/ 42. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftnref6 43. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftnref7 44. http://www.meforum.org/article/354 45. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftnref8 46. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftnref9 47. http://www.meforum.org/article/636#_ftnref10 52. http://www.meforum.org/meq/issues/200406 53. http://www.meforum.org/docs/author/Norvell+B.+De+Atkine 54. http://www.meforum.org/docs/cat/25 Hidden links: 55. http://t.extreme-dm.com/?login=mefmef From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 17:24:47 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:24:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reason: Welcome to the Fun-Free University: The return of in loco parentis is killing student freedom. Message-ID: Welcome to the Fun-Free University: The return of in loco parentis is killing student freedom. http://www.reason.com/0410/fe.dw.welcome.shtml October 2004 [The Strauss-Howe theory of the coming civic generation is moving right alnog.] David Weigel In April 1968, student activists at Columbia University schemed to take over the deans office as a protest against the Vietnam War and plans to build a new gym. More than 700 students were arrested, and the uprising won national attention. But the schools buttoned-up administrators hadnt wanted to involve the police, and the rioters eventually were allowed to graduate. The mayor of New York, John Lindsay, even arrived in December to address the students and applaud "the urgent, authentically revolutionary work of this generation." How much of that revolution has carried over to the Columbia of 2004? Registered students who occupy a building would get a dialogue with administrators, but the school wouldnt shy from expulsion. According to Ricardo Morales, the schools crime prevention specialist since 1983, nonstudent radicals wouldnt make it into the campus buildings. "If you want to bring a friend over," Morales explains, "you bring him to the lobby and swipe your ID cards. The guest leaves a piece of ID. If he wants to stay for a few days, you can apply for a guest pass." Even when theyre not keeping their borders sealed so tight, college administrators have been adopting harsh measures in response to unapproved student behavior. Last fall, students at Southern Methodist University saw their "affirmative action bake sale," a bit of political theater in which prices were determined by the races of buyers, shut down by the student center. They had failed to register with the university as a "protest" or to go to the officially designated "protest zone," on the south stairs outside of the Hughes-Trigg Student Center. Many college administrators throughout the country are taking great pains to keep their students under tight control. Yet in the late 1960s and 70s, whether colleges could rein in students was an open question. Previously, Americas universities had operated under the doctrine of in loco parentis ("in the place of a parent"). By the start of the 70s, thanks to a series of legal rulings and cultural shifts, courts and colleges were tossing out that policy, and universities that had been dealing with students as wards struggled to find a new approach. That didnt last. In loco parentis has been rejuvenated and returned. Administrators have tapped into the devaluation of personal responsibility illustrated by smoking bans and fast food lawsuits, coupling it with bullish political correctness. The resulting dearth of individual liberties on campuses would have seemed impossible to college students of 25 years ago. Double Secret Probation The rights of schools over their pupils were codified before the U.S. Constitution was written. In 1765 the legal scholar Sir William Blackstone wrote that, when sending kids to school, Dad "may also delegate part of his parental authority, during his life to the tutor or schoolmaster of the child; who is then in loco parentis, and has such a portion of the power of the parents committed to his charge." Blackstone was writing about grammar school students, but 19th-century college administrators liked the idea too. Wheaton College, five years after its 1861 founding, denied students the right to form a secret society. The students sued, but judges washed their hands of the matter. In Pratt v. Wheaton College (1866), the Illinois courts said judges have "no more authority to interfere than [they] have to control the domestic discipline of a father in his family." Courts took this hands-off approach well into the next century. When public or private universities bought land, the state treated them like personal fiefdoms. Students got whatever rights their school administrators saw fit to give. At Harvard in 1951, the Administrative Board could tell reporters that it would increase the punishment for a window smashing -- by however much it wanted -- "if a students name is on the police blotter or in the Boston press." That was the power of in loco parentis. Not until 1960 did this system begin to break down. That year, six students at the all-black Alabama State College participated in anti-segregation lunch counter sit-ins. The schools president sent them letters expelling them for "conduct prejudicial to the school." According to Stetson Law School professor Robert Bickel, the students case cut to the root of in loco parentis: "The university actually asserted the right to arbitrarily give some students [due] process and deny it to others." When the students sued, federal courts sided with Alabama State. But in the 1961 decision Dixon v. Alabama State Board of Education, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected the schools claim of omnipotence. Suddenly, college enrollment was a contract between the student and the school. Since kids didnt lose their constitutional rights in their backyard, they couldnt lose them on campus. State universities slackened their grip, and private universities such as Columbia followed suit. During the next few years, in loco parentis continued to collapse as courts chipped away at it. In 1974 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-0 in Scheuer v. Rhodes that Kent State students had the right to sue the governor of Ohio for damages incurred during the notorious 1970 shooting there. Chief Justice Warren Burger concluded the brief decision this way: "We intimate no evaluation whatever as to the merits of the petitioners claims or as to whether it will be possible to support them by proof. We hold only that, on the allegations of their respective complaints, they were entitled to have them judicially resolved." Students had been handed the keys to their kingdom. By then, campus revolts were making national headlines, radical groups had been profiled in Life and Esquire, and undergrads were helping manage George McGoverns presidential campaign. By 1978, when Dean Wormer in Animal House threatened his students with "double secret probation," audiences recognized it as a knowing goof on a dead-and-buried policy. As Stetsons Bickel puts it, "The fall of in loco parentis in the 1960s correlated exactly with the rise of student economic power and the rise of student civil rights." Save the Children In 1969 Sheldon Steinbach arrived at the American Council on Education, the catchall coordinating body for universities, just in time to weather the worst of the campus revolts. Elite schools such as Berkeley, Columbia, and Cornell were acquiescing to radical students and opening up their internal judicial processes. Students won seats on some boards of trustees. Administrators appeared to have lost their grip. "The basic liberal arts education began to crumble," Steinbach says. "Thats what it looked like. When the war ended, we could consolidate, sit back, and look at how to save the system." An unexpected boon arrived in 1974, the year of the Kent State decision Scheuer v. Rhodes. Sens. John Warner (R-Va.) and James Buckley (Conservative-N.Y.) sponsored the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) in the hope of empowering parents to keep tabs on their kids academics. Committees amended the bill into a codification of student privacy rights, and Steinbach got a crack at it before FERPA moved on to the Senate. When the bill passed, parents could peek into the records of their children until their 18th birthday, at which point those rights transferred to the student. But FERPA created exceptions: Schools could release records to providers of financial aid and to "appropriate officials in cases of health and safety emergencies." If a student was hit with a subpoena or legal charge, the school could peek into his criminal records. Yet college administrators and their advisers, Steinbach included, kept the champagne corked. It wasnt immediately clear what effect the law would have, outside of giving parents annual notice of their new rights. "It was a schizophrenic time," Steinbach explains. "We were moving from segregated campuses to co-ed, affirmative action campuses. We didnt have our feet on the floor in 1974." Meanwhile, concern about the state of campuses was spreading. In March 1977, Newsweek ran a hand-wringing expos? titled "The End of Expulsion?," which gave the supposed academic apocalypse some context: "In just ten years, most of the rules that once governed student life in loco parentis have simply disappeared. Even serious scholastic offenses, such as cheating and plagiarism, seldom incur the harsh penalties that were once automatic. Most college administrators admit that they lean over backward to avoid expelling students." The irksome rites of passage that had been mandatory -- core curricula, single-gender dorms, class attendance -- fell away. In the 1979 case Bradshaw v. Rawlings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit spelled out the universities weakness. When a Delaware Valley College sophomore three years under the Pennsylvania drinking age hitched a ride from a drunk driver and was injured in a car crash, he sued the school. The court shrugged him off. "The modern American college is not an insurer of the safety of its students," it said. "Rights formerly possessed by college administrations have been transferred to students." Expectations were pointless, because "beer drinking by college students is a common experience. That this is true is not to suggest that reality always comports with state law and college rules. It does not." The courts decision reflected the way students lived: They had a new relationship with their deans, who should treat them like the young adults they were. How then, did the contemporary nanny university arise? Administrators who got their degrees in the 1960s had a certain idea of how students should be governed, and they found three tools for regaining control. The first involved intoxicants, including the escalating war on drugs and the mid-80s change in the drinking age from 18 to 21. The second was an attempt to stave off liability for student mental health problems by intervening with students who were seen at risk of breakdowns. The third and most well known was a rigid enforcement of political correctness that set standards for just how rowdy students could get. Just Say No University administrators immediately started wringing their hands over the "kids will be kids" philosophy of Bradshaw v. Rawlings. When one of their wards was arrested, injured, or killed, whether a lawsuit resulted or not, the school felt a blow to its prestige and sense of community. Unchecked hedonism and recklessness among students increasingly free to skip classes or make their own schedules were perceived as a threat to the institutions reputation. Brett Bokolow, manager of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management (NCHERM), estimates that colleges have been seeking formulas to keep students out of actionable situations for 20 years. In the 1980s, they were increasingly finding themselves liable for providing services or sponsoring events that involved alcohol. After only a few legal wounds, schools sought methods to put the responsibility for drinking or drug use on the backs of students and fraternities and sororities. Two weapons fell into their laps. As the Department of Education opened for business in 1980, an increasing number of students were turning to government aid and loans to pay for their college bills. From 1970 to 1980, federal aid to college students soared from $600 million to $4.5 billion. In 1978 Congress had passed legislation that entitled all college students to federally insured loans. Suddenly, colleges had leverage to punish students for misusing their leisure time. If they were getting money from taxpayers, they were treated like any other employee found partying on the job. Since students were making use of their loans every minute of the academic year, all of their fun was suspect, and much of the adult behavior that vexed administrators was happening on the public dime. Colleges became willing and able to shift some burden to Greek organizations, which had grown again after a marked falloff in the Vietnam era. Many schools created incentives for fraternities and sororities to go dry, or at least disincentives for them to stay wet. In one typical action in 1988, Rutgers University, which had just banned bringing kegs into dorms, responded to a students death by embargoing all Greek events. In 1997, after first-year student Scott Kreuger drank himself to death at a pledge event, MIT banned freshmen from fraternities. More responsibility was shifted to fraternity and sorority members. By the mid-90s, universities had become so strict that they were rarely found liable for student sins. Instead of threatening to punish their kids if they came home late, schools simply took away the car keys. If kids somehow got themselves into trouble, it was a police matter. Colleges found the rest of their arsenal in 1987, when Congress threatened to withhold federal transportation money from states that allowed anyone below the age of 21 to buy alcohol, with the result that 21 became the de facto national drinking age (see "Age of Propaganda" below). Across the country, the harshness many schools had formerly applied only to drug offenses began to apply to drinking as well, and the war on fraternities was ramped up. Finally, in 1998 FERPA was amended to make one provision clearer: Colleges could sidestep their students wishes and inform parents whenever a drug or alcohol law was broken. Before that, less than 20 percent of schools had informed parents of such violations. Afterward, most of them did so. In 2001 The Chronicle of Higher Education reviewed this phone-home policy and found great success. Reporters spotlighted the story of a University of Delaware freshman who pledged to quit drinking after police stopped him on the street for a Breathalyzer test. After he was caught, his parents began bringing him home each weekend and lecturing him on his mistakes. The student stopped drinking, but not because he worried about the effects of booze. If he was caught again, he would be suspended for a year. For Your Own Good Keri Krissik transferred to Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, in January 1999, 10 years after she was first diagnosed as anorexic. Krissik survived a heart attack four months after arriving and finished her course work while convalescing. In September the school refused to let her back in because, according to spokesman Martin McGovern, "we couldnt monitor her." If she were allowed back in and was injured, the school could have been liable. Stonehill dearly wanted to avoid the risk. Krissik eventually settled with Stonehill, but the courts neglected to ask why, after theyd relieved colleges of the need to nanny their students, the college wouldnt damn the consequences and let her study. The lawsuit provides an answer. Just as colleges have calculated the legal risks of letting students get away with drinking or recreational drugs, they remain in danger of being held responsible when students face mental collapse or attempt suicide. If administrators had moved on and handed their wards more lifestyle freedom after in loco parentis ended, theyd have room to dodge these bullets. But since they had accepted responsibility for keeping kids off the bottle, it was easy for lawyers to make them responsible for the rest of the pressures of campus life. Schools started this battle with a handicap. During the last decade, more and more students have been diagnosed as overstressed or treated for depression while still in high school. In February 2003, after tracking student complaints from 1989 to 2001, researchers at the University of Kansas found that the number of students diagnosed with depression had doubled while the number of "suicidal" students had tripled. The proportion of students taking psychiatric medication rose from 10 percent to 25 percent. In response to such trends, college administrators started making pharmaceuticals and therapy sessions more readily available on campus. Elite universities have been able to provide the most buffers against mental illness claims. According to the May 2002 issue of Psychology Today, 2,000 Harvard students had sought counseling in one year. Fully half of them walked away with a prescription for antidepressants. Students who lived on campus had access to free massages and an ever-expanding mental health center. The overarching goal of these programs is not to eliminate stress or wean students off medication. Its to stop lawsuits, and the ugliest lawsuits of the last decade have concerned students who killed themselves while enrolled, even though studies (including one conducted by the MIT task force appointed after Scott Kreugers death from alcohol poisoning) have shown that most students who commit suicide never seek counseling. At the University of Illinois, counselors work with residential assistants to monitor students who attempt or seriously consider suicide. Such students are ordered into four weeks of assessment sessions under the universitys watch. Those who refuse get the Keri Krissik treatment -- theyre no longer students. The New York Times Magazine called Illinois approach "a highly successful, model plan" for colleges that want to keep their undergrads under control. How to Think As the protective mind-set returned, it jibed with administrators desires to make their campuses placid in every possible way. Alcohol and drug policies had emerged in a national context, justified by laws beyond the universitys control, while mental health policies were driven largely by the threat of lawsuits. But administrators didnt need anyone to force their hands to insert speech standards and "hate crime" prohibitions into campus life. In 1987 the University of Michigan responded to a handful of anonymous racist fliers with new campus regulations aimed at suppressing offensive speech. The speech code, the first to end up in court, prohibited "any behavior, verbal or physical, that stigmatizes or victimizes an individual on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, creed, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, handicap, or Vietnam-era veteran status." A university pamphlet, soon withdrawn, explained that such "harassment" would include hanging a Confederate flag on your dorm room door or being part of a student group that "sponsors entertainment that includes a comedian who slurs Hispanics." Ironically, a one-time member of Berkeleys Free Speech Movement seized on this approach when she became an administrator. Annette Kolodny, a dean of the University of Arizonas College of Humanities, used her 1998 book Failing the Future to explain why colleges needed to regulate what students said. In concert with other administrators, Kolodny had stiffened penalties for offensive speech and created workshops in which new students could have their values certified or corrected. Her bogeyman was "antifeminist intellectual harassment," and her polices were designed to bring contrary speech out into the open, so it could be "readily recognized and effectively contained." By the start of the 1990s, Kolodnys view of campus speech was the norm. Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy told The New York Times in 1991 that speech codes made sense, and that their opponents were just warring against 1960s values. Journalists had gotten some taste of universities strange speech standards through The Dartmouth Review, a conservative newspaper whose editors were punished for articles that would have been protected anywhere else in New Hampshire. But they didnt comprehend how strict the standards were until codes at Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, and George Mason University were challenged in court and overturned. Based on these cases, schools learned how to design speech restrictions that were more likely to pass legal muster. The speech codes, increasingly unpopular but largely still in effect, contain more than a whiff of the omnipotence administrators enjoyed under in loco parentis. Students are not treated as the adults that Dixon made them out to be. Instead theyre young minds that need shaping. In most cases the bodies formed to govern speech -- student judicial boards, special committees -- are uniquely able to adjudicate without explaining their standards for punishment. Universities speech restrictions, unlike their recreational policies, do more to attract lawsuits than to repel them. NCHERM offers a seminar on how administrators can thwart the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the American Civil Liberties Union. But there hasnt been any measurable trend toward saving face by scrapping these rules. Theyre seen as too important to ditch -- and thats illustrative of the way universities view their students. Back in Control Four decades after in loco parentis started to stagger, college students would be hard pressed to name their new personal liberties. Yes, they no longer fear "double secret probation." And when administrators crack down, they will almost always at least provide a reason. But todays students may be punished just as hard as their predecessors -- often harder. Theyve discovered that social engineers have a hard time turning down the opportunity to control things. The expanding control over college students has had repercussions in the rest of America. Campuses are proving grounds for make-nice public programs. Theyve provided laboratories to test speech codes and small, designated "free speech zones" for protests. (Such zones marginalize and effectively silence dissent, which is one reason theyve been adopted by the major political parties for their national conventions.) The stiffening of campus law also illustrates the trend toward greater control of adults personal behavior. In loco parentis could be overturned only once. After 1974, students should have had an arsenal of new rights. But parents never stopped believing that universities were responsible for shaping their kids, and schools have nervously assumed that too much freedom will bring about the systems collapse. It wont. College students will drink, despair, play loose with hygiene, make dirty jokes. Before in loco parentis made its comeback, they were thriving. Meanwhile, the changes that really worried academics in the 1970s -- demands for new disciplines, shrinking core curricula -- are settling into permanence. Its the most enjoyable effect of the 60s student revolts thats being whittled away. David Weigel is an editorial intern at USA Today and a 2004 graduate of Northwestern University. mailto:dave at davidweigel.com From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 17:26:50 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:26:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Presidential Lectures: Jacques Derrida: Introduction Message-ID: Presidential Lectures: Jacques Derrida: Introduction http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/ Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida has had an enormous impact on intellectual life around the world. So much so that his work has been the subject, in whole or in part, of more than 400 books. In the areas of philosophy and literary criticism alone, Derrida has been cited more than 14,000 times in journal articles over the past 17 years [14]^1. He was recently featured in a [15]story in The New York Times. More than 500 US, British and Canadian dissertations treat him and his writings as primary subjects. He came into prominence in America with his critical approach or methodology or philosophy of [16]deconstruction, and it is this line of thought that continues to identify him. Derrida's deconstructionist works are integrally related to the more general phenomenon of [17]postmodernism. Postmodernist theories and attitudes come in a variety of forms. In the realm of social and political theory, what unites them -- from Foucault to Baudrillard, from Lyotard to Derrida and others -- is a challenge to, and largely a rejection of, both the truth value and pragmatic capacity for achieving justice or peace of the modern system of political and economic institutions, as well as the very ways in which we know and act to explain and understand ourselves. Especially in the latter theoretical and explanatory domain, Derrida's deconstructionism is provocative, if not subversive, in questioning the self-evidence, logic and non-judgmental character of dichotomies we live by, such as legitimate/illegitimate, rational/irrational, fact/fiction, or observation/imagination. During the 1960s Derrida published several influential pieces in Tel Quel, France's forum of leftist avant-garde theory. Among this group were not only those mentioned above in relation to postmodernism, but also Bataille, Barthes, Kristeva, and several others. He later distanced himself from Tel Quel. He taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1960-1964 and the ?cole Normale Superieure from 1964-1984. He currently directs the ?cole des Hautes ?tudes en Science Sociales in Paris. Since 1986 he has also been Professor of Philosophy, French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine and continues to lecture in academic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Derrida is "perhaps the world's most famous philosopher -- if not the only famous philosopher," in the words of Dinitia Smith, the talented and entertaining author of the aforementioned New York Times feature "Philosopher Gamely in Defense of His Ideas." Ms. Smith confided in the article, "A scholar ... warned against asking him [Derrida] to define 'deconstruction,' the notoriously difficult and widely influential method of inquiry he invented more than three decades ago. 'Make it your last question,' the scholar counseled, because it sends deconstructionists into "paroxysms of rage.'" If Derrida and deconstruction can not be discussed one without the other, what then is [18]deconstruction? Definitions even vary, from a [19]seven page-explanation to a [20]four page entry or an [21]eleven page reference. How does Professor Derrida himself define it? He says of course a very great deal in numerous writings as well as in published interviews such as Deconstruction in a nutshell: a conversation with Jacques Derrida. What Ms. Smith reported of their conversation at the Polo Grill is the following: "It is impossible to respond," Mr. Derrida said. "I can only do something which will leave me unsatisfied." But after some prodding, he gave it a try anyway. "I often describe deconstruction as something which happens. It's not purely linguistic, involving text or books. You can deconstruct gestures, choreography. That's why I enlarged the concept of text." Mr. Derrida did not seem angry at having to define his philosophy at all; he was even smiling. "Everything is a text; this is a text," he said, waving his arm at the diners around him in the bland suburbanlike restaurant, blithely picking at their lunches, completely unaware that they were being "deconstructed." The name Derrida brings up controversies that would normally be reserved for political figures. In 1992 at the ever proper Cambridge University, the granting of an honorary degree to Derrida provoked an [22]impassioned debate among the dons. The end result was the unusual step of putting the issue to vote, the first rift of its kind in twenty-nine years. It was settled by a 336-204 vote in Derrida's favor (a veritable landslide victory in the context of normal politics). And in such an atmosphere of keen debate and disagreements, parody is not unknown. Stanford English Professor John L'Heureux, with deconstruction and its critical-theoretical progeny in view, offered the reader this prospect of a brave new academic world in his novel The Handmaid of Desire: This department [The Department of Theory and Discourse] was his dream; it would revolutionize university studies. It would include Comp Lit, Mod Thought, and all the little language departments -- French, Russian, Spanish, you name it. It would take on all written documents, equally with absolute indifference to the author's reputation or the western canon or the nature of writing itself -- whether it was Flaubert's Bovary or a 1950 tax form or a label on a Campbell's soup can . . .-- and subject them all to the probing, thrusting, hard-breathing analysis of the latest developments in metaphilosophical trans-literary theory. Whatever those theories might be. Wherever they might lead. However one values Derrida's writings and the philosophical positions and intellectual traditions from which he proceeds, it would be wrongheaded to think of him as an occupant of some "ivory tower". Derrida is the proverbial activist-theorist, who, over the years, has fought for a number of political causes, including the rights of Algerian immigrants in France, anti-apartheid, and the rights of Czech Charter 77 dissidents. True to his own construction of the world and his own autobiography, he has admitted few, if any, strict dichotomies in his life. As he put it in another context, "I am applied Derrida." By John Rawlings Jacques Derrida pages edited by Stanford University curators: John Rawlings (Humanities and Social Science Bibliographer, [23]rawlings at sulmail.stanford.edu), Tony Angiletta (Morrison Curator for the Social Sciences and Population Studies [24]tangilet at sulmail.stanford.edu), and Mary Jane Parrine (Curator for Romance Languages Collections, [25]parrine at leland.stanford.edu) [4]Jacques Derrida [5]BIBLIOGRAPHY [6]EXCERPTS [7]DECONSTRUCTION [8]INTERVIEWS [9]LINKS [10]SCHEDULE [11]SYMPOSIA [12]HUMANITIES AT STANFORD References 4. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/index.html 5. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/biblio.html 6. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/excerpts.html 7. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/deconstruction.html 8. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/interviews.html 9. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/links.html 10. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/jdsched.html 11. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/symposia/index.html 12. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/humanities/index.html 13. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/gifs/derrida.jpg 14. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/#footnote1 15. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/nytderrida.html 16. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/deconstruction.html 17. http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html 18. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/deconstruction.html 19. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/deconstruction.html#1 20. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/deconstruction.html#2 21. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/deconstruction.html#3 22. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/interviews.html#cambridge 23. mailto:rawlings at sulmail.stanford.edu 24. mailto:tangilet at sulmail.stanford.edu 25. mailto:parrine at leland.stanford.edu 26. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/discussion/index.html 27. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/calendar/index.html 28. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/index.html 29. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/symposia/index.html 30. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/humanities/index.html 31. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/#top 32. http://prelectur.stanford.edu/home.html 33. http://www-sul.stanford.edu/ 34. http://www.stanford.edu/ From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Oct 18 17:42:06 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 10:42:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] introverts In-Reply-To: <200410171801.i9HI12020990@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041018174206.58518.qmail@web13422.mail.yahoo.com> >>Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place.<< --I've seen a lot of brilliant introverts marginalized in groups dominated by more outgoing but less talented people. I wonder if there are ways to create groups that nurture introverts rather than pushing them to the edges? Our culture tends to believe that people who are dominant and outgoing deserve to be on top, but in the process a lot of good ideas are lost. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 18:18:25 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 11:18:25 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis Message-ID: <01C4B504.308E3820.shovland@mindspring.com> With half of the personal income in the US going to the top 20%, one supposes that distribution of income will be an important cause of polarization. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 10:04 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; WTA-Politics Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis sent 4.10.18 The principal left-right political axis is going to change from central planning vs. free market in the earlier part of the twentieth century and equality vs. inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. universalism in the current century. There are several minor axes, to wit, secular vs. sacred, self-expression vs. self-restraint, change vs. tradition, cooperation vs. competition, tender-minded vs. tough-minded, relativism vs. absolutism, and many more, some perhaps subsumed by others. (The left tends to be less interested in virtue and moral education generally than the right, and we should reconceptualize how children should be brought up in a world of mass unemployment, how moral education will instill other habits besides those of being a productive member of society. Here's hoping that his next book will address the matter.) There is a general clustering, not at the level of any high theory that reduces political preferences to a single dimension, but a clustering in fact. Left-wingers tend, albeit often quite incompletely, to be on the left side of each axis, not always because they have thought out each opinion, but because their co-left-wing friends also have them. Right-wingers do likewise. For myself, I am a left-wing secularist, moderately to the right as far as self-restraint goes, much to the left in favoring change, mixed on cooperation, tough-minded more in rhetoric than in practice, and fairly much an absolutist (evolution limits the feasible *pace of change* quite a bit). For the major axes, I am a twentieth-century rightist for both the free market and inequality. What's more important is that I am decidedly a *twenty-first* century leftist in favor of pluralism. Indeed let us hope that there has been so much culture-gene coevolution, even along racial lines, that there will be major *internal* resistance to a universal culture, thus keeping the world safe for pluralism. To recapitulate, and I leave it to each one of you to say where you lie on the left-right continuum. Again, we badly need a factor analysis study to group these dimensions and, better still, a grounding in evolutionary psychology, such as Steve Reiss has done with his 16 Basic Desires. Major Axes pluralism vs. universalism (emerging) equality vs. inequality (dying) central planning vs. free market (dead) Minor Axes (several others added) secular vs. sacred international vs. national (left was nationalistic during the first half of the 19th century, though) self-expression vs. self-restraint relativists vs. absolutists in morals tender-minded vs. tough-minded great vs. small concern over the physical environment (each with its own studies to support his view) state vs. individual change vs. tradition centralized state vs. decentralized state dependence vs. self-reliance small vs. great concern over character and virtue small vs. great concern over chastity, divorce, family outs vs. ins cooperation vs. competition regulation vs. freedom labor vs. capital populist vs. elitist rural vs. urban essentialism vs. nominalism [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and spread them.] _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 18:21:24 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 11:21:24 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] introverts Message-ID: <01C4B504.9B006ED0.shovland@mindspring.com> Speaking as an INTP, I am no longer holding my breath waiting for the extroverted majority to recognize my virtues. These days my best thinking goes into building up my own business. Like gays, introverts serve a purpose, and we should pursue it vigorously :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 10:42 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] introverts >>Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place.<< --I've seen a lot of brilliant introverts marginalized in groups dominated by more outgoing but less talented people. I wonder if there are ways to create groups that nurture introverts rather than pushing them to the edges? Our culture tends to believe that people who are dominant and outgoing deserve to be on top, but in the process a lot of good ideas are lost. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 19:23:36 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 15:23:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis In-Reply-To: <01C4B504.308E3820.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4B504.308E3820.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: You're missing my whole point, Steve, and that is that equality-inequality is no longer the major left-right political axis. Besides, the concentration of income is not as important as the concentration of opportunity. But that demands greatly on innate intelligence, in fact more and more so. It gets worse as businessmen and (20th) century leftists bawl for more low IQ immigrants. But that's NOT the big issue. Much bigger is pluralism and its largest flashpoint: will the state leave the Evangelicals alone? If you are a typical secularist or liberal Christian who believes in a Bible full of holes rather than the whole Bible, you probably think the issue is whether the Evangelicals will leave YOU alone. You probably never think that the public schools propagandize secular humanism and will not leave the Evangelicals alone. This is because you do not question the merits of public education. Libertarians do, since they do not believe in taxes, but even they think that, if there are to be schools, they should indoctrinate kids in secular humanism. P.S. I am a devout atheist. I perform the Rite of Insubstantiation five times a day and give thanks to no-god when god fails to be conjured. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > With half of the personal income in the US going to > the top 20%, one supposes that distribution of income > will be an important cause of polarization. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 10:04 AM > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; WTA-Politics > Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis > > Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political > Axis > sent 4.10.18 > > The principal left-right political axis is going to change from central > planning vs. free market in the earlier part of the twentieth century and > equality vs. inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. universalism in > the current century. There are several minor axes, to wit, secular vs. > sacred, self-expression vs. self-restraint, change vs. tradition, > cooperation vs. competition, tender-minded vs. tough-minded, relativism > vs. absolutism, and many more, some perhaps subsumed by others. (The left > tends to be less interested in virtue and moral education generally than > the right, and we should reconceptualize how children should be brought up > in a world of mass unemployment, how moral education will instill other > habits besides those of being a productive member of society. Here's > hoping that his next book will address the matter.) > > There is a general clustering, not at the level of any high theory that > reduces political preferences to a single dimension, but a clustering in > fact. Left-wingers tend, albeit often quite incompletely, to be on the > left side of each axis, not always because they have thought out each > opinion, but because their co-left-wing friends also have them. > Right-wingers do likewise. For myself, I am a left-wing secularist, > moderately to the right as far as self-restraint goes, much to the left in > favoring change, mixed on cooperation, tough-minded more in rhetoric than > in practice, and fairly much an absolutist (evolution limits the feasible > *pace of change* quite a bit). For the major axes, I am a > twentieth-century rightist for both the free market and inequality. What's > more important is that I am decidedly a *twenty-first* century leftist in > favor of pluralism. Indeed let us hope that there has been so much > culture-gene coevolution, even along racial lines, that there will be > major *internal* resistance to a universal culture, thus keeping the world > safe for pluralism. > > To recapitulate, and I leave it to each one of you to say where you lie > on the left-right continuum. Again, we badly need a factor analysis study > to group these dimensions and, better still, a grounding in evolutionary > psychology, such as Steve Reiss has done with his 16 Basic Desires. > > Major Axes > > pluralism vs. universalism (emerging) > equality vs. inequality (dying) > central planning vs. free market (dead) > > Minor Axes (several others added) > > secular vs. sacred > international vs. national (left was nationalistic during the first > half of the 19th century, though) > self-expression vs. self-restraint > relativists vs. absolutists in morals > tender-minded vs. tough-minded > > great vs. small concern over the physical environment (each with its own > studies to support his view) > state vs. individual > change vs. tradition > centralized state vs. decentralized state > dependence vs. self-reliance > > small vs. great concern over character and virtue > small vs. great concern over chastity, divorce, family > outs vs. ins > cooperation vs. competition > regulation vs. freedom > > labor vs. capital > populist vs. elitist > rural vs. urban > essentialism vs. nominalism > > [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with > all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and > spread them.] From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 19:39:33 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 12:39:33 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis Message-ID: <01C4B50F.85746070.shovland@mindspring.com> A lot of people would say that opportunity is badly distributed as well. Many good jobs are going overseas and the "new" jobs are often poor-paying service jobs. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 12:24 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Cc: Richard McClintock; Robert Morrison Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis You're missing my whole point, Steve, and that is that equality-inequality is no longer the major left-right political axis. Besides, the concentration of income is not as important as the concentration of opportunity. But that demands greatly on innate intelligence, in fact more and more so. It gets worse as businessmen and (20th) century leftists bawl for more low IQ immigrants. But that's NOT the big issue. Much bigger is pluralism and its largest flashpoint: will the state leave the Evangelicals alone? If you are a typical secularist or liberal Christian who believes in a Bible full of holes rather than the whole Bible, you probably think the issue is whether the Evangelicals will leave YOU alone. You probably never think that the public schools propagandize secular humanism and will not leave the Evangelicals alone. This is because you do not question the merits of public education. Libertarians do, since they do not believe in taxes, but even they think that, if there are to be schools, they should indoctrinate kids in secular humanism. P.S. I am a devout atheist. I perform the Rite of Insubstantiation five times a day and give thanks to no-god when god fails to be conjured. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > With half of the personal income in the US going to > the top 20%, one supposes that distribution of income > will be an important cause of polarization. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 10:04 AM > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; WTA-Politics > Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis > > Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political > Axis > sent 4.10.18 > > The principal left-right political axis is going to change from central > planning vs. free market in the earlier part of the twentieth century and > equality vs. inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. universalism in > the current century. There are several minor axes, to wit, secular vs. > sacred, self-expression vs. self-restraint, change vs. tradition, > cooperation vs. competition, tender-minded vs. tough-minded, relativism > vs. absolutism, and many more, some perhaps subsumed by others. (The left > tends to be less interested in virtue and moral education generally than > the right, and we should reconceptualize how children should be brought up > in a world of mass unemployment, how moral education will instill other > habits besides those of being a productive member of society. Here's > hoping that his next book will address the matter.) > > There is a general clustering, not at the level of any high theory that > reduces political preferences to a single dimension, but a clustering in > fact. Left-wingers tend, albeit often quite incompletely, to be on the > left side of each axis, not always because they have thought out each > opinion, but because their co-left-wing friends also have them. > Right-wingers do likewise. For myself, I am a left-wing secularist, > moderately to the right as far as self-restraint goes, much to the left in > favoring change, mixed on cooperation, tough-minded more in rhetoric than > in practice, and fairly much an absolutist (evolution limits the feasible > *pace of change* quite a bit). For the major axes, I am a > twentieth-century rightist for both the free market and inequality. What's > more important is that I am decidedly a *twenty-first* century leftist in > favor of pluralism. Indeed let us hope that there has been so much > culture-gene coevolution, even along racial lines, that there will be > major *internal* resistance to a universal culture, thus keeping the world > safe for pluralism. > > To recapitulate, and I leave it to each one of you to say where you lie > on the left-right continuum. Again, we badly need a factor analysis study > to group these dimensions and, better still, a grounding in evolutionary > psychology, such as Steve Reiss has done with his 16 Basic Desires. > > Major Axes > > pluralism vs. universalism (emerging) > equality vs. inequality (dying) > central planning vs. free market (dead) > > Minor Axes (several others added) > > secular vs. sacred > international vs. national (left was nationalistic during the first > half of the 19th century, though) > self-expression vs. self-restraint > relativists vs. absolutists in morals > tender-minded vs. tough-minded > > great vs. small concern over the physical environment (each with its own > studies to support his view) > state vs. individual > change vs. tradition > centralized state vs. decentralized state > dependence vs. self-reliance > > small vs. great concern over character and virtue > small vs. great concern over chastity, divorce, family > outs vs. ins > cooperation vs. competition > regulation vs. freedom > > labor vs. capital > populist vs. elitist > rural vs. urban > essentialism vs. nominalism > > [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with > all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and > spread them.] _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 19:49:10 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 15:49:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis In-Reply-To: <01C4B50F.85746070.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4B50F.85746070.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: I keep wanting to talk about the 21st century issue of pluralism and you keep wanting to talk about the 20th century issue of equality. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > A lot of people would say that opportunity > is badly distributed as well. Many good > jobs are going overseas and the "new" > jobs are often poor-paying service jobs. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 12:24 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Cc: Richard McClintock; Robert Morrison > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the > Principle Left-Right Political Axis > > You're missing my whole point, Steve, and that is that equality-inequality > is no longer the major left-right political axis. Besides, the > concentration of income is not as important as the concentration of > opportunity. But that demands greatly on innate intelligence, in fact more > and more so. It gets worse as businessmen and (20th) century leftists bawl > for more low IQ immigrants. > > But that's NOT the big issue. Much bigger is pluralism and its largest > flashpoint: will the state leave the Evangelicals alone? If you are a > typical secularist or liberal Christian who believes in a Bible full of > holes rather than the whole Bible, you probably think the issue is whether > the Evangelicals will leave YOU alone. You probably never think that the > public schools propagandize secular humanism and will not leave the > Evangelicals alone. This is because you do not question the merits of > public education. Libertarians do, since they do not believe in taxes, but > even they think that, if there are to be schools, they should indoctrinate > kids in secular humanism. > > P.S. I am a devout atheist. I perform the Rite of Insubstantiation five > times a day and give thanks to no-god when god fails to be conjured. > > On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> With half of the personal income in the US going to >> the top 20%, one supposes that distribution of income >> will be an important cause of polarization. >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 10:04 AM >> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; WTA-Politics >> Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle > Left-Right Political Axis >> >> Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political >> Axis >> sent 4.10.18 >> >> The principal left-right political axis is going to change from central >> planning vs. free market in the earlier part of the twentieth century and >> equality vs. inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. universalism > in >> the current century. There are several minor axes, to wit, secular vs. >> sacred, self-expression vs. self-restraint, change vs. tradition, >> cooperation vs. competition, tender-minded vs. tough-minded, relativism >> vs. absolutism, and many more, some perhaps subsumed by others. (The left >> tends to be less interested in virtue and moral education generally than >> the right, and we should reconceptualize how children should be brought > up >> in a world of mass unemployment, how moral education will instill other >> habits besides those of being a productive member of society. Here's >> hoping that his next book will address the matter.) >> >> There is a general clustering, not at the level of any high theory that >> reduces political preferences to a single dimension, but a clustering in >> fact. Left-wingers tend, albeit often quite incompletely, to be on the >> left side of each axis, not always because they have thought out each >> opinion, but because their co-left-wing friends also have them. >> Right-wingers do likewise. For myself, I am a left-wing secularist, >> moderately to the right as far as self-restraint goes, much to the left > in >> favoring change, mixed on cooperation, tough-minded more in rhetoric than >> in practice, and fairly much an absolutist (evolution limits the feasible >> *pace of change* quite a bit). For the major axes, I am a >> twentieth-century rightist for both the free market and inequality. > What's >> more important is that I am decidedly a *twenty-first* century leftist in >> favor of pluralism. Indeed let us hope that there has been so much >> culture-gene coevolution, even along racial lines, that there will be >> major *internal* resistance to a universal culture, thus keeping the > world >> safe for pluralism. >> >> To recapitulate, and I leave it to each one of you to say where you lie >> on the left-right continuum. Again, we badly need a factor analysis study >> to group these dimensions and, better still, a grounding in evolutionary >> psychology, such as Steve Reiss has done with his 16 Basic Desires. >> >> Major Axes >> >> pluralism vs. universalism (emerging) >> equality vs. inequality (dying) >> central planning vs. free market (dead) >> >> Minor Axes (several others added) >> >> secular vs. sacred >> international vs. national (left was nationalistic during the first >> half of the 19th century, though) >> self-expression vs. self-restraint >> relativists vs. absolutists in morals >> tender-minded vs. tough-minded >> >> great vs. small concern over the physical environment (each with its own >> studies to support his view) >> state vs. individual >> change vs. tradition >> centralized state vs. decentralized state >> dependence vs. self-reliance >> >> small vs. great concern over character and virtue >> small vs. great concern over chastity, divorce, family >> outs vs. ins >> cooperation vs. competition >> regulation vs. freedom >> >> labor vs. capital >> populist vs. elitist >> rural vs. urban >> essentialism vs. nominalism >> >> [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with >> all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and >> spread them.] > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 20:30:10 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 16:30:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran Message-ID: Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm 4.10.14 [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking us.] Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, education, and dialogue." That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, Switzerland. -- Nicholas Strakon ___________________________________ The future of the global War on Terror: Next stop, Iran By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. More information appears below. What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. That result has been sought and planned for by the American neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary to see it. Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in Israel.) Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will begin with an attack on Iran. The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the possibility of self-defense." [8][3] Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious militants and moderates. Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its creation" in 1948. [9][4] And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide through the use of missiles." [11][6] And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to Europe." [12][7] As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple the reigning mullahs. [16][11] [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... We must move on, and faster." [17][12] As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." [18][13] It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East covet." [21][16] Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated regime change in Tehran." [22][17] As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents of influence" for a foreign government. Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile can reach Israel. Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who identify with Israel to push for an American attack. Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. [30][25] The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability for the existing Iraqi government. With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of an attack. [32][27] In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built underground. [33][28] [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then destroy. What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted military and financial resources of the United States. Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, which would have dire economic consequences around the world, provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and ride mankind." As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the neoconservatives' World War IV. It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy had been a failure. Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its necessary role of world leadership. For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at stake in staying the course and not giving in. In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist agenda. But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on occasion. The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global debacle in the making. References 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 20:35:40 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:35:40 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis Message-ID: <01C4B517.5CC5F910.shovland@mindspring.com> For a number of years the Evangelicals have been using state power to persecute the rest of us, so in the next turn of the screw we should use state power to persecute them, starting with their tax exemptions :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 12:49 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis I keep wanting to talk about the 21st century issue of pluralism and you keep wanting to talk about the 20th century issue of equality. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > A lot of people would say that opportunity > is badly distributed as well. Many good > jobs are going overseas and the "new" > jobs are often poor-paying service jobs. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 12:24 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Cc: Richard McClintock; Robert Morrison > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the > Principle Left-Right Political Axis > > You're missing my whole point, Steve, and that is that equality-inequality > is no longer the major left-right political axis. Besides, the > concentration of income is not as important as the concentration of > opportunity. But that demands greatly on innate intelligence, in fact more > and more so. It gets worse as businessmen and (20th) century leftists bawl > for more low IQ immigrants. > > But that's NOT the big issue. Much bigger is pluralism and its largest > flashpoint: will the state leave the Evangelicals alone? If you are a > typical secularist or liberal Christian who believes in a Bible full of > holes rather than the whole Bible, you probably think the issue is whether > the Evangelicals will leave YOU alone. You probably never think that the > public schools propagandize secular humanism and will not leave the > Evangelicals alone. This is because you do not question the merits of > public education. Libertarians do, since they do not believe in taxes, but > even they think that, if there are to be schools, they should indoctrinate > kids in secular humanism. > > P.S. I am a devout atheist. I perform the Rite of Insubstantiation five > times a day and give thanks to no-god when god fails to be conjured. > > On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> With half of the personal income in the US going to >> the top 20%, one supposes that distribution of income >> will be an important cause of polarization. >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 10:04 AM >> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; WTA-Politics >> Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle > Left-Right Political Axis >> >> Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political >> Axis >> sent 4.10.18 >> >> The principal left-right political axis is going to change from central >> planning vs. free market in the earlier part of the twentieth century and >> equality vs. inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. universalism > in >> the current century. There are several minor axes, to wit, secular vs. >> sacred, self-expression vs. self-restraint, change vs. tradition, >> cooperation vs. competition, tender-minded vs. tough-minded, relativism >> vs. absolutism, and many more, some perhaps subsumed by others. (The left >> tends to be less interested in virtue and moral education generally than >> the right, and we should reconceptualize how children should be brought > up >> in a world of mass unemployment, how moral education will instill other >> habits besides those of being a productive member of society. Here's >> hoping that his next book will address the matter.) >> >> There is a general clustering, not at the level of any high theory that >> reduces political preferences to a single dimension, but a clustering in >> fact. Left-wingers tend, albeit often quite incompletely, to be on the >> left side of each axis, not always because they have thought out each >> opinion, but because their co-left-wing friends also have them. >> Right-wingers do likewise. For myself, I am a left-wing secularist, >> moderately to the right as far as self-restraint goes, much to the left > in >> favoring change, mixed on cooperation, tough-minded more in rhetoric than >> in practice, and fairly much an absolutist (evolution limits the feasible >> *pace of change* quite a bit). For the major axes, I am a >> twentieth-century rightist for both the free market and inequality. > What's >> more important is that I am decidedly a *twenty-first* century leftist in >> favor of pluralism. Indeed let us hope that there has been so much >> culture-gene coevolution, even along racial lines, that there will be >> major *internal* resistance to a universal culture, thus keeping the > world >> safe for pluralism. >> >> To recapitulate, and I leave it to each one of you to say where you lie >> on the left-right continuum. Again, we badly need a factor analysis study >> to group these dimensions and, better still, a grounding in evolutionary >> psychology, such as Steve Reiss has done with his 16 Basic Desires. >> >> Major Axes >> >> pluralism vs. universalism (emerging) >> equality vs. inequality (dying) >> central planning vs. free market (dead) >> >> Minor Axes (several others added) >> >> secular vs. sacred >> international vs. national (left was nationalistic during the first >> half of the 19th century, though) >> self-expression vs. self-restraint >> relativists vs. absolutists in morals >> tender-minded vs. tough-minded >> >> great vs. small concern over the physical environment (each with its own >> studies to support his view) >> state vs. individual >> change vs. tradition >> centralized state vs. decentralized state >> dependence vs. self-reliance >> >> small vs. great concern over character and virtue >> small vs. great concern over chastity, divorce, family >> outs vs. ins >> cooperation vs. competition >> regulation vs. freedom >> >> labor vs. capital >> populist vs. elitist >> rural vs. urban >> essentialism vs. nominalism >> >> [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with >> all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and >> spread them.] > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 20:44:14 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:44:14 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran Message-ID: <01C4B518.8EED1080.shovland@mindspring.com> Going to war against Iran would be a good way to employ all of those useless young Americans who can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think $6,000 a year is a lot of money. Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq without using conscription, we will be able to get a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I mean is that the political consequences of starting a draft will be so high that any President who does it may as well knock out all of them at once, including Korea. And once Baby Boomers start dying from the fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with Social Security will be solved as well. Great days lie ahead! Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm 4.10.14 [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking us.] Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, education, and dialogue." That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, Switzerland. -- Nicholas Strakon ___________________________________ The future of the global War on Terror: Next stop, Iran By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. More information appears below. What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. That result has been sought and planned for by the American neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary to see it. Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in Israel.) Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will begin with an attack on Iran. The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the possibility of self-defense." [8][3] Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious militants and moderates. Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its creation" in 1948. [9][4] And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide through the use of missiles." [11][6] And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to Europe." [12][7] As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple the reigning mullahs. [16][11] [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... We must move on, and faster." [17][12] As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." [18][13] It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East covet." [21][16] Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated regime change in Tehran." [22][17] As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents of influence" for a foreign government. Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile can reach Israel. Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who identify with Israel to push for an American attack. Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. [30][25] The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability for the existing Iraqi government. With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of an attack. [32][27] In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built underground. [33][28] [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then destroy. What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted military and financial resources of the United States. Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, which would have dire economic consequences around the world, provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and ride mankind." As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the neoconservatives' World War IV. It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy had been a failure. Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its necessary role of world leadership. For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at stake in staying the course and not giving in. In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist agenda. But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on occasion. The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global debacle in the making. References 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 21:05:45 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 17:05:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis In-Reply-To: <01C4B517.5CC5F910.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4B517.5CC5F910.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: I was not aware of any such persecution, and I follow the news rather closely. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > For a number of years the Evangelicals have been using > state power to persecute the rest of us, so in the next > turn of the screw we should use state power to persecute > them, starting with their tax exemptions :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 12:49 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political Axis > > I keep wanting to talk about the 21st century issue of pluralism and you > keep wanting to talk about the 20th century issue of equality. > > On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> A lot of people would say that opportunity >> is badly distributed as well. Many good >> jobs are going overseas and the "new" >> jobs are often poor-paying service jobs. >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 12:24 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Cc: Richard McClintock; Robert Morrison >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the >> Principle Left-Right Political Axis >> >> You're missing my whole point, Steve, and that is that equality-inequality >> is no longer the major left-right political axis. Besides, the >> concentration of income is not as important as the concentration of >> opportunity. But that demands greatly on innate intelligence, in fact more >> and more so. It gets worse as businessmen and (20th) century leftists bawl >> for more low IQ immigrants. >> >> But that's NOT the big issue. Much bigger is pluralism and its largest >> flashpoint: will the state leave the Evangelicals alone? If you are a >> typical secularist or liberal Christian who believes in a Bible full of >> holes rather than the whole Bible, you probably think the issue is whether >> the Evangelicals will leave YOU alone. You probably never think that the >> public schools propagandize secular humanism and will not leave the >> Evangelicals alone. This is because you do not question the merits of >> public education. Libertarians do, since they do not believe in taxes, but >> even they think that, if there are to be schools, they should indoctrinate >> kids in secular humanism. >> >> P.S. I am a devout atheist. I perform the Rite of Insubstantiation five >> times a day and give thanks to no-god when god fails to be conjured. >> >> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >> >>> With half of the personal income in the US going to >>> the top 20%, one supposes that distribution of income >>> will be an important cause of polarization. >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 10:04 AM >>> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; WTA-Politics >>> Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle >> Left-Right Political Axis >>> >>> Meme 034: The Coming Reorientation of the Principle Left-Right Political >>> Axis >>> sent 4.10.18 >>> >>> The principal left-right political axis is going to change from central >>> planning vs. free market in the earlier part of the twentieth century and >>> equality vs. inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. universalism >> in >>> the current century. There are several minor axes, to wit, secular vs. >>> sacred, self-expression vs. self-restraint, change vs. tradition, >>> cooperation vs. competition, tender-minded vs. tough-minded, relativism >>> vs. absolutism, and many more, some perhaps subsumed by others. (The left >>> tends to be less interested in virtue and moral education generally than >>> the right, and we should reconceptualize how children should be brought >> up >>> in a world of mass unemployment, how moral education will instill other >>> habits besides those of being a productive member of society. Here's >>> hoping that his next book will address the matter.) >>> >>> There is a general clustering, not at the level of any high theory that >>> reduces political preferences to a single dimension, but a clustering in >>> fact. Left-wingers tend, albeit often quite incompletely, to be on the >>> left side of each axis, not always because they have thought out each >>> opinion, but because their co-left-wing friends also have them. >>> Right-wingers do likewise. For myself, I am a left-wing secularist, >>> moderately to the right as far as self-restraint goes, much to the left >> in >>> favoring change, mixed on cooperation, tough-minded more in rhetoric than >>> in practice, and fairly much an absolutist (evolution limits the feasible >>> *pace of change* quite a bit). For the major axes, I am a >>> twentieth-century rightist for both the free market and inequality. >> What's >>> more important is that I am decidedly a *twenty-first* century leftist in >>> favor of pluralism. Indeed let us hope that there has been so much >>> culture-gene coevolution, even along racial lines, that there will be >>> major *internal* resistance to a universal culture, thus keeping the >> world >>> safe for pluralism. >>> >>> To recapitulate, and I leave it to each one of you to say where you lie >>> on the left-right continuum. Again, we badly need a factor analysis study >>> to group these dimensions and, better still, a grounding in evolutionary >>> psychology, such as Steve Reiss has done with his 16 Basic Desires. >>> >>> Major Axes >>> >>> pluralism vs. universalism (emerging) >>> equality vs. inequality (dying) >>> central planning vs. free market (dead) >>> >>> Minor Axes (several others added) >>> >>> secular vs. sacred >>> international vs. national (left was nationalistic during the first >>> half of the 19th century, though) >>> self-expression vs. self-restraint >>> relativists vs. absolutists in morals >>> tender-minded vs. tough-minded >>> >>> great vs. small concern over the physical environment (each with its own >>> studies to support his view) >>> state vs. individual >>> change vs. tradition >>> centralized state vs. decentralized state >>> dependence vs. self-reliance >>> >>> small vs. great concern over character and virtue >>> small vs. great concern over chastity, divorce, family >>> outs vs. ins >>> cooperation vs. competition >>> regulation vs. freedom >>> >>> labor vs. capital >>> populist vs. elitist >>> rural vs. urban >>> essentialism vs. nominalism >>> >>> [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with >>> all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and >>> spread them.] From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 21:08:18 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 17:08:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran In-Reply-To: <01C4B518.8EED1080.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4B518.8EED1080.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to have jobs. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > Going to war against Iran would be a good way to > employ all of those useless young Americans who > can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents > per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think > $6,000 a year is a lot of money. > > Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq > without using conscription, we will be able to get > a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I > mean is that the political consequences of starting > a draft will be so high that any President who does > it may as well knock out all of them at once, including > Korea. > > And once Baby Boomers start dying from the > fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with > Social Security will be solved as well. > > Great days lie ahead! > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > > Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm > 4.10.14 > > [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, > but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States > is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we > can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking > us.] > > Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this > article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held > September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The > conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, > education, and dialogue." > > That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current > Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, > Switzerland. > > -- Nicholas Strakon > ___________________________________ > > > The future of the global War on Terror: > Next stop, Iran > By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI > > If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. > More information appears below. > > > > What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be > Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say > that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. > That result has been sought and planned for by the American > neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It > is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary > to see it. > > Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact > that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli > Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern > enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the > single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and > ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of > [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background > for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving > force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in > Israel.) > > Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that > they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle > East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want > such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use > the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the > United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will > begin with an attack on Iran. > > The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, > and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country > may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic > Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program > that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial > ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout > the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is > that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in > importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That > program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian > nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 > Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] > > [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that > would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as > opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United > States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself > against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are > more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East > news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is > pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is > so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region > with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores > that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. > Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent > on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] > > Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. > and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again > serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and > refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure > Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and > its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the > possibility of self-defense." [8][3] > > Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the > United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also > argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a > destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use > a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious > militants and moderates. > > Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's > developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear > monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that > Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared > that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of > course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in > Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past > couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings > about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November > 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and > Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear > program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its > creation" in 1948. [9][4] > And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi > Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said > that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional > weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared > that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] > > Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack > on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading > member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that > Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership > in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide > through the use of missiles." [11][6] > And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime > Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, > he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon > called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes > every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic > missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to > Europe." [12][7] > > > As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man > here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On > April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the > Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish > Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: > "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free > Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] > Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional > struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone > of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, > the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran > would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the > terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States > should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the > terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its > attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to > liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may > soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] > > In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), > an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His > principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a > former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs > Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. > CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and > think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for > Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, > president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise > Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and > former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that > diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and > that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to > actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple > the reigning mullahs. [16][11] > > [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among > neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The > Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose > speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli > Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East > specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI > counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our > fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It > would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... > We must move on, and faster." [17][12] > As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May > 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish > organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to > step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." > [18][13] > > It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of > global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the > monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the > former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of > the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming > the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of > neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with > several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish > Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public > speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los > Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] > > A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, > Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During > the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister > Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as > Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] > > Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall > Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for > Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must > "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports > Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s > energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group > must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of > the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East > covet." [21][16] > > > Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran > was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense > Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key > role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran > expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' > office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but > apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the > Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated > regime change in Tehran." [22][17] > > As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has > come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of > the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that > individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be > conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud > Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents > of influence" for a foreign government. > > Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is > not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon > recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and > secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in > the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst > to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith > (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel > operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine > meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in > Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were > "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, > Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer > (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian > and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to > Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in > Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of > preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) > and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] > > [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush > administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. > Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his > first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National > Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy > clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We > cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] > The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that > Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with > U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] > > Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution > authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian > nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that > resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] > > > There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's > nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For > Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to > be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for > Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to > act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] > But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear > capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 > attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because > we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained > Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the > Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run > preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] > > In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would > purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for > by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground > nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] > > [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear > installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out > retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks > from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel > may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do > report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range > ballistic missile can reach Israel. > > Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle > East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, > American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more > effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less > likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the > safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who > identify with Israel to push for an American attack. > > Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- > Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with > opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same > time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering > countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The > stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would > seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already > controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation > this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will > find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. > [30][25] > The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems > anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability > for the existing Iraqi government. > > With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation > with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime > Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite > resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] > > The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian > Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, > that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in > the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will > not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some > military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations > which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani > continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an > element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is > true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of > an attack. [32][27] > > > In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody > quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration > would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could > the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military > is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is > larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United > States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having > learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military > power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. > > The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a > large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military > occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's > nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, > neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired > in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban > areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian > casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out > Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built > underground. [33][28] > > [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest > attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also > to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically > set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground > invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; > the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian > forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military > forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then > destroy. > > What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war > against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest > of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall > into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would > threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United > States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a > move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans > for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. > Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move > might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify > with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth > noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" > blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. > > While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern > Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. > The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, > the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to > the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted > military and financial resources of the United States. > > Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the > Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the > peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim > fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack > American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American > regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. > > [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, > which would have dire economic consequences around the world, > provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. > > Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, > international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not > want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have > generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with > little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; > Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the > Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. > But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist > status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped > beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson > exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and > ride mankind." > > As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is > very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a > powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors > threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its > survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful > military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant > Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the > United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab > regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that > destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by > facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, > which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the > areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential > American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the > neoconservatives' World War IV. > > It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out > of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its > prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq > is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. > The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and > walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy > had been a failure. > > Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the > support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to > pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] > Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics > have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a > choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in > the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, > has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a > mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have > voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on > Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In > regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect > to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful > that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. > > [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational > backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive > Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on > Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. > Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of > America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government > is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] > It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of > progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and > widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, > whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. > > The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose > their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they > initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that > holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, > unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, > the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a > position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is > because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing > from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As > columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the > administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish > the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We > can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] > According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a > paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its > necessary role of world leadership. > > For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the > rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks > on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is > supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at > stake in staying the course and not giving in. > > In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the > foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of > neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven > American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries > -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. > Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to > those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite > believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist > agenda. > > But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American > wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. > Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the > non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission > [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate > the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world > increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be > well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] > > But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. > And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country > indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. > All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to > self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some > terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, > other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by > bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on > occasion. > > The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the > regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such > an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and > of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the > United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global > debacle in the making. > > References > > 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm > 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html > 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ > 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ > 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm > 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 > 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 > 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 > 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 > 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 > 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 > 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 > 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 > 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 > 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 > 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 > 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 > 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 > 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 > 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 > 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 > 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 > 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 > 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 > 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 > 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 > 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 > 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 > 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 > 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 > 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 > 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 > 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 > 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 > 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 > 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 > 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 > 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 > 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN > 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm > 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm > 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 21:28:16 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 14:28:16 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran Message-ID: <01C4B51E.B5DD6BD0.shovland@mindspring.com> If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any student deferments :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to have jobs. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > Going to war against Iran would be a good way to > employ all of those useless young Americans who > can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents > per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think > $6,000 a year is a lot of money. > > Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq > without using conscription, we will be able to get > a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I > mean is that the political consequences of starting > a draft will be so high that any President who does > it may as well knock out all of them at once, including > Korea. > > And once Baby Boomers start dying from the > fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with > Social Security will be solved as well. > > Great days lie ahead! > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > > Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm > 4.10.14 > > [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, > but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States > is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we > can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking > us.] > > Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this > article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held > September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The > conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, > education, and dialogue." > > That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current > Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, > Switzerland. > > -- Nicholas Strakon > ___________________________________ > > > The future of the global War on Terror: > Next stop, Iran > By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI > > If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. > More information appears below. > > > > What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be > Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say > that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. > That result has been sought and planned for by the American > neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It > is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary > to see it. > > Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact > that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli > Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern > enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the > single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and > ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of > [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background > for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving > force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in > Israel.) > > Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that > they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle > East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want > such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use > the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the > United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will > begin with an attack on Iran. > > The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, > and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country > may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic > Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program > that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial > ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout > the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is > that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in > importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That > program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian > nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 > Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] > > [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that > would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as > opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United > States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself > against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are > more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East > news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is > pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is > so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region > with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores > that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. > Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent > on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] > > Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. > and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again > serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and > refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure > Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and > its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the > possibility of self-defense." [8][3] > > Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the > United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also > argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a > destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use > a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious > militants and moderates. > > Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's > developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear > monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that > Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared > that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of > course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in > Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past > couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings > about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November > 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and > Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear > program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its > creation" in 1948. [9][4] > And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi > Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said > that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional > weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared > that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] > > Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack > on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading > member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that > Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership > in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide > through the use of missiles." [11][6] > And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime > Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, > he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon > called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes > every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic > missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to > Europe." [12][7] > > > As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man > here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On > April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the > Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish > Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: > "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free > Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] > Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional > struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone > of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, > the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran > would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the > terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States > should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the > terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its > attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to > liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may > soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] > > In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), > an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His > principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a > former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs > Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. > CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and > think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for > Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, > president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise > Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and > former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that > diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and > that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to > actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple > the reigning mullahs. [16][11] > > [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among > neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The > Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose > speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli > Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East > specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI > counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our > fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It > would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... > We must move on, and faster." [17][12] > As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May > 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish > organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to > step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." > [18][13] > > It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of > global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the > monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the > former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of > the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming > the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of > neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with > several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish > Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public > speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los > Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] > > A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, > Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During > the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister > Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as > Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] > > Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall > Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for > Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must > "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports > Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s > energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group > must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of > the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East > covet." [21][16] > > > Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran > was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense > Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key > role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran > expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' > office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but > apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the > Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated > regime change in Tehran." [22][17] > > As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has > come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of > the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that > individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be > conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud > Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents > of influence" for a foreign government. > > Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is > not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon > recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and > secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in > the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst > to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith > (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel > operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine > meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in > Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were > "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, > Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer > (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian > and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to > Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in > Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of > preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) > and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] > > [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush > administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. > Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his > first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National > Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy > clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We > cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] > The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that > Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with > U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] > > Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution > authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian > nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that > resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] > > > There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's > nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For > Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to > be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for > Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to > act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] > But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear > capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 > attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because > we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained > Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the > Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run > preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] > > In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would > purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for > by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground > nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] > > [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear > installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out > retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks > from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel > may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do > report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range > ballistic missile can reach Israel. > > Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle > East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, > American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more > effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less > likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the > safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who > identify with Israel to push for an American attack. > > Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- > Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with > opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same > time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering > countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The > stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would > seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already > controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation > this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will > find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. > [30][25] > The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems > anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability > for the existing Iraqi government. > > With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation > with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime > Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite > resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] > > The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian > Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, > that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in > the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will > not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some > military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations > which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani > continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an > element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is > true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of > an attack. [32][27] > > > In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody > quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration > would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could > the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military > is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is > larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United > States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having > learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military > power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. > > The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a > large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military > occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's > nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, > neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired > in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban > areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian > casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out > Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built > underground. [33][28] > > [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest > attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also > to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically > set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground > invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; > the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian > forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military > forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then > destroy. > > What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war > against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest > of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall > into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would > threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United > States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a > move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans > for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. > Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move > might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify > with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth > noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" > blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. > > While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern > Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. > The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, > the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to > the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted > military and financial resources of the United States. > > Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the > Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the > peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim > fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack > American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American > regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. > > [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, > which would have dire economic consequences around the world, > provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. > > Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, > international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not > want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have > generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with > little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; > Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the > Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. > But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist > status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped > beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson > exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and > ride mankind." > > As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is > very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a > powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors > threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its > survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful > military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant > Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the > United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab > regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that > destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by > facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, > which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the > areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential > American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the > neoconservatives' World War IV. > > It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out > of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its > prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq > is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. > The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and > walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy > had been a failure. > > Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the > support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to > pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] > Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics > have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a > choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in > the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, > has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a > mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have > voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on > Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In > regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect > to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful > that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. > > [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational > backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive > Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on > Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. > Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of > America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government > is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] > It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of > progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and > widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, > whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. > > The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose > their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they > initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that > holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, > unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, > the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a > position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is > because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing > from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As > columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the > administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish > the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We > can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] > According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a > paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its > necessary role of world leadership. > > For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the > rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks > on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is > supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at > stake in staying the course and not giving in. > > In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the > foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of > neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven > American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries > -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. > Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to > those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite > believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist > agenda. > > But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American > wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. > Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the > non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission > [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate > the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world > increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be > well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] > > But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. > And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country > indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. > All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to > self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some > terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, > other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by > bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on > occasion. > > The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the > regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such > an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and > of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the > United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global > debacle in the making. > > References > > 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm > 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html > 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ > 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ > 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm > 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 > 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 > 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 > 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 > 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 > 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 > 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 > 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 > 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 > 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 > 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 > 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 > 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 > 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 > 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 > 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 > 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 > 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 > 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 > 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 > 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 > 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 > 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 > 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 > 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 > 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 > 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 > 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 > 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 > 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 > 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 > 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 > 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 > 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN > 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm > 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm > 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 21:37:10 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 17:37:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran In-Reply-To: <01C4B51E.B5DD6BD0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4B51E.B5DD6BD0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: You again are not paying attention. The student deferments will by and large go to those who can compete with the Chinese and Japanese. Those that can should not only get derements but should not be drafted at all. Only those that are in what the Marxoids called the reserve army of the unemployed should be drafted. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any > student deferments :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > > There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with > the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to > have jobs. > > On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> Going to war against Iran would be a good way to >> employ all of those useless young Americans who >> can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents >> per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think >> $6,000 a year is a lot of money. >> >> Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq >> without using conscription, we will be able to get >> a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I >> mean is that the political consequences of starting >> a draft will be so high that any President who does >> it may as well knock out all of them at once, including >> Korea. >> >> And once Baby Boomers start dying from the >> fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with >> Social Security will be solved as well. >> >> Great days lie ahead! >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM >> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> >> Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm >> 4.10.14 >> >> [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, >> but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States >> is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we >> can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking >> us.] >> >> Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this >> article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held >> September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The >> conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, >> education, and dialogue." >> >> That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current >> Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, >> Switzerland. >> >> -- Nicholas Strakon >> ___________________________________ >> >> >> The future of the global War on Terror: >> Next stop, Iran >> By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI >> >> If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. >> More information appears below. >> >> >> >> What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be >> Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say >> that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. >> That result has been sought and planned for by the American >> neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It >> is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary >> to see it. >> >> Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact >> that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli >> Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern >> enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the >> single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and >> ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of >> [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background >> for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving >> force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in >> Israel.) >> >> Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that >> they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle >> East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want >> such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use >> the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the >> United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will >> begin with an attack on Iran. >> >> The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, >> and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country >> may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic >> Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program >> that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial >> ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout >> the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is >> that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in >> importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That >> program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian >> nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 >> Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] >> >> [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that >> would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as >> opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United >> States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself >> against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are >> more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East >> news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is >> pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is >> so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region >> with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores >> that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. >> Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent >> on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] >> >> Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. >> and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again >> serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and >> refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure >> Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and >> its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the >> possibility of self-defense." [8][3] >> >> Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the >> United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also >> argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a >> destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use >> a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious >> militants and moderates. >> >> Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's >> developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear >> monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that >> Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared >> that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of >> course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in >> Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past >> couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings >> about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November >> 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and >> Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear >> program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its >> creation" in 1948. [9][4] >> And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi >> Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said >> that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional >> weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared >> that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] >> >> Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack >> on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading >> member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that >> Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership >> in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide >> through the use of missiles." [11][6] >> And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime >> Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, >> he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon >> called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes >> every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic >> missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to >> Europe." [12][7] >> >> >> As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man >> here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On >> April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the >> Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish >> Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: >> "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free >> Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] >> Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional >> struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone >> of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, >> the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran >> would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the >> terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States >> should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the >> terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its >> attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to >> liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may >> soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] >> >> In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), >> an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His >> principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a >> former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs >> Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. >> CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and >> think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for >> Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, >> president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise >> Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and >> former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that >> diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and >> that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to >> actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple >> the reigning mullahs. [16][11] >> >> [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among >> neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The >> Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose >> speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli >> Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East >> specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI >> counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our >> fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It >> would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... >> We must move on, and faster." [17][12] >> As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May >> 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish >> organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to >> step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." >> [18][13] >> >> It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of >> global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the >> monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the >> former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of >> the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming >> the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of >> neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with >> several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish >> Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public >> speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los >> Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] >> >> A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, >> Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During >> the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister >> Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as >> Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] >> >> Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall >> Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for >> Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must >> "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports >> Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s >> energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group >> must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of >> the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East >> covet." [21][16] >> >> >> Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran >> was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense >> Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key >> role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran >> expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' >> office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but >> apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the >> Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated >> regime change in Tehran." [22][17] >> >> As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has >> come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of >> the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that >> individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be >> conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud >> Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents >> of influence" for a foreign government. >> >> Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is >> not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon >> recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and >> secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in >> the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst >> to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith >> (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel >> operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine >> meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in >> Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were >> "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, >> Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer >> (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian >> and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to >> Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in >> Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of >> preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) >> and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] >> >> [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush >> administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. >> Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his >> first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National >> Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy >> clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We >> cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] >> The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that >> Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with >> U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] >> >> Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution >> authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian >> nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that >> resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] >> >> >> There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's >> nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For >> Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to >> be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for >> Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to >> act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] >> But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear >> capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 >> attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because >> we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained >> Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the >> Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run >> preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] >> >> In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would >> purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for >> by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground >> nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] >> >> [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear >> installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out >> retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks >> from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel >> may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do >> report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range >> ballistic missile can reach Israel. >> >> Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle >> East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, >> American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more >> effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less >> likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the >> safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who >> identify with Israel to push for an American attack. >> >> Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- >> Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with >> opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same >> time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering >> countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The >> stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would >> seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already >> controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation >> this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will >> find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. >> [30][25] >> The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems >> anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability >> for the existing Iraqi government. >> >> With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation >> with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime >> Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite >> resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] >> >> The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian >> Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, >> that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in >> the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will >> not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some >> military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations >> which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani >> continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an >> element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is >> true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of >> an attack. [32][27] >> >> >> In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody >> quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration >> would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could >> the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military >> is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is >> larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United >> States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having >> learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military >> power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. >> >> The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a >> large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military >> occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's >> nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, >> neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired >> in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban >> areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian >> casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out >> Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built >> underground. [33][28] >> >> [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest >> attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also >> to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically >> set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground >> invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; >> the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian >> forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military >> forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then >> destroy. >> >> What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war >> against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest >> of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall >> into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would >> threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United >> States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a >> move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans >> for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. >> Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move >> might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify >> with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth >> noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" >> blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. >> >> While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern >> Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. >> The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, >> the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to >> the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted >> military and financial resources of the United States. >> >> Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the >> Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the >> peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim >> fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack >> American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American >> regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. >> >> [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, >> which would have dire economic consequences around the world, >> provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. >> >> Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, >> international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not >> want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have >> generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with >> little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; >> Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the >> Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. >> But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist >> status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped >> beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson >> exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and >> ride mankind." >> >> As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is >> very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a >> powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors >> threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its >> survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful >> military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant >> Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the >> United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab >> regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that >> destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by >> facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, >> which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the >> areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential >> American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the >> neoconservatives' World War IV. >> >> It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out >> of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its >> prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq >> is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. >> The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and >> walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy >> had been a failure. >> >> Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the >> support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to >> pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] >> Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics >> have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a >> choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in >> the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, >> has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a >> mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have >> voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on >> Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In >> regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect >> to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful >> that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. >> >> [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational >> backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive >> Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on >> Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. >> Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of >> America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government >> is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] >> It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of >> progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and >> widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, >> whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. >> >> The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose >> their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they >> initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that >> holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, >> unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, >> the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a >> position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is >> because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing >> from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As >> columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the >> administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish >> the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We >> can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] >> According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a >> paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its >> necessary role of world leadership. >> >> For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the >> rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks >> on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is >> supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at >> stake in staying the course and not giving in. >> >> In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the >> foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of >> neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven >> American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries >> -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. >> Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to >> those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite >> believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist >> agenda. >> >> But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American >> wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. >> Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the >> non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission >> [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate >> the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world >> increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be >> well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] >> >> But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. >> And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country >> indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. >> All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to >> self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some >> terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, >> other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by >> bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on >> occasion. >> >> The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the >> regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such >> an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and >> of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the >> United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global >> debacle in the making. >> >> References >> >> 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm >> 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html >> 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ >> 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ >> 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm >> 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 >> 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 >> 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 >> 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 >> 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 >> 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 >> 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 >> 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 >> 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 >> 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 >> 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 >> 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 >> 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 >> 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 >> 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 >> 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 >> 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 >> 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 >> 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 >> 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 >> 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 >> 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 >> 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 >> 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 >> 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 >> 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 >> 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 >> 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 >> 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 >> 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 >> 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 >> 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 >> 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 >> 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN >> 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm >> 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm >> 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 21:50:33 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 14:50:33 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran Message-ID: <01C4B521.D2BD3520.shovland@mindspring.com> Concentrating the draft on the lower classes would be a good way to reduce the population of "useless eaters." Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:37 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran You again are not paying attention. The student deferments will by and large go to those who can compete with the Chinese and Japanese. Those that can should not only get derements but should not be drafted at all. Only those that are in what the Marxoids called the reserve army of the unemployed should be drafted. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any > student deferments :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > > There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with > the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to > have jobs. > > On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> Going to war against Iran would be a good way to >> employ all of those useless young Americans who >> can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents >> per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think >> $6,000 a year is a lot of money. >> >> Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq >> without using conscription, we will be able to get >> a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I >> mean is that the political consequences of starting >> a draft will be so high that any President who does >> it may as well knock out all of them at once, including >> Korea. >> >> And once Baby Boomers start dying from the >> fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with >> Social Security will be solved as well. >> >> Great days lie ahead! >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM >> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> >> Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm >> 4.10.14 >> >> [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, >> but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States >> is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we >> can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking >> us.] >> >> Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this >> article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held >> September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The >> conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, >> education, and dialogue." >> >> That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current >> Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, >> Switzerland. >> >> -- Nicholas Strakon >> ___________________________________ >> >> >> The future of the global War on Terror: >> Next stop, Iran >> By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI >> >> If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. >> More information appears below. >> >> >> >> What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be >> Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say >> that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. >> That result has been sought and planned for by the American >> neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It >> is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary >> to see it. >> >> Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact >> that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli >> Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern >> enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the >> single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and >> ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of >> [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background >> for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving >> force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in >> Israel.) >> >> Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that >> they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle >> East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want >> such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use >> the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the >> United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will >> begin with an attack on Iran. >> >> The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, >> and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country >> may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic >> Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program >> that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial >> ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout >> the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is >> that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in >> importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That >> program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian >> nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 >> Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] >> >> [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that >> would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as >> opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United >> States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself >> against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are >> more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East >> news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is >> pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is >> so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region >> with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores >> that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. >> Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent >> on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] >> >> Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. >> and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again >> serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and >> refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure >> Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and >> its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the >> possibility of self-defense." [8][3] >> >> Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the >> United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also >> argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a >> destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use >> a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious >> militants and moderates. >> >> Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's >> developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear >> monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that >> Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared >> that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of >> course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in >> Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past >> couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings >> about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November >> 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and >> Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear >> program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its >> creation" in 1948. [9][4] >> And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi >> Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said >> that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional >> weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared >> that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] >> >> Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack >> on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading >> member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that >> Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership >> in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide >> through the use of missiles." [11][6] >> And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime >> Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, >> he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon >> called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes >> every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic >> missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to >> Europe." [12][7] >> >> >> As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man >> here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On >> April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the >> Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish >> Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: >> "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free >> Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] >> Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional >> struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone >> of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, >> the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran >> would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the >> terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States >> should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the >> terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its >> attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to >> liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may >> soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] >> >> In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), >> an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His >> principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a >> former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs >> Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. >> CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and >> think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for >> Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, >> president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise >> Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and >> former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that >> diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and >> that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to >> actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple >> the reigning mullahs. [16][11] >> >> [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among >> neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The >> Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose >> speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli >> Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East >> specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI >> counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our >> fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It >> would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... >> We must move on, and faster." [17][12] >> As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May >> 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish >> organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to >> step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." >> [18][13] >> >> It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of >> global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the >> monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the >> former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of >> the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming >> the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of >> neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with >> several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish >> Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public >> speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los >> Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] >> >> A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, >> Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During >> the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister >> Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as >> Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] >> >> Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall >> Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for >> Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must >> "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports >> Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s >> energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group >> must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of >> the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East >> covet." [21][16] >> >> >> Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran >> was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense >> Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key >> role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran >> expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' >> office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but >> apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the >> Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated >> regime change in Tehran." [22][17] >> >> As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has >> come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of >> the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that >> individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be >> conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud >> Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents >> of influence" for a foreign government. >> >> Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is >> not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon >> recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and >> secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in >> the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst >> to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith >> (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel >> operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine >> meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in >> Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were >> "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, >> Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer >> (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian >> and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to >> Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in >> Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of >> preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) >> and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] >> >> [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush >> administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. >> Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his >> first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National >> Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy >> clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We >> cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] >> The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that >> Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with >> U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] >> >> Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution >> authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian >> nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that >> resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] >> >> >> There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's >> nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For >> Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to >> be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for >> Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to >> act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] >> But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear >> capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 >> attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because >> we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained >> Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the >> Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run >> preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] >> >> In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would >> purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for >> by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground >> nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] >> >> [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear >> installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out >> retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks >> from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel >> may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do >> report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range >> ballistic missile can reach Israel. >> >> Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle >> East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, >> American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more >> effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less >> likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the >> safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who >> identify with Israel to push for an American attack. >> >> Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- >> Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with >> opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same >> time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering >> countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The >> stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would >> seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already >> controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation >> this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will >> find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. >> [30][25] >> The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems >> anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability >> for the existing Iraqi government. >> >> With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation >> with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime >> Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite >> resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] >> >> The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian >> Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, >> that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in >> the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will >> not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some >> military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations >> which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani >> continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an >> element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is >> true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of >> an attack. [32][27] >> >> >> In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody >> quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration >> would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could >> the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military >> is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is >> larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United >> States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having >> learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military >> power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. >> >> The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a >> large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military >> occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's >> nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, >> neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired >> in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban >> areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian >> casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out >> Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built >> underground. [33][28] >> >> [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest >> attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also >> to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically >> set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground >> invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; >> the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian >> forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military >> forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then >> destroy. >> >> What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war >> against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest >> of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall >> into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would >> threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United >> States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a >> move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans >> for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. >> Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move >> might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify >> with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth >> noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" >> blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. >> >> While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern >> Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. >> The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, >> the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to >> the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted >> military and financial resources of the United States. >> >> Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the >> Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the >> peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim >> fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack >> American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American >> regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. >> >> [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, >> which would have dire economic consequences around the world, >> provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. >> >> Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, >> international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not >> want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have >> generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with >> little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; >> Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the >> Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. >> But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist >> status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped >> beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson >> exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and >> ride mankind." >> >> As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is >> very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a >> powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors >> threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its >> survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful >> military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant >> Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the >> United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab >> regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that >> destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by >> facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, >> which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the >> areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential >> American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the >> neoconservatives' World War IV. >> >> It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out >> of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its >> prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq >> is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. >> The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and >> walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy >> had been a failure. >> >> Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the >> support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to >> pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] >> Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics >> have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a >> choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in >> the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, >> has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a >> mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have >> voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on >> Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In >> regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect >> to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful >> that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. >> >> [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational >> backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive >> Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on >> Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. >> Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of >> America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government >> is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] >> It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of >> progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and >> widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, >> whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. >> >> The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose >> their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they >> initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that >> holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, >> unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, >> the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a >> position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is >> because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing >> from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As >> columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the >> administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish >> the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We >> can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] >> According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a >> paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its >> necessary role of world leadership. >> >> For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the >> rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks >> on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is >> supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at >> stake in staying the course and not giving in. >> >> In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the >> foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of >> neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven >> American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries >> -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. >> Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to >> those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite >> believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist >> agenda. >> >> But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American >> wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. >> Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the >> non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission >> [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate >> the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world >> increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be >> well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] >> >> But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. >> And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country >> indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. >> All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to >> self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some >> terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, >> other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by >> bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on >> occasion. >> >> The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the >> regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such >> an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and >> of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the >> United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global >> debacle in the making. >> >> References >> >> 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm >> 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html >> 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ >> 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ >> 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm >> 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 >> 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 >> 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 >> 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 >> 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 >> 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 >> 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 >> 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 >> 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 >> 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 >> 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 >> 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 >> 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 >> 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 >> 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 >> 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 >> 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 >> 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 >> 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 >> 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 >> 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 >> 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 >> 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 >> 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 >> 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 >> 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 >> 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 >> 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 >> 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 >> 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 >> 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 >> 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 >> 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 >> 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN >> 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm >> 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm >> 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 18 22:01:57 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 18:01:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran In-Reply-To: <01C4B521.D2BD3520.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4B521.D2BD3520.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: It would not reduce the population of useless eaters very much, since not many of them would get killed, fewer than if they stayed at home and engaged in hot rodding. But it would give them jobs and a sense of accomplishment. Or we could create U.S. Department of Reorganization, where half the employees would be reorganizing the other half. THe usual competition over perks and office space would continue, though nothing would be produced. This is very much like the U.S. Department of Education, where I work, except that cash does get dispersed, to the tune of $63 billion a year, most of it going to educrats outside of E.D. but none of it benefiting students. In fact it harms them. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > Concentrating the draft on the lower classes > would be a good way to reduce the population > of "useless eaters." > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:37 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > > You again are not paying attention. The student deferments will by and > large go to those who can compete with the Chinese and Japanese. Those > that can should not only get derements but should not be drafted at all. > Only those that are in what the Marxoids called the reserve army of the > unemployed should be drafted. > > On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any >> student deferments :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> >> There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with >> the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to >> have jobs. >> >> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >> >>> Going to war against Iran would be a good way to >>> employ all of those useless young Americans who >>> can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents >>> per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think >>> $6,000 a year is a lot of money. >>> >>> Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq >>> without using conscription, we will be able to get >>> a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I >>> mean is that the political consequences of starting >>> a draft will be so high that any President who does >>> it may as well knock out all of them at once, including >>> Korea. >>> >>> And once Baby Boomers start dying from the >>> fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with >>> Social Security will be solved as well. >>> >>> Great days lie ahead! >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM >>> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>> >>> Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>> http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm >>> 4.10.14 >>> >>> [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, >>> but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States >>> is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we >>> can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking >>> us.] >>> >>> Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this >>> article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held >>> September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The >>> conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, >>> education, and dialogue." >>> >>> That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current >>> Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, >>> Switzerland. >>> >>> -- Nicholas Strakon >>> ___________________________________ >>> >>> >>> The future of the global War on Terror: >>> Next stop, Iran >>> By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI >>> >>> If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. >>> More information appears below. >>> >>> >>> >>> What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be >>> Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say >>> that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. >>> That result has been sought and planned for by the American >>> neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It >>> is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary >>> to see it. >>> >>> Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact >>> that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli >>> Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern >>> enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the >>> single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and >>> ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of >>> [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background >>> for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving >>> force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in >>> Israel.) >>> >>> Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that >>> they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle >>> East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want >>> such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use >>> the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the >>> United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will >>> begin with an attack on Iran. >>> >>> The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, >>> and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country >>> may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic >>> Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program >>> that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial >>> ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout >>> the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is >>> that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in >>> importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That >>> program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian >>> nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 >>> Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] >>> >>> [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that >>> would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as >>> opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United >>> States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself >>> against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are >>> more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East >>> news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is >>> pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is >>> so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region >>> with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores >>> that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. >>> Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent >>> on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] >>> >>> Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. >>> and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again >>> serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and >>> refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure >>> Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and >>> its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the >>> possibility of self-defense." [8][3] >>> >>> Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the >>> United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also >>> argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a >>> destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use >>> a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious >>> militants and moderates. >>> >>> Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's >>> developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear >>> monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that >>> Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared >>> that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of >>> course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in >>> Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past >>> couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings >>> about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November >>> 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and >>> Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear >>> program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its >>> creation" in 1948. [9][4] >>> And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi >>> Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said >>> that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional >>> weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared >>> that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] >>> >>> Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack >>> on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading >>> member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that >>> Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership >>> in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide >>> through the use of missiles." [11][6] >>> And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime >>> Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, >>> he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon >>> called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes >>> every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic >>> missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to >>> Europe." [12][7] >>> >>> >>> As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man >>> here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On >>> April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the >>> Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish >>> Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: >>> "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free >>> Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] >>> Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional >>> struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone >>> of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, >>> the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran >>> would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the >>> terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States >>> should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the >>> terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its >>> attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to >>> liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may >>> soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] >>> >>> In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), >>> an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His >>> principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a >>> former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs >>> Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. >>> CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and >>> think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for >>> Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, >>> president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise >>> Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and >>> former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that >>> diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and >>> that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to >>> actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple >>> the reigning mullahs. [16][11] >>> >>> [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among >>> neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The >>> Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose >>> speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli >>> Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East >>> specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI >>> counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our >>> fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It >>> would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... >>> We must move on, and faster." [17][12] >>> As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May >>> 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish >>> organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to >>> step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." >>> [18][13] >>> >>> It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of >>> global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the >>> monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the >>> former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of >>> the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming >>> the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of >>> neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with >>> several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish >>> Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public >>> speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los >>> Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] >>> >>> A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, >>> Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During >>> the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister >>> Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as >>> Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] >>> >>> Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall >>> Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for >>> Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must >>> "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports >>> Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s >>> energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group >>> must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of >>> the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East >>> covet." [21][16] >>> >>> >>> Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran >>> was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense >>> Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key >>> role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran >>> expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' >>> office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but >>> apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the >>> Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated >>> regime change in Tehran." [22][17] >>> >>> As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has >>> come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of >>> the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that >>> individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be >>> conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud >>> Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents >>> of influence" for a foreign government. >>> >>> Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is >>> not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon >>> recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and >>> secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in >>> the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst >>> to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith >>> (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel >>> operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine >>> meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in >>> Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were >>> "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, >>> Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer >>> (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian >>> and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to >>> Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in >>> Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of >>> preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) >>> and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] >>> >>> [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush >>> administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. >>> Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his >>> first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National >>> Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy >>> clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We >>> cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] >>> The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that >>> Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with >>> U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] >>> >>> Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution >>> authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian >>> nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that >>> resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] >>> >>> >>> There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's >>> nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For >>> Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to >>> be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for >>> Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to >>> act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] >>> But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear >>> capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 >>> attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because >>> we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained >>> Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the >>> Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run >>> preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] >>> >>> In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would >>> purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for >>> by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground >>> nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] >>> >>> [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear >>> installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out >>> retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks >>> from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel >>> may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do >>> report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range >>> ballistic missile can reach Israel. >>> >>> Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle >>> East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, >>> American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more >>> effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less >>> likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the >>> safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who >>> identify with Israel to push for an American attack. >>> >>> Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- >>> Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with >>> opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same >>> time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering >>> countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The >>> stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would >>> seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already >>> controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation >>> this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will >>> find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. >>> [30][25] >>> The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems >>> anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability >>> for the existing Iraqi government. >>> >>> With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation >>> with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime >>> Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite >>> resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] >>> >>> The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian >>> Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, >>> that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in >>> the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will >>> not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some >>> military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations >>> which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani >>> continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an >>> element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is >>> true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of >>> an attack. [32][27] >>> >>> >>> In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody >>> quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration >>> would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could >>> the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military >>> is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is >>> larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United >>> States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having >>> learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military >>> power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. >>> >>> The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a >>> large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military >>> occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's >>> nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, >>> neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired >>> in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban >>> areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian >>> casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out >>> Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built >>> underground. [33][28] >>> >>> [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest >>> attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also >>> to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically >>> set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground >>> invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; >>> the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian >>> forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military >>> forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then >>> destroy. >>> >>> What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war >>> against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest >>> of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall >>> into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would >>> threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United >>> States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a >>> move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans >>> for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. >>> Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move >>> might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify >>> with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth >>> noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" >>> blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. >>> >>> While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern >>> Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. >>> The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, >>> the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to >>> the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted >>> military and financial resources of the United States. >>> >>> Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the >>> Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the >>> peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim >>> fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack >>> American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American >>> regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. >>> >>> [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, >>> which would have dire economic consequences around the world, >>> provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. >>> >>> Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, >>> international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not >>> want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have >>> generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with >>> little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; >>> Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the >>> Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. >>> But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist >>> status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped >>> beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson >>> exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and >>> ride mankind." >>> >>> As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is >>> very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a >>> powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors >>> threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its >>> survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful >>> military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant >>> Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the >>> United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab >>> regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that >>> destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by >>> facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, >>> which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the >>> areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential >>> American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the >>> neoconservatives' World War IV. >>> >>> It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out >>> of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its >>> prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq >>> is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. >>> The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and >>> walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy >>> had been a failure. >>> >>> Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the >>> support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to >>> pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] >>> Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics >>> have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a >>> choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in >>> the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, >>> has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a >>> mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have >>> voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on >>> Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In >>> regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect >>> to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful >>> that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. >>> >>> [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational >>> backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive >>> Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on >>> Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. >>> Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of >>> America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government >>> is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] >>> It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of >>> progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and >>> widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, >>> whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. >>> >>> The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose >>> their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they >>> initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that >>> holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, >>> unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, >>> the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a >>> position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is >>> because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing >>> from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As >>> columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the >>> administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish >>> the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We >>> can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] >>> According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a >>> paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its >>> necessary role of world leadership. >>> >>> For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the >>> rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks >>> on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is >>> supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at >>> stake in staying the course and not giving in. >>> >>> In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the >>> foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of >>> neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven >>> American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries >>> -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. >>> Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to >>> those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite >>> believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist >>> agenda. >>> >>> But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American >>> wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. >>> Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the >>> non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission >>> [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate >>> the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world >>> increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be >>> well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] >>> >>> But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. >>> And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country >>> indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. >>> All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to >>> self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some >>> terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, >>> other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by >>> bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on >>> occasion. >>> >>> The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the >>> regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such >>> an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and >>> of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the >>> United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global >>> debacle in the making. >>> >>> References >>> >>> 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm >>> 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html >>> 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ >>> 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ >>> 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm >>> 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 >>> 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 >>> 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 >>> 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 >>> 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 >>> 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 >>> 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 >>> 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 >>> 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 >>> 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 >>> 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 >>> 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 >>> 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 >>> 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 >>> 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 >>> 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 >>> 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 >>> 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 >>> 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 >>> 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 >>> 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 >>> 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 >>> 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 >>> 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 >>> 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 >>> 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 >>> 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 >>> 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 >>> 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 >>> 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 >>> 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 >>> 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 >>> 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 >>> 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN >>> 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm >>> 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm >>> 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 18 22:05:52 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 15:05:52 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran Message-ID: <01C4B523.F6BD4B20.shovland@mindspring.com> I'm glad we have a shared vision of our wonderful future :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 3:02 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran It would not reduce the population of useless eaters very much, since not many of them would get killed, fewer than if they stayed at home and engaged in hot rodding. But it would give them jobs and a sense of accomplishment. Or we could create U.S. Department of Reorganization, where half the employees would be reorganizing the other half. THe usual competition over perks and office space would continue, though nothing would be produced. This is very much like the U.S. Department of Education, where I work, except that cash does get dispersed, to the tune of $63 billion a year, most of it going to educrats outside of E.D. but none of it benefiting students. In fact it harms them. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > Concentrating the draft on the lower classes > would be a good way to reduce the population > of "useless eaters." > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:37 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > > You again are not paying attention. The student deferments will by and > large go to those who can compete with the Chinese and Japanese. Those > that can should not only get derements but should not be drafted at all. > Only those that are in what the Marxoids called the reserve army of the > unemployed should be drafted. > > On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any >> student deferments :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> >> There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with >> the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to >> have jobs. >> >> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >> >>> Going to war against Iran would be a good way to >>> employ all of those useless young Americans who >>> can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents >>> per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think >>> $6,000 a year is a lot of money. >>> >>> Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq >>> without using conscription, we will be able to get >>> a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I >>> mean is that the political consequences of starting >>> a draft will be so high that any President who does >>> it may as well knock out all of them at once, including >>> Korea. >>> >>> And once Baby Boomers start dying from the >>> fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with >>> Social Security will be solved as well. >>> >>> Great days lie ahead! >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM >>> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>> >>> Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>> http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm >>> 4.10.14 >>> >>> [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, >>> but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States >>> is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we >>> can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking >>> us.] >>> >>> Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this >>> article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held >>> September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The >>> conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, >>> education, and dialogue." >>> >>> That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current >>> Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, >>> Switzerland. >>> >>> -- Nicholas Strakon >>> ___________________________________ >>> >>> >>> The future of the global War on Terror: >>> Next stop, Iran >>> By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI >>> >>> If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. >>> More information appears below. >>> >>> >>> >>> What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be >>> Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say >>> that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. >>> That result has been sought and planned for by the American >>> neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It >>> is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary >>> to see it. >>> >>> Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact >>> that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli >>> Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern >>> enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the >>> single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and >>> ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of >>> [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background >>> for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving >>> force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in >>> Israel.) >>> >>> Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that >>> they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle >>> East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want >>> such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use >>> the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the >>> United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will >>> begin with an attack on Iran. >>> >>> The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, >>> and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country >>> may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic >>> Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program >>> that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial >>> ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout >>> the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is >>> that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in >>> importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That >>> program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian >>> nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 >>> Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] >>> >>> [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that >>> would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as >>> opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United >>> States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself >>> against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are >>> more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East >>> news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is >>> pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is >>> so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region >>> with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores >>> that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. >>> Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent >>> on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] >>> >>> Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. >>> and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again >>> serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and >>> refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure >>> Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and >>> its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the >>> possibility of self-defense." [8][3] >>> >>> Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the >>> United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also >>> argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a >>> destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use >>> a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious >>> militants and moderates. >>> >>> Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's >>> developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear >>> monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that >>> Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared >>> that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of >>> course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in >>> Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past >>> couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings >>> about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November >>> 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and >>> Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear >>> program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its >>> creation" in 1948. [9][4] >>> And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi >>> Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said >>> that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional >>> weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared >>> that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] >>> >>> Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack >>> on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading >>> member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that >>> Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership >>> in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide >>> through the use of missiles." [11][6] >>> And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime >>> Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, >>> he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon >>> called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes >>> every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic >>> missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to >>> Europe." [12][7] >>> >>> >>> As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man >>> here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On >>> April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the >>> Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish >>> Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: >>> "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free >>> Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] >>> Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional >>> struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone >>> of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, >>> the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran >>> would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the >>> terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States >>> should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the >>> terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its >>> attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to >>> liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may >>> soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] >>> >>> In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), >>> an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His >>> principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a >>> former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs >>> Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. >>> CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and >>> think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for >>> Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, >>> president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise >>> Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and >>> former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that >>> diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and >>> that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to >>> actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple >>> the reigning mullahs. [16][11] >>> >>> [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among >>> neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The >>> Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose >>> speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli >>> Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East >>> specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI >>> counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our >>> fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It >>> would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... >>> We must move on, and faster." [17][12] >>> As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May >>> 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish >>> organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to >>> step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." >>> [18][13] >>> >>> It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of >>> global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the >>> monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the >>> former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of >>> the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming >>> the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of >>> neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with >>> several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish >>> Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public >>> speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los >>> Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] >>> >>> A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, >>> Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During >>> the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister >>> Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as >>> Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] >>> >>> Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall >>> Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for >>> Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must >>> "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports >>> Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s >>> energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group >>> must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of >>> the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East >>> covet." [21][16] >>> >>> >>> Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran >>> was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense >>> Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key >>> role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran >>> expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' >>> office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but >>> apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the >>> Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated >>> regime change in Tehran." [22][17] >>> >>> As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has >>> come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of >>> the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that >>> individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be >>> conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud >>> Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents >>> of influence" for a foreign government. >>> >>> Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is >>> not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon >>> recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and >>> secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in >>> the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst >>> to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith >>> (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel >>> operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine >>> meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in >>> Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were >>> "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, >>> Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer >>> (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian >>> and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to >>> Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in >>> Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of >>> preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) >>> and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] >>> >>> [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush >>> administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. >>> Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his >>> first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National >>> Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy >>> clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We >>> cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] >>> The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that >>> Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with >>> U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] >>> >>> Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution >>> authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian >>> nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that >>> resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] >>> >>> >>> There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's >>> nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For >>> Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to >>> be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for >>> Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to >>> act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] >>> But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear >>> capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 >>> attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because >>> we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained >>> Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the >>> Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run >>> preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] >>> >>> In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would >>> purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for >>> by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground >>> nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] >>> >>> [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear >>> installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out >>> retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks >>> from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel >>> may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do >>> report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range >>> ballistic missile can reach Israel. >>> >>> Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle >>> East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, >>> American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more >>> effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less >>> likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the >>> safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who >>> identify with Israel to push for an American attack. >>> >>> Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- >>> Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with >>> opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same >>> time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering >>> countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The >>> stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would >>> seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already >>> controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation >>> this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will >>> find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. >>> [30][25] >>> The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems >>> anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability >>> for the existing Iraqi government. >>> >>> With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation >>> with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime >>> Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite >>> resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] >>> >>> The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian >>> Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, >>> that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in >>> the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will >>> not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some >>> military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations >>> which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani >>> continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an >>> element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is >>> true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of >>> an attack. [32][27] >>> >>> >>> In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody >>> quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration >>> would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could >>> the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military >>> is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is >>> larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United >>> States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having >>> learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military >>> power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. >>> >>> The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a >>> large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military >>> occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's >>> nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, >>> neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired >>> in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban >>> areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian >>> casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out >>> Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built >>> underground. [33][28] >>> >>> [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest >>> attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also >>> to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically >>> set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground >>> invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; >>> the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian >>> forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military >>> forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then >>> destroy. >>> >>> What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war >>> against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest >>> of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall >>> into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would >>> threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United >>> States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a >>> move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans >>> for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. >>> Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move >>> might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify >>> with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth >>> noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" >>> blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. >>> >>> While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern >>> Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. >>> The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, >>> the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to >>> the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted >>> military and financial resources of the United States. >>> >>> Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the >>> Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the >>> peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim >>> fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack >>> American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American >>> regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. >>> >>> [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, >>> which would have dire economic consequences around the world, >>> provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. >>> >>> Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, >>> international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not >>> want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have >>> generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with >>> little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; >>> Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the >>> Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. >>> But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist >>> status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped >>> beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson >>> exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and >>> ride mankind." >>> >>> As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is >>> very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a >>> powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors >>> threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its >>> survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful >>> military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant >>> Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the >>> United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab >>> regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that >>> destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by >>> facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, >>> which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the >>> areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential >>> American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the >>> neoconservatives' World War IV. >>> >>> It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out >>> of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its >>> prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq >>> is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. >>> The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and >>> walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy >>> had been a failure. >>> >>> Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the >>> support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to >>> pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] >>> Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics >>> have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a >>> choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in >>> the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, >>> has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a >>> mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have >>> voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on >>> Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In >>> regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect >>> to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful >>> that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. >>> >>> [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational >>> backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive >>> Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on >>> Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. >>> Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of >>> America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government >>> is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] >>> It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of >>> progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and >>> widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, >>> whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. >>> >>> The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose >>> their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they >>> initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that >>> holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, >>> unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, >>> the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a >>> position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is >>> because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing >>> from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As >>> columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the >>> administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish >>> the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We >>> can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] >>> According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a >>> paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its >>> necessary role of world leadership. >>> >>> For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the >>> rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks >>> on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is >>> supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at >>> stake in staying the course and not giving in. >>> >>> In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the >>> foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of >>> neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven >>> American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries >>> -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. >>> Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to >>> those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite >>> believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist >>> agenda. >>> >>> But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American >>> wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. >>> Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the >>> non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission >>> [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate >>> the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world >>> increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be >>> well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] >>> >>> But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. >>> And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country >>> indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. >>> All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to >>> self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some >>> terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, >>> other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by >>> bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on >>> occasion. >>> >>> The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the >>> regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such >>> an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and >>> of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the >>> United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global >>> debacle in the making. >>> >>> References >>> >>> 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm >>> 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html >>> 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ >>> 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ >>> 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm >>> 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 >>> 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 >>> 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 >>> 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 >>> 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 >>> 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 >>> 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 >>> 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 >>> 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 >>> 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 >>> 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 >>> 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 >>> 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 >>> 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 >>> 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 >>> 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 >>> 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 >>> 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 >>> 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 >>> 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 >>> 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 >>> 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 >>> 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 >>> 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 >>> 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 >>> 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 >>> 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 >>> 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 >>> 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 >>> 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 >>> 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 >>> 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 >>> 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 >>> 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN >>> 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm >>> 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm >>> 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 19 01:25:42 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 21:25:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran In-Reply-To: <01C4B523.F6BD4B20.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4B523.F6BD4B20.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: Well, maybe you can come up with a better suggestion about what to do with the useless eaters. They will be increasing in the population as artificial intelligence, robots, and so on replaces more and more jobs. Just wait till machines at last can pick strawberries, one of the few fruits that have eluded machines so far. No doubt, these migrant farm worker immigrants can do something else, but each time a job is automated, workers have to take lower paid jobs (presuming, more or less accurately, that workers tend to seek out the most renumerative job). So they can either be put on the "high tech equivalent of the Indian reservation," in Charles Murray's famous phrase, be given affirmative action jobs and do nothing, or be given fake jobs and do nothing useful. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > I'm glad we have a shared vision of our wonderful future :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 3:02 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > > It would not reduce the population of useless eaters very much, since not > many of them would get killed, fewer than if they stayed at home and > engaged in hot rodding. But it would give them jobs and a sense of > accomplishment. > > Or we could create U.S. Department of Reorganization, where half the > employees would be reorganizing the other half. THe usual competition over > perks and office space would continue, though nothing would be produced. > This is very much like the U.S. Department of Education, where I work, > except that cash does get dispersed, to the tune of $63 billion a year, > most of it going to educrats outside of E.D. but none of it benefiting > students. In fact it harms them. > > On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> Concentrating the draft on the lower classes >> would be a good way to reduce the population >> of "useless eaters." >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:37 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> >> You again are not paying attention. The student deferments will by and >> large go to those who can compete with the Chinese and Japanese. Those >> that can should not only get derements but should not be drafted at all. >> Only those that are in what the Marxoids called the reserve army of the >> unemployed should be drafted. >> >> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >> >>> If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any >>> student deferments :-) >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>> >>> There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with >>> the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to >>> have jobs. >>> >>> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >>> >>>> Going to war against Iran would be a good way to >>>> employ all of those useless young Americans who >>>> can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents >>>> per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think >>>> $6,000 a year is a lot of money. >>>> >>>> Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq >>>> without using conscription, we will be able to get >>>> a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I >>>> mean is that the political consequences of starting >>>> a draft will be so high that any President who does >>>> it may as well knock out all of them at once, including >>>> Korea. >>>> >>>> And once Baby Boomers start dying from the >>>> fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with >>>> Social Security will be solved as well. >>>> >>>> Great days lie ahead! >>>> >>>> Steve Hovland >>>> www.stevehovland.net >>>> >>>> >>>> -----Original Message----- >>>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM >>>> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>> Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>> >>>> Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>> http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm >>>> 4.10.14 >>>> >>>> [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, >>>> but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States >>>> is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we >>>> can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking >>>> us.] >>>> >>>> Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this >>>> article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held >>>> September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The >>>> conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, >>>> education, and dialogue." >>>> >>>> That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current >>>> Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, >>>> Switzerland. >>>> >>>> -- Nicholas Strakon >>>> ___________________________________ >>>> >>>> >>>> The future of the global War on Terror: >>>> Next stop, Iran >>>> By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI >>>> >>>> If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. >>>> More information appears below. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be >>>> Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say >>>> that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. >>>> That result has been sought and planned for by the American >>>> neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It >>>> is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary >>>> to see it. >>>> >>>> Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact >>>> that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli >>>> Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern >>>> enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the >>>> single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and >>>> ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of >>>> [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background >>>> for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving >>>> force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in >>>> Israel.) >>>> >>>> Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that >>>> they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle >>>> East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want >>>> such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use >>>> the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the >>>> United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will >>>> begin with an attack on Iran. >>>> >>>> The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, >>>> and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country >>>> may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic >>>> Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program >>>> that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial >>>> ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout >>>> the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is >>>> that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in >>>> importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That >>>> program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian >>>> nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 >>>> Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] >>>> >>>> [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that >>>> would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as >>>> opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United >>>> States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself >>>> against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are >>>> more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East >>>> news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is >>>> pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is >>>> so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region >>>> with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores >>>> that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. >>>> Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent >>>> on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] >>>> >>>> Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. >>>> and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again >>>> serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and >>>> refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure >>>> Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and >>>> its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the >>>> possibility of self-defense." [8][3] >>>> >>>> Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the >>>> United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also >>>> argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a >>>> destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use >>>> a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious >>>> militants and moderates. >>>> >>>> Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's >>>> developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear >>>> monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that >>>> Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared >>>> that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of >>>> course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in >>>> Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past >>>> couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings >>>> about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November >>>> 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and >>>> Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear >>>> program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its >>>> creation" in 1948. [9][4] >>>> And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi >>>> Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said >>>> that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional >>>> weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared >>>> that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] >>>> >>>> Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack >>>> on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading >>>> member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that >>>> Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership >>>> in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide >>>> through the use of missiles." [11][6] >>>> And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime >>>> Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, >>>> he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon >>>> called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes >>>> every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic >>>> missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to >>>> Europe." [12][7] >>>> >>>> >>>> As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man >>>> here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On >>>> April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the >>>> Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish >>>> Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: >>>> "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free >>>> Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] >>>> Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional >>>> struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone >>>> of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, >>>> the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran >>>> would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the >>>> terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States >>>> should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the >>>> terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its >>>> attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to >>>> liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may >>>> soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] >>>> >>>> In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), >>>> an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His >>>> principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a >>>> former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs >>>> Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. >>>> CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and >>>> think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for >>>> Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, >>>> president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise >>>> Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and >>>> former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that >>>> diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and >>>> that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to >>>> actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple >>>> the reigning mullahs. [16][11] >>>> >>>> [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among >>>> neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The >>>> Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose >>>> speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli >>>> Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East >>>> specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI >>>> counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our >>>> fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It >>>> would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... >>>> We must move on, and faster." [17][12] >>>> As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May >>>> 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish >>>> organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to >>>> step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." >>>> [18][13] >>>> >>>> It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of >>>> global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the >>>> monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the >>>> former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of >>>> the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming >>>> the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of >>>> neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with >>>> several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish >>>> Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public >>>> speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los >>>> Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] >>>> >>>> A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, >>>> Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During >>>> the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister >>>> Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as >>>> Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] >>>> >>>> Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall >>>> Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for >>>> Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must >>>> "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports >>>> Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s >>>> energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group >>>> must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of >>>> the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East >>>> covet." [21][16] >>>> >>>> >>>> Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran >>>> was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense >>>> Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key >>>> role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran >>>> expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' >>>> office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but >>>> apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the >>>> Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated >>>> regime change in Tehran." [22][17] >>>> >>>> As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has >>>> come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of >>>> the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that >>>> individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be >>>> conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud >>>> Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents >>>> of influence" for a foreign government. >>>> >>>> Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is >>>> not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon >>>> recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and >>>> secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in >>>> the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst >>>> to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith >>>> (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel >>>> operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine >>>> meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in >>>> Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were >>>> "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, >>>> Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer >>>> (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian >>>> and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to >>>> Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in >>>> Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of >>>> preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) >>>> and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] >>>> >>>> [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush >>>> administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. >>>> Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his >>>> first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National >>>> Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy >>>> clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We >>>> cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] >>>> The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that >>>> Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with >>>> U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] >>>> >>>> Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution >>>> authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian >>>> nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that >>>> resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] >>>> >>>> >>>> There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's >>>> nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For >>>> Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to >>>> be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for >>>> Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to >>>> act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] >>>> But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear >>>> capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 >>>> attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because >>>> we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained >>>> Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the >>>> Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run >>>> preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] >>>> >>>> In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would >>>> purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for >>>> by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground >>>> nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] >>>> >>>> [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear >>>> installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out >>>> retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks >>>> from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel >>>> may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do >>>> report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range >>>> ballistic missile can reach Israel. >>>> >>>> Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle >>>> East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, >>>> American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more >>>> effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less >>>> likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the >>>> safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who >>>> identify with Israel to push for an American attack. >>>> >>>> Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- >>>> Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with >>>> opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same >>>> time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering >>>> countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The >>>> stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would >>>> seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already >>>> controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation >>>> this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will >>>> find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. >>>> [30][25] >>>> The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems >>>> anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability >>>> for the existing Iraqi government. >>>> >>>> With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation >>>> with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime >>>> Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite >>>> resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] >>>> >>>> The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian >>>> Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, >>>> that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in >>>> the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will >>>> not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some >>>> military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations >>>> which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani >>>> continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an >>>> element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is >>>> true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of >>>> an attack. [32][27] >>>> >>>> >>>> In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody >>>> quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration >>>> would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could >>>> the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military >>>> is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is >>>> larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United >>>> States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having >>>> learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military >>>> power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. >>>> >>>> The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a >>>> large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military >>>> occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's >>>> nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, >>>> neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired >>>> in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban >>>> areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian >>>> casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out >>>> Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built >>>> underground. [33][28] >>>> >>>> [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest >>>> attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also >>>> to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically >>>> set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground >>>> invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; >>>> the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian >>>> forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military >>>> forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then >>>> destroy. >>>> >>>> What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war >>>> against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest >>>> of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall >>>> into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would >>>> threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United >>>> States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a >>>> move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans >>>> for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. >>>> Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move >>>> might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify >>>> with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth >>>> noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" >>>> blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. >>>> >>>> While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern >>>> Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. >>>> The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, >>>> the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to >>>> the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted >>>> military and financial resources of the United States. >>>> >>>> Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the >>>> Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the >>>> peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim >>>> fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack >>>> American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American >>>> regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. >>>> >>>> [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, >>>> which would have dire economic consequences around the world, >>>> provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. >>>> >>>> Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, >>>> international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not >>>> want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have >>>> generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with >>>> little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; >>>> Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the >>>> Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. >>>> But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist >>>> status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped >>>> beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson >>>> exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and >>>> ride mankind." >>>> >>>> As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is >>>> very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a >>>> powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors >>>> threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its >>>> survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful >>>> military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant >>>> Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the >>>> United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab >>>> regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that >>>> destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by >>>> facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, >>>> which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the >>>> areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential >>>> American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the >>>> neoconservatives' World War IV. >>>> >>>> It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out >>>> of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its >>>> prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq >>>> is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. >>>> The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and >>>> walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy >>>> had been a failure. >>>> >>>> Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the >>>> support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to >>>> pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] >>>> Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics >>>> have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a >>>> choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in >>>> the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, >>>> has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a >>>> mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have >>>> voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on >>>> Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In >>>> regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect >>>> to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful >>>> that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. >>>> >>>> [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational >>>> backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive >>>> Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on >>>> Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. >>>> Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of >>>> America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government >>>> is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] >>>> It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of >>>> progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and >>>> widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, >>>> whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. >>>> >>>> The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose >>>> their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they >>>> initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that >>>> holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, >>>> unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, >>>> the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a >>>> position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is >>>> because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing >>>> from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As >>>> columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the >>>> administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish >>>> the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We >>>> can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] >>>> According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a >>>> paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its >>>> necessary role of world leadership. >>>> >>>> For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the >>>> rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks >>>> on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is >>>> supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at >>>> stake in staying the course and not giving in. >>>> >>>> In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the >>>> foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of >>>> neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven >>>> American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries >>>> -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. >>>> Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to >>>> those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite >>>> believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist >>>> agenda. >>>> >>>> But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American >>>> wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. >>>> Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the >>>> non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission >>>> [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate >>>> the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world >>>> increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be >>>> well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] >>>> >>>> But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. >>>> And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country >>>> indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. >>>> All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to >>>> self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some >>>> terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, >>>> other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by >>>> bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on >>>> occasion. >>>> >>>> The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the >>>> regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such >>>> an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and >>>> of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the >>>> United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global >>>> debacle in the making. >>>> >>>> References >>>> >>>> 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm >>>> 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html >>>> 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ >>>> 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ >>>> 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm >>>> 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 >>>> 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 >>>> 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 >>>> 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 >>>> 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 >>>> 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 >>>> 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 >>>> 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 >>>> 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 >>>> 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 >>>> 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 >>>> 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 >>>> 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 >>>> 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 >>>> 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 >>>> 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 >>>> 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 >>>> 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 >>>> 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 >>>> 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 >>>> 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 >>>> 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 >>>> 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 >>>> 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 >>>> 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 >>>> 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 >>>> 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 >>>> 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 >>>> 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 >>>> 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 >>>> 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 >>>> 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 >>>> 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 >>>> 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN >>>> 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm >>>> 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm >>>> 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 19 02:51:32 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 19:51:32 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran Message-ID: <01C4B54B.DF0E7DA0.shovland@mindspring.com> I have done some work with artificial intelligence programming. It suffers from something called combinatorial explosion. When you try to build a rule based system that does a real task, as opposed to a narrow-concept demonstration or an artificial problem, the difficulty of doing it increased very quickly to the point of being almost impossible. Similarly, industrial robots have been around for many years, and do some things very well. But nothing is so flexible or easily trained as a human, so they haven't taken over jobs in nearly the numbers that some predicted. I think we live in an insane economy that devalues labor. The Buddhists talk about Right Livelihood, and perhaps we should listen to them. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 6:26 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran Well, maybe you can come up with a better suggestion about what to do with the useless eaters. They will be increasing in the population as artificial intelligence, robots, and so on replaces more and more jobs. Just wait till machines at last can pick strawberries, one of the few fruits that have eluded machines so far. No doubt, these migrant farm worker immigrants can do something else, but each time a job is automated, workers have to take lower paid jobs (presuming, more or less accurately, that workers tend to seek out the most renumerative job). So they can either be put on the "high tech equivalent of the Indian reservation," in Charles Murray's famous phrase, be given affirmative action jobs and do nothing, or be given fake jobs and do nothing useful. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > I'm glad we have a shared vision of our wonderful future :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 3:02 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > > It would not reduce the population of useless eaters very much, since not > many of them would get killed, fewer than if they stayed at home and > engaged in hot rodding. But it would give them jobs and a sense of > accomplishment. > > Or we could create U.S. Department of Reorganization, where half the > employees would be reorganizing the other half. THe usual competition over > perks and office space would continue, though nothing would be produced. > This is very much like the U.S. Department of Education, where I work, > except that cash does get dispersed, to the tune of $63 billion a year, > most of it going to educrats outside of E.D. but none of it benefiting > students. In fact it harms them. > > On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> Concentrating the draft on the lower classes >> would be a good way to reduce the population >> of "useless eaters." >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:37 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> >> You again are not paying attention. The student deferments will by and >> large go to those who can compete with the Chinese and Japanese. Those >> that can should not only get derements but should not be drafted at all. >> Only those that are in what the Marxoids called the reserve army of the >> unemployed should be drafted. >> >> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >> >>> If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any >>> student deferments :-) >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>> >>> There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with >>> the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to >>> have jobs. >>> >>> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >>> >>>> Going to war against Iran would be a good way to >>>> employ all of those useless young Americans who >>>> can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents >>>> per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think >>>> $6,000 a year is a lot of money. >>>> >>>> Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq >>>> without using conscription, we will be able to get >>>> a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I >>>> mean is that the political consequences of starting >>>> a draft will be so high that any President who does >>>> it may as well knock out all of them at once, including >>>> Korea. >>>> >>>> And once Baby Boomers start dying from the >>>> fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with >>>> Social Security will be solved as well. >>>> >>>> Great days lie ahead! >>>> >>>> Steve Hovland >>>> www.stevehovland.net >>>> >>>> >>>> -----Original Message----- >>>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM >>>> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>> Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>> >>>> Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>> http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm >>>> 4.10.14 >>>> >>>> [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, >>>> but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States >>>> is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we >>>> can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking >>>> us.] >>>> >>>> Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this >>>> article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held >>>> September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The >>>> conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, >>>> education, and dialogue." >>>> >>>> That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current >>>> Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, >>>> Switzerland. >>>> >>>> -- Nicholas Strakon >>>> ___________________________________ >>>> >>>> >>>> The future of the global War on Terror: >>>> Next stop, Iran >>>> By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI >>>> >>>> If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. >>>> More information appears below. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be >>>> Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say >>>> that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. >>>> That result has been sought and planned for by the American >>>> neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It >>>> is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary >>>> to see it. >>>> >>>> Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact >>>> that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli >>>> Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern >>>> enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the >>>> single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and >>>> ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of >>>> [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background >>>> for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving >>>> force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in >>>> Israel.) >>>> >>>> Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that >>>> they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle >>>> East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want >>>> such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use >>>> the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the >>>> United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will >>>> begin with an attack on Iran. >>>> >>>> The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, >>>> and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country >>>> may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic >>>> Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program >>>> that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial >>>> ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout >>>> the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is >>>> that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in >>>> importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That >>>> program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian >>>> nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 >>>> Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] >>>> >>>> [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that >>>> would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as >>>> opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United >>>> States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself >>>> against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are >>>> more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East >>>> news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is >>>> pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is >>>> so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region >>>> with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores >>>> that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. >>>> Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent >>>> on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] >>>> >>>> Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. >>>> and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again >>>> serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and >>>> refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure >>>> Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and >>>> its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the >>>> possibility of self-defense." [8][3] >>>> >>>> Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the >>>> United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also >>>> argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a >>>> destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use >>>> a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious >>>> militants and moderates. >>>> >>>> Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's >>>> developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear >>>> monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that >>>> Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared >>>> that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of >>>> course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in >>>> Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past >>>> couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings >>>> about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November >>>> 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and >>>> Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear >>>> program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its >>>> creation" in 1948. [9][4] >>>> And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi >>>> Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said >>>> that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional >>>> weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared >>>> that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] >>>> >>>> Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack >>>> on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading >>>> member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that >>>> Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership >>>> in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide >>>> through the use of missiles." [11][6] >>>> And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime >>>> Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, >>>> he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon >>>> called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes >>>> every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic >>>> missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to >>>> Europe." [12][7] >>>> >>>> >>>> As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man >>>> here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On >>>> April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the >>>> Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish >>>> Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: >>>> "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free >>>> Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] >>>> Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional >>>> struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone >>>> of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, >>>> the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran >>>> would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the >>>> terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States >>>> should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the >>>> terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its >>>> attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to >>>> liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may >>>> soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] >>>> >>>> In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), >>>> an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His >>>> principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a >>>> former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs >>>> Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. >>>> CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and >>>> think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for >>>> Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, >>>> president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise >>>> Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and >>>> former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that >>>> diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and >>>> that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to >>>> actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple >>>> the reigning mullahs. [16][11] >>>> >>>> [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among >>>> neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The >>>> Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose >>>> speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli >>>> Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East >>>> specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI >>>> counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our >>>> fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It >>>> would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... >>>> We must move on, and faster." [17][12] >>>> As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May >>>> 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish >>>> organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to >>>> step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." >>>> [18][13] >>>> >>>> It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of >>>> global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the >>>> monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the >>>> former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of >>>> the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming >>>> the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of >>>> neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with >>>> several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish >>>> Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public >>>> speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los >>>> Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] >>>> >>>> A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, >>>> Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During >>>> the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister >>>> Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as >>>> Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] >>>> >>>> Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall >>>> Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for >>>> Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must >>>> "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports >>>> Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s >>>> energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group >>>> must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of >>>> the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East >>>> covet." [21][16] >>>> >>>> >>>> Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran >>>> was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense >>>> Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key >>>> role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran >>>> expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' >>>> office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but >>>> apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the >>>> Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated >>>> regime change in Tehran." [22][17] >>>> >>>> As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has >>>> come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of >>>> the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that >>>> individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be >>>> conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud >>>> Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents >>>> of influence" for a foreign government. >>>> >>>> Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is >>>> not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon >>>> recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and >>>> secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in >>>> the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst >>>> to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith >>>> (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel >>>> operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine >>>> meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in >>>> Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were >>>> "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, >>>> Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer >>>> (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian >>>> and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to >>>> Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in >>>> Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of >>>> preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) >>>> and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] >>>> >>>> [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush >>>> administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. >>>> Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his >>>> first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National >>>> Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy >>>> clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We >>>> cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] >>>> The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that >>>> Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with >>>> U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] >>>> >>>> Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution >>>> authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian >>>> nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that >>>> resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] >>>> >>>> >>>> There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's >>>> nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For >>>> Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to >>>> be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for >>>> Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to >>>> act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] >>>> But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear >>>> capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 >>>> attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because >>>> we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained >>>> Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the >>>> Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run >>>> preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] >>>> >>>> In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would >>>> purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for >>>> by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground >>>> nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] >>>> >>>> [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear >>>> installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out >>>> retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks >>>> from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel >>>> may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do >>>> report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range >>>> ballistic missile can reach Israel. >>>> >>>> Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle >>>> East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, >>>> American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more >>>> effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less >>>> likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the >>>> safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who >>>> identify with Israel to push for an American attack. >>>> >>>> Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- >>>> Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with >>>> opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same >>>> time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering >>>> countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The >>>> stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would >>>> seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already >>>> controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation >>>> this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will >>>> find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. >>>> [30][25] >>>> The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems >>>> anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability >>>> for the existing Iraqi government. >>>> >>>> With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation >>>> with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime >>>> Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite >>>> resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] >>>> >>>> The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian >>>> Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, >>>> that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in >>>> the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will >>>> not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some >>>> military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations >>>> which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani >>>> continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an >>>> element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is >>>> true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of >>>> an attack. [32][27] >>>> >>>> >>>> In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody >>>> quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration >>>> would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could >>>> the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military >>>> is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is >>>> larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United >>>> States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having >>>> learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military >>>> power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. >>>> >>>> The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a >>>> large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military >>>> occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's >>>> nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, >>>> neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired >>>> in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban >>>> areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian >>>> casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out >>>> Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built >>>> underground. [33][28] >>>> >>>> [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest >>>> attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also >>>> to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically >>>> set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground >>>> invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; >>>> the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian >>>> forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military >>>> forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then >>>> destroy. >>>> >>>> What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war >>>> against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest >>>> of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall >>>> into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would >>>> threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United >>>> States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a >>>> move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans >>>> for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. >>>> Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move >>>> might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify >>>> with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth >>>> noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" >>>> blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. >>>> >>>> While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern >>>> Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. >>>> The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, >>>> the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to >>>> the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted >>>> military and financial resources of the United States. >>>> >>>> Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the >>>> Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the >>>> peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim >>>> fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack >>>> American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American >>>> regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. >>>> >>>> [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, >>>> which would have dire economic consequences around the world, >>>> provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. >>>> >>>> Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, >>>> international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not >>>> want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have >>>> generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with >>>> little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; >>>> Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the >>>> Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. >>>> But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist >>>> status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped >>>> beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson >>>> exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and >>>> ride mankind." >>>> >>>> As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is >>>> very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a >>>> powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors >>>> threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its >>>> survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful >>>> military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant >>>> Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the >>>> United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab >>>> regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that >>>> destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by >>>> facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, >>>> which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the >>>> areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential >>>> American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the >>>> neoconservatives' World War IV. >>>> >>>> It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out >>>> of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its >>>> prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq >>>> is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. >>>> The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and >>>> walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy >>>> had been a failure. >>>> >>>> Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the >>>> support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to >>>> pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] >>>> Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics >>>> have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a >>>> choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in >>>> the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, >>>> has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a >>>> mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have >>>> voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on >>>> Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In >>>> regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect >>>> to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful >>>> that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. >>>> >>>> [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational >>>> backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive >>>> Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on >>>> Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. >>>> Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of >>>> America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government >>>> is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] >>>> It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of >>>> progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and >>>> widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, >>>> whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. >>>> >>>> The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose >>>> their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they >>>> initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that >>>> holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, >>>> unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, >>>> the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a >>>> position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is >>>> because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing >>>> from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As >>>> columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the >>>> administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish >>>> the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We >>>> can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] >>>> According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a >>>> paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its >>>> necessary role of world leadership. >>>> >>>> For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the >>>> rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks >>>> on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is >>>> supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at >>>> stake in staying the course and not giving in. >>>> >>>> In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the >>>> foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of >>>> neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven >>>> American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries >>>> -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. >>>> Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to >>>> those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite >>>> believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist >>>> agenda. >>>> >>>> But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American >>>> wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. >>>> Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the >>>> non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission >>>> [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate >>>> the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world >>>> increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be >>>> well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] >>>> >>>> But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. >>>> And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country >>>> indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. >>>> All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to >>>> self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some >>>> terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, >>>> other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by >>>> bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on >>>> occasion. >>>> >>>> The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the >>>> regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such >>>> an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and >>>> of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the >>>> United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global >>>> debacle in the making. >>>> >>>> References >>>> >>>> 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm >>>> 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html >>>> 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ >>>> 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ >>>> 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm >>>> 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 >>>> 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 >>>> 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 >>>> 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 >>>> 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 >>>> 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 >>>> 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 >>>> 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 >>>> 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 >>>> 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 >>>> 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 >>>> 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 >>>> 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 >>>> 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 >>>> 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 >>>> 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 >>>> 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 >>>> 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 >>>> 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 >>>> 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 >>>> 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 >>>> 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 >>>> 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 >>>> 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 >>>> 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 >>>> 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 >>>> 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 >>>> 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 >>>> 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 >>>> 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 >>>> 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 >>>> 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 >>>> 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 >>>> 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN >>>> 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm >>>> 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm >>>> 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Oct 19 13:54:13 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 07:54:13 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran In-Reply-To: <01C4B523.F6BD4B20.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4B523.F6BD4B20.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41751C85.2090202@solution-consulting.com> The central fact overlooked by the discussion about the draft is that the military and the Republicans do not want a draft. There are plenty of willing and patriotic volunteers. The draft is simply a red herring manufactured whole cloth by social justice (n?e socialists-marxists) democrats to attack the republicans. Hey, red herring. Get it? Frank's point is that automation reduces the employment opportunities for the least skilled. Thomas Sowell has pointed out that those are overwhelmingly first generations immigrants, and has shown that their children move up the social / educational ladder. I am pretty close to the Mexican community, and their apathy toward education might short-circuit that process. However, there is some hope. In mexican maquiladoras there is a new emphasis on quality. They cannot compete with China on wages, their traditional niche. They have to move to education and quality, and that may eventually transform the Mexican culture, just as listening to Demming transformed post war Japan. Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: >I'm glad we have a shared vision of our wonderful future :-) > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 3:02 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > >It would not reduce the population of useless eaters very much, since not >many of them would get killed, fewer than if they stayed at home and >engaged in hot rodding. But it would give them jobs and a sense of >accomplishment. > >Or we could create U.S. Department of Reorganization, where half the >employees would be reorganizing the other half. THe usual competition over >perks and office space would continue, though nothing would be produced. >This is very much like the U.S. Department of Education, where I work, >except that cash does get dispersed, to the tune of $63 billion a year, >most of it going to educrats outside of E.D. but none of it benefiting >students. In fact it harms them. > >On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > > > >>Concentrating the draft on the lower classes >>would be a good way to reduce the population >>of "useless eaters." >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:37 PM >>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> >>You again are not paying attention. The student deferments will by and >>large go to those who can compete with the Chinese and Japanese. Those >>that can should not only get derements but should not be drafted at all. >>Only those that are in what the Marxoids called the reserve army of the >>unemployed should be drafted. >> >>On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >> >> >> >>>If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any >>>student deferments :-) >>> >>>Steve Hovland >>>www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>>-----Original Message----- >>>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM >>>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>>Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>> >>>There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with >>>the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to >>>have jobs. >>> >>>On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >>> >>> >>> >>>>Going to war against Iran would be a good way to >>>>employ all of those useless young Americans who >>>>can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents >>>>per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think >>>>$6,000 a year is a lot of money. >>>> >>>>Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq >>>>without using conscription, we will be able to get >>>>a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I >>>>mean is that the political consequences of starting >>>>a draft will be so high that any President who does >>>>it may as well knock out all of them at once, including >>>>Korea. >>>> >>>>And once Baby Boomers start dying from the >>>>fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with >>>>Social Security will be solved as well. >>>> >>>>Great days lie ahead! >>>> >>>>Steve Hovland >>>>www.stevehovland.net >>>> >>>> >>>>-----Original Message----- >>>>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>>Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM >>>>To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>>Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>> >>>>Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>>http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm >>>>4.10.14 >>>> >>>>[The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, >>>>but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States >>>>is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we >>>>can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking >>>>us.] >>>> >>>> Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this >>>> article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held >>>> September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The >>>> conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, >>>> education, and dialogue." >>>> >>>> That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current >>>> Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, >>>> Switzerland. >>>> >>>> -- Nicholas Strakon >>>> ___________________________________ >>>> >>>> >>>> The future of the global War on Terror: >>>> Next stop, Iran >>>> By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI >>>> >>>> If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. >>>> More information appears below. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be >>>> Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say >>>> that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. >>>> That result has been sought and planned for by the American >>>> neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It >>>> is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary >>>> to see it. >>>> >>>> Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact >>>> that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli >>>> Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern >>>> enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the >>>> single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and >>>> ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of >>>> [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background >>>> for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving >>>> force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in >>>> Israel.) >>>> >>>> Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that >>>> they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle >>>> East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want >>>> such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use >>>> the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the >>>> United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will >>>> begin with an attack on Iran. >>>> >>>> The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, >>>> and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country >>>> may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic >>>> Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program >>>> that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial >>>> ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout >>>> the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is >>>> that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in >>>> importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That >>>> program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian >>>> nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 >>>> Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] >>>> >>>> [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that >>>> would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as >>>> opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United >>>> States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself >>>> against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are >>>> more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East >>>> news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is >>>> pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is >>>> so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region >>>> with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores >>>> that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. >>>> Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent >>>> on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] >>>> >>>> Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. >>>> and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again >>>> serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and >>>> refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure >>>> Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and >>>> its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the >>>> possibility of self-defense." [8][3] >>>> >>>> Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the >>>> United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also >>>> argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a >>>> destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use >>>> a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious >>>> militants and moderates. >>>> >>>> Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's >>>> developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear >>>> monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that >>>> Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared >>>> that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of >>>> course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in >>>> Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past >>>> couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings >>>> about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November >>>> 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and >>>> Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear >>>> program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its >>>> creation" in 1948. [9][4] >>>> And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi >>>> Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said >>>> that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional >>>> weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared >>>> that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] >>>> >>>> Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack >>>> on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading >>>> member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that >>>> Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership >>>> in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide >>>> through the use of missiles." [11][6] >>>> And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime >>>> Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, >>>> he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon >>>> called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes >>>> every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic >>>> missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to >>>> Europe." [12][7] >>>> >>>> >>>> As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man >>>> here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On >>>> April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the >>>> Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish >>>> Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: >>>> "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free >>>> Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] >>>> Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional >>>> struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone >>>> of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, >>>> the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran >>>> would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the >>>> terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States >>>> should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the >>>> terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its >>>> attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to >>>> liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may >>>> soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] >>>> >>>> In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), >>>> an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His >>>> principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a >>>> former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs >>>> Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. >>>> CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and >>>> think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for >>>> Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, >>>> president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise >>>> Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and >>>> former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that >>>> diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and >>>> that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to >>>> actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple >>>> the reigning mullahs. [16][11] >>>> >>>> [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among >>>> neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The >>>> Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose >>>> speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli >>>> Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East >>>> specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI >>>> counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our >>>> fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It >>>> would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... >>>> We must move on, and faster." [17][12] >>>> As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May >>>> 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish >>>> organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to >>>> step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." >>>> [18][13] >>>> >>>> It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of >>>> global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the >>>> monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the >>>> former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of >>>> the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming >>>> the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of >>>> neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with >>>> several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish >>>> Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public >>>> speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los >>>> Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] >>>> >>>> A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, >>>> Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During >>>> the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister >>>> Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as >>>> Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] >>>> >>>> Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall >>>> Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for >>>> Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must >>>> "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports >>>> Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s >>>> energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group >>>> must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of >>>> the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East >>>> covet." [21][16] >>>> >>>> >>>> Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran >>>> was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense >>>> Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key >>>> role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran >>>> expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' >>>> office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but >>>> apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the >>>> Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated >>>> regime change in Tehran." [22][17] >>>> >>>> As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has >>>> come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of >>>> the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that >>>> individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be >>>> conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud >>>> Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents >>>> of influence" for a foreign government. >>>> >>>> Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is >>>> not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon >>>> recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and >>>> secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in >>>> the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst >>>> to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith >>>> (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel >>>> operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine >>>> meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in >>>> Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were >>>> "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, >>>> Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer >>>> (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian >>>> and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to >>>> Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in >>>> Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of >>>> preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) >>>> and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] >>>> >>>> [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush >>>> administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. >>>> Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his >>>> first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National >>>> Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy >>>> clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We >>>> cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] >>>> The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that >>>> Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with >>>> U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] >>>> >>>> Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution >>>> authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian >>>> nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that >>>> resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] >>>> >>>> >>>> There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's >>>> nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For >>>> Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to >>>> be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for >>>> Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to >>>> act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] >>>> But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear >>>> capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 >>>> attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because >>>> we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained >>>> Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the >>>> Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run >>>> preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] >>>> >>>> In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would >>>> purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for >>>> by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground >>>> nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] >>>> >>>> [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear >>>> installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out >>>> retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks >>>> from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel >>>> may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do >>>> report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range >>>> ballistic missile can reach Israel. >>>> >>>> Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle >>>> East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, >>>> American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more >>>> effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less >>>> likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the >>>> safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who >>>> identify with Israel to push for an American attack. >>>> >>>> Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- >>>> Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with >>>> opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same >>>> time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering >>>> countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The >>>> stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would >>>> seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already >>>> controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation >>>> this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will >>>> find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. >>>> [30][25] >>>> The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems >>>> anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability >>>> for the existing Iraqi government. >>>> >>>> With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation >>>> with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime >>>> Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite >>>> resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] >>>> >>>> The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian >>>> Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, >>>> that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in >>>> the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will >>>> not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some >>>> military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations >>>> which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani >>>> continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an >>>> element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is >>>> true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of >>>> an attack. [32][27] >>>> >>>> >>>> In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody >>>> quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration >>>> would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could >>>> the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military >>>> is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is >>>> larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United >>>> States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having >>>> learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military >>>> power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. >>>> >>>> The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a >>>> large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military >>>> occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's >>>> nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, >>>> neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired >>>> in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban >>>> areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian >>>> casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out >>>> Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built >>>> underground. [33][28] >>>> >>>> [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest >>>> attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also >>>> to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically >>>> set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground >>>> invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; >>>> the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian >>>> forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military >>>> forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then >>>> destroy. >>>> >>>> What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war >>>> against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest >>>> of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall >>>> into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would >>>> threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United >>>> States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a >>>> move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans >>>> for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. >>>> Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move >>>> might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify >>>> with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth >>>> noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" >>>> blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. >>>> >>>> While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern >>>> Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. >>>> The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, >>>> the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to >>>> the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted >>>> military and financial resources of the United States. >>>> >>>> Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the >>>> Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the >>>> peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim >>>> fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack >>>> American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American >>>> regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. >>>> >>>> [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, >>>> which would have dire economic consequences around the world, >>>> provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. >>>> >>>> Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, >>>> international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not >>>> want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have >>>> generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with >>>> little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; >>>> Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the >>>> Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. >>>> But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist >>>> status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped >>>> beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson >>>> exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and >>>> ride mankind." >>>> >>>> As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is >>>> very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a >>>> powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors >>>> threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its >>>> survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful >>>> military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant >>>> Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the >>>> United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab >>>> regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that >>>> destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by >>>> facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, >>>> which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the >>>> areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential >>>> American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the >>>> neoconservatives' World War IV. >>>> >>>> It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out >>>> of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its >>>> prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq >>>> is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. >>>> The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and >>>> walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy >>>> had been a failure. >>>> >>>> Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the >>>> support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to >>>> pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] >>>> Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics >>>> have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a >>>> choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in >>>> the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, >>>> has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a >>>> mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have >>>> voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on >>>> Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In >>>> regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect >>>> to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful >>>> that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. >>>> >>>> [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational >>>> backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive >>>> Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on >>>> Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. >>>> Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of >>>> America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government >>>> is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] >>>> It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of >>>> progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and >>>> widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, >>>> whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. >>>> >>>> The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose >>>> their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they >>>> initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that >>>> holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, >>>> unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, >>>> the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a >>>> position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is >>>> because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing >>>> from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As >>>> columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the >>>> administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish >>>> the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We >>>> can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] >>>> According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a >>>> paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its >>>> necessary role of world leadership. >>>> >>>> For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the >>>> rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks >>>> on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is >>>> supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at >>>> stake in staying the course and not giving in. >>>> >>>> In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the >>>> foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of >>>> neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven >>>> American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries >>>> -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. >>>> Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to >>>> those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite >>>> believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist >>>> agenda. >>>> >>>> But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American >>>> wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. >>>> Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the >>>> non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission >>>> [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate >>>> the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world >>>> increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be >>>> well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] >>>> >>>> But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. >>>> And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country >>>> indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. >>>> All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to >>>> self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some >>>> terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, >>>> other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by >>>> bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on >>>> occasion. >>>> >>>> The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the >>>> regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such >>>> an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and >>>> of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the >>>> United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global >>>> debacle in the making. >>>> >>>>References >>>> >>>> 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm >>>> 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html >>>> 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ >>>> 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ >>>> 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm >>>> 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 >>>> 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 >>>> 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 >>>> 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 >>>> 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 >>>> 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 >>>> 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 >>>> 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 >>>> 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 >>>> 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 >>>> 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 >>>> 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 >>>> 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 >>>> 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 >>>> 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 >>>> 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 >>>> 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 >>>> 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 >>>> 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 >>>> 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 >>>> 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 >>>> 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 >>>> 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 >>>> 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 >>>> 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 >>>> 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 >>>> 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 >>>> 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 >>>> 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 >>>> 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 >>>> 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 >>>> 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 >>>> 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 >>>> 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN >>>> 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm >>>> 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm >>>> 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html >>>> >>>> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Oct 19 13:56:41 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 07:56:41 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] introverts In-Reply-To: <20041018174206.58518.qmail@web13422.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20041018174206.58518.qmail@web13422.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <41751D19.9090202@solution-consulting.com> Introverts are marginalized because they are more comfortable on the margins. Extraverts love the spotlight and flourish there, so naturally they tend to lead. Wishing it were otherwise is irrational. Michael Christopher wrote: >>>Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This >>> >>> >is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no >doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of >place.<< > >--I've seen a lot of brilliant introverts marginalized >in groups dominated by more outgoing but less talented >people. I wonder if there are ways to create groups >that nurture introverts rather than pushing them to >the edges? Our culture tends to believe that people >who are dominant and outgoing deserve to be on top, >but in the process a lot of good ideas are lost. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. >http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 19 16:45:54 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 12:45:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Gary North: Google's Free Desktop Search Engine: E-Mails Only Message-ID: Gary North: Google's Free Desktop Search Engine: E-Mails Only Gary North's REALITY CHECK Issue 388, October 19, 2004 [For myself, I definitely want to be able to index WordPerfect files, esp. good old WP 5.1 for DOS, and files without extensions, as so many WP files are and so many I download from my UNIX shell account. Using Window's own search engine, I can find any string in any file, but opening them is a horrible chore. Actually, WP 5.1 for DOS allows you to rapidly peek at files one after another by pressing *one* key, but only in alphabetical order by file name within a single directory. Power Desk lets you do this but converts files first, so you are not looking at the raw ASCII characters, and is thus a bit slow. [And I'd love to be able to find files with words near one another, as you can in Nexis, and then specific parts of files. Thus, I have a long WP file of my cassette tapes and would like to find all of them what have Beethoven conducted by Mengelberg.] You are hereby authorized to send this report to anyone, or post it on-line. GOOGLE'S FREE DESKTOP SEARCH ENGINE: E-MAILS ONLY I have good news and bad news. The good news is that Google's new Desktop Search program works great on a hard disk full of old e-mails. The bad news is that it doesn't work on downloaded Web pages after day one. You can download the program here: http://desktop.google.com To download it takes only a couple of minutes. It offers you a choice: let the program communicate with Google to identify problems -- this is a beta version -- or override this feature. I overrode it. I am writing this report instead. As you know, I think the best way to make more money is to increase your productivity. That's why, from time to time, I report on freeware that can improve the way we do our work. This is one of those reports. After 24 years of dreaming, one of my data storage and data retrieval dreams has come true. Well, not quite. It came true for one day. Then I woke up. Reality intruded. I assume that you have the same dream: locating that lost file, e-mail, or article. HERE IS MY PROBLEM I am a writer. I write all sorts of stuff -- e-mails, articles, and books. Like everyone else, I forget where I have filed all this stuff on my hard drive. I lose track of where certain items are. I also do a lot of research. I download links in my "Favorites" section, but this feature has severe limitations. The main one is that Web links go bad all the time. When I click on a link, I often get this page instead: "This page cannot be displayed." Bad news. A second limitation is that I must be on- line for a Web link to work. The Web document is not on my hard drive. A third limitation is that I can search only for keywords in the name I assigned to the link. Because the page itself is not on my hard drive, I cannot search for words in the original article. Google has begun to solve my problem. The company has just released a search program for desktop computers. It looks and works much like Google's on-line search engine does. It works instantaneously. It is in beta-testing stage. It still has glitches. The company is going to enlist a "team" of several million beta-testers who will help identify problems free of charge. I am one of them. I downloaded the program. This took under two minutes. I then had it index my hard drive. I have about six gigabytes of files. This process took under ten minutes. If you have a huge collection of wordy HTML pages on your hard disk, it may take overnight for the program to index your hard drive the first time. Anyway, that's what Google says. Here has been my long-term problem. In my office, I have eleven 4-drawer filing cabinets stuffed with clippings, which are filed under hundreds of categories. I have no electronic filing system for these clippings. So, I forget about them. Also, when I do remember an article, I may forget which article was filed under which category: the keyword problem. Ideally, it ought to be filed under half a dozen keywords. It amazes me how many I can still find, even though I stopped filing in 1996 when I went on the Web full-time. I don't trust my brain to do this work indefinitely, and besides, I would prefer to create a data base of clippings that others can use after I'm gone. Filing cabinets full of articles filed according to my classification system are not easily used by third parties. In any case, I rarely use those files these days because of the Web and Google. I don't read physical newspapers any more. I read on-line newspapers instead. I don't need to print them out. With Google's search tool, I will now assemble a very large collection of digital documents. I will be able to locate them. If I forget one, I may still be able to retrieve it through the use of keywords. HOW WELL DOES IT WORK? On the first day, it worked fairly well for a beta product. I would give it a B-minus. On the second day, it went to a D. Something in the system died. It worked only on e-mails. Google has a big problem. But the e-mail feature is so good that I recommend it as-is. Click on the program's desktop icon. A search page pops up that looks like Google's regular search page. It offers a "Search Desktop" button and a "Search the Web" button, which you can use if you're on-line. It searches these file types, any of which you may choose or reject: Outlook mail, Outlook Express mail, AOL IM, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, Web history, and Web pages (HTML). It does not search PDF files. Too bad. First, I wanted to see if I could retrieve a specific e- mail. I decided to search for the word "gatekeepers." I have used this word to describe those people and institutions that filter information so that the general public cannot gain easy access to it. I have argued that the Internet has created a society in which gatekeepers can no longer perform this function effectively. This fact is re-shaping society. (For evidence, search the Web for "Monica Lewinsky," "Drudge," "Newsweek," "spiked," and "impeached.") I typed in "gatekeepers." As soon as I clicked the "Search Desktop" button -- in the twinkling of an eye, to use St. Paul's language -- there were half a dozen e-mail links on my screen. Every one of them had "gatekeepers" in it. I could see a brief extract of each e-mail on-screen. I clicked the first link. Up popped the complete e-mail, nicely formatted. This takes care of what has been a major retrieval problem: e-mail clutter. Note: I use Outlook Express. The beta version of Google's Desktop Search works only on Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. I hope the programmers add other formats later on. Second, I have always wanted to fill my disk with Web pages: a digital filing cabinet with 500 drawers. I do lots of research on the Web. I want to be able to do the following: (1) Download a Web page. (2) Enter as many keywords as I can think of. (3) Search months later for any or all of these keywords. (4) Have the search program pull up the link fast. (5) Avoid pulling up links to 50 unrelated Web pages. I went to Lew Rockwell's site and downloaded an old article of mine, "Why the Job Market Is Slanted in Favor of College Graduates." This article discusses some of the myths of college education and ways to get around the corporate career barriers that are placed against non-graduates. Second, I saved this page to my hard disk -- not "Favorites," but "Save As." To save it, I had to type in a title in the "File name" box. Instead of typing in a name, I typed in keywords that I think I may possibly recall if I ever go looking for this article or related articles. I typed in these words: discount college degree graduates money salary business hire apprenticeship boredom. I clicked the Save button. In an instant, the article was saved to my hard disk. This long title widens the spaces in between the rows of article titles in my filing system. This is a small price to pay. I then disconnected from the Web. I wanted to test the program's disk-searching capabilities. Again, I clicked the Google icon. Up came the search page. I typed in two words: "discount college" (without quotation marks. I then clicked the "Search Desktop" button. Immediately, I got a list of files. The first two were obviously useless: gif files: component parts of the complete file. The third one was the right one: "Why the Job Market Is Slanted in Favor of College Graduates." (http://snipurl.com/8tqi) I clicked it. Bad news. I got "This page cannot be displayed." For some reason, pages from LewRockwell.com do not download properly, as I was to discover in subsequent tests. Then I noticed the word "cached" at the end of the link. I clicked it. Up popped the original article, with the words "college" and "discount" highlighted in yellow. Because of the highlighting, this cached format is actually more valuable to me than the original page would have been. I can easily find the keywords I'm looking for. Warning: If your keyword is not in the original article, there will be no highlighting. The Google program searches both for keywords in the "File name" and words in the original article. This is good. In downloading other Web pages, I did not have the "problem" of the message, "This page cannot be displayed." But all downloaded files offer "cached," and these cached pages have highlighted all of my keywords that are in the article. So, I intend to use "cached" as my original choice. It makes rapid skimming so much more efficient. This takes care of the second-biggest storage/retrieval problem I have had since 1996: how to save a Web page to my hard disk and find it later. The use of a long file name solves my old clippings-based problem: the need for multiple categories for the same clipping. Or should I say, it took care of my problem for one day. Then it died. When I came back the next day to retrieve the same article on college, the program failed to locate it. It is still on my hard disk. I checked. I searched for discount college degree slanted. I was told on-screen that this did not match any items. So, I extracted a phrase and put quotation marks around it: "dirty little secrets." Nothing. Google Desktop Search had completely lost track of the article. This happened twice. I quit trying after that. I came across an article on the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. Derrida taught that words and reality are not really linked. He was famous as a deconstructionist philosopher. The article is a short, brilliant satire on Derrida, who is dead. Or is he? We can't be sure if we follow Derrida's philosophy. You can read it here: http://snipurl.com/9sr0. Deconstructionism is taught at the best and most expensive universities that charge parents $140,000. It is rarely taught at junior colleges or lower-tuition universities. This is another reason why I recommend discount colleges rather than Ivy league universities. For my instant-reply free report on this, send an e-mail to discount-colleges at kbot.com In order to test my keyword system, I saved the Web page to my disk and inserted these words in the "File name" box: "goofball French philosopher." If I ever download a page on Jean Paul Sartre, I will have to use a different file name, so as not to overwrite the article on Derrida. I will add "commie" to "goofball French philosopher." Again, I disconnected from the Web. Then I typed in "goofball." Up came the article. This time when I clicked on the link, there was no announcement: "This page cannot be displayed." I did not have to click "cached." Nevertheless, I will always click "cached," because I like the word-highlighting feature. The Google program also pulled up a bunch of irrelevant links: "background.gif," "article_submenu_r1_c1_gif," etc. This is a beta version. I trust that the programmers will fix this glitch. If not, the venture will fail. People will not use the program. Will I remember "goofball French Philosopher" as an article on Derrida? Probably. But if I don't, I can still search for "Derrida." Google will search the text on the Web page, not just my name/keyword entries. Searching will become a problem only if I have lots of entries on Derrida, which I won't. A little Derrida goes a long way. But, like my article on college, on day two the article disappeared. I searched for Derrida. No article. So, I give the program a D: an A for e-mail retrieval, but an F for Web page retrieval. Back to the digital drawing board, guys! Let's assume that they get this fixed. I think they will. What happens if I want to find an article labeled "Greenspan"? I will have a problem. Now that I have Google Desktop Search program, I will file lots and lots of Web pages about or by Greenspan. I may even have to buy a 200-gigabyte hard disk. How will I locate the Greenspan article I am looking for? "Goofball central banker" won't be sufficiently narrow. Besides, I can only use it once. I will use the "File name" box to enter key words that I think will help me retrieve a particular Greenspan article. That will take some creativity on my part, but every detailed filing system does. I won't type in Greenspan. That word will be in the article's text. I'll file the page in a "Greenspan" folder. If the article is about his obtuse language, I will add "esperanto." If it's on his denial of a bubble, I will use "bubble." If it's an admission of a previous bubble that he failed to warn against or even denied was happening at the time, I can use "retroactive bubble." And so on. GLITCHES: .GIF FILES The program retrieves .gif files along with the original Web page. This is a major flaw. The program should retrieve only the Web page, not clutter up the screen with useless .gif files that make up the Web page. Another glitch is also quite serious. I downloaded a Web page with lots of graphic-heavy ads in it. All I wanted was the text of a particular columnist. It took a long time to save this page to my disk. Then, when I used Google Desktop Search, all I got was a .gif file -- a small image. No text. So, I removed the file. Blip. I then went to a "print" page of the columnist's article and downloaded it. I named it similarly, but not identically. Google Desktop Search now cannot find the new file. It keeps retrieving the original .gif file. It says: "The following file cannot be found . . . This may happen if you renamed or deleted this file." But I deleted a different file/name. Worse: I now cannot delete the .gif file. I cannot even find it on my hard drive in order to delete it. Yet Google keeps retrieving it, while ignoring the replacement. The program apparently cannot differentiate between the quick and the dead. They had better fix this problem. So, it's a beta program. Don't expect it to solve your data retrieval problems yet. But Google is serious about developing a useful piece of software. This is surely useful for e-mails now. It will get better. WHAT NEXT? You can use quotation marks to limit your search to a phrase. This is helpful, but only if you recall the exact phrase. The program should someday imitate Google's "Advanced Search" option. It will allow a search for only specific words, though not a single phrase. This will let us retrieve only those documents that contain all of these words. It should search PDF files someday. Google should create an on-line manual of tips on how to use this program efficiently. To do this, the company should hire a skilled instruction manual writer to work with a skilled user of the program. (These are never the same people.) PRIVACY A competing company, whose product, Copernic, I used to use, says that Google's product could become a privacy threat. The company has said that the threat is potential. Users can opt out of sharing information, which I did. If your computer is not secured by a password, then someone can access your e-mail, with or without Google Desktop Search. Your privacy problem is your lack of computer security. Don't confuse the issue. Google wants to protect its image as non-coercive. I have few fears that the company is going to use my files against me, especially when I opted out of data sharing. In any case, my files are sufficiently boring that I'm not worried about MP3- tracking by the RIAA, which was one example that the critic provided. I don't have any MP3 files. If I ever do, they will be lectures and sermons, which I am happy to share. MY SECOND DREAM I have a second dream regarding data storage and retrieval. I want to take notes verbally on a digital recorder that allows me to use a high quality external microphone like the Sennheiser 835e ($99), and then upload my voice files into speech- recognition dictation software: Naturally Speaking 7. Then I want to be able to retrieve these notes (Google). I'm still looking for the right digital recorder, although I think it will be a Sony. These notes will be long, especially if I'm summarizing a 500-page book. So, when I call up a file by means of keywords, the file may be very long. I want to be able to go right to the section I need to recall. I will therefore need keywords. I will dictate key words at any relevant point in a document. After verbally summarizing whatever I have been reading, I will tell the program "paragraph." It will create a new paragraph. Then I will dictate a string of keywords. Then I will say "paragraph." When it comes time to retrieve documents using these keywords, Google Desktop Search highlights in yellow the search words. This means that I can type in the search words and then rapidly scroll down the file, which will probably be in ASCII or e-mail text format. I will be able to skim rapidly. I can make skim reading faster by breaking up my notes into shorter files, such as summaries of just one chapter, and filing all of these chapters in one folder. This way, I can skim read a shorter file. The problem is, I may want the folder to summarize one book, or I may want the folder to relate to a single research project, which means notes taken from many sources. Or maybe I want both kinds of folders. This is not much of a problem any more. It was when I used physical folders. Google Desktop Search will spot the keywords. It pays no attention to folders. I will probably create one notes folder per verbally summarized book. If I summarize several of one author's books, I will create a large folder with his name, and then create sub- folders with each book's summary. I can also download book reviews from the Web. Now I'm going to let you in on a little-known fact. Universities today subscribe to many newspapers and journals on- line. These are library-paid subscriptions, not Web articles. If you go to a local university, you may be able to log on. Not all of them screen out visitors. Not all require passwords. You can read a full-text article on-line and then send the document to your email box. It depends on school policy. When you can do this kind of research at a local university, free of charge, you can assemble a huge data base. Google Desktop Search lets you manage a large data base. This program, when it's out of beta stage, will be a godsend for college students. Here is a tool to use in researching term papers. For graduate students, it will become indispensable. CONCLUSION If you want to retrieve lost e-mails, this program will help solve your problem. Someday, they will fix it, so that it will work well with downloaded Web pages. Then it will be a terrific tool. From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 19 16:48:38 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 12:48:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Bush vs. the Laureates: How Science Became a Partisan Issue Message-ID: Bush vs. the Laureates: How Science Became a Partisan Issue NYT October 19, 2004 By ANDREW C. REVKIN [This is kinda long and I have not read it, though I know it will be of great interest to several here. Let me know if I might read it.] Why is science seemingly at war with President Bush? For nearly four years, and with rising intensity, scientists in and out of government have criticized the Bush administration, saying it has selected or suppressed research findings to suit preset policies, skewed advisory panels or ignored unwelcome advice, and quashed discussion within federal research agencies. Administration officials see some of the criticism as partisan, and some perhaps a function of unrealistic expectations on the part of scientists about their role in policy debates. "This administration really does not like regulation and it believes in market processes in general," said Dr. John H. Marburger III, the president's science adviser, who is a Democrat. "So there's always going to be a tilt in an administration like this one to a certain set of actions that you take to achieve some policy objective," he went on. "In general, science may give you some limits and tell you some boundary conditions on that set of actions, but it really doesn't tell you what to do." Dr. Jesse H. Ausubel, an expert on energy and climate at Rockefeller University, said some of the bitterness expressed by other researchers could stem from their being excluded from policy circles that were open to them under previous administrations. "So these people who believe themselves important feel themselves belittled," he said. Indeed, much of the criticism has come from private groups, like the Union of Concerned Scientists and many environmental organizations, with long records of opposing positions the administration favors. Nevertheless, political action by scientists has not been so forceful since 1964, when Barry Goldwater's statements promoting the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons spawned the creation of the 100,000-member group Scientists and Engineers for Johnson. This year, 48 Nobel laureates dropped all pretense of nonpartisanship as they signed a letter endorsing Senator John Kerry. "Unlike previous administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, the Bush administration has ignored unbiased scientific advice in the policy making that is so important to our collective welfare," they wrote. The critics include members of past Republican administrations. And battles continue to erupt in government agencies over how to communicate research findings that might clash with administration policies. This month, three NASA scientists and several officials at NASA headquarters and at two agency research centers described how news releases on new global warming studies had been revised by administrators to play down definitiveness or risks. The scientists and officials said other releases had been delayed. "You have to be evenhanded in reporting science results, and it's apparent that there is a tendency for that not to be occurring now," said Dr. James E. Hansen, a climate expert who is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan. Glenn Mahone, the assistant administrator of NASA for public affairs, yesterday denied that any releases on climate had been held up or modified by anything other than normal reviews. "There has been a slowdown," he said. But he insisted, "There is nothing in terms of any kind of approval process with the White House." Earlier this year, after continuing complaints that the White House was asking litmus-test questions of nominees for scientific advisory panels, the first question asked of a candidate for a panel on Arctic issues, the candidate said, was: "Do you support the president?" When asked about such incidents, officials with the Bush campaign call attention to Mr. Bush's frequent queries to the National Academy of Sciences as evidence of his desire for good advice on technical issues. "This president believes in pursuing the best, most objective science, and his record proves that," said Brian Jones, a campaign spokesman. Yet complaints about the administration's approach to scientific information are coming even from within the government. Many career scientists and officials have expressed frustration and anger privately but were unwilling to be identified for fear of losing their jobs. But a few have stepped forward, including Dr. Hansen at NASA, who has been researching global warming and conveying its implications to Congress and the White House for two decades. Dr. Hansen, who was invited to brief the Bush cabinet twice on climate and whose work has been cited by Mr. Bush, said he had decided to speak publicly about the situation because he was convinced global warming posed a serious threat and that further delays in addressing it would add to the risks. "It's something that I've been worrying about for months," he said, describing his decision. "If I don't do something now I'll regret it. "Under the Clinton-Gore administration, you did have occasions when Al Gore knew the answer he wanted, and he got annoyed if you presented something that wasn't consistent with that," Dr. Hansen said. "I got a little fed up with him, but it was not institutionalized the way it is now." Under the Bush administration, he said, "they're picking and choosing information according to the answer that they want to get, and they've appointed so many people who are just focused on this that they really are having an impact on the day-to-day flow of information." Disputes between scientists and the administration have erupted over stem cell policy, population control and Iraq's nuclear weapons research. But nowhere has the clash been more intense or sustained than in the area of climate change. There the intensity of the disagreements has been stoked not only by disputes over claimed distortion or suppression of research findings, but on the other side by the enormous economic implications. Several dozen interviews with administration officials and with scientists in and out of government, along with a variety of documents, show that the core of the clash is over instances in which scientists say that objective and relevant information is ignored or distorted in service of pre-established policy goals. Scientists were essentially locked out of important internal White House debates; candidates for advisory panels were asked about their politics as well as their scientific work; and the White House exerted broad control over how scientific findings were to be presented in public reports or news releases. An Early Skirmish Climate emerged as a prickly issue in the first months of Mr. Bush's term, when the White House began forging its energy policy and focusing on ways to increase domestic use of coal and production of oil. In March 2001, a White House team used a single economic analysis by the Energy Department to build a case that Mr. Bush quickly used to back out of his campaign pledge to restrict power plant discharges of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. The analysis, from December 2000, was based on a number of assumptions, including one that no technological innovation would occur. The result showed that prompt cuts in carbon dioxide from power plants would weaken the economy. Other analyses, including some by other branches of the Department of Energy, drew different conclusions but were ignored. Advice from climate experts at the Environmental Protection Agency was sought but also ignored. A March 7 memorandum from agency experts to the White House team recommended that the carbon dioxide pledge be kept, saying the Energy Department study "was based on assumptions that do not apply" to Mr. Bush's plan and "inflates the costs of achieving carbon dioxide reductions." The memo was given to The New York Times by a former E.P.A. official who says science was not adequately considered. Nonetheless, the White House team stuck to its course, drafting a memo on March 8 to John Bridgeland, the president's domestic policy adviser, that used the energy study to argue for abandoning the campaign promise. None of the authors was a scientist. The team consisted of Cesar Conda, an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and now a political consultant; Andrew Lundquist, the White House energy policy director, who is now an energy lobbyist; Kyle E. McSlarrow, the chairman of Dan Quayle's 2000 presidential campaign and now deputy secretary of energy; Robert C. McNally Jr., an energy and economic analyst who is now an investment banker; Karen Knutson, a deputy on energy policy and a former Republican Senate aide; and Marcus Peacock, an analyst on science and energy issues from the Office of Management and Budget. They concluded that Mr. Bush could continue to say he believed that global warming was occurring but make a case that "any specific policy proposals or approaches aimed at addressing global warming must await further scientific inquiry." A copy of the memo was recently given to The New York Times by a White House adviser at the time who now disagrees with the administration's chosen policies. The Environmental Protection Agency tried one more time to argue that Mr. Bush should not change course. In a section of a March 9 memo to the White House headed "Global warming science is compelling," agency officials said: "The science is strongest on the fact that carbon dioxide is contributing, and will continue to contribute, to global climate change. The greatest scientific uncertainties concern how fast the climate will change and what will be the regional impacts. Even within these bands of uncertainty, however, it is clear that global warming is an issue that must be addressed." On March 13, Mr. Bush signed and sent a letter to four Republican senators who had sought clarification of the administration's climate plans. In it, Mr. Bush described the Energy Department study as "important new information that warrants a re-evaluation, especially at a time of rising energy prices and a serious energy shortage." He said reconsideration of the carbon dioxide curbs was particularly appropriate "given the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change." The letter also reiterated his longstanding opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, the climate treaty now moving toward enactment in almost all other industrialized countries. In the next months, the White House set up a series of briefings on climate science and economics for the cabinet and also sought the advice of the National Academy of Sciences. The experts convened by the academy reaffirmed the scientific consensus that recent warming has human causes and that significant risks lie ahead. But the administration's position on what to do has not changed. Hidden Assumptions A handful of experts who have worked on climate policy in the Bush and Clinton administrations say that both tried to skew information to favor policies, but that there were distinct differences. Andrew G. Keeler, who until June 2001 was on the president's Council of Economic Advisers and has since returned to teaching at the University of Georgia, said the Clinton administration had also played with economic calculations of the costs of curbing carbon dioxide emissions, in its case to show that limiting emissions would not be expensive. But it made available all of the assumptions that went into its analysis, he said; by contrast, the Bush administration drew contorted conclusions but never revealed the details. "The Clinton administration got these lowest possible costs by taking every assumption that would bias them down," he said. "But they were very clear about what the assumptions were. Anybody who wanted to could wade through them." Tilting the Discussion Some of the loudest criticisms of the administration on climate science have centered on changes to reports and other government documents dealing with the causes and consequences of global warming. Political appointees have regularly revised news releases on climate from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, altering headlines and opening paragraphs to play down the continuing global warming trend. The changes are often subtle, but they consistently shift the meaning of statements away from a sense that things are growing warmer in unusual ways. The pattern has appeared in reports from other agencies as well. Several sets of drafts and final press releases from NOAA on temperature trends were provided to The Times by government employees who said they were dismayed by the practice. On Aug. 14, 2003, a news release summarizing July temperature patterns began as a draft with this headline: "NOAA reports record and near-record July heat in the West, cooler than average in the East, global temperature much warmer than average." When it emerged from NOAA headquarters, it read: "NOAA reports cooler, wetter than average in the East, hot in the West." Such efforts have continued in recent weeks. Scientists at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a leading research center studying climate, worked with public affairs officials last month to finish a release on new studies explaining why Antarctica had experienced cooling while most of the rest of the world had warmed. The results, just published in a refereed scientific journal, showed that the depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctica had temporarily shifted atmospheric conditions in a way that cooled the region, but that as the layer heals in coming decades, Antarctica would quickly warm. The headline initially approved by the agency's public affairs office and the scientists was "Cool Antarctica May Warm Rapidly This Century, Study Finds." The version that finally emerged on Oct. 6 after review by political appointees was titled "Study Shows Potential for Antarctic Climate Change." More significant than such changes has been the scope and depth of involvement by administration appointees in controlling information flowing through the farthest reaches of government on issues that could undermine policies. Jeffrey Ruch, who runs Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a network for whistle-blowers who identify government actions that violate environmental laws or rules, said the Bush administration had taken information control to a level far beyond that of its predecessor. "The Clinton administration was less organized and systematic, with lots of infighting, kind of like the old Will Rogers joke 'I belong to no organized political party; I'm a Democrat,' '' Mr. Ruch said. "This group, for good or ill, is much more centralized," he added. "It's very controlled in the sense that almost no decision, even personnel decisions, can be made without clearance from the top. In the realm of science that becomes problematic, because science isn't neat like that." Dr. Marburger, the president's science adviser, defended such changes. "This administration clearly has an attitude about climate change and climate science, and it's much more cautious than the previous administration," Dr. Marburger said. "This administration also tries to be consistent in its messages. It's an inevitable consequence that you're going to get this kind of tuning up of language." Choosing Advisers Another area where the issue of scientific distortion keeps surfacing is in the composition of advisory panels. In a host of instances documented in news reports and by groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, candidates have been asked about their politics. In March 2003, the American Association for the Advancement of Science criticized thosequeries, saying in a statement that the practice "compromises the integrity of the process of receiving advice and is inappropriate." Despite three years of charges that it is remaking scientific and medical advisory panels to favor the goals of industry or social conservatives, the White House has continued to ask some panel nominees not only about their political views, but explicitly whether they support Mr. Bush. One recent candidate was Prof. Sharon L. Smith, an expert on Arctic marine ecology at the University of Miami. On March 12, she received a call from the White House. She had been nominated to take a seat about to open up on the Arctic Research Commission, a panel of presidential appointees that helps shape research on issues in the far north, including the debate over oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The woman calling from the White House office of presidential personnel complimented her r?sum?, Dr. Smith recalled, then asked the first and - as it turned out - only question: "Do you support the president?" "I was taking notes," Dr. Smith recalled. "I'm thinking I've lost my mind. I was in total shock. I'd never been asked that before." She responded she was not a fan of Mr. Bush's economic and foreign policies. "That was the end of the interview," she said. "I was removed from consideration instantly." In interviews, senior administration officials said that most advisory panels reflected a broad array of opinions and backgrounds and that Mr. Bush had the right at least to know where candidates stood on his policies. "The people who end up on these panels tend to be pretty diverse and clearly don't all support the president's policies," Dr. Marburger said. "I think you'd have to say that the question is not a litmus-test question. It's perfectly acceptable for the president to know if someone he's appointing to one of his advisory committees supports his policies or not." Inevitable Tension To some extent, the war between science and the administration is a culture clash, both supporters and critics of Mr. Bush say. "He uses a Sharpie pen," said John L. Howard Jr., a former adviser to Mr. Bush on the environment in both the White House and the Texas statehouse. "He's not a pencil with an eraser kind of guy." In the campaign, Mr. Bush's team has portrayed this trait as an asset. His critics in the sciences say it is a dangerous liability. Dr. Marburger argues that when scientific information is flowing through government agencies, the executive branch has every right to sift for inconsistencies and adjust the tone to suit its policies, as long as the result remains factual. He said the recent ferment, including the attacks from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Democrats and environmental groups, all proved that the system works and that objective scientific information ultimately comes to the surface. "I think people overestimate the power of government to affect science," he said. "Science has so many self-correcting aspects that I'm not really worried about these things." He acknowledged that environmental and medical issues, in particular, would continue to have a difficult time in the policy arena, because the science was fundamentally more murky than in, say, physics or chemistry. "I'm a physicist," Dr. Marburger said. "I know what you have to do to design an experiment where you get an unambiguous result. There is nothing like that in health and environment." The situation is not likely to get better any time soon, say a host of experts, in part because of the growing array of issues either underlaid by science, like global warming, or created by science, like genetic engineering and cloning. "Since the Sputnik era we have not seen science and technology so squarely in the center of the radar screen for people in either the executive branch or Congress," said Charles M. Vest, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. "I think it's inevitable we're going to have increasing conflicts and arguments about the role it plays in policy." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/science/19poli.html From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 19 16:51:27 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 12:51:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Dawkins) 'The Ancestor's Tale': You Are Here Message-ID: 'The Ancestor's Tale': You Are Here New York Times Book Review, 4.10.17 By CARL ZIMMER THE ANCESTOR'S TALE A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. By Richard Dawkins. Illustrated. 673 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $28. I once attended a conference about systematics -- the classification of species -- and felt as if I were looking at Mount Rushmore with a magnifying glass. The names alone -- Tetraconata, Amoebozoa, Ecdysozoa, Oomycota, Neomeniomorpha -- were overwhelming. Speaker after speaker hypothesized about how various species were related -- whether springtails or bristletails were the closest relatives of winged insects, whether sponges all descended from a common ancestor, whether slime molds are really molds. I stumbled out of the lecture hall desperate for the big picture. And suddenly I saw it, on a five-foot-square poster taped to a wall. It showed an evolutionary tree by David Hillis of the University of Texas and his colleagues. The tree displayed the relationships of 3,000 species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes. The scientists drew it as a kind of a surreal bicycle wheel, each species represented as a tip of a branch along its rim. As my eye moved toward the center of the tree, I moved back through time, our own branch joining together with that of chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Farther in, all living mammals merged into a common ancestor, and then all vertebrates, and then all animals. The deepest branches of the tree met at the very center, which represented the common ancestor of all living things. Hillis's tree included only a sampling of life's diversity, which has been estimated at 10 million to 100 million species. Yet its tiny branch tips were so densely packed that it was hard to find our own. Fortunately, the poster included a big arrow pointing to Homo sapiens, reading: ''You are here.'' The tree of life was Darwin's greatest and most dislocating discovery. Our species is not the center of nature; it is one among millions of branches, its ancestry mingled with that of pufferfish and puffballs. Yet outside of systematics circles, few people understand how scientists assemble the tree of life, or use it to learn how life has evolved. In ''The Ancestor's Tale,'' the Oxford University zoologist Richard Dawkins offers a tour through the tree's thickety depths. Dawkins, the author of the scientific classics ''The Selfish Gene'' and ''The Blind Watchmaker,'' is an excellent guide, both a profoundly original scientific thinker and a marvelously adept explainer. He organizes ''The Ancestor's Tale'' as a pilgrimage, leading readers from the tip of our own branch down to the base of the tree of life. He moves back through time, stopping occasionally so we humans can be joined by related species -- first by chimpanzees, which share a common ancestor with us six million to seven million years ago, then by gorillas, orangutans, gibbons, Old World monkeys and so on. Dawkins patterns his book on ''The Canterbury Tales'' of Chaucer, breaking it up into ''The Marsupial Mole's Tale,'' ''The Elephant Bird's Tale'' and many others. In each tale he looks at an aspect of the tree of life or at evolution in general. Together, the tales add up to an encyclopedia that sheds light on some of the stranger features of the tree of life. For example, it is tempting to look at the platypus, a duck-billed mammal that lays eggs, as a living fossil trapped in the past. In fact, the platypus is no more primitive than we are. True, its ancestors branched off from our own some 180 million years ago, before our more recent ancestors evolved placentas and live births. But the ancestors of today's platypuses were not frozen in time. They evolved sophisticated adaptations of their own, like sense organs in their bills that can detect faint electric fields produced by other animals. From this perspective, it is humans who are the living fossils. Dawkins not only makes an important point here, but does it with flair. He eloquently describes how platypuses combine information from electric-sense organs with signals from mechanical sensors in their bills, likening the process to our measuring how far away a lightning bolt strikes by comparing the flash to the thunder. ''When you think of a platypus, forget duck,'' he writes. ''Think huge hand feeling its way, by remote pins and needles; think lightning flash and thunder rumbling, through the watery mud of Australia.'' As enlightening as ''The Ancestor's Tale'' is, it could have been better. Dawkins clearly wanted it to be more literary, evocative and personal than his previous books. But his efforts are often awkward and halfhearted, as when he writes about earthworms. ''I am privileged to have seen giant earthworms (Megascolides australis), in Australia, said to be capable of growing to four meters long,'' he announces. Cool, the reader thinks -- let's hear what that was like. But Dawkins abruptly abandons earthworms altogether. The structure of ''The Ancestor's Tale'' could have been better as well. The backward pilgrimage is a brilliant inspiration, which allows Dawkins to ease us into our kinship with the rest of life. Neanderthals come early in the book because of all other species they were our closest relatives. It's not too much of a stretch to see a bond in Neanderthals because they look so much like us. A jellyfish, on the other hand, doesn't exactly seem like family. In part, that's because the common ancestor of jellyfish and humans lived perhaps a billion years ago. But Dawkins introduces us to jellyfish only deep in the book, after we've met many closer relatives. At the same time, though, the book is wildly lopsided. Dawkins spends nearly 500 pages on animals, and 100 on all other life forms. Fungi, estimated to total 1.5 million species, get four pages. The vast bulk of life, whether measured by sheer biomass or by genetic diversity, lies outside the animal kingdom. And not all the lessons about evolution that the animal kingdom offers apply outside its borders. While animals generally evolve into new species when populations become isolated, plants can also form a new species when two existing species interbreed. Fungi are even weirder. They can form vast subterranean networks of threadlike growths, which sometimes fuse with other networks, mingling their DNA so that they wind up as strange genetic chimeras, defying our notion of what it means to be a genetically distinct individual. Bacteria and other microbes are even more casual with their genes, trading them like baseball cards. Evolution not only has a different flavor outside the animal kingdom; it also may give the tree of life a different shape. Some scientists today argue that early life did not follow the regular branching pattern of evolution seen in animals. Instead of a tree, a better metaphor might be a ring or a web. These are some of the most important, most fascinating lines of research in evolutionary biology, but Dawkins skims over them. Despite these shortcomings, this is an ambitious, important book rich with fascinating insights. Also, it couldn't come at a better time. Evolutionary trees have become the lingua franca of biology. Virus hunters draw them to find the origin of SARS and H.I.V. Conservation biologists draw them to decide which endangered species are in most urgent need of saving. Geneticists draw them to pinpoint the genes that have made us uniquely humans. Genome sequencers draw them to discover new genes that may lead to new technologies and medical treatments. If you want to understand these trees -- and through them, the nature of life -- ''The Ancestor's Tale'' is an excellent place to start. Carl Zimmer's books include ''Soul Made Flesh'' and ''Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea.'' He also writes ''The Loom,'' a blog about evolution. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/books/review/17ZIMMERL.html From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 19 16:59:57 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 12:59:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Op-Ed: Imagining America if George Bush Chose the Supreme Court Message-ID: Imagining America if George Bush Chose the Supreme Court New York Times Op-Ed, 4.10.18 By ADAM COHEN [This is an unusually stupid opinion piece, if only because Supreme Court justices have to be confirmed by the entire Senate, not the most "right-wing" subset of Republicans. In order to get his nominations through, Bush has generally proposed "moderates." This kind of fear mongering used to be a monopoly of Republicans, but now the Democrats have caught up, just as the Republicans have caught up with the Democrats in looting the public fisc. Democratic looting has been around so long it is part of the general background noise. This means the new, innovative looting by Republicans looks alarming. [Choice quotations from Mr. Mencken are badly needed at this hour.] Abortion might be a crime in most states. Gay people could be thrown in prison for having sex in their homes. States might be free to become mini-theocracies, endorsing Christianity and using tax money to help spread the gospel. The Constitution might no longer protect inmates from being brutalized by prison guards. Family and medical leave and environmental protections could disappear. It hardly sounds like a winning platform, and of course President Bush isn't openly espousing these positions. But he did say in his last campaign that his favorite Supreme Court justices were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and the nominations he has made to the lower courts bear that out. Justices Scalia and Thomas are often called "conservative," but that does not begin to capture their philosophies. Both vehemently reject many of the core tenets of modern constitutional law. For years, Justices Scalia and Thomas have been lobbing their judicial Molotov cocktails from the sidelines, while the court proceeded on its moderate-conservative path. But given the ages and inclinations of the current justices, it is quite possible that if Mr. Bush is re-elected, he will get three appointments, enough to forge a new majority that would turn the extreme Scalia-Thomas worldview into the law of the land. There is every reason to believe Roe v. Wade would quickly be overturned. Mr. Bush ducked a question about his views on Roe in the third debate. But he sent his base a coded message in the second debate, with an odd reference to the Dred Scott case. Dred Scott, an 1857 decision upholding slavery, is rarely mentioned today, except in right-wing legal circles, where it is often likened to Roe. (Anti-abortion theorists say that the court refused to see blacks as human in Dred Scott and that the same thing happened to fetuses in Roe.) For more than a decade, Justices Scalia and Thomas have urged their colleagues to reverse Roe and "get out of this area, where we have no right to be." If Roe is lost, the Center for Reproductive Rights warns, there's a good chance that 30 states, home to more than 70 million women, will outlaw abortions within a year; some states may take only weeks. Criminalization will sweep well beyond the Bible Belt: Ohio could be among the first to drive young women to back-alley abortions and prosecute doctors. If Justices Scalia and Thomas become the Constitution's final arbiters, the rights of racial minorities, gay people and the poor will be rolled back considerably. Both men dissented from the Supreme Court's narrow ruling upholding the University of Michigan's affirmative-action program, and appear eager to dismantle a wide array of diversity programs. When the court struck down Texas' "Homosexual Conduct" law last year, holding that the police violated John Lawrence's right to liberty when they raided his home and arrested him for having sex there, Justices Scalia and Thomas sided with the police. They were just as indifferent to the plight of "M.L.B.," a poor mother of two from Mississippi. When her parental rights were terminated, she wanted to appeal, but Mississippi would not let her because she could not afford a court fee of $2,352.36. The Supreme Court held that she had a constitutional right to appeal. But Justices Scalia and Thomas dissented, arguing that if M.L.B. didn't have the money, her children would have to be put up for adoption. That sort of cruelty is a theme running through many Scalia-Thomas opinions. A Louisiana inmate sued after he was shackled and then punched and kicked by two prison guards while a supervisor looked on. The court ruled that the beating, which left the inmate with a swollen face, loosened teeth and a cracked dental plate, violated the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But Justices Scalia and Thomas insisted that the Eighth Amendment was not violated by the "insignificant" harm the inmate suffered. This year, the court heard the case of a man with a court appearance in rural Tennessee who was forced to either crawl out of his wheelchair and up to the second floor or be carried up by court officers he worried would drop him. The man crawled up once, but when he refused to do it again, he was arrested. The court ruled that Tennessee violated the Americans With Disabilities Act by not providing an accessible courtroom, but Justices Scalia and Thomas said it didn't have to. A Scalia-Thomas court would dismantle the wall between church and state. Justice Thomas gave an indication of just how much in his opinion in a case upholding Ohio's school voucher program. He suggested, despite many Supreme Court rulings to the contrary, that the First Amendment prohibition on establishing a religion may not apply to the states. If it doesn't, the states could adopt particular religions, and use tax money to proselytize for them. Justices Scalia and Thomas have also argued against basic rights of criminal suspects, like the Miranda warning about the right to remain silent. President Bush claims to want judges who will apply law, not make it. But Justices Scalia and Thomas are judicial activists, eager to use the fast-expanding federalism doctrine to strike down laws that protect people's rights. Last year, they dissented from a decision upholding the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees most workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one. They said Congress did not have that power. They have expressed a desire to strike down air pollution and campaign finance laws for similar reasons. Neither President Bush nor John Kerry has said much about Supreme Court nominations, wary of any issue whose impact on undecided voters cannot be readily predicted. But voters have to think about the Supreme Court. If President Bush gets the chance to name three young justices who share the views of Justices Scalia and Thomas, it could fundamentally change America for decades. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/18/opinion/18mon3.html From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 19 17:02:12 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 13:02:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Derrida, a Pioneer of Literary Theory, Dies Message-ID: Derrida, a Pioneer of Literary Theory, Dies The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.10.22 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i09/09a00101.htm French philosopher created concept of 'deconstruction' By SCOTT McLEMEE Jacques Derrida, the thinker whose concept of "deconstruction" influenced at least two generations of scholarship in the humanities, died in Paris on October 8 at the age of 74. The director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, Derrida also held a professorship at the University of California at Irvine, beginning in 1986. Irvine houses an archive of Derrida's manuscripts. His frequent seminars and lectures at American universities gave audiences here a sense of eavesdropping on the thinker's work in progress. Since the 1980s, the time between the publication of his books, essays, and interviews in French and their translation has grown ever shorter. In some cases, works appeared first in English. His recent books have included Arguing with Derrida (Blackwell, 2002), Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With J?rgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press, 2003), and For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue (Stanford University Press, 2004). News that the philosopher was being treated for pancreatic cancer had been circulating among his students and admirers since the spring of 2003. In a statement, Jacques Chirac, the French president, announced the death "with sadness," calling Derrida "one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time," whose work was "read, discussed, and taught around the world." The evaluation of Derrida's complex legacy (always a topic of heated debate, informed and otherwise) will undoubtedly continue for years to come, particularly in the United States. One of Derrida's earliest formulations of deconstruction -- the landmark essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" -- was delivered at a now-legendary conference at the Johns Hopkins University in 1966. In a paper titled "How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida" that appeared in the American Journal of Sociology in 1987, Mich?le Lamont, now a professor of sociology at Harvard University, treated Derrida as a thinker with a rather canny grasp of the intellectual marketplace. In France, Derrida published his early essays in avant-garde cultural journals such as Tel Quel and Critique, thereby "targeting his work to a large cultural public rather than to a shrinking group of academic philosophers." In the United States, by contrast, "professional institutions and journals played a central role in the diffusion of his work" -- in particular, the institutions and journals in the discipline of literary scholarship. "Deconstruction was an answer to a disciplinary crisis," wrote Ms. Lamont. "The legitimacy of literature departments had been consistently weakened by the increased pressure for academic research oriented toward social needs." Derrida's work was neglected by academic philosophers in the United States, at least until recently. By contrast, deconstruction revitalized literary studies by introducing a challenging new mode of analyzing texts -- and the controversy provoked by Derrida's reception within American academe boosted his renown to new heights. Shrewd player of the intellectual stock market though he may have been, Derrida left his mark not just on scholarship but on the imagination. Traces of deconstructive influence run throughout the essays and novels of Samuel R. Delany, a professor of English at Temple University, who has won numerous awards for his science fiction as well as the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to lesbian and gay literature. Mr. Delany described himself as "shaken" by news of Derrida's death. "He made us look again, read again," wrote Mr. Delany in an e-mail message, "and he made us recontextualize what we read, because he saw that context expands infinitely, until, when we are exhausted by that expansion's velocity and inclusiveness, we erect some fiction of intention, completed and in place, to justify our failure to go on." The Birth of a Movement Derrida was born in Algeria, then a French colony, in 1930. In interviews and autobiographical writings, he recalled when "state anti-Semitism was unleashed" in the early 1940s, which led to his expulsion from school in 1942. At the same time, he said, he never felt "integrated" into the Jewish community in Algeria. After he arrived in France in 1950, his academic career was both distinguished and a bit rocky. He twice failed the entrance exam for the ?cole Normale Sup?rieure, the hothouse for the country's intellectual elite, before gaining admittance in 1952. He spent the 1956-57 academic year at Harvard University, followed by two years of military service in Algeria, where he taught school. Following various appointments upon returning to France, he joined the faculty as a professor of philosophy at the ?cole Normale in 1965. Three seemingly unrelated influences combined in the work Derrida began publishing around that time. The first was his immersion in the writings of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger -- two German philosophers who offered exacting studies of philosophical questions about meaning and how those problems were framed. Derrida's first book was a translation and analysis of an essay by Husserl on geometry. The second current sweeping through French intellectual life in that era was structuralism. Borrowing models from linguistics, thinkers such as Claude L?vi-Strauss and Roland Barthes tried to work out the deepest structures of cultural and social phenomena. If an endless variety of sentences can be produced on the basis of some fundamental patterns of grammar and syntax, the structuralists thought, the diverse forms of mythology or kinship systems also might be the result of a deep set of rules. Some of Derrida's early essays are critiques of structuralist theory. And finally, there was the influence of modernist literature, such as the work of St?phane Mallarm?, whose poetry in French is considered virtually untranslatable. Derrida also read the fiction of James Joyce, which he recalled discovering during his year at Harvard. And he was fascinated by Antonin Artaud, the poet and theater director considered too extreme by the surrealists. Derrida not only published essays on each of these authors, but borrowed from their stylistic experimentation -- in effect, erasing the difference between philosophy and literature. He offered not so much a theory as a new way of reading. The deconstructive analysis of literary or philosophical writings teased out nuggets of inescapable complexity. Reading a dialogue by Plato, a scene in Shakespeare, or one of Freud's essays, Derrida would locate a moment when some concept or image proved impossible to reconcile with whatever theme or argument seemed to drive the rest of the work. Then, from that interpretive sticking point, he would work his way back through the text, patiently revealing intricate networks of meaning and otherwise hidden levels of internal conflict. It was an approach that could push one's intellectual stamina to the limits. In her novel about the French literati of the 1960s and '70s, The Samurai, Julia Kristeva, a professor of literature at the University of Paris, portrays Derrida as the character Sa?da, whose seminars "irritated the philosophers and reduced the literature merchants to silence." (Both, she writes, "were confronted with their own transcendental stupidity.") He "broke down every word into its minutest elements, and from these seeds produced shoots so flexible he could later weave them into his own dreams, his own literature, rather ponderous but as profound as it was inaccessible." Sa?da's method is called "condestruction," just in case the reader doesn't get the hint. "This," the novel goes on, "was how he started to acquire his reputation as a guru, which was to overwhelm the United States and the American feminists." A less sardonic account of this appeal to young American intellectuals came from Peggy Kamuf, the translator of numerous works by Derrida, including Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (Routledge, 1994) and Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford University Press, 1998). Ms. Kamuf, a professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California, recalled what it was like to read Derrida as a graduate student at Cornell University in 1970. "There was a sense of urgency when we encountered it," she said, "urgency in the context of the American political circumstances at the time. It was a few months after Kent State. But we were intellectuals who were not willing just to condemn the university, to renounce rigor of thought, in order to get out into the streets." Derrida's theory, she said, offered a way to perform serious intellectual work in the humanities while maintaining "that urgency of response to the abuses of power" that fed political engagement. Another student of that era spoke of the exhilaration Derrida's work provoked in the early years of the deconstructive invasion. "For those of us in literature," said Forest Pyle, an associate professor of English at the University of Oregon, "it was extraordinarily exciting to see a philosopher reading texts in a way that was rigorous and careful, that showed things that had remained unseen before." As an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1970s, Mr. Pyle studied with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who had translated Derrida's book Of Grammatology. The introduction by Ms. Spivak, who is now a professor of humanities at Columbia University, offered the first comprehensive account of deconstruction available in English. Opposing Forces If some scholars found deconstruction exhilarating, others found it alarming. Ren? Wellek, an eminent figure in comparative literature and the author of an eight-volume history of literary theory and criticism, denounced the approach in The New Criterion in 1983, saying that Derrida had provided "license to the arbitrary spinning of metaphors, to the stringing of puns, to mere language games." Deconstruction, he wrote, "has encouraged utter caprice, extreme subjectivity, and hence the destruction of the very concepts of knowledge and truth." In reply to such complaints, Derrida loyalists could readily cite passages in which the thinker insisted that he respected "all the instruments of traditional criticism" -- since otherwise, "critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything." In an interview appearing in Critical Intellectuals on Writing (State University of New York Press, 2003), Derrida recalled that his high-school and university years were "very hard and heavy, very demanding according to classical norms. . . . When I take liberties, it's always by measuring the distance from the standards I know or that I've been rigorously trained in." By the late 1970s, deconstruction itself was setting the standards, at least in some quarters of American literary study. A prominent group of literary critics at Yale University (including Paul de Man, Geoffrey H. Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller) used Derridean methods to analyze Romantic and Victorian literature. The "Yale school" of critical theorists was also known, not always affectionately, as "the deconstruction mafia." (An English department joke of the early 1980s involved Paul de Man as the godfather, "making you an offer you can't understand.") As Yale graduate students fanned out across the country, they met resistance -- and not just from those who rejected deconstruction itself. Other currents influenced by Derrida stressed his roots in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger or sought to bring Derrida together with Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial concerns. The field of deconstructionist literary scholarship underwent a severe crisis following the revelation, in 1987, that de Man, arguably the most influential critic associated with Derrida, had published numerous articles in a collaborationist newspaper in Belgium during World War II. That same year, a well-publicized book on Heidegger's membership in the Nazi party provoked still more soul-searching among French deconstructionist thinkers and their American acolytes. In 1991, Richard Wolin, now a professor of history and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, translated an interview with Derrida for a volume called The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Columbia University Press). Mr. Wolin had secured permission to reprint the interview from the French newsweekly in which it had appeared, but Derrida objected. The press withdrew the original printing of the book after being contacted by Derrida's lawyer. An article about the matter appeared in The New York Review of Books in 1993, following the publication of a new edition of the book by MIT Press, minus the interview. The letters-to-the-editor column soon filled up, especially after Derrida and his lawyer began contributing to it. Whatever the merits of the case, it was a remarkable spectacle. A thinker who had repeatedly questioned the institution of authorship itself (saying that a writer's name "is first the name of a problem") proved vigilant in defending his claim to intellectual property. But by then, the dispute seemed an echo of the past -- at least in literary studies, where other theoretical approaches had replaced deconstruction in setting the central terms for debate. Residual Influence While his American readers argued over how to understand his work from earlier years -- or how to handle the embarrassing disclosures about de Man and Heidegger -- Derrida himself continued to publish at a bewildering pace, including writings on art criticism, law, psychoanalysis, and social theory. He also began to emerge as a kind of theologian sui generis. "He acquired a whole new life in the academy in the last 15 years or so," said John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University, and the author of The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Indiana University Press, 1997). "He began to talk about what he called 'the undeconstructible.' ... The idea that deconstruction could be carried out in the name of something undeconstructible -- you just didn't hear from literary folks. But in his later work, he began to talk about the undeconstructibility of justice, of democracy, of friendship, of hospitality." Some scholars have referred to "the ethico-political turn" in Derrida's work during the 1990s, though others see such concerns as a continuous strand in his work. Michael Hardt, an associate professor of comparative literature at Duke University, says that all of Derrida's work contains a "primary political insight": that in "even the most seemingly progressive identity, there is always some remainder, some people excluded, left out, abject." That creates an ethical and moral imperative "to attend to that remainder" that, Mr. Hardt says, "has been enormously influential for my generation and indeed several generations of political scholars." And for a period in the mid-1980s, Derrida "became all the rage among some people in the legal community," notes Larry D. Kramer, dean of the law school at Stanford University. "Legal scholars applied deconstructive theory to show that legal rules had no substance beyond the power that they masked." It was not a new idea; similar arguments had been made by the legal-realist school and others. "But Derrida helped hit the point home," says Mr. Kramer. "His influence faded, but it didn't disappear. It left a residue." Almost a dozen years after his clash with Derrida in the pages of the New York Review of Books, Mr. Wolin is skeptical of claims about this "ethico-political turn." In an e-mail note, he writes that the thinker's work offered "a fitting apologia pro vita sua for those who were condemned to spend the majority of their waking hours chained to a study carrel in the library." In a chapter of his 2004 book The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press), Mr. Wolin writes that Derrida's effort at political relevance "threatens to collapse under the weight of a series of postmodern banalities and cliches." Talmudic Traces Mr. Caputo, however, insists that Derrida's later thought does move in new directions. "The idea of something of unconditional value begins to emerge in Derrida's work," he says, "something that makes an unconditional claim on us, So the deconstruction of this or that begins to look a little bit like the critique of idols in Jewish theology." Some commentators have wondered whether Derrida's exacting attention to texts might not make him, in effect, a secular practitioner of the reading skills cultivated by centuries of Talmudic scholars. Indeed, he had hinted as much himself: His book, Writing and Difference, first published in 1967, closes with a quotation attributed to a rabbi named Derrisa. More and more of his writing began to take the form of an overt dialogue with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, a French Jewish thinker who worked at the intersection of Heideggerian philosophy, ethical reflection, and biblical commentary. In 2002, Derrida gave the keynote address at the convention of the American Academy of Religion, held in Toronto. Speaking to a crowded auditorium, the philosopher said, "I rightly pass for an atheist" -- a puzzling formulation, by any measure. Mr. Caputo recalled that other scholars asked Derrida, "Why don't you just say, 'Je suis. I am an atheist'?" Derrida replied, "Because I don't know. Maybe I'm not an atheist." "He meant that, I think, the name of God was important for him," said Mr. Caputo, "even if, by the standards of the local pastor or rabbi, he was an atheist. The name of God was tremendously important for him because it was one of the ways that we could name the unconditional, the undeconstructible." (It also sounds, in hindsight, like a reasonably safe metaphysical wager.) French cultural life contains a long tradition of eulogistic essays in which one distinguished intellectual pays tribute to another. Derrida wrote his share of these memorial tributes over the years. In 2001, the University of Chicago Press published a collection of them, The Work of Mourning. In 1995, when the philosopher Gilles Deleuze committed suicide after several years of deteriorating health, Derrida wrote: "Each death is unique, of course, and therefore unusual. But what can one say about the unusual when, from Barthes to Althusser, from Foucault to Deleuze, it multiplies, as in a series?" One of the translators of The Work of Mourning was Michael Naas, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University, in Chicago. In an e-mail message, Mr. Naas spoke for many other people in calling Derrida "an extremely generous and faithful friend to so many scholars and students throughout the world -- and especially here in the United States." Derrida, he recalled, "often said that at the death of a friend what one loses is not simply a part of our world but someone who opened up our world -- who opened up the world -- for us." Even those who did not admire Derrida, let alone consider him a friend, may have the sense that, with his death, an era has reached an end. Or a beginning. DERRIDA: SIGNS OF HIS LIFE July 1930: Jacques Derrida, son of a commercial traveler for a French wine company, is born in Algeria. 1956: Graduates from ?cole Normale Sup?rieure. Goes to Harvard University for postgraduate work. 1962: Publishes translation into French of Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry, with long introduction. 1967: Publishes three books introducing deconstruction: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. 1972: Publishes another theoretical tripleheader: Dissemination, Positions, and Margins of Philosophy. Early 1980s: Most early books available in English translation. Late 1980s: Writes books and essays on Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger, who were accused of Nazi sympathies. 1994: Publishes Specters of Marx after decades of speculation among readers over relationship between Marxism and deconstruction. Late 1990s: Produces numerous seminars and books on ethical and religious questions. 2002: Derrida: The Film shows philosopher lecturing, writing, walking around his house, having his hair cut. Spring 2003: Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. With J?rgen Habermas, signs public statement criticizing U.S. invasion of Iraq. Spring 2004: Tells American friends that he finds working difficult. Translation of Rogues, his recent book on the philosophical implications of the contemporary international situation, is under way. October 2004: Dies in Paris. From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 19 17:04:28 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 13:04:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: An Interview with Francis Fukuyama by Joseph E. Davis Message-ID: An Interview with Francis Fukuyama by Joseph E. Davis The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=360681&textreg=1&id=DavFuku4-3 Francis Fukuyama is Bernard Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. He has written widely on questions concerning democratization, the role of culture and social capital in modern economic life, and the social consequences of new technology. His books include The End of History and the Last Man (1992); The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999); and Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002). Joseph E. Davis is Research Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He is also the Program Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and Co-Director of the Center on Religion and Democracy. You are best known for your writing on liberal democracy and the nature of politics, but your recent book, The Great Disruption, dealt in part with information technology, and your new book, Our Posthuman Future, deals with biotechnology. How is your concern with liberal democracy and political institutions connected to your concern with new technologies? The issue that I've been thinking about for some time has to do with this whole question of how technology impacts politics. It actually started with a study group on the information revolution and world politics that I started seven or eight years ago, and it gradually broadened because the sponsor really liked it and said, "why don't you look at other issues in science," one of which was biotechnology. The more I started thinking about biotechnology and reading about it, the more it seemed to me that this was the more consequential of the two ongoing technology revolutions. So that was one origin of my interest. Compared to information technology, the impact of biotechnology on politics is potentially quite different. It has become a clich? at this point to say that the IT revolution has been good for democracy, but I think, like a lot of clich?s, it's got something to it. IT tends to spread out power rather than concentrate it, and it gives ordinary people access to valuable information. But what would happen if you had a real cognitive neuroscience, for example, that understood the biological bases of behavior and gave you tools for manipulating it? That would make possible certain forms of social engineering that by the end of the 20^th century we had thought were pretty much dead. I guess that's the central concern that animates this current book. In a certain sense, liberal democracy emerged preeminent at the end of the 20^th century because of the failure of the more utopian types of social revolutionary programs to actually shape human behavior and re-engineer societies in a way that the planners had hoped for. It could be that with better understanding of the brain we could see new political possibilities arise. There's also a broader context for this interest that speaks more to my earlier book The Great Disruption. It's been fascinating to me as a social scientist watching the development of the life sciences over the past generation or so because we've moved from this extreme of social constructionism in our views of how human behavior is shaped to one that has restored some real substance to the idea of human nature. This is a development that I think a lot of people in different parts of the academy haven't really taken on board, and that was a key interest I had in writing The Great Disruption. I want to come back to the question of human nature, but let me first ask about a couple of issues that always seem to come up when concerns are expressed about biotechnology. The first is the issue of inevitability. There's a lot of comment on the economic forces driving the advance of biotechnology. The claim is made that these technologies can't be stopped or effectively regulated. What do you say to that? People are probably thinking about different things when they talk about inevitability. In terms of the simple accumulation of human knowledge and the basic science, I think it's probably right that most of that is unstoppable. But in terms of technological applications and particularly with regard to developments that involve choices of where society decides to put its money, it's simply not the case that things are unstoppable. We regulate all sorts of activities in biomedicine, not just drugs, but also the way we do research, and so forth. We regulate nuclear weapons and hazardous materials, and we regulate industries very heavily to prevent various kinds of environmental damage. If you pose the question not whether technology can be stopped but whether technology can be directed and channeled and in some cases slowed down, I think there's plenty of precedence for that. Attitudes toward technology tend to come and go in cycles. The most recent cycle concerned information technology, which produces relatively little social harm. In this area, it has been much more common to think that progress is inevitable and unstoppable and illegitimate to stop, even if you could. But consider the difference in the European and American reactions to genetically modified foods. I don't think there's a deep cultural difference between the U.S. and Europe. It's a question of who has had the more recent experience with regulatory failure. The British had mad cow disease (BSE), and the French had the tainted blood scandal and a few other problems that haven't occurred in the United States. If you look back code 25 /code years or so, the regulatory climate was reversed. American environmental regulations were much more stringent than that of Europe, and the Europeans at that point were kind of clucking about how the United States was hobbling itself economically by imposing all these restrictions. The reason, I think, is because we had Love Canal and Three Mile Island. Today, it's the Europeans who have had the more recent experience with regulatory failure, and I think that's really what affects people's view of the possibility of guiding and limiting technology. The idea of inevitability is not an eternal verity. A second issue that comes up a lot when concerns are being expressed about potential negative outcomes of biotechnology is that one is either being alarmist or confusing science with science fiction. I wonder if you'd comment on that because surely some issues of regulation in this area have to do with being able to make prudential judgments about what outcomes might look like. First of all, for the most part in my book, I was talking about developments that are already on the way. I said I thought that germline engineering would be the most consequential, but such engineering is probably further down the road than most people think. Anyway, my argument doesn't rest on the possibility of doing that. We're already, for example, in the midst of a revolution in neuropharmacology. I think that over the next ten years we're going to see a lot of developments in that area that will allow us to modify behavior in virtually all the ways that we expect from genetic engineering. It won't be as consequential because it doesn't involve the germline. It's not inheritable, and it's reversible to a large extent just the way any other drug therapy is. But it really does raise all the same questions of therapy versus enhancement uses and on what grounds we want people to compete. In fact, there was recently an article in The Washington Post about Modafinil, which is a new drug that allows people to basically defeat the sleep impulse. With the drug, you can now stay awake for code 40 /code hours at a stretch. There's going to be a whole succession of such developments. It's true that you don't want, in the short term, regulations that anticipate something that may never happen, but many of the core issues are here today. Do we want, for instance, to give parents unlimited freedom of choice in selecting the genetic characteristics of their children? We already have preimplantation genetic screening, and before long we will have screening available not just for therapeutic purposes but also for what amount to enhancement purposes. These are near-term issues, and in fact other countries have already written regulations to control enhancement uses of genetic screening. All I'm proposing is that we have a society-wide discussion about when and how to do this kind of regulation. Obviously it's going to take some time to think this through and then come to any kind of agreement about it, but it's not too early to have the conversation. What resources do we have for evaluating these new technologies? We have the field of bioethics. Are the standard approaches there insufficient? Yes, I would say so. I keep getting in trouble for making over-broad assertions about bioethicists, and so I want to be careful about generalizations. There are some very serious people in bioethics. Having said that, I also think that there are many professional bioethicists who have in effect been captured by the community that they're trying to oversee or regulate. For a variety of complex reasons, they have tended to narrow the ethics discussion to either a utilitarian calculus or simply the maximization of individual autonomy. Especially among the newer generation of bioethicists, it's harder to find people who raise more substantive kinds of moral concerns. In a sense the whole field of bioethics was created with the help of the scientific community in order to put some boundaries around the potential restrictions or regulations that might impede the activities the scientists wanted to engage in. It's time to broaden the conversation so that not just bioethicists but a broader range of ethicists are involved. Perhaps other people as well? Certainly theologians and politicians. These are matters that cannot simply be left up to experts. Let's talk about the question of human nature and human dignity. What is your view of human nature? And can we have a view of human nature that is not in some way grounded in religious beliefs? I think we can. In cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology, for instance, human nature is used quite commonly in ways that have, of course, nothing to do with religion. These fields suggest elements of human nature. There are certain cognitive functions whose specific content is cultural but whose general structure is genetically programmed. Thus, facial recognition, the ability to respond to certain emotional signals, the way that language is learned, the way that social interaction is learned, all of these things I would say are actually components of human nature. But there is no simple answer to this question because human beings are extraordinarily complex creatures. One of the recurring problems in discussions of human nature is the tendency to reduce human nature to one or another of its components. The neo-Kantians emphasized moral choice; in the more modern version the emphasis is on the capacity to express preferences. Other people have argued for other aspects, such as reason or language. My view is that human nature is all of these plus some. For me, a key feature is the range of emotional responses that give people the ability to respond to each other in social situations. In fact, I think these responses are at the core of what most people commonsensically understand to be their human nature. But it's not any one of these features by itself because all are in fact components of the complete human being. How is this understanding of human nature connected to, or the grounds for, a conception of human dignity? I think a conception of human nature has to be the reasoning behind most thinking about human dignity. Unless we have a specific nature that distinguishes us from other kinds of creatures or other parts of the natural world, then there's no grounds for special treatment. I take seriously the dignity of human persons because they possess some combination of reason, the capacity for moral choice and moral behavior, the ability to socially interact, language, and the like. All of these are specific to human beings as a species and explain why human beings can have political rights and other kinds of creatures cannot. Yet not everything on your list is unique to humans. Wouldn't an animal rights advocate agree on the genetic capacities we have but then argue that a lot of these are shared with other species? For the animal rights position to have any coherence at all, it has to make distinctions between a species' typical characteristics and the level of dignity that we accord it. I think the core of the moral impulse behind the movement is the recognition that non-human creatures can suffer. Some animals may also have consciousness and even some rudimentary moral qualities, but that's not as central as the idea that they can suffer and anticipate suffering: that's what gives them a certain measure of rights. I think that's a perfectly acceptable argument. However, we also have to allow that non-human animals don't share other species-typical characteristics with humans, like the ability to communicate in human language and to make human social and moral choices. These would disqualify chimpanzees, for instance, from voting, even though they do have a rudimentary type of language, our genomes overlap by 97%, and so forth. If we go further down the complexity scale, we get to creatures that don't have central nervous systems, don't have consciousness, and can't feel pain. It makes no sense to argue that creatures like that have rights of any sort. The animal rights position, it seems to me, in fact lacks a theory that links the respect with which we treat different natural organisms to their specific characteristics as a species. If we make that link, then I think there are grounds for according humans a unique dignity. You argued in both your recent book and in Congressional testimony last year that one of the reasons why reproductive cloning should be banned is because it is "highly unnatural." Does knowledge of human nature, our innately given capacities, give us enough direction to make clear judgments about what is natural with respect to particular biotechnologies or their applications? The links between specific judgments and this broad view of human nature are very complex and will be quite controversial, but I think that the links still exist. For example, I think there are certain forms of family organization that are clearly grounded in nature and that on the whole provide for the healthiest kinds of family situations. A type of reproduction, therefore, that short-circuits or bypasses that form has, all other things being equal, got problems. Now, not everything that has a problem necessarily has to be banned or has to be the subject of legislation or regulation, but I do think that human nature gives us some grounds for making judgments, including judgments about risk. If cloning would be unnatural, then wouldn't that be true of something like in vitro fertilization (IVF) as well? Mixing sperm and egg in a petri dish is certainly a far cry from the natural method of conception. Not necessarily. The aspects of nature that I'm most concerned about have to do with child welfare and the social relations that would exist within families that are produced by these different technologies. That for me is the more essential issue, and IVF doesn't really affect that terribly directly. I'd like to push this issue a little bit, because before IVF became a routine way of conceiving children, critics argued that it would be dehumanizing precisely because it was unnatural. Of course, many critics were making a deontological argument about dehumanization rather than a necessarily consequentialist one, but if we do just focus on outcomes in individual cases, I don't know of anyone making the argument that IVF has been directly dehumanizing for those involved. I guess my argument about cloning was really consequentialist in terms of the family dynamics that would be produced, and I would not argue that it's dehumanizing purely because it's unnatural. I wouldn't have made that argument in the case of IVF, and I wouldn't make it in the case of cloning. While I doubt many people will be interested in cloning themselves, I do think it could lead to some fairly unhealthy situations, and I try to outline some of these in my book. Nature points us toward certain family forms and that gives us some guidance. It still leaves us with some potentially complicated calculations of potential harms. Let's turn to the distinction between therapy and enhancement. You make the argument--as, of course, do many others--that what might be acceptable for therapeutic purposes, taking Prozac for instance, should not be allowed for merely enhancement purposes or entertainment purposes. Yet this distinction is not always easy to draw, and some of the new biotechnologies may make it harder still. Can we draw the line such that it provides clarity for distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate uses of technology? I recognize that there's a big gray area in a lot of medical technologies, and it's not just the genetic ones. Drugs are a good example. Ritalin is a classic case where the distinction between therapy and enhancement is almost impossible to define in any theoretical way. But just because there is always a gray area or sometimes a larger gray area is not a reason for invalidating the basic distinction. At the ends of the spectrum, there are things that are clearly enhancements, and there are things that are clearly therapeutic. Using a genetic technology to help someone with cystic fibrosis, which is a genetically linked disorder, is therapeutic, while taking a kid who would normally be a certain height and then boosting his height using some genetic technique would clearly be an enhancement. We have to argue these distinctions on a case-by-case basis, and some of these distinctions will be very difficult ones to make. I argue in my book that making a distinction between therapy and enhancement is actually something that is easier to do in practice than it is theoretically and that regulatory institutions make such distinctions all the time. They do so in the case of Ritalin, for example. We've banned steroids for some uses, and we control steroids in others. A lot of times it's not really clear on what theoretical basis the therapy/enhancement distinction is being made, but as a practical matter there are regulatory institutions that make it. You're in favor of a ban on reproductive cloning, but am I right that you do not think outright bans are a useful model for dealing with problematic developments? That's right. I think regulation is really what we need. I'm in favor of the cloning ban, in part, because I think, for tactical purposes, it's important to show that the political community actually can draw the line somewhere. In general, though, Congress should not be in the business of legislating broad bans on technology. We need, as we have in other areas, a delegation of regulatory authority under some broad set of guidelines. The detailed decisions can then be made by the regulatory agency. Incidentally, regulation does not have to involve any direct prohibition. For example, it's perfectly possible to enforce a preference for therapeutic uses of a technology over enhancement ones simply by manipulating the cost/safety parameter. If someone wanted to propose germline engineering of an otherwise normal child, you could raise the safety requirements to a much higher point than if someone wanted to use the same kind of genetic technology for treatment of a child with a genetic disease. We wouldn't actually ban the former, but we'd make it much more expensive and difficult to do. That's one possible approach to enforcing the distinction that doesn't involve bans at all. It simply allocates the incentives for pursuing different uses of technologies in favor of one over the other. Are you optimistic that there exists the political will to introduce these types of regulation and create new regulatory agencies? I don't know. I honestly don't know about that. The situation is certainly different in different societies. I just returned from three weeks in Europe, and the differences between countries are really striking. Germany is always criticized for being much too liberal on these matters, and yet they have banned virtually everything that is under consideration in my book. Britain, by contrast, is quite different. Then you get countries like Holland, which I don't really understand. They're very permissive on gay marriage and prostitution and a lot of other things, but then they completely ban all of these genetic modification technologies. So the answer depends on each society, and I honestly don't know what the prospects of doing this kind of regulation are in this country. In the cloning and the stem cell debates, an alliance emerged between religious conservatives and environmental liberals, on the one side, and liberal democrats and the biotech companies, on the other. Given their larger differences, these groups' alliances seem temporary and perhaps limited to the specific issues at hand. Surely creating new regulatory institutions will require coalition building. Is there a natural constituency that might emerge around these issues? Well, it's possible. This is all so new that people haven't really defined their positions on a lot of it. In Europe there has emerged an anti-GMO (genetically modified organisms) coalition that aligns the environmentalists and other parts of the left with religious conservatives, so in a way that's already happened there. The U.S. is different. On the one hand, the American environmental movement is less anti-corporate and anti-American than in Europe. On the other hand, we've got more principled libertarians, more technology enthusiasts, and more anti-abortion social conservatives. I guess the short answer is I don't know what's going to happen. It's a very new set of political alignments, though I can see the potential for some of them growing and strengthening over time. To return to your earlier point about the regulatory climate, do you think it will take some accidents? That's very possible. If you look at the history of regulation in this country as well as in other countries, it's almost always the case that they follow on some big screw up or accident, like a Thalidomide scandal. It may be that nobody is going to have the political will to do any of this until something like that happens. In your congressional testimony on the cloning ban, you expressed a concern that if legislatures don't act, the court system might later be drawn in. Why would that be problematic? Making legislation through the courts is terrible public policy, and Roe v. Wade is the classic case. If we wanted to legalize abortion, then state legislatures, which were moving in this direction anyway, or perhaps the U.S. Congress should have changed the law. For it to happen through the courts, through the creation of a previously unrecognized right, is not a good way to make public policy, and it's added a level of controversy to the whole abortion debate that I think was not really necessary. We could, in theory, replay this scenario if somehow a court found that we have a hitherto undiscovered right to clone ourselves or to genetically modify ourselves. Perhaps we have such a right, but if so, it ought to be created legislatively rather than through the court system. In light of the criticism that the Supreme Court took for Roe v. Wade, I suspect they would be disinclined to wade into such waters, particularly if legislatures express some clear judgments. Opponents of regulation have argued that regulations on biotechnology would be ineffective because attempts to control the technology by, say, the United States, could easily be avoided. The companies, scientists, and so on could just move their operations to another jurisdiction. How do you respond to that criticism? I think it all depends on what we're worried about. If it is a really hot technology that promises lots of economic benefits, that's one thing; if it's potentially extremely dangerous, like nuclear weapons, that's another. In the latter case, if you have only one instance of getting around the regulation, we're all cooked. But for the kinds of things that I'm talking about regulating, violations are probably far less consequential. My sense is that the idea that there'll be all this jurisdiction shopping or jurisdictional arbitrage is overblown. I suspect, for example, that stem cell researchers at Stanford or MIT or other centers of genetic research in the United States would really think twice about leaving for, say, Singapore with their families solely to work in a more favorable regulatory climate. There are a lot of other reasons for wanting to be in the U.S., for wanting to be at a Stanford. Admittedly, in some cases relocations may happen if the technology is really promising, and there's a lot of money behind it, but that's not necessarily going to be the case. In other instances of regulation, such as with cloning, I don't think it matters at all what happens in other jurisdictions. Would it really matter to us if the Chinese legalized cloning? I doubt if their policy would compel us to change ours. You're a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. What do you hope that the Council will achieve? At our first Council meeting I said that my hope was that the Council would leave an institutional legacy by dealing precisely with regulatory institutions. Our influence would be very limited, I felt, if we didn't move beyond abstract questions of ethics. One of the possible ways out of the impasse over cloning legislation, for example, would be to create a body like the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Agency in Britain that would regulate embryo experimentation. I think we are probably going to take that up as part of our broader considerations, so I hope that will be one of the outcomes. From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 19 17:08:08 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 13:08:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WSJ: (Derrida) Roger Kimball: The Meaninglessness of Meaning Message-ID: Roger Kimball: The Meaninglessness of Meaning http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005745 October 12, 2004 Jacques Derrida is dead, but his baneful ideas live on. BY ROGER KIMBALL It's not every French intellectual whose death is commemorated by an announcement from the office of Jacques Chirac, the French president. But Jacques Derrida, who died Friday at age 74, was not just any French intellectual. His work, as Mr. Chirac's office noted, was "read, discussed, and taught around the world." Whether Mr. Derrida was also "one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time," as Mr. Chirac's office asserted, is a point that has been fiercely contested ever since Mr. Derrida burst onto the intellectual scene in the mid-1960s. Mr. Derrida (the name is pronounced deh-ree-DAH) was without doubt one of the most famous intellectuals of the past 40 years. His celebrity rivaled that of Jean-Paul Sartre. As the founder, honorary CEO and chief publicist for an abstruse philosophical doctrine he called "deconstruction," Mr. Derrida was celebrated and vilified in about equal measure. Academics on the lookout for a trendy intellectual and moral high-explosive tended to love Mr. Derrida. The rest of us felt . . . otherwise. What is deconstruction? Mr. Derrida would never say. It was a question certain to spark his contempt and ire. He denied that deconstruction could be meaningfully defined. I think he was right about that, though not necessarily for the reasons he believed. But even if deconstruction cannot be defined, it can be described. For one thing, deconstruction comes with a lifetime guarantee to render discussion of any subject completely unintelligible. It does this by linguistic subterfuge. One of the central slogans of deconstruction is il n'y a pas de hors-texte, i.e., "there is nothing outside the text." (It sounds better in French.) In other words, deconstruction is an updated version of nominalism, the view that the meanings of words are completely arbitrary and that, at bottom, reality is unknowable. Of course, if you put it as baldly as that, people will just laugh and ignore you. But if you dress up the idea in a forbidding vocabulary, full of neologisms and recondite references to philosophy, then you may have a prescription for academic stardom. Stock in deconstruction has sagged a bit in recent years. There are basically two reasons for this. The first has to do with the late Paul de Man, the Belgian-born Yale professor of comparative literature. In addition to being one of the most prominent practitioners of deconstruction, Mr. de Man--as was revealed in the late 1980s--was an enthusiastic contributor to Nazi newspapers during World War II. [101304derrida.jpg] That discovery, and above all the flood of obscurantist mendacity disgorged by the deconstructionist brotherhood--not least by Mr. Derrida, who was himself Jewish--to exonerate Mr. de Man, cast a permanent shadow over deconstruction's status as a supposed instrument of intellectual liberation. The second reason that deconstruction has lost some sheen is simply that, like any academic fashion, deconstruction's methods and vocabulary, once so novel and forbidding, have gradually become part of the common coin of academic discourse, and thus less trendy. It is important to recognize, however, that this very process of assimilation has assured the continuing influence of deconstruction. Once at home mostly in philosophy and literature departments, the nihilistic tenets of deconstruction have cropped up further and further afield: in departments of history, sociology, political science and architecture; in law schools and--God help us--business schools. Deconstructive themes and presuppositions have increasingly become part of the general intellectual atmosphere: absorbed to such an extent that they float almost unnoticed, part of the ambient spiritual pollution of our time. Who can forget the politician who, accused of wrongdoing, said in his defense that "it all depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"? Although the language of deconstruction is forbidding, the appeal of the doctrine is not hard to understand. It is the appeal of all intellectual radicalism. Because deconstruction operates by subversion, its evasions are at the same time an attack: an attack on the cogency of language and the moral and intellectual claims that language has codified in tradition. The subversive element inherent in the deconstructive enterprise is another reason that it has exercised such a mesmerizing spell on intellectuals. Deconstruction promises its adherents not only an emancipation from the responsibilities of truth but also the prospect of engaging in a species of radical activism. A blow against the legitimacy of language is at the same time a blow against the legitimacy of the tradition in which language lives and has meaning. By undercutting the idea of truth, the decontructionist also undercuts the idea of value, including established social, moral, and political values. There is a lot to be said for the old adage de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Jacques Derrida is dead. Let us not speak ill of him. But his ideas are still very much alive. They deserve unstinting criticism from anyone who cares about the moral fabric of intellectual life. Mr. Kimball, managing editor of The New Criterion, is author of "The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art" (Encounter Books). From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 19 17:19:54 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 13:19:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran In-Reply-To: <01C4B54B.DF0E7DA0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4B54B.DF0E7DA0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: I don't see why you think the market devalues labor. Employee compensation runs about 80% of GDP. Profits run only about 4% of sales. I'd have to go through the Economic Report of the President to be sure how this all breaks out and to avoid double counting and omitting things. I used to use ERP fairly regularly, but no for quite a while. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > I have done some work with artificial intelligence programming. > > It suffers from something called combinatorial explosion. > > When you try to build a rule based system that does a real > task, as opposed to a narrow-concept demonstration or an > artificial problem, the difficulty of doing it increased very > quickly to the point of being almost impossible. > > Similarly, industrial robots have been around for many years, > and do some things very well. But nothing is so flexible or > easily trained as a human, so they haven't taken over jobs > in nearly the numbers that some predicted. > > I think we live in an insane economy that devalues labor. > > The Buddhists talk about Right Livelihood, and perhaps we > should listen to them. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 6:26 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > > Well, maybe you can come up with a better suggestion about what to do with > the useless eaters. They will be increasing in the population as > artificial intelligence, robots, and so on replaces more and more jobs. > Just wait till machines at last can pick strawberries, one of the few > fruits that have eluded machines so far. No doubt, these migrant farm > worker immigrants can do something else, but each time a job is automated, > workers have to take lower paid jobs (presuming, more or less accurately, > that workers tend to seek out the most renumerative job). > > So they can either be put on the "high tech equivalent of the Indian > reservation," in Charles Murray's famous phrase, be given affirmative > action jobs and do nothing, or be given fake jobs and do nothing useful. > > On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> I'm glad we have a shared vision of our wonderful future :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 3:02 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> >> It would not reduce the population of useless eaters very much, since not >> many of them would get killed, fewer than if they stayed at home and >> engaged in hot rodding. But it would give them jobs and a sense of >> accomplishment. >> >> Or we could create U.S. Department of Reorganization, where half the >> employees would be reorganizing the other half. THe usual competition over >> perks and office space would continue, though nothing would be produced. >> This is very much like the U.S. Department of Education, where I work, >> except that cash does get dispersed, to the tune of $63 billion a year, >> most of it going to educrats outside of E.D. but none of it benefiting >> students. In fact it harms them. >> >> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >> >>> Concentrating the draft on the lower classes >>> would be a good way to reduce the population >>> of "useless eaters." >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:37 PM >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>> >>> You again are not paying attention. The student deferments will by and >>> large go to those who can compete with the Chinese and Japanese. Those >>> that can should not only get derements but should not be drafted at all. >>> Only those that are in what the Marxoids called the reserve army of the >>> unemployed should be drafted. >>> >>> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >>> >>>> If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any >>>> student deferments :-) >>>> >>>> Steve Hovland >>>> www.stevehovland.net >>>> >>>> >>>> -----Original Message----- >>>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM >>>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>>> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>> >>>> There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with >>>> the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to >>>> have jobs. >>>> >>>> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >>>> >>>>> Going to war against Iran would be a good way to >>>>> employ all of those useless young Americans who >>>>> can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents >>>>> per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think >>>>> $6,000 a year is a lot of money. >>>>> >>>>> Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq >>>>> without using conscription, we will be able to get >>>>> a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I >>>>> mean is that the political consequences of starting >>>>> a draft will be so high that any President who does >>>>> it may as well knock out all of them at once, including >>>>> Korea. >>>>> >>>>> And once Baby Boomers start dying from the >>>>> fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with >>>>> Social Security will be solved as well. >>>>> >>>>> Great days lie ahead! >>>>> >>>>> Steve Hovland >>>>> www.stevehovland.net >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> -----Original Message----- >>>>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM >>>>> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>>> Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>>> >>>>> Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>>> http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm >>>>> 4.10.14 >>>>> >>>>> [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, >>>>> but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States >>>>> is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we >>>>> can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking >>>>> us.] >>>>> >>>>> Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this >>>>> article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held >>>>> September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The >>>>> conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, >>>>> education, and dialogue." >>>>> >>>>> That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current >>>>> Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, >>>>> Switzerland. >>>>> >>>>> -- Nicholas Strakon >>>>> ___________________________________ >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> The future of the global War on Terror: >>>>> Next stop, Iran >>>>> By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI >>>>> >>>>> If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. >>>>> More information appears below. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be >>>>> Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say >>>>> that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. >>>>> That result has been sought and planned for by the American >>>>> neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It >>>>> is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary >>>>> to see it. >>>>> >>>>> Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact >>>>> that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli >>>>> Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern >>>>> enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the >>>>> single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and >>>>> ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of >>>>> [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background >>>>> for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving >>>>> force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in >>>>> Israel.) >>>>> >>>>> Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that >>>>> they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle >>>>> East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want >>>>> such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use >>>>> the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the >>>>> United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will >>>>> begin with an attack on Iran. >>>>> >>>>> The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, >>>>> and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country >>>>> may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic >>>>> Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program >>>>> that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial >>>>> ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout >>>>> the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is >>>>> that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in >>>>> importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That >>>>> program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian >>>>> nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 >>>>> Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that >>>>> would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as >>>>> opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United >>>>> States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself >>>>> against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are >>>>> more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East >>>>> news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is >>>>> pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is >>>>> so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region >>>>> with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores >>>>> that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. >>>>> Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent >>>>> on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] >>>>> >>>>> Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. >>>>> and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again >>>>> serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and >>>>> refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure >>>>> Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and >>>>> its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the >>>>> possibility of self-defense." [8][3] >>>>> >>>>> Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the >>>>> United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also >>>>> argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a >>>>> destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use >>>>> a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious >>>>> militants and moderates. >>>>> >>>>> Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's >>>>> developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear >>>>> monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that >>>>> Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared >>>>> that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of >>>>> course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in >>>>> Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past >>>>> couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings >>>>> about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November >>>>> 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and >>>>> Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear >>>>> program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its >>>>> creation" in 1948. [9][4] >>>>> And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi >>>>> Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said >>>>> that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional >>>>> weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared >>>>> that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] >>>>> >>>>> Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack >>>>> on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading >>>>> member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that >>>>> Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership >>>>> in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide >>>>> through the use of missiles." [11][6] >>>>> And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime >>>>> Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, >>>>> he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon >>>>> called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes >>>>> every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic >>>>> missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to >>>>> Europe." [12][7] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man >>>>> here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On >>>>> April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the >>>>> Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish >>>>> Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: >>>>> "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free >>>>> Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] >>>>> Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional >>>>> struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone >>>>> of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, >>>>> the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran >>>>> would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the >>>>> terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States >>>>> should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the >>>>> terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its >>>>> attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to >>>>> liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may >>>>> soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] >>>>> >>>>> In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), >>>>> an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His >>>>> principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a >>>>> former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs >>>>> Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. >>>>> CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and >>>>> think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for >>>>> Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, >>>>> president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise >>>>> Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and >>>>> former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that >>>>> diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and >>>>> that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to >>>>> actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple >>>>> the reigning mullahs. [16][11] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among >>>>> neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The >>>>> Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose >>>>> speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli >>>>> Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East >>>>> specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI >>>>> counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our >>>>> fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It >>>>> would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... >>>>> We must move on, and faster." [17][12] >>>>> As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May >>>>> 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish >>>>> organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to >>>>> step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." >>>>> [18][13] >>>>> >>>>> It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of >>>>> global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the >>>>> monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the >>>>> former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of >>>>> the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming >>>>> the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of >>>>> neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with >>>>> several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish >>>>> Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public >>>>> speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los >>>>> Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] >>>>> >>>>> A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, >>>>> Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During >>>>> the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister >>>>> Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as >>>>> Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] >>>>> >>>>> Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall >>>>> Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for >>>>> Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must >>>>> "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports >>>>> Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s >>>>> energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group >>>>> must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of >>>>> the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East >>>>> covet." [21][16] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran >>>>> was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense >>>>> Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key >>>>> role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran >>>>> expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' >>>>> office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but >>>>> apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the >>>>> Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated >>>>> regime change in Tehran." [22][17] >>>>> >>>>> As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has >>>>> come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of >>>>> the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that >>>>> individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be >>>>> conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud >>>>> Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents >>>>> of influence" for a foreign government. >>>>> >>>>> Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is >>>>> not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon >>>>> recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and >>>>> secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in >>>>> the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst >>>>> to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith >>>>> (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel >>>>> operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine >>>>> meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in >>>>> Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were >>>>> "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, >>>>> Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer >>>>> (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian >>>>> and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to >>>>> Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in >>>>> Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of >>>>> preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) >>>>> and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush >>>>> administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. >>>>> Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his >>>>> first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National >>>>> Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy >>>>> clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We >>>>> cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] >>>>> The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that >>>>> Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with >>>>> U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] >>>>> >>>>> Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution >>>>> authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian >>>>> nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that >>>>> resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's >>>>> nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For >>>>> Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to >>>>> be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for >>>>> Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to >>>>> act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] >>>>> But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear >>>>> capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 >>>>> attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because >>>>> we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained >>>>> Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the >>>>> Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run >>>>> preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] >>>>> >>>>> In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would >>>>> purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for >>>>> by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground >>>>> nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear >>>>> installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out >>>>> retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks >>>>> from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel >>>>> may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do >>>>> report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range >>>>> ballistic missile can reach Israel. >>>>> >>>>> Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle >>>>> East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, >>>>> American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more >>>>> effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less >>>>> likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the >>>>> safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who >>>>> identify with Israel to push for an American attack. >>>>> >>>>> Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- >>>>> Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with >>>>> opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same >>>>> time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering >>>>> countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The >>>>> stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would >>>>> seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already >>>>> controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation >>>>> this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will >>>>> find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. >>>>> [30][25] >>>>> The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems >>>>> anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability >>>>> for the existing Iraqi government. >>>>> >>>>> With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation >>>>> with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime >>>>> Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite >>>>> resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] >>>>> >>>>> The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian >>>>> Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, >>>>> that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in >>>>> the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will >>>>> not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some >>>>> military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations >>>>> which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani >>>>> continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an >>>>> element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is >>>>> true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of >>>>> an attack. [32][27] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody >>>>> quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration >>>>> would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could >>>>> the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military >>>>> is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is >>>>> larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United >>>>> States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having >>>>> learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military >>>>> power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. >>>>> >>>>> The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a >>>>> large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military >>>>> occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's >>>>> nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, >>>>> neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired >>>>> in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban >>>>> areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian >>>>> casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out >>>>> Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built >>>>> underground. [33][28] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest >>>>> attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also >>>>> to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically >>>>> set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground >>>>> invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; >>>>> the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian >>>>> forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military >>>>> forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then >>>>> destroy. >>>>> >>>>> What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war >>>>> against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest >>>>> of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall >>>>> into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would >>>>> threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United >>>>> States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a >>>>> move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans >>>>> for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. >>>>> Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move >>>>> might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify >>>>> with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth >>>>> noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" >>>>> blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. >>>>> >>>>> While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern >>>>> Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. >>>>> The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, >>>>> the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to >>>>> the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted >>>>> military and financial resources of the United States. >>>>> >>>>> Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the >>>>> Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the >>>>> peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim >>>>> fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack >>>>> American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American >>>>> regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, >>>>> which would have dire economic consequences around the world, >>>>> provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. >>>>> >>>>> Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, >>>>> international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not >>>>> want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have >>>>> generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with >>>>> little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; >>>>> Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the >>>>> Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. >>>>> But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist >>>>> status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped >>>>> beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson >>>>> exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and >>>>> ride mankind." >>>>> >>>>> As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is >>>>> very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a >>>>> powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors >>>>> threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its >>>>> survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful >>>>> military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant >>>>> Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the >>>>> United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab >>>>> regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that >>>>> destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by >>>>> facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, >>>>> which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the >>>>> areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential >>>>> American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the >>>>> neoconservatives' World War IV. >>>>> >>>>> It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out >>>>> of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its >>>>> prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq >>>>> is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. >>>>> The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and >>>>> walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy >>>>> had been a failure. >>>>> >>>>> Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the >>>>> support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to >>>>> pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] >>>>> Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics >>>>> have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a >>>>> choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in >>>>> the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, >>>>> has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a >>>>> mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have >>>>> voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on >>>>> Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In >>>>> regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect >>>>> to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful >>>>> that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational >>>>> backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive >>>>> Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on >>>>> Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. >>>>> Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of >>>>> America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government >>>>> is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] >>>>> It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of >>>>> progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and >>>>> widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, >>>>> whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. >>>>> >>>>> The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose >>>>> their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they >>>>> initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that >>>>> holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, >>>>> unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, >>>>> the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a >>>>> position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is >>>>> because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing >>>>> from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As >>>>> columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the >>>>> administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish >>>>> the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We >>>>> can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] >>>>> According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a >>>>> paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its >>>>> necessary role of world leadership. >>>>> >>>>> For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the >>>>> rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks >>>>> on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is >>>>> supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at >>>>> stake in staying the course and not giving in. >>>>> >>>>> In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the >>>>> foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of >>>>> neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven >>>>> American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries >>>>> -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. >>>>> Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to >>>>> those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite >>>>> believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist >>>>> agenda. >>>>> >>>>> But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American >>>>> wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. >>>>> Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the >>>>> non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission >>>>> [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate >>>>> the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world >>>>> increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be >>>>> well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] >>>>> >>>>> But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. >>>>> And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country >>>>> indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. >>>>> All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to >>>>> self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some >>>>> terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, >>>>> other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by >>>>> bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on >>>>> occasion. >>>>> >>>>> The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the >>>>> regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such >>>>> an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and >>>>> of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the >>>>> United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global >>>>> debacle in the making. >>>>> >>>>> References >>>>> >>>>> 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm >>>>> 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html >>>>> 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ >>>>> 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ >>>>> 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm >>>>> 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 >>>>> 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 >>>>> 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 >>>>> 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 >>>>> 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 >>>>> 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 >>>>> 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 >>>>> 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 >>>>> 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 >>>>> 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 >>>>> 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 >>>>> 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 >>>>> 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 >>>>> 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 >>>>> 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 >>>>> 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 >>>>> 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 >>>>> 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 >>>>> 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 >>>>> 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 >>>>> 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 >>>>> 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 >>>>> 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 >>>>> 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 >>>>> 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 >>>>> 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 >>>>> 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 >>>>> 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 >>>>> 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 >>>>> 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 >>>>> 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 >>>>> 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 >>>>> 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 >>>>> 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN >>>>> 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm >>>>> 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm >>>>> 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 19 17:35:14 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 13:35:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran In-Reply-To: <41751C85.2090202@solution-consulting.com> References: <01C4B523.F6BD4B20.shovland@mindspring.com> <41751C85.2090202@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: Who or what is a "mexican maquiladoras," Lynn? In any case, it's long been a puzzle why Hispanics enroll in colleges at a lower rate than blacks, even though their IQ is higher. One suggestion is that their are higher on "family values" personality traits and are too busy helping their immigrant relatives to stop out for college. But Whites are higher on family values than Hispanics on such measures as divorce and crime. What I also know is American Indians are very high on family values than expected for their IQ, close to the East Asian mean and, I think, higher than Whites. But the IQ of American Indians is lower than Whites, though higher than blacks. I read about this in Rushton's book. It's a major anomaly in his thesis that there is tight correlation along several lines: increasing IQ, increasing family values, decreasing twinning, decreasing penis length, and so on. Whites stand between blacks and East Asians on all these scales. I asked Rushton about this anomaly at a conference, where there had been a discussion about why Whites were more creative than East Asians, and to which he replied that blacks were more creative still (!), thus saving his thesis. Thus he abandoned the facts. And why I asked my question, he said his thesis did not apply to American Indians, only to blacks, Whites, and East Asians. Thus he abandoned his thesis! He's probably just getting old and this should not mean that everything he says is wrong. It's just that theories like his will have exceptions, esp. since he doesn't offer much of an explanation of why evolutionary forces should produce such uniformity of results. (Basically, he is adopting r-K theory to variations in its tale K end, namely people.) And he does marshall a lot of data. On 2004-10-19, Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. opined [message unchanged below]: > The central fact overlooked by the discussion about the draft is that the > military and the Republicans do not want a draft. There are plenty of willing > and patriotic volunteers. The draft is simply a red herring manufactured > whole cloth by social justice (n?e socialists-marxists) democrats to attack > the republicans. Hey, red herring. Get it? > > Frank's point is that automation reduces the employment opportunities for the > least skilled. Thomas Sowell has pointed out that those are overwhelmingly > first generations immigrants, and has shown that their children move up the > social / educational ladder. I am pretty close to the Mexican community, and > their apathy toward education might short-circuit that process. > > However, there is some hope. In mexican maquiladoras there is a new emphasis > on quality. They cannot compete with China on wages, their traditional niche. > They have to move to education and quality, and that may eventually transform > the Mexican culture, just as listening to Demming transformed post war Japan. > Lynn > > Steve Hovland wrote: > >> I'm glad we have a shared vision of our wonderful future :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 3:02 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> >> It would not reduce the population of useless eaters very much, since not >> many of them would get killed, fewer than if they stayed at home and >> engaged in hot rodding. But it would give them jobs and a sense of >> accomplishment. >> >> Or we could create U.S. Department of Reorganization, where half the >> employees would be reorganizing the other half. THe usual competition over >> perks and office space would continue, though nothing would be produced. >> This is very much like the U.S. Department of Education, where I work, >> except that cash does get dispersed, to the tune of $63 billion a year, >> most of it going to educrats outside of E.D. but none of it benefiting >> students. In fact it harms them. >> >> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >> >> >>> Concentrating the draft on the lower classes >>> would be a good way to reduce the population >>> of "useless eaters." >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:37 PM >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>> >>> You again are not paying attention. The student deferments will by and >>> large go to those who can compete with the Chinese and Japanese. Those >>> that can should not only get derements but should not be drafted at all. >>> Only those that are in what the Marxoids called the reserve army of the >>> unemployed should be drafted. >>> >>> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >>> >>> >>>> If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any >>>> student deferments :-) >>>> >>>> Steve Hovland >>>> www.stevehovland.net >>>> >>>> >>>> -----Original Message----- >>>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM >>>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>>> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>> >>>> There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with >>>> the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad >>>> to >>>> have jobs. >>>> >>>> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >>>> >>>> >>>>> Going to war against Iran would be a good way to >>>>> employ all of those useless young Americans who >>>>> can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents >>>>> per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think >>>>> $6,000 a year is a lot of money. >>>>> >>>>> Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq >>>>> without using conscription, we will be able to get >>>>> a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I >>>>> mean is that the political consequences of starting >>>>> a draft will be so high that any President who does >>>>> it may as well knock out all of them at once, including >>>>> Korea. >>>>> >>>>> And once Baby Boomers start dying from the >>>>> fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with >>>>> Social Security will be solved as well. >>>>> >>>>> Great days lie ahead! >>>>> >>>>> Steve Hovland >>>>> www.stevehovland.net >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> -----Original Message----- >>>>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM >>>>> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>>> Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>>> >>>>> Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>>> http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm >>>>> 4.10.14 >>>>> >>>>> [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, >>>>> but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United >>>>> States >>>>> is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we >>>>> can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of >>>>> attacking >>>>> us.] >>>>> >>>>> Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this >>>>> article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held >>>>> September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The >>>>> conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, >>>>> education, and dialogue." >>>>> >>>>> That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current >>>>> Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, >>>>> Switzerland. >>>>> >>>>> -- Nicholas Strakon >>>>> ___________________________________ >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> The future of the global War on Terror: >>>>> Next stop, Iran >>>>> By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI >>>>> >>>>> If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. >>>>> More information appears below. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be >>>>> Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say >>>>> that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. >>>>> That result has been sought and planned for by the American >>>>> neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It >>>>> is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary >>>>> to see it. >>>>> >>>>> Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact >>>>> that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli >>>>> Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern >>>>> enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the >>>>> single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and >>>>> ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of >>>>> [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background >>>>> for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving >>>>> force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in >>>>> Israel.) >>>>> >>>>> Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that >>>>> they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle >>>>> East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want >>>>> such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use >>>>> the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the >>>>> United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will >>>>> begin with an attack on Iran. >>>>> >>>>> The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, >>>>> and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country >>>>> may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic >>>>> Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program >>>>> that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial >>>>> ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout >>>>> the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is >>>>> that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in >>>>> importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That >>>>> program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian >>>>> nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 >>>>> Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that >>>>> would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as >>>>> opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United >>>>> States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself >>>>> against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are >>>>> more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East >>>>> news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is >>>>> pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is >>>>> so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region >>>>> with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores >>>>> that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. >>>>> Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent >>>>> on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] >>>>> >>>>> Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. >>>>> and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again >>>>> serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and >>>>> refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure >>>>> Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and >>>>> its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the >>>>> possibility of self-defense." [8][3] >>>>> >>>>> Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the >>>>> United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also >>>>> argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a >>>>> destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use >>>>> a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious >>>>> militants and moderates. >>>>> >>>>> Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's >>>>> developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear >>>>> monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that >>>>> Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared >>>>> that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of >>>>> course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in >>>>> Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past >>>>> couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings >>>>> about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November >>>>> 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and >>>>> Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear >>>>> program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its >>>>> creation" in 1948. [9][4] >>>>> And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi >>>>> Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said >>>>> that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional >>>>> weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared >>>>> that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] >>>>> >>>>> Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack >>>>> on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading >>>>> member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that >>>>> Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership >>>>> in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide >>>>> through the use of missiles." [11][6] >>>>> And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime >>>>> Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, >>>>> he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon >>>>> called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes >>>>> every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic >>>>> missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to >>>>> Europe." [12][7] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man >>>>> here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On >>>>> April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the >>>>> Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish >>>>> Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: >>>>> "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free >>>>> Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] >>>>> Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional >>>>> struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone >>>>> of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, >>>>> the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran >>>>> would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the >>>>> terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States >>>>> should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the >>>>> terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its >>>>> attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to >>>>> liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may >>>>> soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] >>>>> >>>>> In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), >>>>> an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His >>>>> principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a >>>>> former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs >>>>> Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. >>>>> CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and >>>>> think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for >>>>> Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, >>>>> president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise >>>>> Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and >>>>> former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that >>>>> diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and >>>>> that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to >>>>> actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple >>>>> the reigning mullahs. [16][11] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among >>>>> neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The >>>>> Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose >>>>> speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli >>>>> Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East >>>>> specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI >>>>> counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our >>>>> fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It >>>>> would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... >>>>> We must move on, and faster." [17][12] >>>>> As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May >>>>> 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish >>>>> organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to >>>>> step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." >>>>> [18][13] >>>>> >>>>> It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of >>>>> global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the >>>>> monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the >>>>> former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of >>>>> the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming >>>>> the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of >>>>> neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with >>>>> several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish >>>>> Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public >>>>> speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los >>>>> Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] >>>>> >>>>> A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, >>>>> Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During >>>>> the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister >>>>> Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as >>>>> Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] >>>>> >>>>> Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall >>>>> Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for >>>>> Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must >>>>> "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports >>>>> Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s >>>>> energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group >>>>> must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of >>>>> the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East >>>>> covet." [21][16] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran >>>>> was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense >>>>> Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key >>>>> role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran >>>>> expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' >>>>> office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but >>>>> apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the >>>>> Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated >>>>> regime change in Tehran." [22][17] >>>>> >>>>> As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has >>>>> come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of >>>>> the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that >>>>> individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be >>>>> conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud >>>>> Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents >>>>> of influence" for a foreign government. >>>>> >>>>> Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is >>>>> not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon >>>>> recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and >>>>> secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in >>>>> the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst >>>>> to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith >>>>> (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel >>>>> operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine >>>>> meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in >>>>> Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were >>>>> "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, >>>>> Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer >>>>> (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian >>>>> and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to >>>>> Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in >>>>> Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of >>>>> preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) >>>>> and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush >>>>> administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. >>>>> Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his >>>>> first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National >>>>> Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy >>>>> clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We >>>>> cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] >>>>> The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that >>>>> Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with >>>>> U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] >>>>> >>>>> Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution >>>>> authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian >>>>> nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that >>>>> resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's >>>>> nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For >>>>> Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to >>>>> be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for >>>>> Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to >>>>> act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] >>>>> But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear >>>>> capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 >>>>> attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because >>>>> we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained >>>>> Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the >>>>> Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run >>>>> preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] >>>>> >>>>> In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would >>>>> purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for >>>>> by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground >>>>> nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear >>>>> installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out >>>>> retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks >>>>> from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel >>>>> may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do >>>>> report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range >>>>> ballistic missile can reach Israel. >>>>> >>>>> Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle >>>>> East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, >>>>> American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more >>>>> effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less >>>>> likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the >>>>> safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who >>>>> identify with Israel to push for an American attack. >>>>> >>>>> Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- >>>>> Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with >>>>> opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same >>>>> time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering >>>>> countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The >>>>> stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would >>>>> seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already >>>>> controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation >>>>> this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will >>>>> find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. >>>>> [30][25] >>>>> The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems >>>>> anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability >>>>> for the existing Iraqi government. >>>>> >>>>> With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation >>>>> with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime >>>>> Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite >>>>> resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] >>>>> >>>>> The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian >>>>> Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, >>>>> that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in >>>>> the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will >>>>> not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some >>>>> military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations >>>>> which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani >>>>> continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an >>>>> element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is >>>>> true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of >>>>> an attack. [32][27] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody >>>>> quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration >>>>> would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could >>>>> the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military >>>>> is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is >>>>> larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United >>>>> States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having >>>>> learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military >>>>> power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. >>>>> >>>>> The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a >>>>> large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military >>>>> occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's >>>>> nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, >>>>> neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired >>>>> in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban >>>>> areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian >>>>> casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out >>>>> Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built >>>>> underground. [33][28] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest >>>>> attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also >>>>> to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically >>>>> set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground >>>>> invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; >>>>> the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian >>>>> forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military >>>>> forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then >>>>> destroy. >>>>> >>>>> What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war >>>>> against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest >>>>> of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall >>>>> into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would >>>>> threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United >>>>> States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a >>>>> move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans >>>>> for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. >>>>> Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move >>>>> might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify >>>>> with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth >>>>> noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" >>>>> blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. >>>>> >>>>> While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern >>>>> Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. >>>>> The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, >>>>> the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to >>>>> the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted >>>>> military and financial resources of the United States. >>>>> >>>>> Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the >>>>> Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the >>>>> peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim >>>>> fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack >>>>> American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American >>>>> regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, >>>>> which would have dire economic consequences around the world, >>>>> provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. >>>>> >>>>> Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, >>>>> international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not >>>>> want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have >>>>> generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with >>>>> little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; >>>>> Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the >>>>> Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. >>>>> But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist >>>>> status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped >>>>> beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson >>>>> exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and >>>>> ride mankind." >>>>> >>>>> As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is >>>>> very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a >>>>> powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors >>>>> threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its >>>>> survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful >>>>> military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant >>>>> Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the >>>>> United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab >>>>> regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that >>>>> destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by >>>>> facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, >>>>> which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the >>>>> areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential >>>>> American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the >>>>> neoconservatives' World War IV. >>>>> >>>>> It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out >>>>> of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its >>>>> prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq >>>>> is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. >>>>> The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and >>>>> walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy >>>>> had been a failure. >>>>> >>>>> Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the >>>>> support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to >>>>> pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] >>>>> Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics >>>>> have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a >>>>> choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in >>>>> the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, >>>>> has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a >>>>> mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have >>>>> voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on >>>>> Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In >>>>> regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect >>>>> to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful >>>>> that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational >>>>> backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive >>>>> Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on >>>>> Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. >>>>> Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of >>>>> America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government >>>>> is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] >>>>> It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of >>>>> progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and >>>>> widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, >>>>> whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. >>>>> >>>>> The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose >>>>> their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they >>>>> initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that >>>>> holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, >>>>> unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, >>>>> the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a >>>>> position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is >>>>> because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing >>>>> from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As >>>>> columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the >>>>> administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish >>>>> the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We >>>>> can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] >>>>> According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a >>>>> paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its >>>>> necessary role of world leadership. >>>>> >>>>> For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the >>>>> rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks >>>>> on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is >>>>> supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at >>>>> stake in staying the course and not giving in. >>>>> >>>>> In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the >>>>> foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of >>>>> neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven >>>>> American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries >>>>> -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. >>>>> Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to >>>>> those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite >>>>> believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist >>>>> agenda. >>>>> >>>>> But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American >>>>> wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. >>>>> Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the >>>>> non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission >>>>> [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate >>>>> the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world >>>>> increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be >>>>> well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] >>>>> >>>>> But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. >>>>> And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country >>>>> indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. >>>>> All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to >>>>> self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some >>>>> terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, >>>>> other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by >>>>> bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on >>>>> occasion. >>>>> >>>>> The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the >>>>> regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such >>>>> an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and >>>>> of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the >>>>> United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global >>>>> debacle in the making. >>>>> >>>>> References >>>>> >>>>> 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm >>>>> 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html >>>>> 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ >>>>> 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ >>>>> 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm >>>>> 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 >>>>> 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 >>>>> 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 >>>>> 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 >>>>> 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 >>>>> 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 >>>>> 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 >>>>> 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 >>>>> 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 >>>>> 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 >>>>> 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 >>>>> 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 >>>>> 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 >>>>> 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 >>>>> 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 >>>>> 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 >>>>> 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 >>>>> 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 >>>>> 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 >>>>> 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 >>>>> 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 >>>>> 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 >>>>> 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 >>>>> 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 >>>>> 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 >>>>> 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 >>>>> 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 >>>>> 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 >>>>> 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 >>>>> 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 >>>>> 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 >>>>> 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 >>>>> 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 >>>>> 39. >>>>> mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN >>>>> 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm >>>>> 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm >>>>> 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html >>>>> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> > From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Oct 19 18:22:06 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 11:22:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] introverts, extraverts In-Reply-To: <200410191800.i9JI0P014418@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041019182206.26670.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> >>Introverts are marginalized because they are more comfortable on the margins. Extraverts love the spotlight and flourish there, so naturally they tend to lead. Wishing it were otherwise is irrational.<< --The issue isn't who wants to be or not be in the spotlight. It's how a society filters information and makes decisions as a mass. When the introverts have no way of getting their message out (through a sympathetic extrovert, for example, or through writing), extraverted perception skews reality. Any system tends to put more and more energy into sustaining itself, and a system based on ego will eventually put so much energy into sustaining ego that it loses information and can no longer engage in smooth self-correction, leading to huge mistakes on the historical timeline. Think about how much our system would change if "the masses" were more focused on science, philosophy, history and art than on Paris Hilton and gossip news. With the loss of respect for introverted perception, extraverts can create a dangerously shallow world. With respect for introverts, extraverts can create a system with the integrity and the power of both, one that not only recognizes the need for action but understands the fruit of contemplation. We tend to polarize and give up wisdom when we choose action, when we start putting down or ignoring the introverts. These days, we call them "hand-wringers", people who fret too much about the moral intricacies of taking action in an uncertain world. We throw their insights away, just as Hollywood throws away the aged because a face that isn't pretty cannot come with a voice that's true. The misfits of society are easily ignored, because we mistake beauty and status for truth. Same problem if the perceptions of women are filtered out, if the elderly are marginalized, or if one ethnic or religious group writes the official history. Something is lost in translation. Consider how the spirituality of introverts has been marketed and distorted by extraverts, leading to a few religions controlling huge mindshare, with the solitary imaginations of mystics limping along behind the armies of God, unable to preserve the integrity of their visions. Consider also how some of the greatest visions in history (including the classical thinkers like Socrates, et al) are swept aside in the attention given to media celebrities. Is there a way to preserve the perception of introverts in a system flooded by shallow extraversion? Michael _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 19 18:59:59 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 11:59:59 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran Message-ID: <01C4B5D3.28AD00D0.shovland@mindspring.com> If we value labor why are 80% of the people seeing declines in their share of personal income? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2004 10:20 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran I don't see why you think the market devalues labor. Employee compensation runs about 80% of GDP. Profits run only about 4% of sales. I'd have to go through the Economic Report of the President to be sure how this all breaks out and to avoid double counting and omitting things. I used to use ERP fairly regularly, but no for quite a while. On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > I have done some work with artificial intelligence programming. > > It suffers from something called combinatorial explosion. > > When you try to build a rule based system that does a real > task, as opposed to a narrow-concept demonstration or an > artificial problem, the difficulty of doing it increased very > quickly to the point of being almost impossible. > > Similarly, industrial robots have been around for many years, > and do some things very well. But nothing is so flexible or > easily trained as a human, so they haven't taken over jobs > in nearly the numbers that some predicted. > > I think we live in an insane economy that devalues labor. > > The Buddhists talk about Right Livelihood, and perhaps we > should listen to them. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 6:26 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > > Well, maybe you can come up with a better suggestion about what to do with > the useless eaters. They will be increasing in the population as > artificial intelligence, robots, and so on replaces more and more jobs. > Just wait till machines at last can pick strawberries, one of the few > fruits that have eluded machines so far. No doubt, these migrant farm > worker immigrants can do something else, but each time a job is automated, > workers have to take lower paid jobs (presuming, more or less accurately, > that workers tend to seek out the most renumerative job). > > So they can either be put on the "high tech equivalent of the Indian > reservation," in Charles Murray's famous phrase, be given affirmative > action jobs and do nothing, or be given fake jobs and do nothing useful. > > On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> I'm glad we have a shared vision of our wonderful future :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 3:02 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> >> It would not reduce the population of useless eaters very much, since not >> many of them would get killed, fewer than if they stayed at home and >> engaged in hot rodding. But it would give them jobs and a sense of >> accomplishment. >> >> Or we could create U.S. Department of Reorganization, where half the >> employees would be reorganizing the other half. THe usual competition over >> perks and office space would continue, though nothing would be produced. >> This is very much like the U.S. Department of Education, where I work, >> except that cash does get dispersed, to the tune of $63 billion a year, >> most of it going to educrats outside of E.D. but none of it benefiting >> students. In fact it harms them. >> >> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >> >>> Concentrating the draft on the lower classes >>> would be a good way to reduce the population >>> of "useless eaters." >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:37 PM >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>> >>> You again are not paying attention. The student deferments will by and >>> large go to those who can compete with the Chinese and Japanese. Those >>> that can should not only get derements but should not be drafted at all. >>> Only those that are in what the Marxoids called the reserve army of the >>> unemployed should be drafted. >>> >>> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >>> >>>> If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any >>>> student deferments :-) >>>> >>>> Steve Hovland >>>> www.stevehovland.net >>>> >>>> >>>> -----Original Message----- >>>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM >>>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>>> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>> >>>> There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with >>>> the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to >>>> have jobs. >>>> >>>> On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >>>> >>>>> Going to war against Iran would be a good way to >>>>> employ all of those useless young Americans who >>>>> can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents >>>>> per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think >>>>> $6,000 a year is a lot of money. >>>>> >>>>> Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq >>>>> without using conscription, we will be able to get >>>>> a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I >>>>> mean is that the political consequences of starting >>>>> a draft will be so high that any President who does >>>>> it may as well knock out all of them at once, including >>>>> Korea. >>>>> >>>>> And once Baby Boomers start dying from the >>>>> fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with >>>>> Social Security will be solved as well. >>>>> >>>>> Great days lie ahead! >>>>> >>>>> Steve Hovland >>>>> www.stevehovland.net >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> -----Original Message----- >>>>> From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>>> Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM >>>>> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>>> Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>>> >>>>> Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>>> http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm >>>>> 4.10.14 >>>>> >>>>> [The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, >>>>> but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States >>>>> is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we >>>>> can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking >>>>> us.] >>>>> >>>>> Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this >>>>> article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held >>>>> September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The >>>>> conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, >>>>> education, and dialogue." >>>>> >>>>> That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current >>>>> Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, >>>>> Switzerland. >>>>> >>>>> -- Nicholas Strakon >>>>> ___________________________________ >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> The future of the global War on Terror: >>>>> Next stop, Iran >>>>> By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI >>>>> >>>>> If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. >>>>> More information appears below. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be >>>>> Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say >>>>> that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. >>>>> That result has been sought and planned for by the American >>>>> neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It >>>>> is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary >>>>> to see it. >>>>> >>>>> Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact >>>>> that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli >>>>> Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern >>>>> enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the >>>>> single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and >>>>> ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of >>>>> [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background >>>>> for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving >>>>> force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in >>>>> Israel.) >>>>> >>>>> Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that >>>>> they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle >>>>> East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want >>>>> such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use >>>>> the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the >>>>> United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will >>>>> begin with an attack on Iran. >>>>> >>>>> The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, >>>>> and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country >>>>> may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic >>>>> Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program >>>>> that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial >>>>> ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout >>>>> the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is >>>>> that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in >>>>> importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That >>>>> program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian >>>>> nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 >>>>> Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that >>>>> would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as >>>>> opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United >>>>> States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself >>>>> against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are >>>>> more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East >>>>> news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is >>>>> pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is >>>>> so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region >>>>> with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores >>>>> that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. >>>>> Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent >>>>> on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] >>>>> >>>>> Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. >>>>> and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again >>>>> serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and >>>>> refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure >>>>> Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and >>>>> its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the >>>>> possibility of self-defense." [8][3] >>>>> >>>>> Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the >>>>> United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also >>>>> argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a >>>>> destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use >>>>> a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious >>>>> militants and moderates. >>>>> >>>>> Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's >>>>> developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear >>>>> monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that >>>>> Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared >>>>> that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of >>>>> course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in >>>>> Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past >>>>> couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings >>>>> about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November >>>>> 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and >>>>> Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear >>>>> program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its >>>>> creation" in 1948. [9][4] >>>>> And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi >>>>> Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said >>>>> that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional >>>>> weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared >>>>> that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] >>>>> >>>>> Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack >>>>> on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading >>>>> member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that >>>>> Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership >>>>> in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide >>>>> through the use of missiles." [11][6] >>>>> And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime >>>>> Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, >>>>> he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon >>>>> called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes >>>>> every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic >>>>> missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to >>>>> Europe." [12][7] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man >>>>> here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On >>>>> April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the >>>>> Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish >>>>> Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: >>>>> "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free >>>>> Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] >>>>> Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional >>>>> struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone >>>>> of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, >>>>> the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran >>>>> would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the >>>>> terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States >>>>> should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the >>>>> terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its >>>>> attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to >>>>> liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may >>>>> soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] >>>>> >>>>> In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), >>>>> an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His >>>>> principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a >>>>> former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs >>>>> Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. >>>>> CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and >>>>> think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for >>>>> Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, >>>>> president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise >>>>> Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and >>>>> former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that >>>>> diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and >>>>> that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to >>>>> actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple >>>>> the reigning mullahs. [16][11] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among >>>>> neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The >>>>> Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose >>>>> speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli >>>>> Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East >>>>> specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI >>>>> counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our >>>>> fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It >>>>> would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... >>>>> We must move on, and faster." [17][12] >>>>> As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May >>>>> 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish >>>>> organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to >>>>> step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." >>>>> [18][13] >>>>> >>>>> It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of >>>>> global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the >>>>> monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the >>>>> former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of >>>>> the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming >>>>> the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of >>>>> neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with >>>>> several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish >>>>> Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public >>>>> speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los >>>>> Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] >>>>> >>>>> A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, >>>>> Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During >>>>> the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister >>>>> Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as >>>>> Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] >>>>> >>>>> Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall >>>>> Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for >>>>> Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must >>>>> "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports >>>>> Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s >>>>> energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group >>>>> must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of >>>>> the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East >>>>> covet." [21][16] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran >>>>> was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense >>>>> Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key >>>>> role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran >>>>> expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' >>>>> office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but >>>>> apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the >>>>> Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated >>>>> regime change in Tehran." [22][17] >>>>> >>>>> As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has >>>>> come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of >>>>> the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that >>>>> individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be >>>>> conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud >>>>> Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents >>>>> of influence" for a foreign government. >>>>> >>>>> Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is >>>>> not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon >>>>> recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and >>>>> secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in >>>>> the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst >>>>> to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith >>>>> (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel >>>>> operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine >>>>> meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in >>>>> Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were >>>>> "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, >>>>> Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer >>>>> (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian >>>>> and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to >>>>> Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in >>>>> Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of >>>>> preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) >>>>> and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush >>>>> administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. >>>>> Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his >>>>> first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National >>>>> Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy >>>>> clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We >>>>> cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] >>>>> The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that >>>>> Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with >>>>> U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] >>>>> >>>>> Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution >>>>> authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian >>>>> nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that >>>>> resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's >>>>> nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For >>>>> Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to >>>>> be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for >>>>> Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to >>>>> act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] >>>>> But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear >>>>> capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 >>>>> attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because >>>>> we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained >>>>> Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the >>>>> Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run >>>>> preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] >>>>> >>>>> In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would >>>>> purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for >>>>> by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground >>>>> nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear >>>>> installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out >>>>> retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks >>>>> from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel >>>>> may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do >>>>> report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range >>>>> ballistic missile can reach Israel. >>>>> >>>>> Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle >>>>> East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, >>>>> American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more >>>>> effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less >>>>> likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the >>>>> safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who >>>>> identify with Israel to push for an American attack. >>>>> >>>>> Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- >>>>> Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with >>>>> opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same >>>>> time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering >>>>> countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The >>>>> stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would >>>>> seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already >>>>> controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation >>>>> this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will >>>>> find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. >>>>> [30][25] >>>>> The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems >>>>> anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability >>>>> for the existing Iraqi government. >>>>> >>>>> With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation >>>>> with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime >>>>> Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite >>>>> resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] >>>>> >>>>> The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian >>>>> Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, >>>>> that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in >>>>> the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will >>>>> not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some >>>>> military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations >>>>> which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani >>>>> continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an >>>>> element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is >>>>> true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of >>>>> an attack. [32][27] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody >>>>> quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration >>>>> would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could >>>>> the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military >>>>> is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is >>>>> larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United >>>>> States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having >>>>> learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military >>>>> power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. >>>>> >>>>> The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a >>>>> large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military >>>>> occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's >>>>> nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, >>>>> neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired >>>>> in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban >>>>> areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian >>>>> casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out >>>>> Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built >>>>> underground. [33][28] >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest >>>>> attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also >>>>> to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically >>>>> set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground >>>>> invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; >>>>> the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian >>>>> forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military >>>>> forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then >>>>> destroy. >>>>> >>>>> What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war >>>>> against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest >>>>> of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall >>>>> into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would >>>>> threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United >>>>> States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a >>>>> move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans >>>>> for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. >>>>> Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move >>>>> might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify >>>>> with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth >>>>> noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" >>>>> blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. >>>>> >>>>> While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern >>>>> Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. >>>>> The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, >>>>> the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to >>>>> the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted >>>>> military and financial resources of the United States. >>>>> >>>>> Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the >>>>> Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the >>>>> peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim >>>>> fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack >>>>> American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American >>>>> regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, >>>>> which would have dire economic consequences around the world, >>>>> provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. >>>>> >>>>> Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, >>>>> international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not >>>>> want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have >>>>> generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with >>>>> little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; >>>>> Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the >>>>> Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. >>>>> But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist >>>>> status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped >>>>> beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson >>>>> exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and >>>>> ride mankind." >>>>> >>>>> As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is >>>>> very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a >>>>> powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors >>>>> threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its >>>>> survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful >>>>> military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant >>>>> Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the >>>>> United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab >>>>> regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that >>>>> destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by >>>>> facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, >>>>> which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the >>>>> areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential >>>>> American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the >>>>> neoconservatives' World War IV. >>>>> >>>>> It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out >>>>> of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its >>>>> prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq >>>>> is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. >>>>> The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and >>>>> walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy >>>>> had been a failure. >>>>> >>>>> Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the >>>>> support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to >>>>> pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] >>>>> Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics >>>>> have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a >>>>> choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in >>>>> the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, >>>>> has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a >>>>> mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have >>>>> voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on >>>>> Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In >>>>> regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect >>>>> to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful >>>>> that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. >>>>> >>>>> [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational >>>>> backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive >>>>> Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on >>>>> Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. >>>>> Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of >>>>> America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government >>>>> is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] >>>>> It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of >>>>> progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and >>>>> widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, >>>>> whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. >>>>> >>>>> The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose >>>>> their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they >>>>> initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that >>>>> holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, >>>>> unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, >>>>> the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a >>>>> position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is >>>>> because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing >>>>> from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As >>>>> columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the >>>>> administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish >>>>> the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We >>>>> can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] >>>>> According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a >>>>> paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its >>>>> necessary role of world leadership. >>>>> >>>>> For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the >>>>> rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks >>>>> on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is >>>>> supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at >>>>> stake in staying the course and not giving in. >>>>> >>>>> In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the >>>>> foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of >>>>> neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven >>>>> American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries >>>>> -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. >>>>> Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to >>>>> those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite >>>>> believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist >>>>> agenda. >>>>> >>>>> But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American >>>>> wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. >>>>> Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the >>>>> non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission >>>>> [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate >>>>> the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world >>>>> increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be >>>>> well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] >>>>> >>>>> But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. >>>>> And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country >>>>> indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. >>>>> All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to >>>>> self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some >>>>> terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, >>>>> other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by >>>>> bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on >>>>> occasion. >>>>> >>>>> The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the >>>>> regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such >>>>> an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and >>>>> of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the >>>>> United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global >>>>> debacle in the making. >>>>> >>>>> References >>>>> >>>>> 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm >>>>> 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html >>>>> 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ >>>>> 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ >>>>> 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm >>>>> 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 >>>>> 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 >>>>> 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 >>>>> 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 >>>>> 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 >>>>> 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 >>>>> 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 >>>>> 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 >>>>> 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 >>>>> 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 >>>>> 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 >>>>> 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 >>>>> 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 >>>>> 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 >>>>> 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 >>>>> 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 >>>>> 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 >>>>> 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 >>>>> 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 >>>>> 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 >>>>> 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 >>>>> 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 >>>>> 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 >>>>> 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 >>>>> 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 >>>>> 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 >>>>> 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 >>>>> 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 >>>>> 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 >>>>> 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 >>>>> 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 >>>>> 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 >>>>> 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 >>>>> 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN >>>>> 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm >>>>> 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm >>>>> 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 19 19:07:33 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 12:07:33 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran Message-ID: <01C4B5D4.37E11A90.shovland@mindspring.com> Sometimes I think that meeting in person is not necessary for a successful therapy session. I think it could be done with a video phone, and perhaps I could do it with an Indian or Chinese therapist who charges $10 an hour... Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2004 6:54 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran The central fact overlooked by the discussion about the draft is that the military and the Republicans do not want a draft. There are plenty of willing and patriotic volunteers. The draft is simply a red herring manufactured whole cloth by social justice (nee socialists-marxists) democrats to attack the republicans. Hey, red herring. Get it? Frank's point is that automation reduces the employment opportunities for the least skilled. Thomas Sowell has pointed out that those are overwhelmingly first generations immigrants, and has shown that their children move up the social / educational ladder. I am pretty close to the Mexican community, and their apathy toward education might short-circuit that process. However, there is some hope. In mexican maquiladoras there is a new emphasis on quality. They cannot compete with China on wages, their traditional niche. They have to move to education and quality, and that may eventually transform the Mexican culture, just as listening to Demming transformed post war Japan. Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: >I'm glad we have a shared vision of our wonderful future :-) > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 3:02 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran > >It would not reduce the population of useless eaters very much, since not >many of them would get killed, fewer than if they stayed at home and >engaged in hot rodding. But it would give them jobs and a sense of >accomplishment. > >Or we could create U.S. Department of Reorganization, where half the >employees would be reorganizing the other half. THe usual competition over >perks and office space would continue, though nothing would be produced. >This is very much like the U.S. Department of Education, where I work, >except that cash does get dispersed, to the tune of $63 billion a year, >most of it going to educrats outside of E.D. but none of it benefiting >students. In fact it harms them. > >On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > > > >>Concentrating the draft on the lower classes >>would be a good way to reduce the population >>of "useless eaters." >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:37 PM >>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >> >>You again are not paying attention. The student deferments will by and >>large go to those who can compete with the Chinese and Japanese. Those >>that can should not only get derements but should not be drafted at all. >>Only those that are in what the Marxoids called the reserve army of the >>unemployed should be drafted. >> >>On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >> >> >> >>>If they do a draft, I hope that there won't be any >>>student deferments :-) >>> >>>Steve Hovland >>>www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>>-----Original Message----- >>>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 2:08 PM >>>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>>Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>> >>>There wouldn't be much political fallout if those who can complete with >>>the Chinese and Indians don't get drafted. Those who can't will be glad to >>>have jobs. >>> >>>On 2004-10-18, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: >>> >>> >>> >>>>Going to war against Iran would be a good way to >>>>employ all of those useless young Americans who >>>>can't compete with Chinese who make 37 cents >>>>per hour, not to mention Indian PhD's who think >>>>$6,000 a year is a lot of money. >>>> >>>>Since we won't be able to continue the war in Iraq >>>>without using conscription, we will be able to get >>>>a two-fer-one by attacking Iran as well. What I >>>>mean is that the political consequences of starting >>>>a draft will be so high that any President who does >>>>it may as well knock out all of them at once, including >>>>Korea. >>>> >>>>And once Baby Boomers start dying from the >>>>fallout from the Korean bomb, the problem with >>>>Social Security will be solved as well. >>>> >>>>Great days lie ahead! >>>> >>>>Steve Hovland >>>>www.stevehovland.net >>>> >>>> >>>>-----Original Message----- >>>>From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] >>>>Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 1:30 PM >>>>To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>>Subject: [Paleopsych] Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>> >>>>Stephen J. Sniegoski: Next Stop, Iran >>>>http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future.htm >>>>4.10.14 >>>> >>>>[The author is quite biased against neocons and American empire policy, >>>>but read it anyhow. It warns of the impossible quagmire the United States >>>>is heading toward. But remember this may be a blessing in disguise if we >>>>can somehow rope 30 surplus MegaChinese males into it instead of attacking >>>>us.] >>>> >>>> Editor's note. Dr. Sniegoski presented an earlier version of this >>>> article as a paper at the 12th [2]Mut zur Ethik Conference held >>>> September 3-5, 2004, in Feldkirch/Vorarlberg, Austria. The >>>> conference theme was "Giving Inner Courage: democracy, values, >>>> education, and dialogue." >>>> >>>> That version is to be published by [3]Zeit-Fragen ([4]Current >>>> Concerns). Zeit-Fragen/Current Concerns is published in Zurich, >>>> Switzerland. >>>> >>>> -- Nicholas Strakon >>>> ___________________________________ >>>> >>>> >>>> The future of the global War on Terror: >>>> Next stop, Iran >>>> By STEPHEN J. SNIEGOSKI >>>> >>>> If you find this column of value, please send a donation of $4 to TLD. >>>> More information appears below. >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> What will be the next front in the war on terror? I don't claim to be >>>> Nostradamus and I don't have a crystal ball, but I can confidently say >>>> that the current situation points to a wider war in the Middle East. >>>> That result has been sought and planned for by the American >>>> neoconservatives; it is what they have referred to as World War IV. It >>>> is all in the published record; no conspiracy-theorizing is necessary >>>> to see it. >>>> >>>> Also on the record, but receiving much less attention, is the fact >>>> that the drive toward World War IV reflects the long-held Israeli >>>> Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel's Middle Eastern >>>> enemies in order to ultimately facilitate the elimination of the >>>> single greatest danger to the Jewish state -- its large and >>>> ever-growing Palestinian population. (I will not repeat here all of >>>> [5]what I have written elsewhere about the neocon/Likudnik background >>>> for the war in the Middle East -- how the neocons were the driving >>>> force for the war on Iraq and how the war plans were conceived in >>>> Israel.) >>>> >>>> Neoconservatives do not control American policy to the extent that >>>> they can lead the country directly into the wider war in the Middle >>>> East. Other U.S. elites, especially the financial elite, do not want >>>> such a wider war. Instead, it seems likely that the neocons will use >>>> the momentum of their invasion and occupation of Iraq to thrust the >>>> United States into the wider war, and it seems likely that it will >>>> begin with an attack on Iran. >>>> >>>> The neocons have been focusing on the danger of Iran for some time, >>>> and it now appears that much of what they have said about that country >>>> may actually be true. Numerous experts now report that the Islamic >>>> Republic of Iran possesses an extensive and intensive nuclear program >>>> that could develop weapons. Moreover, Iran has developed substantial >>>> ballistic-missile capabilities; it can probably hit targets throughout >>>> the Middle East, including Israel. An interesting point, however, is >>>> that Iran does not seem to be violating any international laws in >>>> importing materials for its suspected nuclear-weapons program. That >>>> program uses the same basic technology involved in a civilian >>>> nuclear-energy program, which Iran is permitted to have under the 1968 >>>> Non-Proliferation Treaty. [6][1] >>>> >>>> [future_qt1.gif] If Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, that >>>> would fit with its declared strategy of "deterrent defense," as >>>> opposed to an offensive threat to Israel or, certainly, to the United >>>> States. Iran wants to be a regional power able to defend itself >>>> against Israel and the United States, which it apparently believes are >>>> more apt to attack weak countries unable to fight back. As Middle East >>>> news commentator Youssef Ibrahim writes: "I have little doubt Iran is >>>> pursuing nuclear weapon systems. Its officials privately assert it is >>>> so because they view Israel as a real menace to them and the region >>>> with its 200 nuclear warheads.... The United States completely ignores >>>> that double standard, which resonates widely among Arabs and Muslims. >>>> Added to that is the suspicion the Bush administration is still bent >>>> on, or addicted to, more American-induced regime changes." [7][2] >>>> >>>> Commentator Edward S. Herman aptly observes: "Iran is the next U.S. >>>> and Israeli target, so the mainstream U.S. media are once again >>>> serving the state agenda by focusing on Iran's alleged menace and >>>> refusing to provide context that would show the menace to be pure >>>> Orwell -- that is, while Iran is seriously threatened by the U.S. and >>>> its aggressively ethnic-cleansing client, Iran only threatens the >>>> possibility of self-defense." [8][3] >>>> >>>> Iran's very effort to develop strategic weapons prompts Israel and the >>>> United States to press for a pre-emptive attack. It might be also >>>> argued that while the rulers of Iran certainly want to avoid a >>>> destructive American or Israeli attack, at the same time they can use >>>> a war atmosphere to unify their country, now divided between religious >>>> militants and moderates. >>>> >>>> Israel is especially concerned -- it is obsessed, even -- about Iran's >>>> developing nuclear weapons because it regards its regional nuclear >>>> monopoly as a fundamental pillar of its security. We might recall that >>>> Israel bombed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 when it feared >>>> that Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons there. Iran is, of >>>> course, an active enemy of Israel, providing support to Hezbollah in >>>> Lebanon and to a number of Palestinian resistance groups. In the past >>>> couple of years numerous Israeli officials have sounded grave warnings >>>> about the potential Iranian nuclear threat. For example, in November >>>> 2003 testimony before the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and >>>> Defense Committee, Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned that Iran's nuclear >>>> program posed "the biggest threat to Israel's existence since its >>>> creation" in 1948. [9][4] >>>> And addressing a conference on national security in December 2003, Avi >>>> Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security agency, said >>>> that Iran was sponsoring terrorism and developing non-conventional >>>> weapons, which posed "a strategic threat to Israel." Dichter declared >>>> that "Iran is the No. 1 terror nation in the world." [10][5] >>>> >>>> Israeli leaders emphasized concern about Iran before the U.S. attack >>>> on Iraq. In January 2002, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a leading >>>> member of the Labor Party and a former prime minister, claimed that >>>> Iran posed a grave missile threat to Israel: "The ayatollah leadership >>>> in Iran is also threatening to destroy Israel ... inflicting genocide >>>> through the use of missiles." [11][6] >>>> And in an interview with the New York Post in November 2002, Prime >>>> Minister Ariel Sharon said that as soon as Iraq had been dealt with, >>>> he would "push for Iran to be at the top of the 'to do' list." Sharon >>>> called Iran the "center of world terror" and declared that "Iran makes >>>> every effort to possess weapons of mass destruction ... and ballistic >>>> missiles.... That is a danger to the Middle East, and a danger to >>>> Europe." [12][7] >>>> >>>> >>>> As usual, neoconservatives acted in tandem with Israel. The point man >>>> here would seem to be veteran neoconservative Michael A. Ledeen. On >>>> April 30, 2003, in an address titled "Time to Focus on Iran -- the >>>> Mother of Modern Terrorism" at a policy forum of the Jewish >>>> Institutite for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared: >>>> "The time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free >>>> Syria and free Lebanon." [13][8] >>>> Elsewhere Ledeen would write: "We are now engaged in a regional >>>> struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone >>>> of the terror network. Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, >>>> the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran >>>> would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the >>>> terrorists." [14][9] Ledeen actually argued that the United States >>>> should first attack Iran, which he portrayed as the "keystone of the >>>> terror network," even while the Bush administration was preparing its >>>> attack on Iraq. "I have long argued that it would be better to >>>> liberate Iran before Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "and events may >>>> soon give us that opportunity." [15][10] >>>> >>>> In early 2002 Ledeen set up the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), >>>> an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran. His >>>> principal collaborator is Morris Amitay, vice chairman of JINSA and a >>>> former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs >>>> Committee (AIPAC), Israel's ultra-powerful lobby in the United States. >>>> CDI also includes members of key neoconservative policy institutes and >>>> think tanks, including Raymond Tanter of the Washington Institute for >>>> Near East Affairs (WINEA) -- an off-shoot of AIPAC -- Frank Gaffney, >>>> president of the Center for Security Policy, American Enterprise >>>> Institute (AEI) scholars Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and >>>> former CIA director James Woolsey. The organization proclaims that >>>> diplomatic engagement with Iran has proved to be an utter failure, and >>>> that the only way to end the reign of Iran's "terror masters" is to >>>> actively support opponents of the regime in their efforts to topple >>>> the reigning mullahs. [16][11] >>>> >>>> [future_qt2.gif] The move on Iran enlisted broad support among >>>> neocons. On May 6, 2003, AEI hosted an all-day conference titled "The >>>> Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy, and the War on Terror," whose >>>> speakers included Ledeen, Amitay, and Uri Lubrani from the Israeli >>>> Defense Ministry. The convenor, Hudson Institute Middle East >>>> specialist Meyrav Wurmser (whose husband David worked as her AEI >>>> counterpart until joining the Bush administration), set the tone. "Our >>>> fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war," she said. "It >>>> would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone.... >>>> We must move on, and faster." [17][12] >>>> As Marc Perelman pointed out in the Jewish newspaper Forward in May >>>> 2003, "A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish >>>> organizations, and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to >>>> step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran." >>>> [18][13] >>>> >>>> It is worth noting that despite their reputation as advocates of >>>> global democracy, the neoconservatives have proposed restoring the >>>> monarchy in Iran, in the person of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the >>>> former shah. Perelman wrote: "The emerging coalition is reminiscent of >>>> the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming >>>> the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of >>>> neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with >>>> several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish >>>> Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public >>>> speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los >>>> Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders." [19][14] >>>> >>>> A strong Israeli connection was apparent here. According to Perelman, >>>> Pahlavi has had direct contacts with the Israeli leadership: "During >>>> the last two years ... [Pahlavi] has met privately with Prime Minister >>>> Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as >>>> Israel's Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav." [20][15] >>>> >>>> Another writer, Iraj Pakravan, maintained that the neocon and overall >>>> Zionist support for Pahlavi was to be reciprocated by his support for >>>> Israel, should he ever take power. Pahlavi and his supporters must >>>> "give guarantees that they will conduct a policy that supports >>>> Israel's position against the Palestinians and abide by the U.S.'s >>>> energy needs. Furthermore, and most importantly, the opposition group >>>> must accept that Israel will be the leading state in the hierarchy of >>>> the regional system, a position that many states in the Middle East >>>> covet." [21][16] >>>> >>>> >>>> Indicating the seriousness of the American move to destabilize Iran >>>> was the fact that preparations were being made by the Defense >>>> Department's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which played such a key >>>> role in the U.S. attack on Iraq. Perelman wrote in May 2003: "Iran >>>> expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon's 'special plans' >>>> office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but >>>> apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the >>>> Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated >>>> regime change in Tehran." [22][17] >>>> >>>> As a result of a leaked FBI probe in the late summer of 2004, it has >>>> come out that Israel might have had direct contacts with members of >>>> the OSP on the Iran issue. The implication is not simply that >>>> individuals involved were pro-Israel but that some of them might be >>>> conspirators in a clandestine operation launched by Sharon's Likud >>>> Party. Robert Dreyfuss, writing in the Nation, has called them "agents >>>> of influence" for a foreign government. >>>> >>>> Dreyfuss reports that "the point of the FBI probe, sources believe, is >>>> not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon >>>> recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and >>>> secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in >>>> the Middle East." Tom Barry of In These Times writes that, unbeknownst >>>> to the CIA or the State Department, the office of Douglas Feith >>>> (assistant secretary of defense for policy) engaged in "back-channel >>>> operations" and over the past three years participated in clandestine >>>> meetings in Washington, Rome, and Paris "to discuss regime change in >>>> Iraq, Iran, and Syria." Attending the meetings, Barry writes, were >>>> "Office of Policy officials and consultants ... [Lawrence] Franklin, >>>> Harold Rhode, and Michael Ledeen..., an expatriate Iranian arms dealer >>>> (Manichur Ghorbanifar), AIPAC lobbyists, Ahmed Chalabi, and Italian >>>> and Israeli intelligence officers, among others." The direct link to >>>> Sharon's government was most obvious in the plan for regime change in >>>> Iran, which Barry says would most likely involve "a combination of >>>> preemptive military strikes (either by the United States or Israel) >>>> and support for a coalition of Iranian dissidents." [23][18] >>>> >>>> [future_qt3.gif] It was not just the neoconservatives in the Bush >>>> administration who were moving to attack Iran: President George W. >>>> Bush himself identified Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his >>>> first State of the Union Address in January 2002. And National >>>> Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made this aspect of U.S. policy >>>> clear in her August 8, 2004, appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press": "We >>>> cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon." [24][19] >>>> The next day, while campaigning for re-election, Bush asserted that >>>> Iran "must abandon her nuclear ambitions," and he vowed to stand with >>>> U.S. allies to pressure Tehran to do so. [25][20] >>>> >>>> Ominously, on May 6, 2004, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution >>>> authorized "all appropriate means" to put an end to Iranian >>>> nuclear-weapons development; the administration could use that >>>> resolution as legal justification to launch an attack. [26][21] >>>> >>>> >>>> There are strong rumors floating that Israel plans to attack Iran's >>>> nuclear installations, as it attacked Iraq's reactor in 1981. "For >>>> Israel it's quite clear, that we're not going to wait for a threat to >>>> be realized," says Ephraim Inbar, head of the Jaffee Center for >>>> Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. "For self-defense we have to >>>> act in a preemptive mode." [27][22] >>>> But some Israeli authorities believe that destroying Iran's nuclear >>>> capabilities would be a far more difficult mission than the 1981 >>>> attack. "I don't think there's an option for a pre-emptive act because >>>> we're talking about a different sort of a nuclear program," maintained >>>> Shmuel Bar, a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the >>>> Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. "A hit-and-run >>>> preemptive attack can't guarantee much success." [28][23] >>>> >>>> In late September 2004, however, Israel announced that it would >>>> purchase 500 "bunker-busting" bombs from the United States (paid for >>>> by U.S. military aid) -- weapons that could destroy Iran's underground >>>> nuclear stores and laboratories. [29][24] >>>> >>>> [future_qt4.gif] In the event of any Israeli strike on its nuclear >>>> installations, Iran has threatened to unleash its forces in an all-out >>>> retaliation, including long-range missile attacks and terror attacks >>>> from Lebanon. Iran's claim to be able to wreak great damage on Israel >>>> may just be bluster to ward off an attack, but defense experts do >>>> report that the latest version of Iran's Shahab-3 medium-range >>>> ballistic missile can reach Israel. >>>> >>>> Threats of an Israeli attack, which could ignite an all-out Middle >>>> East war, might induce the United States to move on Iran. Moreover, >>>> American attacks on Iranian missile sites would probably be more >>>> effective than anything Israel could carry out and would make it less >>>> likely that Israel would suffer from Iranian retaliation. Thus, the >>>> safety of Israel would likely motivate those influential Americans who >>>> identify with Israel to push for an American attack. >>>> >>>> Ironically, by eliminating the hostile regimes bordering Iran -- >>>> Afghanistan and Iraq -- the United States provided Tehran with >>>> opportunities to greatly expand its power in the region. At the same >>>> time, however, the presence of American forces in those bordering >>>> countries puts considerable geopolitical pressure on Iran. The >>>> stabilization of those neighbors under American domination would >>>> seriously endanger Iran, especially since the United States already >>>> controls the Persian Gulf. Historian Juan Cole describes the situation >>>> this way: "The Iranians are very afraid that the United States will >>>> find a way to maneuver an anti-Iranian government into power" in Iraq. >>>> [30][25] >>>> The current Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi definitely seems >>>> anti-Iranian; thus it is in Iran's interest to work against stability >>>> for the existing Iraqi government. >>>> >>>> With American occupation forces in neighboring Iraq, the situation >>>> with Iran is a veritable powder keg. American officials and Prime >>>> Minister Allawi have claimed that Iran is aiding the violent Shi'ite >>>> resistance in Iraq led by the radical cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr. [31][26] >>>> >>>> The situation is ripe for incidents leading to conflict. Iranian >>>> Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV on August 18, 2004, >>>> that Iran might even launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in >>>> the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will >>>> not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some >>>> military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations >>>> which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly." Shamkhani >>>> continued: "The U.S. military presence (in Iraq) will not become an >>>> element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is >>>> true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in the event of >>>> an attack. [32][27] >>>> >>>> >>>> In light of the American public's disenchantment with the bloody >>>> quagmire in Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the Bush administration >>>> would dare to attack Iran before the November election. But what could >>>> the United States do after the election? Although the Iranian military >>>> is not in any way comparable to that of the United States, it is >>>> larger and better equipped than the Iraqi forces that the United >>>> States faced in 2003. The Iranians also have the benefit of having >>>> learned from U.S. military operations in Iraq. And Iran's military >>>> power has not been sapped by a decade of bombing, as Iraq's had been. >>>> >>>> The occupation of Iraq has stretched the U.S. Army so thin that a >>>> large-scale ground invasion of Iran, followed by a comparable military >>>> occupation, seems to be out of the question. But bombing of Iran's >>>> nuclear sites and military infrastructure is highly likely. After all, >>>> neither the Air Force nor the Navy, with its cruise missiles, is mired >>>> in Iraq. However, since many Iranian facilities are located in urban >>>> areas, even "precision" bombing would cause extensive civilian >>>> casualties. Furthermore, precision bombing alone might not knock out >>>> Iran's nuclear installations, many of which are said to be built >>>> underground. [33][28] >>>> >>>> [future_qt5.gif] Neocons would undoubtedly press for the severest >>>> attack possible, not just to set back Iran's nuclear program but also >>>> to weaken its military and economic potential. That would dramatically >>>> set the stage for regime change in Iran. Hence, a limited ground >>>> invasion of Iran with air support would not be out of the question; >>>> the aim would be not to occupy Iran but rather to destroy Iranian >>>> forces. A ground invasion could oblige Iran to position its military >>>> forces in defensive positions that American airpower could then >>>> destroy. >>>> >>>> What would be the impact of such an American attack on Iran? A war >>>> against Iran is liable to set off a tidal wave of terror in the rest >>>> of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, already shaken by terror, could fall >>>> into chaos. The concomitant danger to the Saudi oil supply would >>>> threaten the economy of the world. A call would arise in the United >>>> States to militarily occupy the Saudi oil-producing regions; that is a >>>> move for which Washington is reported to have had contingency plans >>>> for a long time, and it has been publicly advocated by the neocons. >>>> Since anti-Saudi feeling is high in the United States, such a move >>>> might enjoy considerable support here even among those who identify >>>> with the anti-war American Left (i.e., the moderate Left). It is worth >>>> noting that Michael Moore's popular anti-war movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" >>>> blames the Saudi government for the 9/11 attacks and the war on Iraq. >>>> >>>> While the U.S. military could manage to occupy Saudi Arabia's Eastern >>>> Province, maintaining the oil supply would not necessarily be easy. >>>> The pipelines would also have to be secured, including, presumably, >>>> the vitally important pipeline that stretches across the country to >>>> the Red Sea. Such an undertaking would further stretch the depleted >>>> military and financial resources of the United States. >>>> >>>> Any aggression directed against Saudi Arabia, the center of the >>>> Islamic religion, would undoubtedly have a galvanizing effect on the >>>> peoples of the entire Muslim world. Thousands of fanatical Muslim >>>> fighters would not only pour into Saudi Arabia but would also attack >>>> American and Western interests throughout the world. The pro-American >>>> regimes in Jordan and Egypt would face destabilization. >>>> >>>> [future_qt6.gif] The turmoil would cause oil prices to skyrocket, >>>> which would have dire economic consequences around the world, >>>> provoking social and political upheavals far beyond the Middle East. >>>> >>>> Obviously, important American economic interests -- Big Oil, >>>> international finance -- as well as the foreign-policy elite would not >>>> want that nightmare scenario to develop. But those groups have >>>> generally opposed the American war in the Middle East all along, with >>>> little success. They are currently pushing for negotiation with Iran; >>>> Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, headed a recent study for the >>>> Council on Foreign Relations that recommended the diplomatic approach. >>>> But the war skeptics among the elites -- defenders of the imperialist >>>> status quo -- have been overtaken by events. Things have slipped >>>> beyond their control. As the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson >>>> exclaimed during the American Civil War: "Events are in the saddle and >>>> ride mankind." >>>> >>>> As long as the United States stays in Iraq, the widening of the war is >>>> very likely. Earlier I referred to the U.S. occupation of Iraq as a >>>> powder keg; it is now ready to explode. And a couple of crucial actors >>>> threaten to light the fuse. The Islamic regime in Iran believes its >>>> survival depends on keeping Iraq unstable and on developing a powerful >>>> military deterrent, probably including nuclear weapons. Militant >>>> Islamic terrorists -- al Qaeda -- see an all-out war between the >>>> United States and Islam as a chance to overthrow the existing Arab >>>> regimes and gain power. Sharon and the American neocons realize that >>>> destabilizing the Middle East can save the Jewish state by >>>> facilitating a final solution to the Palestinian demographic threat, >>>> which if ignored will soon overwhelm the Jewish population in the >>>> areas controlled by Israel. Consequently, Israel and its influential >>>> American supporters push for a U.S. hard line -- to bring about the >>>> neoconservatives' World War IV. >>>> >>>> It is probably beyond the power of the Bush administration to pull out >>>> of Iraq, given the influence of the neocons and the fact that its >>>> prestige is on the line. In fact, its justification for attacking Iraq >>>> is even more applicable to attacking Iran, as many have pointed out. >>>> The Bush administration is just not willing to throw in the sponge and >>>> walk away from Iraq; to do so would be to admit that its whole policy >>>> had been a failure. >>>> >>>> Although John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, has the >>>> support of most of the substantial anti-war vote, he is likely to >>>> pursue a policy in the Middle East similar to Bush's. [34][29] >>>> Kerry, in fact, doesn't even promise much change; some of his critics >>>> have styled the Kerry program on the Middle East "an echo, not a >>>> choice." [35][30] Kerry has said he would retain American troops in >>>> the Middle East. Only recently, finding himself behind in the polls, >>>> has he begun to actually admit that the invasion of Iraq was a >>>> mistake. As late as August 2004, Kerry was saying that he would have >>>> voted in the Senate to give the president the power to wage war on >>>> Iraq even if he had known that the WMD danger was non-existent. In >>>> regard to his plan for Iraq, Kerry differs with Bush only in respect >>>> to the former's much-touted internationalism, though it is doubtful >>>> that Kerry could attract much international support to occupy Iraq. >>>> >>>> [future_qt7.gif] It should be added that Kerry's major organizational >>>> backers -- the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive >>>> Policy Institute -- are peopled by liberals who supported the war on >>>> Iraq. Moreover, like the neocons, they identify closely with Israel. >>>> Kerry himself has said that the "cause of Israel must be the cause of >>>> America" -- at a time when the actual "cause" of the Sharon government >>>> is to destabilize the Middle East in the interests of Israel. [36][31] >>>> It also should be noted, however, that Kerry, under the guise of >>>> progressive internationalism, could more effectively intensify and >>>> widen the war in the Middle East than could the Bush administration, >>>> whose credibility is much tarnished by lies, torture, and corruption. >>>> >>>> The fact is that even if the neoconservatives themselves should lose >>>> their grip on the reins of government power, the war policy that they >>>> initiated in the Middle East has taken on a life of its own. And that >>>> holds true despite the influence of the Establishment figures who, >>>> unlike Kerry, opposed the American attack on Iraq. In large measure, >>>> the neoconservatives have placed their Establishment adversaries in a >>>> position where they cannot undo what the neocons have done. That is >>>> because the American foreign-policy elite believes that withdrawing >>>> from Iraq would destroy America's image as a world superpower. As >>>> columnist Paul Krugman writes: "Even among harsh critics of the >>>> administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish >>>> the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We >>>> can't cut and run. We have to stay the course." [37][32] >>>> According to this line of thinking, if the United States looked like a >>>> paper tiger in Iraq, it would not have the credibility to exercise its >>>> necessary role of world leadership. >>>> >>>> For the United States to pull out would put it on the defensive in the >>>> rest of the world. That demonstration of weakness would invite attacks >>>> on other parts of the American empire. Elite opinion on this issue is >>>> supported by much of the general populace, who see American honor at >>>> stake in staying the course and not giving in. >>>> >>>> In stipulating that the United States must not retreat, the >>>> foreign-policy elite inadvertently reveals the genius of >>>> neoconservative foreign policy on Iraq. The neocons have driven >>>> American policy into a position that their foreign-policy adversaries >>>> -- insofar as they support the American global empire -- must accept. >>>> Essentially, the neocons tied the interests of the American empire to >>>> those of Israel, which the non-neoconservative foreign-policy elite >>>> believes it cannot now abandon without undermining its own globalist >>>> agenda. >>>> >>>> But why can't the United States jettison its empire? Some say American >>>> wealth depends on its military empire -- an economic view I reject. >>>> Arnaud de Borchgrave, a critic of the attack on Iraq, presents the >>>> non-economic rationale for global militarism: "Not to see this mission >>>> [the Iraq business] through to a successful conclusion would relegate >>>> the United States to the role of Sweden or Switzerland in a world >>>> increasingly populated by pariah states. A new world disorder would be >>>> well-nigh inevitable." [38][33] >>>> >>>> But Sweden and Switzerland do quite well without a military empire. >>>> And it seems unlikely that the United States could be the country >>>> indispensable for maintaining prosperity for the rest of the world. >>>> All producers have a vital self-interest in trade, as opposed to >>>> self-sacrificing embargoes. If there arose [39][comment.gif] some >>>> terrible threat to cut off vital resources to the industrial world, >>>> other countries would undoubtedly intervene in some manner -- even by >>>> bribing dictators, as the dastardly French are supposed to do on >>>> occasion. >>>> >>>> The standard of living in the United States does not depend on the >>>> regime's global military empire. Unfortunately, the necessity of such >>>> an empire is ingrained in the thinking of the foreign-policy elite and >>>> of most educated Americans. Therefore it is hardly likely that the >>>> United States will pull out of Iraq. And that means there is a global >>>> debacle in the making. >>>> >>>>References >>>> >>>> 1. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/reprint.htm >>>> 2. http://www.mut-zur-ethik.ch/index_en.html >>>> 3. http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/ >>>> 4. http://currentconcerns.ch/ >>>> 5. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm >>>> 6. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note1 >>>> 7. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note2 >>>> 8. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note3 >>>> 9. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note4 >>>> 10. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note5 >>>> 11. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note6 >>>> 12. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note7 >>>> 13. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note8 >>>> 14. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note9 >>>> 15. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note10 >>>> 16. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note11 >>>> 17. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note12 >>>> 18. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note13 >>>> 19. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note14 >>>> 20. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note15 >>>> 21. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note16 >>>> 22. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note17 >>>> 23. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note18 >>>> 24. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note19 >>>> 25. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note20 >>>> 26. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note21 >>>> 27. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note22 >>>> 28. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note23 >>>> 29. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note24 >>>> 30. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note25 >>>> 31. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note26 >>>> 32. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note27 >>>> 33. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note28 >>>> 34. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note29 >>>> 35. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note30 >>>> 36. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note31 >>>> 37. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note32 >>>> 38. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_future_notes.htm#note33 >>>> 39. mailto:ditch at thornwalker.com?subject=StephenJ.Sniegoski--NEXTSTOP,IRAN >>>> 40. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/donor_update_info.htm >>>> 41. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/subscribe_tld.htm >>>> 42. http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/index.html >>>> >>>> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00002.html >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> From unstasis at gmail.com Wed Oct 20 15:21:47 2004 From: unstasis at gmail.com (Stephen Lee) Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 11:21:47 -0400 Subject: Forum created to discuss this subject here Re: [Paleopsych] introverts, extraverts In-Reply-To: <20041019182206.26670.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> References: <200410191800.i9JI0P014418@tick.javien.com> <20041019182206.26670.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <951ad0704102008217fbce741@mail.gmail.com> Was inspired by the discussion to actually set up a forum for its discussion with the idea of getting a clear idea of how introverts and extroverts see themselves in society.. And hopefully a dialogue not only between like minds but between the opposing parties to see what's good, bad, and possibly inevitable from the prospectives of each and those not clearly defined by their introvert or extroverted nature (generally am very borderline one way or the or the other in those tests). Just plopped it together this morning, and supposedly one doesn't have to be a registered member to post, so it would be interesting to see waht people say, or paste in as examples. Here's the link. Tell me what you think? Not just of the idea for the introverted/extroverted dialogue, but also on this method of gathering information/opinions/solutions in general. http://p219.ezboard.com/binandoutandinbetween99376 Stephen Lee On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 11:22:06 -0700 (PDT), Michael Christopher wrote: > > >>Introverts are marginalized because they are more > comfortable on the margins. Extraverts love the > spotlight and flourish there, so naturally they tend > to lead. Wishing it were otherwise is irrational.<< > > --The issue isn't who wants to be or not be in the > spotlight. It's how a society filters information and > makes decisions as a mass. When the introverts have no > way of getting their message out (through a > sympathetic extrovert, for example, or through > writing), extraverted perception skews reality. > >.... More. was here and then snipped... -- When there's nothing left... There's always something or you're dead. Use it. -- http://www.freewebs.com/rewander http://hopeisus.fateback.com/story.html From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 20 19:25:07 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 15:25:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Notices of the AMS: Some of What Mathematicians Do by Martin H. Krieger Message-ID: Some of What Mathematicians Do by Martin H. Krieger NOTICES OF THE AMS (American Mathematical Society) VOLUME 51, NUMBER 10 http://www.ams.org/notices/200410/comm-krieger.pdf (converted to txt by me) Martin H. Krieger is professor of planning at the University of Southern California. His email address is krieger at usc.edu. Whether it be at a party or at a tavern or while being examined by a physician, on announcing that you are a mathematician, you are likely to be greeted with comments about your companion's failure in high school math, or a request for a brief account of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, or perhaps an offer of a counterexample to the Four Color Theorem. Your parents, your friends and relatives, airplane seatmates, or your dean or provost are not likely to be mathematicians, and they too would like to know what you do, preferably in bite-sized pieces. Might we provide an everyday description that has sufficient technical detail so that a mathematician would recognize the work as real research mathematics? I suggest that if we think of mathematical work as showing that what might seem arbitrary is actually necessary, as analyzing everyday notions, as calculation, and as analogizing--using rich examples of mathematical work itself, we might be able to say a bit more about some of what mathematicians do. None of these descriptions are easy, but I think they connect better with the work of other people, so that they might see our work and their own as having some shared features. Conventions Mathematicians make certain notions conventional. What might seem arbitrary is shown to be in effect necessary, at least within a wide enough range of situations. For example, means and variances were once taken merely as ways of "combining observations", to use a term of art of two hundred years ago. There were other ways, including medians and average absolute deviations (Sxi -x/N). But through the central limit theorem, for example, the variance became entrenched as a good measure of the width of a distribution for various different kinds of more or less identically distributed independent random variables. Moreover, it was easy to depict such statistics in a Euclidean space of observations, the various formulas being Pythagorean theorems with Euclidean distances. And if one used a large electromechanical calculator, it was not hard to set up the calculation so that one could calculate a sum of the squares of xi and yi and a sum of xiyi. In the law of the iterated logarithm, Khinchin provided an estimate of fluctuations that would not be readily accounted for by gaussian behavior, so even exceptional behavior fit under this regimen. Variances turned out to be good measures of the kinds of noise and dissipation physicists encountered, and Einstein's work on fluctuations (1905, 1917) entrenched variances as the measure of choice. It also turned out that variances were good measures of the risk involved in financial markets, and the calculus of L?vy and It? (where, in effect, dx is replaced by vdx) became the bread and butter of finance professors. As for exceptions to means and variances, L?vy showed that the crucial fact was the asymptotic norming constant, the vN that appears in the central limit theorem: that is, N1/a, here a =2. For a need not be 2 but could be other numbers for other distributions ("distributions without variance", that is, with infinite variance), which still scaled asymptotically, such as the world of fractals. However, if the variance is finite, then the only game in town is the gaussian. The deep idea turns out to be asymptotic approximation and scaling, that N1/a. And this is seen in modern results related to random matrices and prime number distributions, where the norming constant can be N1/6, for example. What is made conventional here is the gaussian, characterized by its mean and variance, and its being the asymptotic limit of sums of nice random variables. And that is made clear by the description of its exceptions. Although means and variances might well be arbitrary, they are demonstrably the right statistics ("necessary") for a wide range of cases. Nowadays, statisticians are realizing that for actual data sets, often infected by wild and outlying data, one needs statistical methods that are "robust" and "resistant", not a strong point of means and variances. For a wide range of new cases, means and variances will no longer be conventions, and presumably new statistics are proven to be "necessary" and become the reigning conventions. Mathematicians affirm that these conventions are not arbitrary. They are well grounded in mathematical practice and theory. Analyzing Everyday Notions Mathematicians formally analyze everyday notions. Topology developed as a way of understanding nearbyness, connectivity, and networks. It turned out that the key idea was continuity of mappings and how that continuity was affected by other transformations. For continuity preserved nearbyness, connectivity, and networks. Of course, this demanded a number of conceptual and mathematical discoveries. One great discovery was the subtleties of continuity, uniform vs. pointwise, for example. A second discovery was the fact that one might represent continuity and neighborhoods in terms of mappings: if the neighborhood of a point was mapped into an open set, that neighborhood itself was open, if the mapping was continuous. A third discovery was that networks could be characterized in terms of how they decomposed into simpler networks and that characterization would be preserved under continuous mappings. Moreover, a space might well be approximated by a skeletal framework, and a study of that framework would tell us about the space. A fourth discovery was that that decomposition sequence had a natural algebraic analog in commutative algebra. And a fifth discovery was that the algebraic decomposition had a natural analog with derivatives and second derivatives (Stokes's and Green's theorems and Gibbs's vector calculus), again the world of continuity. As a consequence of this analysis, it was realized that there are many different kinds of nearbyness and many different topologies for a space, yet they might share important features. Functions came to be understood as mappings, in terms of what they did. And the transcendental realm turned out to be deeply involved with the algebraic realm. That analysis of everyday notions led to powerful technologies for analyzing connectivity and networks, techniques vital to current society. Those technologies are grounded in the formal mathematical analysis. Calculation Perhaps "proofs should be driven not by calculation but solely by ideas", as Hilbert averred in what he called Riemann's Principle. But some of the time, if not often, mathematicians have to calcu-late--doggedly and lengthily--in order to get interesting results. In some future time, knowing the solution, other mathematicians may well be able to provide a one-line proof driven solely by ideas, plus a great deal of mathematical superstructure built up in the intervening period of time. Or, in fact, lengthy proof and calculation are unavoidable, and delicate arguments involving hairy technology are the only way to go. The mathematician's achievement is, first of all, to actually follow through on that long and complex calculation and come to a useful conclusion, and, second, to present that calculation so that it is mildly illuminating. As we shall see, such a presentation involves matters of structure, organizing the whole; strategy, being able to tell a story about how it all holds together; and tactics, being able to do what needs to be done to get on with the next main step of the proof. The first proof, by Dyson and Lenard (1967-1968), of the stability of matter--that bulk matter, held together by electrical forces of electrons and nuclei, won't collapse (then to explode)--is considered one of these long and elaborate calculations. What one has to prove is that the binding energy of bulk matter per nucleus is bounded from below by a negative constant, -E*. The proof begins with an idea: an insight by Onsager (1939) about how to incorporate the screening of positively charged nuclei by negatively charged electrons. But the actual calculation would seem to involve a number of preliminary theorems and a goodly number of lemmas, all of which might seem a bit distant from the main problem. Actually, many of the preliminary theorems motivate the proof and indicate what is needed if a proof is to go through. And the lemmas might be seen as lemmas hanging from a tree of theorems or troops lined up to do particular work. As in many such calculations, the result almost miraculously appears at the end. And in this case the proportionality constant is about 1014 larger in absolute value than it need be. A few years later, Lieb and Thirring (1975) were able to figure out how to efficiently use the crucial physics of the problem (Onsager's screening, and also that the electrons are fermions and are represented by antisymmetric wave functions). As a consequence, the proof was now about ideas, involved comparatively little calculation, and could be readily seen in outline, and the proportionality constant was about 10 rather than 1014. Their crucial move was to employ the Thomas-Fermi model of an atom: the many electrons in an atom exist in a field due to their own charges (as well as that of the nucleus), and hence one seeks a self-consistent field. Dyson and Lenard had all these ideas except for Thomas-Fermi. But in their pioneering proof, getting to the endpoint was avowedly more important than efficiency or controlling the size of the proportionality constant, -E*. Theirs was a first proof of a fundamental fact of our world. By the way, in retrospect, the Dyson-Lenard proof is rather less long than it once appeared, its various manipulations along the way rather more rich with meaning. Over the next decades a variety of rigorous proofs were provided of various fundamental facts about our world, many of which proofs are lengthy and complex and involve much calculation. (1) Thermodynamics. One would like to be able to estimate the binding energy of bulk matter, the energy required to break it up into isolated atoms, as being proportional to the number of atoms. Such an estimate justifies thermodynamics, with its separation of intensive variables (such as temperature) and extensive variables (such as volume or number of particles). In a remarkable and lengthy proof, Lebowitz and Lieb (1972) provided a calculation of the asymptotic form of the binding energy of bulk matter, E ~-AN, where N is the number of atoms--just the required form. Along the way, they employed the Dyson-Lenard result. In all of these calculations, one technical problem is to figure out how to break up space into balls or boxes, fitting the atoms into those containers ("balls into boxes"). For example, Lebowitz and Lieb develop a Swiss-cheese decomposition: smaller balls fit into the interstices between larger balls. (2) A gas of atoms. One would like to prove that at a suitable temperature and pressure, atoms form, and one has a gas of such atoms. Charles Fefferman (1983-1986) provides the proof with all of its "gruesome details", as he refers to the latter endeavor. First, he employs a technology he developed for solving partial differential equations--what he called "the uncertainty principle", the idea that the phase space of x and d/dx might be divided into suitably shaped boxes on which the differential equation is trivial--and then fill balls of phase space with these boxes, fitting "boxes into balls". Along the way, he redoes the Lieb-Thirring proof. What is notable is his technical definition of an atom and, later, of a gas of atoms, a mathematically precise way of describing a physical state, one that would allow him to make mathematical progress on the problem. What is remarkable, and this is true for much of Fefferman's work, is his capacity to push through a lengthy calculation. In order to complete the proof of "the atomic nature of matter" (that a gas of atoms forms), Fefferman then needs an even better estimate for the proportionality constant for the stability of matter than was provided by Lieb and Thirring, and with de la Llave and Trotter he provides a lengthy proof and an exact numerical calculation for E*. (Lieb and his followers have provided another route to such better constants.) So far, it should be noted, the calculated E*is still about two times too big for Fefferman's purposes and given what we expect. (3) An isolated atom. Finally, one would like to estimate the ground state energy of a large isolated atom. The hydrogen atom's proverbial 13.6 elec-tron-volts is the only calculation one might make in closed form (one of the first calculations in a quantum mechanics course). For larger atoms one must use approximations in which the errors are not in general rigorously known. In a series of calculations, some rigorous, some merely physical, by Lieb and Simon, Scott, Dirac, and Schwinger, a good idea of the asymptotic formula for the ground state energy in terms of Z, the atomic charge, is given in terms of a series in Z1/3: Z7/3,Z6/3,Z5/3. What Fefferman and Seco (1990-1996) provide in something like 800 pages of proof is a rigorous derivation of this formula with a rigorous estimate of its error, O(Z5/3-1/a). Whole new technologies for partial differential equations are developed along the way, and even the paper that brings these all together is almost two hundred pages in length. Their achievement is again the ability to divide up the problem into tractable parts, to orchestrate the parts so that they work together, and to be able to tell a story of the proof (in this case, in fourteen pages). There have been subsequent simplifications for parts of the Fefferman-Seco derivation, but much of the calculation remains lengthy and complicated. And C?rdoba, Fefferman, and Seco have found the next term in the asymptotic expansion. Lengthy calculation demands enormous technical skill, courage, and insight and usually demands herculean inventions along the way. But sometimes it is the only way to make progress on a problem. I have chosen examples in which the lengthy calculations also lead to analyses of everyday notions, such as a gas of atoms. Analogy Some time ago, P?lya showed that analogy plays a vital role in mathematical work. Sometimes those analogies are provably true, such as the analogy between ideals and varieties: polynomials and their properties, considered as algebraic objects, and the graphs of those polynomials and their properties, considered as geometric objects. At other times, the analogies are not provable but provide for ongoing research programs for hundreds of years. Here I want to describe a syzygy, an analogy of analogies, between mathematical work and work in mathematical physics. What the physicists find, the mathematicians would expect, although the mathematicians could never have predicted such an analogy in the physical realm without the physicists' work. For the mathematicians, I am thinking of the Riemann-Dedekind/Weber-Weil-Langlands analogy of analysis, algebra, and arithmetic. I will call it the Dedekind-Weil analogy, for short. Dedekind and Weber tried to derive Riemann's results concerning the transcendental realm (that is, referring to the realm of the continuous)--think here of Riemann surfaces and the Riemann-Roch theorem--using rigorous algebraic methods with no intuitions about continuity. Again, could there be a useful analogy between curves or surfaces and algebra? They were guided by what was known algebraically about numbers (number theory); in fact, they were able to translate those concepts and results to the realm of polynomials, and so were able to algebraicize Riemann's transcendental point of view. Subsequently, Hilbert and Weil and others extended the analogy. Andr? Weil describes the analogy in a particularly poignant way in a long letter he wrote from prison to his sister, Simone, in 1940. It is a remarkable document, combining a rich mixture of mathematics, a notional history of the analogy, reflections on how Weil himself does mathematics, and analogies of the interchange among the moments of the analogy to incest and war. I urge the reader to get hold of it (either in the original French in the first volume of Weil's Collected Papers, or in English translation in my Doing Mathematics). Weil refers to three columns, in analogy with the Rosetta Stone's three languages and their arrangement, and the task is to "learn to read Riemannian". Given an ability to read one column, can you find its translation in the other columns? In the first column are Riemann's transcendental results and, more generally, work in analysis and geometry. In the second column is algebra, say polynomials with coefficients in the complex numbers or in a finite field. And in the third column is arithmetic or number theory and combinatorial properties. So, for example: (Column 3) Arithmetically, the zeta function packages the prime numbers. (2) Algebraically, its Mellin transform (a Fourier-like transform) is the theta function, originally found by Fourier in solving the heat equation. Theta has wonderful algebraic properties, such as automorphy (transformations of the function, that is, of its argument, can be expressed in terms of the function itself) and a functional equation that defines it. And (1), analytically, the spectrum of the zeta function (its zeros) is rich with information about the prime numbers. A simple example of the threefold analogy is found in the sine function: its series expansion packages the factorials of the odd numbers; sin Mx is expressible in terms of the trigonometric functions themselves (say, sin x and cos x); and the periodicity of the sine function (its spectrum) more or less defines it. Weil points out that the analogy continues to be productive, his later having proved the Riemann hypothesis in the algebraic column being a case in point. In the twentieth century, mathematicians discovered that attaching group representations (or systems of matrices) to objects would often lead to progress in understanding those objects. Lang-lands's very great contribution (1960s ff) was to suggest, following Emil Artin, that attaching a group representation to the algebraic or automorphy column would turn out to be very productive for understanding the arithmetic column. The idea is to extend the analogy of theta functions to zeta functions into a much more complicated realm. Moreover, what might be impossibly difficult to prove from the point of view of one column is readily built in in another, much as theta's automorphy and functional equation leads to zeta's functional equation. While the mathematicians worked at their analogy, physicists were solving a simple classical model of a ferromagnet using statistical mechanics: the Ising model in two dimensions, up-down spins arranged on a, say, rectangular lattice. The spins' interaction is local and simplified. The first exact solution was provided by Onsager in 1944, using a combination of Clifford or quaternion algebra and elliptic functions. Over the subsequent sixty years, physicists have provided many different solutions of the Ising model. (One solution refers to itself as the "399th solution".) Of course, they all get the same result for the partition function (in effect, the zeta function for this problem). When we examine the solutions, we discover that we might group the solutions into those that are arithmetic and combinatorial, those that are algebraic and automorphic, and those that are analytic or transcendental concerned with the zeros of the partition function. Moreover, from the initial solutions of the Ising model by Kramers and Wannier and by Montroll (1941), matrices played a crucial role in many of the solutions. They were in fact group representations, although they were not taken as such. They were taken to be matrices that conveniently did the combinatorics, and it was the algebraic properties of those matrices that allowed for the Onsager solution. No one worried much about what those matrices were a group representation of, although Onsager surely had many insights. The trace of those transfer matrices was the partition function of interest. Moreover, once again, there were functional equations that allowed for the solution for the partition function, and there were the scaling symmetries and automorphies characteristic of theta or elliptic functions. The latter were eventually canonized in the renormalization group techniques of Wilson (1960s, 1970s). Parenthetically, I should note that Onsager's original paper might well be another candidate for a lengthy calculation. Subsequent calculations of asymptotic properties of the Ising model by Wu and McCoy (1966 ff) and collaborators are impressive for their length and complexity and for the courage needed to carry them through. What is striking is that at the end of one such calculation, the Painlev? transcendents appear, and that appearance has since become significant for much of contemporary mathematics and mathematical physics. It would seem that there are two analogies here. The Dedekind-Weil analogy has been worked on as an analogy for 150+ years, most recently in its connection with representation theory in the Lang-lands Program. The physicists have been exactly solving the Ising model in two dimensions for more than sixty years and have produced a wide variety of solutions, employing what are in effect group representations from the beginning. Those various solutions would seem to be naturally described and classified using the categories provided by the mathematicians. The analogy the mathematicians seek to develop generically is developed and proven in its particular realm as a matter of course by the everyday work of the physicists. What the mathematicians seek, the physicists by the way provide an example of. The multiplicity of the physicists' solutions is given meaning and order by the mathematicians' hard-won concepts. I am unsure whether the physicists' analogy is provably the same as the mathematicians'. But surely the Dedekind-Weil analogy provides a way of thinking of diverse phenomena as being naturally connected, rather than their being merely many ways of solving a problem. These analogies and the analogy between them (the syzygy) organize an enormous amount of information, suggest facts in one realm that might be true in another, and illuminate concepts among the columns and the analogies. What Do Mathematicians Do? Words such as convention, analyzing everyday notions, calculation, and analogy might be used to describe activities other than mathematics. And it is just in this sense that we might give outsiders a sense of what mathematicians do. At the same time, those notions have very specific meanings for mathematical work. And it is just in this latter sense that we might describe mathematics to ourselves. The shared set of terms allows us to connect our highly technical and often esoteric work with the work of others. Mathematicians show why some ways of thinking of the world are the right ways, they explore our everyday intuitions and make them rather more precise, they do long and tortuous calculations in order to reveal the consequences of their theories, and they explore analogies of one theory with others in order to find out the truths of the mathematical world. I would also claim that, in a very specific sense, mathematical work is a form of philosophical analysis. The mathematicians and mathematical physicists find out through their rigorous proofs just which features of the world are necessary if we are to have the kind of world we do have. For example, if there is to be stability of matter, electrons must be fermions. The mathematicians show just what we mean by everyday notions such as an average or nearbyness. And mathematics connects diverse phenomena through encompassing theories and speculative analogies. So when you are asked, What do mathematicians do?, you can say: I like to think we are just like lawyers or philosophers who explore the meanings of our everyday concepts, we are like inventors who employ analogies to solve problems, and we are like marketers who try to convince others they ought to think "Kodak" when they hear "photography" (or the competition, who try to convince them that they ought to think "Fuji"). Moreover, some of the time, our work is not unlike solving a two-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, all in one color. That surely involves lots of scut work, but also ingenuity along the way in dividing up the work, sorting the pieces, and knowing that it often makes sense to build the border first. Sources The material in this article is drawn from Martin H. Krieger, Constitutions of Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Doing Mathematics (Singapore: World Scientific, 2003). See, especially, R.P. Langlands, "Representation theory: Its rise and role in number theory", which originally appeared in Proceedings of the Gibbs Symposium (Providence: AMS, 1990), but is also available at http://www.sunsite.ubc.ca/DigitalMathArchive/Langlands/pdf/gibbs-ps.pdf From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 20 19:32:11 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 15:32:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CIO Magazine: (Kurzweil) Machine Dreams - Interview Message-ID: Machine Dreams - Interview CIO Magazine Oct 15,2004 http://www.cio.com/archive/101504/interview.html Machine Dreams When software runs inside our brains, what will happen to us? Ray Kurzweil, who helped invent the IT present, explains to Web Editorial Director Art Jahnke how humans fit into the IT future. You may not like it. INTERVIEW BY ART JAHNKE Ray Kurzweil grew up in Queens, N.Y., where, he says, schoolwork was never so challenging that it kept him from doing what he really wanted to do: build computers. That was also the case at Kurzweil's next school, MIT, where the young student skipped so many classes to work on inventions that his classmates nicknamed him The Phantom. They should have called him The Natural because, as it turns out, Kurzweil is an intuitive inventor. He helped invent the first optical character reading technology, the first text-to-voice synthesizer, computer-based musical instruments, and the first large-vocabulary speech-recognition system. His inventions have made him famous. He has founded several companies and written hundreds of articles. He has also authored and coauthored a number of books, including The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, and the forthcoming Fantastic Voyage, which he cowrote with Terry Grossman, founder and medical director at Frontier Medical Institute. In recent years, Kurzweil has shifted from inventing technologies to tracing the arc of technology progress. Want to know how technology will change our lives, our jobs and our bodies over the next two decades? Kurzweil is a good person to ask. So we did. CIO: Recently we've been hearing about increases in productivity without a corresponding increase in jobs. Could technology continue to improve productivity without creating new jobs? Ray Kurzweil: This is part of a process that began at least 200 years ago, when we automated the English textile industry. You had a machine that could replace 10 or 20 or 30 weavers. But the resulting prosperity from automation created whole new industries. We had industries to create machines and maintain them. Demand increased for things the machines made. The common man or woman didn't want just one shirt, and so on. The broad history of automation shows that we have actually increased the number of jobs. One hundred years ago, we had about 30 percent of the potential workforce employed; we now have about 60 percent. Wages, in constant dollars, have increased by a factor of six to eight over the past century. Can we expect that trend to continue? The relative wealth that we now have comes from productivity, and we're going to see dramatic productivity enhancements in the future. If you jump ahead 20 years or so, we will be able to create virtually any physical product at almost no cost, just from information and fabrication techniques. In fact, we're not that far today from being able to create physical products with software because we have computer-assisted inventory control systems, just-in-time procurement, computer-controlled movement of materials and assembly. Everyone agrees that increased productivity is great, but what about increased productivity without an increase in jobs, which is what we've been seeing recently? Right now we're dealing with relatively small unemployment in the United States--about six percent--and we're seeing a reallocation of jobs around the world. National boundaries don't count as much as they used to. It used to be that you had to be in New York to work in New York. But now that we can really work effectively in cyberland, we have a reallocation of mental work. In terms of the world economy, that's a positive thing. It's not a zero-sum game. Just because India and China benefit doesn't mean that's to our detriment. But these types of trends do have short-term dislocations, so there may be some short-term issues with employment. What about the longer term? We're seeing international competition for the first time in types of work that require education and skills, and that's going to continue. And I think it's a good thing. China is committed to building 50 MITs, as they put it. That's not an exaggeration. They're creating scores of world-class technology universities. But these people are going to create intellectual property from which we'll all benefit. If somebody creates a breakthrough in bioengineering, we all benefit. It may also result in China respecting intellectual property more, if they are heavily invested in creating intellectual property. Still, I believe the United States retains an edge in terms of innovation. We still lead the world in terms of creating new paradigms, new business models, new ways of creating products. Speaking of new models, what will be different about the IT department 10 years from now? "A lot of the equipment that IT departments concern themselves with now--routers and servers--it's all going to be gone. There won't be computers on desks. We're going to eliminate most of that clutter." Let's look at a few trends. A lot of the equipment that IT departments concern themselves with now--routers and servers--will all be gone. There won't be computers on desks. We'll eliminate most of that clutter, certainly by the end of this decade. Technology will be very mobile; it'll be so small that it'll be virtually invisible. Everybody will be online. Images will be written right to our retinas. We'll have very high-speed bandwidth connections at all times. The computing substrate will be everywhere. So, what will the IT department be doing? It will be concerned with security, privacy and protection--particularly protection against software pathogens. These are important issues today, but they're going to be the profound issues civilization struggles with in the future. Eventually, we're going to have software processes running close to our bodies and, ultimately, inside our bodies, in our brains, so detecting pathogens is going to be extremely important. I also think information professionals should take a broad view of the power of information, because information will be the only thing that has value to the corporation. Consequently, there will be no more important department than the information department. What about people? What will we be like? What will we be doing? Technology progresses at an exponential pace because we use the latest generation of technology to create the next generation. That's a process that began with biology. It took billions of years to create DNA, but once it had evolved an information processing capacity to store and record the results of evolutionary experiments, the DNA could use that for the next stage. That was the Cambrian explosion. We see that also in technology. The first computers were designed with pen on paper, and they were put together with screwdrivers and wires. Today, a designer sits down at a workstation and puts in formulas that look very much like software programming. The chips are laid out automatically and fabricated automatically, so the process takes days or weeks rather than years. That's why the products of technology grow exponentially in price, performance and capability. So the creation of technology is already very much a collaborative process between humans and machines. I think it's important to understand that technology and human civilization are deeply integrated and that that integration is going to become more intimate. We're getting closer to our computers. I was talking to a woman yesterday who said her 10-year-old son's notebook is an extension of him. She said it might as well be inside him. Well, soon computers will be inside us. Within one to two decades, we will be able to place nonbiological intelligence inside us, noninvasively. By the 2020s we will be placing millions or billions of nanobots--blood cell-size devices--inside our bloodstream to travel into our brains and interact with our neurons. We will be extending our cognitive capability directly through this intimate merger of biology with machines. Right now, there's a restricted architecture to the way our brains work. The brain uses electrochemical signaling for information processing, and that's a million times slower than electronic circuits. You can make only about 100 trillion connections in there. That may seem like a big number, but the way in which we store information is inefficient, so that a master of an area of knowledge can really remember only about 100,000 chunks of knowledge. If you use Google, you can already see the power of what machines can do. In the future, we will be able to expand the 100 trillion connections we have with new, virtual ones. Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in our brains, it will grow exponentially. As we get to the 2030s, human beings will have biological brains enhanced with more powerful nonbiological thought processes. So the answer to your question is, if we remain unenhanced, if you just had machines developing on a distinct track, they would surpass humans. But that's not what's happening. We are merging. As technology changes our world--and us--that radically, won't we suffer shock upon culture shock? No. It's a very smooth process. If I describe the world of 2030, it would seem quite different from the world today, but we get from here to there in 200 little steps. Each step is benign and conservative and makes sense and addresses some compelling need. Of course, there's already a reaction to this change. We see a strengthening of a kind of antitechnology movement. There is basic philosophic debate about whether we are intended to be masters of our world or whether the world should master us, whether we should fit into the so-called natural order. My view is, what's unique and compelling about human beings is that we seek to surpass our limitations. Other people would rather celebrate our limitations, but we didn't stay on the ground. We won't stay within the limits of our biology. I plan to expand my intelligence along with the available machine intelligence. Aren't you smart enough now? Absolutely not. Are you kidding? A major focus of my interest is in tracking technology trends, which requires me to get my intellectual arms around a lot of diverse fields. It's really an opposite activity to what a lot of scientists do, which is to become more and more narrow. So I'm a neophyte in just about every field I run across. You seem to have unbounded faith in the power of machines to help us, yet recently there's been talk of failure, especially in biotech. No cures for cancer. No cure for AIDS. Has technology let us down? That's complete nonsense. We're in the early stages of biotechnology. We just finished the genome. We haven't finished reverse-assembling it yet, and we don't understand how the genes express themselves in proteins. Just now, we're getting machines powerful enough to simulate protein folding. We're learning the information processing methods underlying biology, disease and aging. We're finding very finely tuned interventions to reverse aging and to reverse disease processes. And there are very profound bio-technology-based therapies in the pipeline already. There are drugs in the pipeline that will enable us to eat as much as we want and remain slim, that will reverse type-2 diabetes by getting rid of excess glucose. I'm very confident that over the next decade we'll largely eliminate the diseases that kill 95 percent of people today. We've identified a dozen or so aging processes, and we have strategies for reversing them all. I believe that within 10 years we'll produce a mouse that doesn't age, and we'll translate that into human therapies within another five to 10 years after that. Do you think that someday there'll be legal limits on how long people can live? Not if I have anything to say about it. But there's a very powerful "death-ist" need. People really have it deeply ingrained. Life is short. You can't live forever. The only things that are certain are death and taxes. We have this whole so-called normal lifecycle; certain things happen at certain ages. We've rationalized death, which in my view is a profound tragedy and a tremendous loss of knowledge and expertise. And we have rationalized it as a good thing. I guess if there's nothing you can do about it, the best thing you can do is rationalize it, but there will be things that we can do about it. I have a book coming out in the fall, Fantastic Voyage. And in it I say that right now we have the means to slow down aging to such an extent that even baby boomers like myself can remain healthy and vital long enough for the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution, at which point we will be able to rebuild our bodies and brains. You look like you're in good shape. Well, I take this very seriously. I'm very aggressive in terms of reversing aging, or slowing down aging. I recently took a biological aging test with my health collaborator (who is also my coauthor), and based on 20 different tests--memory and sensory acuity and response times--it had me at age 40. I'm 56. What do you do to slow the aging process? "We have a lot of outmoded programs in our genes. One says, 'Hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season might be fallow.' These are all programs that need to be changed." I eat a certain diet. I take 250 supplements a day. I'm really reprogramming my biochemistry. A lot of people think it's good to be natural. I don't think it's good because biological evolution is not on our side. It's in the interest of our species for people past child-rearing age not to stick around, at least in an era of scarcity, and our biological program hasn't changed since we lived in an era of scarcity. We have a lot of outmoded programs in our genes. One says, "Hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season might be fallow." These are all programs that need to be changed. We have a lot of aging processes that really accelerate when we get into our 50s and 60s, and I'm working aggressively to reverse those. Who needs a bunch of 120-year-olds hanging around, especially when so much knowledge will be stored in machines? Well, ultimately, there's going to be very little difference between a guy who's 120 and a guy who's 30. And with so much of our lives spent in virtual reality, we'll able to express ourselves in many different ways. It's not a matter of the knowledge that a 120-year-old would have. We all have an opportunity to create knowledge, and we'll expand that opportunity, which, I think, is really the mission of our civilization. end Add a Comment 8 Comments [18]Post Your Comment Most recent responses ... One comment that was here when I first read the interview stated that the direct interface of nanotechnology to the human brain could create some kind of thought police. Well. A technology is neutral by itself, it has no moral values whatsoever ; what makes it "good" or "bad" depends on how it is used and how "moral" (according to our standards) we see it. Consider cell phones for example : you can communicate with people using them, they can be useful to people, but then again, it can be used as a chain and a locator device. What I fear most about that would be the restriction of that sort of technology to a certain elite (based mostly on money) ; since this would make this elite (much) more powerful, what would prevent them from keeping the tech to themselves ? The human mind has a instinctual need for power over other members of the species. E.B. [19]Print comment Although I like the fresh and positive way Ray Kurzweil thinks about the future, there are some points I really miss: * What will this future society do with people that have an IQ below 150? (Oh, sorry, I forgot about the Prenatal checks...) * What about Overpopultation (ok, its nice to handle this by law) * I think its very obvious that there will not be enough jobs in this future - and I do believe that people need work in order to be healty. Dani Oderbolz [20]Email [21]Print comment My current area of research is exactly what this article is about. The ability to upload software into the human brain I feel will allow us as a species to overcome the limitations that we presently have and possibly allow us to use more of our current brain capicity. I think the current politicians would probably benifit the most from such ability. D. Allen Warren Applications Developer MajorBytes [22]Email [23]Print comment If we have bioware firewalls that aren't written by microsoft then brain hacking shouldn't be a problem. Tim Maxwell [24]Print comment I look forward to expressing myself at 120... with the first ever "120 year-olds gone wild!" video. All the geriatric action you can handle! David Steffenson [25]Email [26]Print comment [27]Index of all responses to this column to date. How much are you looking forward to expressing yourself as a 120-year-old? From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 20 19:36:06 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 15:36:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Claremont: Religious Interpretations of Evolutionary Biology Message-ID: Religious Interpretations of Evolutionary Biology Conference at the Center for Process Studies http://www.ctr4process.org/news/evolutionconf.htm October 21-24, 2004 Claremont School of Theology 1325 N. College Ave. Claremont, CA 91711 Evolutionary theory as usually formulated excludes any role for divine causation in the development of living things on Earth. Instead, it explains all living things as the result of a purely natural, ateleological process. Insofar as human beings are the product of this process, the logical implication is that we too are the product of a random process, and hence there is no overarching purpose to our existence or actions. If, as usually presented, the process is fundamentally deterministic, then the idea that human beings, as parts of this process, are free and responsible is undercut. This is religiously distressing. Some theologians oppose all Darwinian explanations; others accept the neo-Darwinian synthesis, while separating it dualistically from the sphere of human meanings. Process theologians want to avoid this dualism while still formulating a theory of evolution that is responsibly scientific. To do so, they posit the basic model of the organism against that of the machine, and they attribute purposes to the organism involved in evolution. The result is a theory of evolution that includes a role for divine purpose and influence. This conference, entitled "Religious Interpretations of Evolutionary Biology: Neo-Darwinism in Dialogue with Lynn Margulis and Process Thought," will bring together orthodox Darwinian biologists, evolutionary biologists who raise questions about the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and process theologians. Our hope is to formulate and to publish a theoretical approach that does justice to the evidence provided by the biological sciences, but interprets it in a way that includes creaturely freedom and divine purpose. _________________________________________________________________ Public Lectures Each lecture will be held at 7:30 p.m. in Mudd Theatre, Claremont School of Theology, 1325 North College Avenue, Claremont, California, 91711. These lectures are free and open to the public. [ayala.jpg] October 21, 2004; 7:30 p.m. "From Paley to Darwin: Design to Natural Selection" by Francisco Ayala Francisco J. Ayala, a biologist at the University of California at Irvine, is noted for his contributions to population and evolution genetics. He has made singular contributions not only to his discipline but to education, philosophy, ethics, religion and national science policy. Ayala has served on the governing council of the National Academy of Sciences and as president and chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [margulis.jpg] October 22, 2004; 7:30 p.m. "Evolution: The Inheritance of Acquired Genomes" by Lynn Margulis Renowned biologist Margulis, of the University of Massachusetts, is known for her long collaboration with British scientist James E. Lovelock, originator of the provocative Gaia Hypothesis, which suggests that life has had a greater influence on the evolution of the Earth than is ordinarily assumed, affecting the global environment in ways that favor the continuity of life. An energetic popularizer of science and spokesperson for environmental issues, Margulis has written many books on a wide range of scientific topics. [van-till.jpg] October 23, 2004; 7:30 p.m. "From Calvinism to Claremont: Now That's Evolution! One Scientist's Evolution from Calvin's Supernaturalism to Griffin's Naturalism" by Howard Van Till Howard J. Van Till is Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy at Calvin College. Having concluded that the usual creation/evolution debate is the product of serious misunderstandings, Van Till's goal is to encourage a non-adversarial and mutually-informative engagement of Christian theology and the natural sciences. [goodenough.jpg] October 24, 2004; 7:30 p.m. "Exploring the Concept of Religious Naturalism" by Ursula Goodenough Ursula Goodenough, of Washington University of St. Louis, is one of the forces behind a growing movement that calls itself "religious naturalism" and suggests that whatever our religious beliefs, and even if we have none at all, we can all come together to celebrate nature, tell the epic of evolution with awe and joy, and protect the earth. _________________________________________________________________ Conference Schedule Besides the public lecturers, daytime sessions will be held for participants and registered attendees only. Other participants in the conference include David Ray Griffin, Charles Birch, Ian Barbour, Philip Clayton, John B. Cobb, Jr., Pete A. Y. Gunter, Jack Haught, Thomas Jay Oord, Jeff Schloss, Dorion Sagan, and Robert Valenza. All daytime sessions will be held in Haddon Conference Room, Claremont School of Theology. Thursday, October 21 7:30 p.m. Public lecture by Francisco Ayala: "From Paley to Darwin: Design to Natural Selection" Friday, October 22 (Theme: Ayala and Goodenough) 8:45 Greetings and introductions 9:00 Comments by Ayala and Goodenough 9:30 Invited Response by Valenza 10:50 Break 11:10 Invited Response by Barbour 12:30 Lunch 2:00 Invited Response by Haught 3:20 Break 3:40 Invited Response by Schloss 5:00 Break 7:30 p.m. Public lecture by Lynn Margulis: "Evolution: The Inheritance of Acquired Genomes" Saturday, October 23 (Theme: Margulis and Sagan) 9:00 Summary by Margulis and Sagan 9:30 Invited Response by Haught 10:50 Break 11:10 Invited Response by Ayala 12:30 Lunch 2:00 Invited Response by Clayton 3:20 Break 3:40 Invited Response by Cobb 5:00 Break 7:30 p.m. Public lecture by Howard Van Till: "From Calvinism to Claremont: Now That's Evolution! One Scientist's Reformation from Calvin's Supernaturalism to Griffin's Naturalism" Sunday, October 24 (Theme: Birch and Griffin) 9:00 Summary by Birch and Griffin 9:30 Invited Response by Goodenough 10:50 Break 11:10 Invited Response by Van Till 12:30 Lunch 2:00 Invited Response by Gunter 3:20 Break 3:40 Invited Response by Sagan 5:00 Break 7:30 p.m. Public lecture by Ursula Goodenough: "Exploring the Concept of Religious Naturalism" _________________________________________________________________ Registration Info Though the evening lectures are free, the daytime discussion panels require registration [DEL: (fee of $50) :DEL] . The fee includes lunch each day. After October 07, 2004, the registration fee increases to $100. [arrow.gif] [21]Register for the Conference _________________________________________________________________ Logistics and Lodging The conference will take place October 21 - 24, 2004. It will be held at Claremont School of Theology, 1325 N. College Ave, Claremont, California 91711. Events will begin the evening of the 21st and conclude the evening of the 24th. For lodging, we have organized a special offer with the Claremont Inn. The package includes: * A Standard Room * Free taxi service from Ontario airport (Bell Cab only, not Yellow Cab). * Free shuttle to Ontario Airport * $69 + tax * Upgrade to Premium Room: $82 + tax * Add full breakfast (bacon, eggs, hash browns, fruit, and cereal): extra $5 To take advantage of this offer, please contact the Claremont Inn at (909) 626-2411 or (800) 854-5733 or [22]fwilson at theclaremontinn.com and mention the Center for Process Studies "Religion and Evolution" Conference. [arrow.gif] [23]The Claremont Inn [arrow.gif] [24]Other Local Hotels _________________________________________________________________ Suggested Reading List Non-specialists who are interested in attending the conference may benefit from the following works: Barbour, Ian G. Religion In An Age of Science. San Francisco, CA : Harper Collins, 1990. _____. When Science Meets Religion; Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? San Francisco, CA : Harper, 2000. Birch, Charles. Feelings. Kensington, NSW, Australia : New South Wales University Press, 1995. _____. On Purpose. Kensington, NSW, Australia : New South Wales University Press, 1990. _____. Biology and the Riddle of Life. Kensington, NSW, Australia : New South Wales University Press, 2000. _____, and John B. Cobb, Jr. The Liberation of Life: From Cell to Community. New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 1981. Clayton, Philip. Explanation from Physics to Theology:. Yale University Press, 1989. Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature. New York : Oxford University Press, 1998. Griffin, David Ray. Religion and Scientific Naturalism; Overcoming the Conflicts. Albany, NY : SUNY Press, 2000. Haught, John F. Science and Religion; From Conflict to Conversation. New York , NY : Paulist Press, 1995. _____. God After Darwin; A Theology of Evolution. Westview Press, 2001. Holmes, Rolston III. Genes, Genesis, and God; Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History. Marguilis, Lynn. Mystery Dance; On the Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York, NY: Summit Books, 1991. _____, Dorion Sagan, and Niles Elredge. What Is Life? Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. _____, Dorion Sagan, and Ernst Mayer. Acquiring Genomes; The Theory of the Origin of the Species. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2003. Miller, Kenneth R. Finding Darwins God; A Scientists Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. New York, NY: Cliff Street Books, 1999. Morrison, Reg. The Spirit in the Gene; Humanitys Proud Illusion and the Laws of Nature. Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing, 1999. Peacocke, Arthur. Theology for a Scientific Age; Being and Becoming Natural, Divine, and Human. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993. Post, Stephen G., et. al. Altruism and Altruistic Love; Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Ruse, Michael. Darwin and Design; Does Evolution Have a Purpose? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Russell, John Robert, William R. Stoeger, and Francisco J. Ayala, eds. Evolutionary and Molecular Biology; Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. Berkeley: Center for Theology and the Natural Science, 1998. References 20. mailto:sweeney at ctr4process.org 21. https://chippewa.vervehosting.com/~process/join/evolution.htm 22. mailto:fwilson at theclaremontinn.com 23. http://www.theclaremontinn.com/ 24. http://www.ctr4process.org/about/hotels.htm 25. mailto:webmaster at ctr4process.org 26. http://www.ctr4process.org/disclaimer.htm From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 20 19:37:52 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 15:37:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Scholars Infuse Religion With Cultural Light Message-ID: Scholars Infuse Religion With Cultural Light The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.10.22 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i09/09b00601.htm Scholars Infuse Religion With Cultural Light By ALAN WOLFE Religion is playing a major role in the 2004 campaign for the presidency. Conservative faiths are growing rapidly, in the United States as well as abroad. While a clash of civilizations may not be taking place, religious conflict -- primarily, but not exclusively, in the Middle East -- is a major cause of global instability. All of those statements are not only true but testify to the importance of religion in the contemporary world. They also raise the question of whether scholarship on religion is up to the task of offering Americans insights on the controversies that surround them. Thirty years ago, the answer to that question would have been negative. Religion had been instrumental in the founding of at least two academic disciplines: sociology, because of the focus of Max Weber and ?mile Durkheim on the role of religion in maintaining social order, and anthropology, because of its interest in ritual and symbols. Yet persuaded that the world was becoming increasingly secular and dedicated to value-free scholarship ill equipped to deal with passionate and irreconcilable beliefs, social scientists from the 1960s until the 1980s treated religion as marginal to their concerns. Combined with the conviction on the part of many natural scientists that religion was hostile to their enterprise and a turn in the humanities away from actual texts like Paradise Lost in favor of theories about how such works can or should be read, that left American academics outside of divinity schools unready for the religious revival that seemed to take on new life in the 1990s, particularly the rise of evangelical religions and the decline of mainline ones. The academic study of religion, having badly missed the boat on one of the most profound social transformations of our time, has a lot of catching up to do. The good news is that the process has started, as a plethora of books and scholarly articles dealing with religion has begun to appear. There may even be an advantage to the late start in academic scholarship on the role of religion in American life: Scholars have been able to incorporate recent approaches that show considerable promise. One involves ethnographic description of individuals and the groups with which they affiliate. Looking under the conventional labels used to depict religious believers, ethnographers and cultural historians are uncovering some unexpected findings. We know, for example, that religious conservatives are likely to vote Republican, but what, exactly, does it mean to be a religious conservative? If the scholarship of historians like R. Marie Griffith or sociologists like Gerardo Marti is any indication, it does not necessarily mean turning one's back on the modern world. Griffith's Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, published this month, places the popularity of diet and fitness books among American believers, many of them conservative, in the context of earlier attempts to achieve spiritual renewal through mind control or self-discipline. Marti's A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church, to be published next month, offers a case study of a Los Angeles-based church that is at one and the same time Southern Baptist in affiliation and conservative theologically and attractive to a young, primarily single Hollywood clientele working at cutting-edge cultural jobs in the entertainment industry. As such books illustrate, the ethnographic trend overlaps with interest in the complexities of religion and American culture and their intersection. While religion has certainly done its share to shape American culture, it is also the case that American culture shapes religion, and in very powerful ways. For example, the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the first Jew on North American soil marks the publication of Jonathan D. Sarna's magisterial American Judaism: A History. Sarna's recent book documents the many ways American Jews adapted themselves to American practices, not only in the obvious case of transforming Hanukkah into a holiday resembling Christmas but also by revising Judaism to help suburban parents with child rearing or to appeal to increasingly assertive Jewish women. At the same time, Sarna also shows the importance of movements designed to resist American culture in the name of Jewish renewal, including the return to Orthodoxy on the part of highly educated Jews who once might have been considered candidates for assimilation. Jews belong both to an ethnic and a religious category, and, as such, their history reflects the ways in which not only national culture but the specific cultures of America's many ethnic groups influence the religious composition of the nation. The forthcoming Themes in Religion and American Culture, edited by Philip Goff and Paul Harvey, offers a synthesis of the work of primarily younger scholars who examine the ways in which Latinos, Native-Americans, and African-Americans, among others, have shaped a contemporary religious environment in the United States that would have been unrecognizable to a Jonathan Edwards or a Henry Ward Beecher, however much they may have admired its energy and authenticity. No other scholar in America has explored the relationship between ethnicity and religion with the insight of Robert A. Orsi, whose classic work, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem 1880-1950, published in 1985, brought to life the visibly celebratory and public world of Italian-American Roman Catholicism (while comparing it to the more cerebral and dourly Calvinistic IrishAmerican variety). In his Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, due out soon, Orsi combines personal reflections on his own family with a historical analysis of the relationships Catholics have formed with the Virgin Mary. As in all his work, Orsi shows religious believers as people who are very much like everyone else in their concerns with pain, suffering, and getting by, yet also unlike secularists because they really do believe that supernatural forces shape the course of the lives they lead. Orsi also demonstrates how slippery even some of our basic religious categories can be, for while the term "Catholic" conjures up for many Americans a universal church led by a pope in Rome, the worship experiences of a Latino in New Mexico may have so little to do with those of a German-American in Milwaukee that applying the same term to both is not going to tell us much about how Catholics will vote or even about what they believe. What do religious people believe in when they believe? Monotheistic religions emphasize the centrality of one God, but people themselves, even those devoted to monotheist faiths, are often more capacious in their understanding than that. Indeed, if the work of a cultural historian like Stephen R. Prothero is any indication, Christians believe in Jesus while Buddhists, or at least significant numbers of them, believe in -- Jesus. In American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, published last year, Prothero finds people continually defining and redefining Jesus to accommodate their needs. If one believes that belief itself is or ought to be fixed, universal, and demanding, one comes away from Prothero's book convinced that something is rotten in the state of faith. If one admires people for their ingenuity, as well as their determination to make religion meaningful to themselves, one comes away impressed by the many forms belief can take. When it comes to politics, ethnographic and historical accounts of religious experiences supplement surveys and polling data, but they do not entirely supplant them. If anything, quantitative studies of the role that religion plays in American voting have increased in both their methodological sophistication and their understanding of religion since political scientists began in the 1950s to pay attention to political behavior in addition to political institutions. Of all the scholars who offer journalists and others interested in the role religion plays in American politics relevant data, no one is more frequently cited than John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron. And with good reason. Green, who happens to live and work in the crucial swing state of Ohio, never allows his political views, whatever they are, to color his analysis. At a recent retreat for political journalists held in Key West, Fla., under the auspices of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Green presented the findings of a study, "The American Religious Landscape and Political Attitudes: A Baseline for 2004," which offered a number of conclusions that support the ethnographic approach to the study of religion. For example, evangelical Protestants, who, according to Green, constitute 26.3 percent of the American population, are by no means unanimously Republican in their political outlook. And that is because evangelicals come in many forms, some more traditional than others. In fact, Green shows, of those usually considered by the news media to be associated with the "religious right," traditionalist evangelicals (12.6 percent of the population) represent a smaller group than the combined centrist (10.8 percent) and modernist (2.9 percent) evangelicals. Since the latter two groups are not as likely to identify as Republican as the former, George W. Bush would be wrong to take the evangelical vote for granted in the 2004 election. Sometimes the new scholarship on religion directly relates to the issues facing Americans as they vote for candidates or take positions on matters of public policy. Consider Robert Wuthnow's recent book Saving America?: Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society. Wuthnow, America's most distinguished sociologist of religion in the generation that has followed Peter Berger and Robert N. Bellah, points out that both President Bush, who defends providing public funds to religious-based charities, and his critics, who worry that such financing may violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, know very little about how America's faith-based organizations actually work. Based on surveys he and others have taken, as well as his own study of the Lehigh Valley area in Pennsylvania, Wuthnow has concluded that congregations are unlikely to increase the charitable work they already do if additional federal funds come their way through faith-based initiatives; that even strongly religious national organizations devoted to charitable provision frequently play down their religious character; and that recipients of public provision are more likely to trust providers if they view them as motivated by faith. Wuthnow does not tell Americans what they should believe about Mr. Bush's proposals, but he does offer them empirically grounded findings that can help them reach their own conclusions. There are other ways to have an impact on society besides direct engagement with its preoccupations. The study of religion will always, and should always, include those who examine the theologies of different faith traditions, write biographies of important religious figures, or study the psychological templates of belief. But by focusing on culture, examining the actual practices of believers, and demonstrating a willingness to explore widely used, but often misunderstood, categories, much of the new scholarship on religion enables Americans to recognize that a revival of religion need not lead to the creation of a theocracy or that the religious conflict so evident around the world need not be played out within the United States. Religion is here to stay. What form it takes and how it will continue to interact with culture and politics is very much open to discussion. Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and professor of political science at Boston College. He is on leave this fall at the American Academy in Berlin. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Oct 21 02:15:43 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 19:15:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] labor In-Reply-To: <200410201800.i9KI0Z032741@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041021021543.89191.qmail@web13422.mail.yahoo.com> >>If we value labor why are 80% of the people seeing declines in their share of personal income?<< --Labor is valued depending on market conditions. Right now, everyone's looking for a job, or afraid to leave the one they've got for something better. So labor is as cheap as the minimum wage allows, or lower, if companies give the jobs to India or China. If you look at employee compensation relative to CEO pay raises (it's nice to be able to raise your own wage!) it looks like labor is being left in the dust. Of course, you can always throw them a few hundred bucks and tell them you'll stop gays from marrying, which is a nice diversion. Males get insecure when their job security is at risk, and they respond well to distractions that appeal to sexual insecurity... the one thing gay marriage and the war on terror have in common is the gender aspect: those who disagree with Bush about the war are framed as "girly-men". Those who support gay marriage are "weakening the foundation of society". It's all about firmness vs. floppiness, i.e. virility. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 21 16:44:06 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 09:44:06 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Solar tubes: saves energy and improves life indoors Message-ID: <01C4B752.82178FC0.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.solatube.com/ Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 21 20:16:50 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 16:16:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Scholar Sends Sham Papers to Social-Work Journals to Show Weakness of Peer Review Message-ID: Scholar Sends Sham Papers to Social-Work Journals to Show Weakness of Peer Review News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.10.20 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2004/10/2004102003n.htm [45]By DAVID GLENN Most scholars would let out a groan if a journal returned their submissions with peer-review comments like these: "The author presents us with a flawed study that is not well analyzed. ... The reviewer has no idea what statistical tests were conducted, how many of them were done, and what those findings were." William M. Epstein, however, was delighted by those comments, and wishes that he'd gotten many more like them. Two years ago, Mr. Epstein, a professor of social work at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, submitted fictitious, pseudonymous, deliberately shoddy papers to 33 journals in his field. "The basic designs were off," he says. "I drew conclusions that were unwarranted on the basis of the data. I never brought up statistical tests -- I just simply announced that there was significance." Even the most quotidian passages were mined with errors. One paper concluded by saying, "The average cost of care for control clients was about $576 and for experimental clients about $3,975. The $3,419 difference seems well justified by the outcomes." (The difference between those costs is actually $3,399.) In sum, Mr. Epstein says, "a careful reviewer would have butchered these papers." No journal came very close to publishing any of the sham articles, but Mr. Epstein believes that his experiment nonetheless uncovered some deep intellectual problems in the world of social-work scholarship. He explains his deed -- and lays out his accusations against his field -- in an article published this month in the journal Research on Social Work Practice, which was among the journals hit by his hoax. Mr. Epstein's targets are not taking this lightly. Some of them say that his project was needlessly deceptive, and that it was itself biased and poorly designed. The first charge in Mr. Epstein's indictment is that social-work journals suffer from "confirmational response bias." By that he means that the journals are more inclined to publish papers that support social workers' typical methods than papers that raise doubts. To test that hypothesis, Mr. Epstein circulated a pair of articles about a fictitious program to preserve families whose children are at risk of being placed in foster care. The "positive" version of the article said that the program worked well; the "negative" version said that the program had no effect. Both versions were methodologically shoddy, and they were identical except for a few paragraphs in the findings section. Half of the journals in Mr. Epstein's experiment were randomly selected to receive the positive version, and the other half received the negative version. The positive version got a much warmer welcome. The negative version received seven flat rejections, but the positive version received only two. And the positive version received four acceptances -- in each case, conditioned on various revisions -- while the negative version received none. In Mr. Epstein's eyes, social work -- together with other practice-oriented fields, like counseling, management, and clinical psychology -- is too reluctant to publish information about techniques that don't seem to work. There is a bias, he says, toward "happy little news." Mr. Epstein's second charge is that the general quality of peer review in social-work journals is feeble. He and three anonymous colleagues evaluated the thoroughness and sophistication of the peer-review reports generated by the sham articles. Mr. Epstein's panel deemed almost three-quarters of the reviews to be inadequate; in his paper, he describes some of them as "incomplete, short, personalized, and even impenetrable." Very few of the reviews, he says, pointed out that the papers lacked coherent accounts of their statistical tests. "When you take a look at the appalling quality of research in the field," Mr. Epstein says, "it's really quite obvious that methodological sophistication is not of paramount interest." This is not Mr. Epstein's first foray into surreptitious research. In the late 1980s he conducted a very similar project, and it landed him in hot water. A board of inquiry at the National Association of Social Workers voted in 1988 to censure him for failing to obtain his subjects' informed consent, although that decision was later overturned by the association's National Board of Directors. This time, Mr. Epstein says, he sought and won approval for the project from his university's committee on human-subject protection (he had no academic affiliation when he conducted the 1980s study). And, he says, he is no longer a member of the social-workers association, so there are no clubs he could be kicked out of. But even if he faces no formal disciplinary action in this round, some of the journal editors unwittingly involved in Mr. Epstein's latest experiment are deeply displeased. "I think there are other ways to answer this question without being deceitful," says Deborah P. Valentine, director of the school of social work at Colorado State University and editor of the Journal of Social Work Education, which flatly rejected the two fictitious papers it received. If she had sat on the human-subject-research committee reviewing Mr. Epstein's proposal, she says, she would have suggested that, for example, journal editors could allow outside evaluators to examine a full year's worth of acceptances and rejections, to see if there was indeed "confirmational response bias." Because less-deceptive options were feasible, Ms. Valentine says, Mr. Epstein's committee acted wrongly when it approved his project. Beyond such ethical questions, Ms. Valentine and other skeptics have raised a number of criticisms of Mr. Epstein's study. Those criticisms and Mr. Epstein's responses to them are as follows: Some of the peer-reviewers might have written "short, personalized" commentaries because they knew the papers had no chance of publication. According to this line of argument, some reviewers might have quickly spotted the papers' severe weaknesses, and therefore chosen not to spend time and energy in scrutinizing the papers' statistical models. "If a manuscript is obviously unacceptable, then it probably wouldn't get to the point where I would check the math," Ms. Valentine says. Mr. Epstein replies that this argument accounts for neither the four tentative acceptances that his sham papers received nor the many revise-and-resubmit letters that failed to acknowledge the papers' profound flaws. He regards Ms. Valentine's argument as an evasion. "A responsible field understands what a threat to its authority is, and handles it very seriously," he says. "But not here." The four-person panel of scholars that assessed the peer-review reports was self-selected -- and it included Mr. Epstein himself. "It's not hard to find people who share your views, or perhaps your skepticism," says Michael J. Mahoney, a professor of psychology at the University of North Texas and the author of Scientist as Subject: The Psychological Imperative (Percheron Press). A different group of people, Mr. Mahoney says, might have rated the reports very differently. Mr. Epstein concedes that his panel might have been skewed, and offers to send the peer-review reports to any interested scholars who would like to replicate his analysis. "The inadequacy of the reviews is patent and overwhelming," he says. Mr. Epstein's analysis of "confirmational response bias" was hopelessly contaminated because a number of journal editors had caught on to what he was doing. In addition to his family-preservation papers, Mr. Epstein circulated a pair of papers about a fictitious program to prevent juvenile pregnancy. In this case, he was caught red-handed by a reviewer who had been asked to scrutinize the positive version for one journal (Affilia) and the negative version for another (Social Work). The papers were submitted under a pseudonym, but Miriam Dinerman, editor of Affilia, had vivid memories of Mr. Epstein's earlier hoax, and she told several other editors to be on the lookout for odd-looking papers about pregnancy prevention. Mr. Epstein says that he would be happy to toss out the results from the pregnancy-prevention papers, and limit his analysis to the family-preservation papers. With the pregnancy papers excluded, he says, the bias appears even stronger (albeit, he concedes, with a smaller sample size). Rachelle D. Hollander, a senior adviser at the National Science Foundation, says she has mixed feelings about Mr. Epstein's project, but she hopes that it will prompt journal editors throughout academe to think carefully about how to improve the quality of their peer reviews. "The fields and professional societies need to start to think systematically about these things," she says. "They need to develop some criteria about what they take their role as gatekeepers to be." If "confirmational response bias" does indeed exist here, says Ron Westrum, a professor of science, technology, and society at Eastern Michigan University, then that is an extremely serious problem. In the field of juvenile criminology, he says, scholars were much too slow to take heed of studies that suggested that popular interventions like "scared straight" programs simply didn't work. Applied fields like social work, he says, need to devote at least as much ink to ineffective programs as effective programs. "Social work is going to need to find a way to respond to this," he says. "People just don't appreciate how valuable negative information is." _________________________________________________________________ Background article from The Chronicle: * [55]The Emperor's New Science: French TV Stars Rock the World of Theoretical Physics (11/15/2002) References 45. mailto:david.glenn at chronicle.com 55. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i12/12a01601.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 21 20:20:43 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 16:20:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Joseph E. Davis: Healing the Fragmented Self Message-ID: Joseph E. Davis: Healing the Fragmented Self The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=391458&textreg=1&id=DavHeal1-1 While the therapeutic is often seen as a cultural ethic, Joseph Davis focuses on one form of clinical practice, the recently developed therapies for adult child abuse survivors. These therapies provide a window on contemporary identity questions, he argues, because they explicitly address identity fragmentation, a central theme in much current discussion of the self. Davis identifies a conceptual disjunction between the treatment process and the new client self-narrative to which it builds. He considers what this self-narrative might suggest about the nature of identity and the question of self-fragmentation as a form of personal liberation. Joseph E. Davis is a Fellow at The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He has edited two forthcoming books: Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements and Social Change and the Problem of Identity: Paradoxes and Prospects of Postmodern Life. He is currently writing a book about the historical roots and current practice of adult survivor therapies. In affirming the "decentering of the subject," and even the "death of the subject," many seem to suggest that the question of personal identity is no longer important. Upon closer inspection, however, it appears that they have been sorely disappointed. For, despite predictions to the contrary, questions of subjectivity and multiple identities have reemerged with a new force and a new urgency. We should not have expected otherwise. The destabilizing and uprooting social forces that created the "homeless mind," that pervasive uncertainty about how to place oneself in an increasingly pluralistic environment, have, if anything, only intensified. The social conditions of advanced capitalist society have rather served to accentuate the plurality of authorities, the de-institutionalization of private life, the multiplicity of role expectations, the disembedding from geographical place, and the loss of overarching systems of meaning that so strained the task of establishing and maintaining a coherent sense of self in modern times. While by no means affecting everyone equally, many well-documented features of contemporary life, from consumerism to new technologies, can have a powerfully fragmenting and relativizing effect on personal experience and on the continuity and content of the self-narrative. Of course, some celebrate self-fragmentation and malleable identities as a form of personal liberation. Many postmodern thinkers champion a self characterized by variation, by change, by flux, by an irony toward life and a free-floating approach to work, ideas, attitudes, and feelings. This self is not stable and centered but multiple, and can, like Proteus, the sea god who could change his form into many shapes, resymbolize itself, linking disparate identity elements in a constant stream of new combinations.[3]^1 For many in the postmodern avant-garde, freedom is precisely the ability to transcend and reconstitute one's self. Similarly, players in multiple-user fantasy games testify to the fulfillment enjoyed by the virtually limitless identities they can adopt on-line, and one segment of the multiple personality literature applauds the ability of some multiples to dissociate creatively, and, thus, in part, applauds multiplicity itself.[4]^2 Though what is meant by terms like "identity" and the "self" is not always clear in these discussions, the celebrated belief is that a fragmented "self" allows one at some level the experience of freedom. Despite the celebration, however, fragmented selves are often seen to constitute a disability, and in more extreme cases, a mental disorder. Nowhere is this more evident than in the proliferation of programs, shows, books, teachers, counselors, and guides on how to consolidate and hold the right identity. Whole movements with high rates of participation, including the New Age and recovery movements, have arisen over the past few decades to attend to tribulations of the self arising from the insidious and fragmenting discontinuities of everyday life. Closer to the mental health mainstream, new categories of disorder and new therapies have proliferated that explicitly attend to fragmented selves. Multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder) and post-traumatic stress disorder are but two of the more outstanding examples. Together, they would seem to have replaced narcissism, a blurring of boundaries between the self and what is not self, as the characteristic psychological disorders of our time. The new therapies for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse are based largely on one or both of these disorders, and are addressed, in principal part, to self-fragmentation in the clients' lives. With some fringe exceptions, there is no celebration of fragmentation here. Dissociation and identity-splits are postulated to result from serious childhood trauma, and their resolution is central to the healing regime. Rather than discarding overarching narrative frameworks, as with the postmodernists, the therapeutic goal is to construct new ones. However, considered from their endpoint--the attitudinal signs of health--survivor therapies would appear to share a vision of the normative self largely consistent with the conceptualization offered by the postmodernist. In much the same terms, clients in these therapies are encouraged to take an open and contingent view of the self and personal relationships, to be skeptical of all social conventions, and to be self-defining. But if the endpoints can be so similar, then how can the views of fragmentation be so different? Here we come to the paradox in the practice of survivor therapies that, I suggest, challenges the postmodernist idea that fragmented selves are liberating. The paradox in survivor therapies is the disjunction between the endpoint self and the means used to produce it. According to survivor therapists, the endpoint self, the "true" self, is self-discovered by clients. The therapist tells clients that he or she is merely a guide, helping them to strip away the painful emotional baggage that has kept them from fully developing and recognizing their true autonomy and capacity for self-direction. As each client comes to discover his or her true self, the therapist continues, he or she will find that it flourishes when unencumbered, realizing its potential in freedom of choice, growing and developing in many possible and simultaneous directions, always capable of revising itself as the need arises. The therapeutic means, by contrast, involve an expert persuading a client to tell the story of his or her life according to a preexisting narrative template, legitimated with scientific findings, and presupposing essentially universalist rules about individual development, responsibility for life outcomes, and the nature of normality. One version of the self-narrative, the client's, is effectively pathologized by linking it to trauma, systematically deconstructing it, and then substituting another version in its place. This is not a coercive process as its critics have claimed, nor is it the mere emancipation and recognition of a hitherto silenced voice as the therapists have claimed. The paradox in the means-ends disjunction is not limited to survivor therapies. Many within the vast network of "anonymous" groups, for instance, seek to produce a self rooted in much the same therapeutic ethic by employing a medical model of addiction not for biochemical dependencies but for excessive behaviors ranging from gambling to shopping to caring for pets.[5]^3 The discourse of identity politics is another, and important, example. Using a social constructionist methodology, activists and academics challenge all claims to objectivity, truth, and rationality by arguing for the social origins of knowledge and its service of political ideologies and structures of power. Yet, as otherwise sympathetic critics have noted, the social critique worked out within identity politics is itself typically grounded in discourses filled with realist, essentialist, and foundationalist assumptions about the marginalized.[6]^4 The objectivity, and thus authority, of one version of reality is deconstructed as inherently biased so as to be replaced with the marginalized alternative, which is then privileged as a truth beyond cultural standpoint. The means-ends inconsistencies in survivor therapies, and in these other examples, may simply represent a cultural lag. Survivor therapy, from this angle, might be seen as an example of a transitional form of therapy, leading clients toward a form of postmodern sensibility, yet still rooted in modern warrants of science and the tendency to universalizing presumptions. Over time, if this view has merit, we should expect the means to "catch up" and conform more closely with the ends (or, as in identity politics, the ends to catch up with the means). The future direction of such therapies would be towards some form of constructivism, which, as noted earlier, does not view old self-narratives as objectively wrong but simply as subjectively undesirable. A second possibility, and it seems to me the more persuasive for the means-ends disjunction in survivor therapies, concerns not a cultural lag in the means but a largely unspoken premise in the ends. Survivor therapies aim to help clients jettison impediments from the past and resolve a fragmented sense of self by guiding them to reflexively construct a new self-narrative. The new self-narrative, however, would appear to require a foundation, a moral evaluation of victimization, that is not itself reflexively constructed by the client (so likewise with the moral indignation at the heart of identity politics). Therapists use all their rhetorical tactics precisely to prevent clients from taking a contingent or morally uncertain view of their pasts. Moreover, the therapeutic ethic that informs the reconstituted endpoint-self embodies moral ideals about what is good, what is worthwhile, and what has meaning. Despite an ostensible process of clients liberating their own true selves, then, survivor therapies reorient them according to new moral frameworks. While not described by therapists in this way, it would appear that if clients come away with a more unified sense of self, it is because they now possess a moral orientation toward the past and toward the future that infuses identity with continuity and coherence. The identity-framing work of therapists suggests that personal identity rests on a moral foundation, a point which the philosopher Charles Taylor has been making for some time.[7]^5 Seen in this light, it would appear that the celebration of identity fragmentation is not about identity at all. Adopting different personas in on-line games, for example, while exhilarating for players, may in no way challenge the unity of the moral frameworks that help define who they are. A moral foundation to personal identity challenges the postmodernist claim that the self can be truly decentered without at the same time being in crisis. As Anthony Giddens has argued, rather than succumbing to fragmentation, a range of cultural options are available for engaging the tribulations of the self in nonpathological ways.[8]^6 But without some orientation in moral space, however achieved (a point recognized by the therapists), the self is adrift and the meaning of personal experience remains undetermined. It is hard to conceive of how such an experience could be liberating. Perhaps, as some have noted about assertions that "everything is relative," behind claims to a liberation in nonfoundations lies an unacknowledged foundation nonetheless. Given the increasingly fragmenting tendencies of contemporary social experience, problems of identity are here to stay. So too, if identity fragmentation or decentering is in fact intolerable, is the need for expert guidance and overarching narratives. Reports of their demise or transcendence, it would seem, have been greatly exaggerated. ________________________ [9]^1 See, for example, Robert Jay Lifton, "Protean Man," Partisan Review 35 (1968): 13-27, and The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic, 1993); Connie Zweig, "The Death of the Self in the Postmodern World," The Truth About the Truth: De-confusing and Re-constructing the Postmodern World, ed. Walter Truett Anderson (New York: Putnam, 1995) 145-150. ] [10]^2 See sources in Michael F. Brown, "The New Alienists: Healing Shattered Selves at Century's End," Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation, ed. George E. Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 137-156. ] [11]^3 See John Steadman Rice, A Disease of One's Own: Psychotherapy, Addiction, and the Emergence of Co-Dependency (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1996). ] [12]^4 See, for example, Kenneth J. Gergen, "Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics," Social Construction in Context (London: Sage, forthcoming). ] [13]^5 See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). ] [14]^6 See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). ] From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 21 20:23:23 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 16:23:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: John Patrick Diggins: Proceduralism, Pragmatism, and Postmodernity Message-ID: John Patrick Diggins: Proceduralism, Pragmatism, and Postmodernity The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=482250&textreg=1&id=DigProc2-1 Introduction At a conference on political thought held at Yale University several years ago, one session addressed the question: "Does Democracy Require Foundations?" Panel members who took part in the session were responding to the idea, derived from French poststructualism and deconstruction, that we must learn to live in a world without philosophical absolutes, without, that is, any possibility of tracing things to their origins or establishing necessary, indubitable truths as a means of legitimizing a political regime. All there is, we are told, is the reality that power is everywhere, and that words and language can get us nowhere since they float freely without reference to objects beyond the text. Curiously, all the members of the panel agreed that democracy did not require foundations. Had I participated, I would have dissented, or at least suggested that the answer can be yes as well as no. For most of American history, politics was practiced without reference to philosophical foundations, and indeed the founding of the John Patrick Diggins is Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York. Among his many publications are The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism; The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernity and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority; and most recently, Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class. Republic itself, as articulated in the Federalist Papers, did not rely upon such foundations as "self-evident truths." Yet in periods of moral crisis--such as the crisis over slavery, which the Democratic Party had deflected until the 1850s--it is difficult to see how politics can be addressed without reference to deeper philosophical foundations. Consider the Lincoln-Douglas debates. In those famous debates, Senator Stephen Douglas might be regarded as a precursor of postmodernity, one who refused to think of politics as requiring foundations or to regard slavery itself as a matter of right and wrong. Abraham Lincoln, although often referred to as a pragmatist, was a foundationalist on the issue of slavery. Not only did he reject the idea that the subject of slavery should be left up to a public opinion poll, or that its status could turn on the tropes of language itself, he also demonstrated why truth must be grounded in invariant principles. What the poststructuralist hails as a great discovery--that ideas are social constructions reflecting the conditions of their production--was, for Lincoln, precisely the problem. "The world," Lincoln wrote, has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are such in the want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases, with himself, and with the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names--liberty and tyranny. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty, especially if the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty.[3]^1 A language that cannot be constrained by the defining properties of the object to which it purports to refer is precisely the problem of politics as Lincoln saw it. Ultimate questions cannot be decided by either the vagaries of language or the brute realities of power. Although the issue of slavery was indeed fought over on the field of battle, Lincoln sought to prevent war by elevating politics to principles based upon foundations. Thus he challenged the proto-poststructuralism and contextualism of Douglas, who insisted that the meaning of slavery and freedom depended on the use of language and how the terms were understood in different sections of the country. If that were the case, Lincoln replied, there would be no way to establish right from wrong. That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principlesIright and wrongIthroughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle.[4]^2 There is a moralistic, foundational tradition in American politics that reaches sublime expression in Lincoln and appears again in Woodrow Wilson. It may have something to do with Calvinism, which George Santayana credited with giving America something American politics sorely needs: "an agonized conscience."[5]^3 There is also a fundamentalist tradition involving the competing religious perspectives of evangelical Protestants, orthodox Jews, and doctrinaire Catholics, whose members disagree vociferously with their more liberal counterparts on such issues as education, sexual relations, abortion, marriage, and the family.[6]^4 But the tradition that founded America and shaped its course of political development, at least up until recently, was neither foundational nor fundamentalist, and it involved two ingredients that were a part of what might be called the Anglo-Scottish legacy. The Anglo side stems from a Lockeanism that pervaded America's political history and, I hope to demonstrate, is still with us despite all the recent developments in contemporary culture. In some respects the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke presaged the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Long before the latter made philosophy instrumental, the former liberated philosophy from metaphysics, declaring that unanswerable questions need not bother us since all we need to know is whatever answers to our practical needs. Thus the sailor need not plumb the depths of the ocean, Locke advised in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, but only know the length of the line in order to keep his vessel off the shoals.[7]^5 Although Thomas Jefferson may have been uncomfortable with Locke's unconcern for metaphysical foundations, he embraced his political theory, even to the point of claiming it should be the official philosophy of the University of Virginia. The idea of inalienable natural rights, and the relationship of labor to moral character and freedom to property and opportunity--ideas that resonate in the Declaration of Independence--are derived from Locke's The Second Treatise of Government. It is the Lockean consensus in American thought that makes it so difficult to find a tradition of civic virtue based on politics alone to the exclusion of economics and the life of labor.[8]^6 The Scottish component in American thought can be seen in the Federalist Papers and in the voluminous writings of John Adams, where David Hume and Adam Smith are cited. What the Scots provided was a combination of Calvinism and skepticism that made American thinkers aware of the omnipresent reality of power and interest, the unreliability of language as representative of reality, and the deceits involved in the rhetoric of virtue. The poststructuralists and deconstructionists of our time have the French Enlightenment in mind when they do a critique of its pretensions to reason and logocentrism. But such Cartesian assumptions are not in the Federalist, and America had its political founding not on the promises of knowledge but on the premises of power and the devices necessary for its control.[9]^7 The Fragility of Civil Society The expression "civil society" has been revived in America after having disappeared from political discourse for more than a century. When people in countries once under communist control found that they had to figure out ways of coping with their lives apart from government, the term "civil society," first used by the German philosopher G. F. W. Hegel, reemerged in Eastern Europe. More recently in America, the term was traced to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, where the French thinker extolled "voluntary associations" and other organizations that sprang up spontaneously to face problems and sustain stable values in a period of rapid change. The critique of present-day America holds that the American people have become too dependent upon the Federal government and, as a result, neighborhood, community, and the family are losing all independence and self-reliance. That critique has been elegantly expressed in Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. The American government has become a "procedural state" that responds neutrally to various interest groups and rights-bearing factions, making no distinction in regard to values and ethics as it deals with subjects who assume themselves to be independent, freely-choosing, and self-constituting individuals. In reality, according to Sandel, persons are "encumbered by moral or civic obligations they have not chosen" and, hence, we must see ourselves as part of a community and take responsibility for that community's affairs. The essence of freedom in the "civic republic" is involvement in the very community that influences our fate. Power must be dispersed away from the Federal government toward local communities.[10]^8 The case for a decentralized civic republic calls to mind the eighteenth-century debate between the Federalists and anti-Federalists over the new Constitution. The latter also believed that values and civic attitudes are best generated at the local level and that a large government remote from the people can undermine the people's character and virtue. Today, many Americans would also agree that government has become the problem rather than the solution, but how much they would like to see it recede from their lives is another matter altogether. Nevertheless, at the time of the Constitution, it was precisely because local governments proved incapable of governing themselves that a larger "extended Republic" had to be devised. Instead of practicing civic virtue and putting the interests of the public good ahead of their own acquisitiveness, people in several of the states printed cheap money and took other actions to avoid indebtedness, and thus the new U.S. Constitution had to assume control of currency and other monetary affairs. The Federalist Papers authors discovered what British leaders had already learned when trying to get the colonists to pay their share for the upkeep and military protection of the imperial system: the more local and private are politics, the less public spirited are the people. What, after all, was the American Revolution if not a revolution against taxes; against government as an external imposition; against civic duty as loyalty to the mother country; and against, from the British perspective, reform itself? Had the Revolution been inspired by the principles of classical republicanism, one would expect the Declaration of Independence to have demanded the right to participate in politics in the name of civic virtue--subjects upon which it remained silent. Instead, the Declaration pronounced a set of Lockean principles that set Americans free not to engage in civic obligations but to pursue happiness. Had America developed according to the visions of the nationalist Alexander Hamilton or of the Calvinist John Adams, one might expect to find some traces of morality and public duty. But America's political culture has been Jeffersonian through and through--a culture that continues to extol the goodness of the people and the awfulness of government. In America, liberty seldom meant more than resistance to authority, and freedom always referred to the foreground. As George Santayana put it, describing the America of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "a sense of potentiality and a sense of riddance are, as he might have said, the two poles of liberty."[11]^9 The America of Tocqueville also seems distant from anything resembling a "civic republic." In Democracy in America, Tocqueville himself is not so certain that civil society can be relied upon to overcome America's drive toward a materialism that may turn out to be more "pernicious" than "virtuous" and an individualism that would be more destructive of community values than upholding of them. In America it was "not that virtue is great but that temptation is small," he observed, noting how the absence of distinct social classes rendered property safe from democracy and made it unnecessary for the American people to follow Montesquieu's advice and practice civic virtue by renouncing inclinations toward comfort and pleasure. It is amazing that many recent scholars cite Tocqueville's Democracy in America as a beacon that will help guide us out of our contemporary dilemmas. His description of "voluntary associations" takes up only a half-dozen pages in a book that goes on for 700. More seriously, Tocqueville, instead of describing Americans as situated, rooted, and encumbered with ties here and there, explains why associations are impermanent and why Americans are too migratory, too much on the move to sustain any sense of community. "Why Are Americans So Restless Amidst Their Prosperity?" he asked. A nation of immigrants who chose to uproot themselves from past ties, Americans continue to see themselves as free to choose again and again to move on. Americans are seldom relaxed, content, at one with themselves. Thus, although Tocqueville spots a few stirrings of civil society, he describes the American national character as incompatible with communal loyalty and other requirements necessary for a civic republic.[12]^10 According to Sandel, American intellectual history, years ago, amounted to a struggle between two warring camps: Hamiltonian nationalism and the public good and Jeffersonian individualism and the local community. When writing about the past today, the division is between liberalism and republicanism, and the analysis goes something like this: Liberalism is negative in that one exercises rights primarily to protect oneself from government interference and from societal threats. Liberalism is rights-based and its claims take precedence over the larger good, the spiritual well-being and welfare of the nation as a whole. Liberalism thus results in proceduralism; it is concerned only with the processes of government, not with any substantive conception of the moral or civic life, but simply with the freedom to choose our own ends and values. Republicanism, in contrast, is positive; it is for something, particularly whatever may be higher or more ennobling in the life of citizenship. Republicanism emphasizes civic virtue, the willing subordination of private interests to public ideals; hence it is less about rights than about duties and obligations. Republicanism also emphasizes liberty not as a stance apart from government but as a principle that is earned by virtue of participating in politics and taking part in the workings of government and in government's vital decisions. Sandel's account of how liberal proceduralism became prevalent in modern American law is compelling; but acceptance of his account of how republican moralism prevailed in early American history requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Sandel sees the Lincoln-Douglas debates as an instance when republican moralism challenged liberal proceduralism. Douglas wanted to avoid the question of slavery as a moral issue and to allow people in the territories to "vote it up or down." In contrast, Lincoln argued "for a political conception of justice," for the idea that "policy should express rather than avoid a substantive moral judgment about slavery."[13]^11 Against Douglas's amoral procedural position, "Lincoln replied that it was reasonable to bracket the question of the morality of slavery only on the assumption that it was not the moral evil he regarded it to be. Any man can advocate political neutrality `who does not see anything wrong in slavery,'" Sandel quotes Lincoln as insisting, "`but no man can logically say he don't care whether a wrong is voted up or down.'"[14]^12 Sandel's account of the debates is accurate and discerning, but we must face the contradiction within civic republicanism when it comes to moral issues like slavery. Douglas's advocating popular sovereignty in the territories was compatible with republicanism in that the people themselves would decide the issue of slavery. Lincoln, aware that democratic input does not necessarily lead to democratic outcomes, had to deny people the right to do wrong. Here we have, it seems, a conflict between the republican principle of liberty as the right to participate in the decisions of government and the republican principle of substantive justice as the duty to bring ethics to bear upon politics. Fortunately for America, Lincoln was a Calvinist who knew sin when he saw it, and he was willing to deny the republican principle of participatory politics, even going so far as to deny the self the right to self-determination. When forced to choose between liberty and morality, Lincoln chose the latter. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in contrast, chose the former and left the American judicial system sunk in proceduralism. Sandel's critical analysis of Holmes's reasoning is as learned as it is lucid. Holmes led the way in seeing the Constitution as an instrument of safeguards rather than as a vessel of truths. Along with other justices, Holmes denied the notion that the Constitution substantively affirms a particular social or economic philosophy; while the justices championed judicial protection of such civil liberties as freedom of speech, they resisted the position that the Constitution should take on controversial issues involving moral or political beliefs. "There is," wrote Holmes, nothing that I more deprecate than the use of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond the absolute compulsion of its words to prevent the making of social experiments that an important part of the community desires, even though the experiments may seem futile or even noxious to me and to those whose judgment I most respect. Sandel's own judgment of Holmes deserves quotation: Although Holmes's dissents are often read as arguments about the role of the judge, they also contain a larger claim about the nature of the Constitution. Implicit in his dissents is not only an argument for judicial deference to majorities but also a certain reading of the Constitution, a reading that says the Constitution does not embody any particular conception of the good. His point was not only that judges should refrain from imposing their morality on the Constitution, but also that the Constitution itself refuses to endorse any particular morality.[15]^13 Sandel is disturbed to discover how Holmes's reasoning led to a stance of judicial restraint that would be neutral about the ends of government and leave us with a "procedural republic" when what we need is a polity of community, civic engagement, and other virtuous activities required by the ideal of self-government. But it should be noted that Holmes's proceduralism evolved from his deeper pragmatic temperament; and while Sandel's recent quarrel is with proceduralism, this writer's long-standing quarrel has been with pragmatism. A philosophy that promises to help us confront "problematic situations" and solve them, pragmatism may very well be the problem of democratic politics itself. Pragmatism And Its Limits In the last decade or so, pragmatism has enjoyed a revival in America and in parts of Europe and Asia. The revival may have something to do with the collapse of communism, the exhaustion of Marxism as a theory of history and society, and the renewed respect paid to democracy as a way of life as well as a political system. At first glance it may seem that pragmatism reinforces democracy as an open-ended proposition ungrounded in philosophical foundations. The case for "postmodern democracy" that has been made on behalf of Friedrich Nietzsche can also be made on behalf of John Dewey. The philosopher Lawrence J. Hatab makes the case in these terms: We can summarize the case for a postmodern, postmetaphysical democracy as follows: In politics, since we have no certainty, no absolutes, no transcendent or a priori guidance, since we cannot trust human beings to be fully knowledgeable or good, we need an ongoing contest of perspectives, a vote to provide temporary contingent decisions, and an agreement that such decisions be binding. Nothing in this description involves or requires some positive condition, property, or capacity that makes us "equal," that indicates some universal "human nature" or "common good." Indeed it is driven by negativity, opposition, and limits. We can therefore replace "all persons are equal" with "no person should be excluded from participation," or, if one likes it in positive terms, "all persons should be allowed to participate." Why should everyone be included? Because we do not know the truth or the good, and we cannot know in advance with any a priori confidence what course we should follow or who is privileged to identify or execute that course.[16]^14 Dewey, who remained convinced that there was no way to return to eighteenth-century ideas like "human nature," would probably endorse the statement, although with perhaps more trust in people being "fully knowledgeable" in using their intelligence. The problem is that the position described above resembles nothing so much as Douglas in his debates with Lincoln. It was Douglas who insisted that we cannot know in advance what should be the policy on slavery in the territories and, hence, it should be left up to the people to decide. There are no certainties or absolutes in politics, no philosophical foundations from which we can take our bearings. Lincoln, good Calvinist that he was, knew better and took his bearings from the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. Combine Lincoln's political actions with his thoughtful meditations, and we have a leader who could be both a pragmatist and a foundationalist The philosopher Richard Rorty remains convinced that we can embrace the former and drop the latter. The mission of the intellectual, he has argued, consists in writing a "narrative of emancipation from cruelty" that will bring about "a decent society--defined as one where social institutions do not humiliate," and such efforts can be spun without much reference to religion or philosophy, to the views people hold about the existence or non-existence of God, or about the nature of Truth or Reason. We should not presume that there is a tight connection between the attainment of decency in human relations and the ascendancy of a particular worldview.[17]^15 Perhaps not. But it would be helpful to have presented before us concrete examples in history when emancipatory movements have succeeded without "reference to religion or philosophy." The abolitionist movement had many orientations to Protestant religion and the philosophy of Transcendentalism, which in turn derived from the German idealism of Immanuel Kant and its ethic of duty. The pragmatist-poststructuralist regards Kantianism as deluded by its own foundationalist precepts and imperatives, but it served well those who wanted to bring about the decent society that is part of Rorty's hopes. The abolitionist-theologian Theodore Parker even felt the need to regender God: "I have called God Father, but also Mother...to express more sensibility, the quality of tender and unselfish love, which mankind associates with Mother more than aught else besides."[18]^16 To forge the most successful American political movement of the twentieth century, the post-World-War-II civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., drew upon the Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr--further evidence, it would seem, that philosophy and religion are not irrelevant to the making of a decent society. When one turns to the career of Dewey himself, one would also like to have some reassurance that he was able to confront problems facing America without recourse to foundational principles in philosophy and religion. Although a decent man of utmost principles himself, Dewey seemed indifferent to the indecencies and brutalities of the world around him. He never wrote about the issue of race in America and seldom made any mention of feminism and the women's movement, as did many of his own generation, particularly the Greenwich Village rebels of the pre-World-War-I years. And significantly, the success of both the civil rights movement and the women's movement had little to do with democracy and instead depended upon the Constitution and the equal protection of the laws. Any success the trade union movement had in America also had little do to with democracy and the sentiments of majorities who refused to identify with the working class. Pragmatism supposedly has reference only to "experience," and not to God, truth, reason, or whatever might be considered foundational. Yet it may be that experience itself refutes the promises of pragmatism, particularly in the area of politics and social reform. Except for educational reform and a brief involvement with the pacifist movement in America, Dewey rarely became caught up in American politics as practiced at the local or national level of government. Unlike Walter Lippmann and Henry Adams, he never wrote about democratic politics and representative government as actual, day-to-day realities; unlike Weber and Tocqueville, he never wrote on the necessity of reconstituting representative political institutions or held a public office that required coping with the wheeling and dealing of electoral politics. Thus Dewey, like our contemporary neo-pragmatists, was reluctant to admit that many problems facing the country derived directly from democracy itself. Contrary to the view of the pragmatist, it was not the lack of participation and involvement on the part of the citizen that had befuddled the American polity. With its emphasis on instrumental adaptation to changing conditions, pragmatism issued in the proceduralism that is death to politics as an ethical vocation. In The Public And Its Problems and elsewhere, Dewey declared that the answer to the problems of democracy is "more democracy." Nowhere in his writings did he seem to understand that more democracy means more politics--and with more political participation, the American people end up with more institutions and agencies, more structures and systems, even, and especially, those structures that become alienated from the very people who consented to their creation. Hence, today's state primary systems, once thought to be a popular democratic reform that would wrest power from party heads, have made politics so expensive that only millionaires can afford to run for office. When one raises reservations about Dewey's "more democracy" fixation, one risks being dubbed an elitist who seeks to exclude others from political participation. Yet the issue needs to be raised, for mass democratic participation could very well generate the conditions of its own defeat. The leveling of social difference, the demands for equality before the law, the Constitutional guarantee of procedural rights--all result in more regulation, while popular demands made upon the state result in greater expenditures from the public treasury together with the proliferation of agencies to administer government programs and supervise budget allocations. Democratization and bureaucratization go hand in hand as each professes to be objective in treating people alike. But in a rights-based culture, deriving from America's liberal tradition, government is pressured to serve particular constituencies. It is not enough to claim that interest politics represent a betrayal of democracy when it happens whenever people have a chance to express their desires. Whether in 1776 or in 1996, whether democracy is breaking the bonds of domination or enjoying the fruits of liberation, no government dare ask the American people to pay for the services and protections they enjoy. The reason that "more democracy" cannot solve problems of democracy, and that pragmatism cannot solve problems of indecency, humility, and cruelty, is that most Americans have, since the Puritans of the seventeenth century, been practicing pragmatists. The decision to allow slavery to be incorporated into the Constitution was a decision on the part of northern statesmen to be realistic and settle for pragmatic compromise instead of raising issues of right and wrong. It was abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison who were uncompromising in insisting that foundational principles were being violated: Assenting to the "self-evident truth" maintained in the Declaration of Independence "that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights--among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.[19]^17 American History Without Foundations The philosophy of pragmatism that informed many of Holmes's decisions also came to prevail in much of American political and educational life. No less than legal proceduralism, pragmatism makes knowledge instrumental rather than substantive, a matter of inquiry based on problem-solving rather than a challenge to grapple with fundamental moral issues. Convinced that knowledge has no foundations in anything fixed and permanent, pragmatism teaches us not what to think and believe, but how to go about finding out how things have come to be the way they are. And if as historians we find out how America came to be what it is, what then? American historians as well as political scientists commit the same mistake of thinking that what has happened recently in politics refutes the liberal consensus. I suggest, in contrast, that if one watches how America evolved pragmatically throughout its history, the liberal consensus remains alive and well. After the passing of the seventeenth-century Puritans and their doctrines, and after a few doses of foundational theory were applied in drafting the Constitution, American history proceeded procedurally as the American people ceased looking to doctrines and ideologies and instead responded to the exigencies of change. As I have pointed out elsewhere, a century before Rorty pronounced the "end of philosophy," Henry Adams discerned the American political mind coming to its end in ceasing to have any significant role in American history.[20]^18 simple republics; the curse of the Constitution; and Hamilton's commercial policies; and then compares those thoughts to Jefferson's concrete actions as President, one observes how America's leader moved in directions that violated all his principles. Adams depicted political leaders of both parties behaving pragmatically and allowing decisions to be determined by "circumstance" rather than by "principle," by considering consequences rather than by adhering to ideology. Except for some moralists outside the political system who intervened when they saw injustice and cruelty, that system ran smoothly without the disruptions of a conscience based on foundational principles. The philosopher may mislead us when we are told that the American past allowed itself to be confined by foundational postulates until pragmatism came along to liberate us from all dogmatisms. Conceived as an "experiment," what governed the movement of American history was not a foundational premise but a commitment to growth and development unrestrained by moral theory or political ideology. As Robert Penn Warren observed, what the Civil War taught Adams and Holmes was that history displays not the force of principle, but the principle of force--a vague, shadowy phenomenon that the human intellect can only adjust to as the movement of events defies all efforts to guide and direct them.[21]^19 Since a commitment to pragmatism comes down to an absence of any commitment to anything beyond the incoherence of a history that proceeds on its own ways, how can pragmatism solve the problems of proceduralism? As we approach the end of the twentieth century, it may be time to question the whole pragmatist-poststructuralist proposal that the quality of moral life does not depend upon the quality of foundational thought. Many of the values that Rorty holds highest (including a decent sensibility of social relations that leaves no one suffering from hunger or humiliation) do not necessarily require rational foundations. Many religious principles were never meant to be derived from reason and, hence, were formulated as a series of commandments. But pragmatists, ever averse to authority, want to persuade us rather than command us, thereby attributing to their own powers the omnipotence that had once belonged only to God. Faced with the sin of pride, some of us find more persuasive the pronouncements of religion even when we ourselves are not religious. There is in the voice of the pragmatist what Santayana would have called a "sort of acoustic illusion"; a voice that "reverberates from the heavens is too clearly a human voice."[22]^20 I, for one, would prefer to hear Rorty say: "Thou shalt not humiliate." [23]^1 Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. VII (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953) 301-302. ] [24]^2 Basler, The Collected Works of Lincoln, vol. III, 315. ] [25]^3 George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," Santayana on America, ed. Richard Colton Lyon (New York: Harcourt, 1968) 36-56. ] [26]^4 James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic, 1991). ] [27]^5 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarenden, 1975). ] [28]^6 Joshua Foa Dienstag, "Serving God and Mammon: The Lockean Sympathy in Early American Thought," American Political Science Review 90 (1996): 497-511. See also John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics (New York: Basic, 1984). ] [29]^7 For a comparison of the early federalist thinkers and contemporary poststructuralists, see John Patrick Diggins, The Promises of Pragmatism: Modernity and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 427-434. ] [30]^8 Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1996) 3-24. ] [31]^9 George Santayana, "Emerson the Poet," Santayana on America, 268-283. ] [32]^10 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1969) 604-632; Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. 1, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968) 258. ] [33]^11 Sandel, Democracy's Discontent, 22. ] [34]^12 Sandel, Democracy's Discontent, 22. ] [35]^13 Sandel, Democracy's Discontent, 45. ] [36]^14 Lawrence J. Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics (Chicago: Open Court, 1995) 76. ] [37]^15 Richard Rorty, "Intellectuals and the Millennium," The New Leader 80 (24 Feb. 1997): 10-12. ] [38]^16 Parker is quoted in Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: The Romantic Revolution, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, 1930) 418. ] [39]^17 Garrison is quoted in Parrington, American Thought, vol. 2, 354. ] [40]^18 Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism, 17-21. ] [41]^19 John Burt, Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) 34-42. ] [42]^20 George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," 127-158. ] From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 21 20:24:35 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 16:24:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Mike Featherstone: The Citizen and Cyberspace Message-ID: Mike Featherstone: The Citizen and Cyberspace The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=608031&textreg=1&id=FeaCiti1-1 The growth of "global cities"--megacities at the heart of the information networks of the global economy--and the continued development and spread of information technologies raise profound questions about public life and the civic engagement necessary for citizenship. Will there be a progressive privatization of public life, Featherstone asks, with the replacement of the citizen by the consumer, a McCitizen without means or basis for association? On the one hand, Featherstone argues, if we conceive of the public sphere, as Habermas does, as essentially a dialogical one, with individuals interacting in a shared locale as equal participants, then the prospects for new spaces of participation and citizenship appear to be dim. On the other hand, the new information technologies also appear to have the potential to create new forms of solidarity and bases of deliberation, suggesting a need to rethink citizenship in a broader key. Featherstone considers both the possibilities and problems of cyberspace for generating the trust and empathy necessary for democratic community. Mike Featherstone is Professor of Sociology at Nottingham Trent University. He is the editor of the journal, Theory, Culture, and Society, as well as the author and editor of many books, including, most recently, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity and Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. John Thompson's book The Media and Modernity was published in 1995, yet it fails to discuss the Internet and the development of cyberspace. These are important developments in terms of his typology of face-to-face interaction, mediated interaction, and mediated quasi-interaction.[3]^1 The Internet is clearly a form of mediated interaction, sharing some of the characteristics of the letter and telephone. Like the letter it is a scriptural form, yet it is almost like the telephone in that the exchanges between parties can be almost instantaneous and relatively simple to initiate. It is like a conversation, except that it uses the written word; it is also possible for multiple users to participate in the same "conversation." Yet the next stage of the Internet, which we are just seeing emerge, really deserves a classificatory category of its own; for simplicity we can call it virtual interactivity, although this only captures limited dimensions of its characteristics. It is a multimedia form, combining text, speech, music, video, and images; hence it has the combined characteristics of the telephone, radio, video, television, newspapers, books, etc., yet with a massive potential difference from the conventional media in the extent of programming and archive material available for access through increased "bandwidth." Also important is the capacity to configure material in databases, which can be accessed and searched rapidly from many points of view. The data is hypertexted or hyperlinked so that non-narrative modes of investigation entailing jumps within and across texts become the habitual mode, in contrast to the linear mode we are used to with reading books and other texts. New discontinuous, parallel-accessing modes of reading and viewing akin to channel-hopping with television are in the process of being developed. In the first place, these developments promise the fulfillment of a long-held dream of humanity, that of completeness--every piece of written or recorded knowledge (image/music/text) will be immediately available. Yet the corollary is the problem of navigation, selectivity, and sense: now that everything is available, where do we go and why do we go there? But along with completeness there is an important second feature to this next stage of the internet: interactivity. This does not mean that the Internet can be used like a telephone, but that the material downloaded, or used in conversational mode, can be edited and reformed. With text it is possible to write in the middle of other people's text--to effectively become a co-author--which threatens to make available a whole mass of co-written hybrid versions of texts, as well as to undermine the authority of book writers and intellectuals. In addition similar possibilities of co-production are possible with imagistic forms--it will be easy to alter, morph, and reconstruct existing film and television output, or construct new output which is not based on montage, but mixing or morphing through digitalization. A third and potentially radical feature of the new medium is the possibility of three-dimensional representation and fuller sensory replication. There are already three dimensional programs available on the Internet that have the potential to reconfigure the existing flat page format to a move-through data-architecturally constructed space (VRML, it is predicted, will replace HTML). Yet the potential of cyberspace, by incorporating virtual reality into the process, is to simulate a highly realistic space, which offers a high degree of instantiation or immersion--a space which one can rapidly move or "fly" through, which is highly realistic and transmits not only aural and visual information, but touch and feelings of force or gravity. What are the implications for public life and citizenship? In such a (parallel) world there are clearly new possibilities of public space. In the first place the prospects of a Habermasian public sphere emerging with the Internet and cyberspace do not look very good. How can one have public interaction when one will never meet the other interactants, when the routine tests of sincerity or goodwill we operate with in everyday interactions become impossible? How can trust be generated? Yet there are those like Rheingold[4]^2 who argue that virtual communities can revitalize citizenship democracy. People will form personal relationships in cyberspace; indeed it is interesting to read the accounts of BBS (bulletin board), MOO, and MUD (multi user domain) friendships, where people develop intimate, emotionally rewarding attachments with complete strangers, reversing some of our long held sociological assumptions about primary and secondary relationships. For Rheingold the loss of community which many bemoan in contemporary societies will now be regenerated through BBSs and MOOs, which have relatively democratic access and modes of address undistorted by external power and authority.[5]^3 One can rediscover one's citizenship rights and involvement in a whole range of issues. One can escape from the rigid interdependencies and power balances within which one is normally placed and escape the significant others and superiors who "know what you think" and feel entitled to "speak on your behalf." Violence--both actual and symbolic--which silences the voices of the less powerful becomes more difficult to operate. New forms of trust may become generated. In a society where many of the major dangers are cumulative and invisible--e.g., ecological threats, pollution, radiation, AIDS, etc.--we rely more and more on information about them. A technology which is in part a "super-telephone" can aid verification of information by the ease with which it can be exchanged and checked.[6]^4 These are the conditions for the development of what some would call the postmodern public sphere[7]^--a notion that contests the myth of the extendibility of the Enlightenment public sphere and asks us to see the democratic potential of the mass media and cyberspace forms. Hartley asks us to reflect on and reconsider an intellectual tradition which has favored production over consumption, urban over suburban, masculine over feminine, authority over the popular, truth over desire, word over image, and the printed archive over the popular screen.[8]^6 The Internet and cyberspace, then, may well force us to rethink our notions of citizenship and public space. Yet there are also clear problems with this pioneering and subversive vision. In conventional terms, as we have just mentioned, trust is generated over time as we get to know people, as we digest their actions and words and observe their gestures and bodily betrayals in co-present interactions. Liminal moments are usually well circumscribed, at least if one lives in Anglo-Saxon, North European, or North American cultures, although consumer culture and advertising generate a wider range of liminoid repertoires and sense of the constructability of persona and performing selves, which invade everyday life. In the Habermasian discourse on the public sphere, masks and disguises are misinformation to be filtered out; they are resonant with the lack of seriousness of the carnival, or with the artfulness and deception of the courtier in the court society, to be contrasted with the solid, serious, purposeful bourgeois gentleman--the clarifier of truth.[9]^7 The Internet and cyberspace will make masking and disguise both easy and routine. Already we see that in MOOs and BBSs there is the phenomenon of computer cross-dressing: age, gender, ethnicity are all seen as reconstructable. Indeed there are also accounts of people interacting on the Internet with `bots' (computer programs which masquerade as persons, being coded up to give a sophisticated and flexible range of responses).[10]^8 If one develops regular interactions with a person who is in disguise, or with a machine, how does this effect trust? There are clearly gains as well as losses to be considered here, for example, the loss of the ideal of pure communication, of complete truthfulness and trust: a romantic ideal of complete and self-sufficient identity which draws on Rousseau and others. Instead of the masculine and bourgeois ideal, there may well be more realistic possibilities for communication and participation by accepting masking and performance as part of everyday life and not seeking to eradicate it. Many academics and intellectuals often inhabit the tradition of Rousseau and have a long-standing prejudice for sincerity over acting.[11]^9 Likewise, it has been argued that the Internet and cyberspace will encourage us to accept the notion of multiple selves.[12]^10 The Windows format many of us operate with when using personal computers already encourages parallel processing, carrying out many tasks at once. The lack of a strong identity, the possibility of fragmentation and splitting into multiple selves, formerly regarded as a pathology, it is argued, is now increasingly normalized and brought into the psychological orthodoxy and surfaces in the popular psychology how-to-do-it literature.[13]^11 There exists a further problem in terms of the generation of the "civic bodies" Sennett speaks about.[14]^12 The simulated puppet bodies we use to represent ourselves in virtual reality seem a long way from the body in pain, the aging body which reminds us of our common human fate and vulnerability. One can know little about the body in pain from the representation the person chooses to employ: it could well be a sick and invalid person who chooses a youthful, active body to represent him-or herself. One can seemingly escape the lived body and interact only with the virtual body, something which, it has been argued, reveals a continuity between the cyberspace aficionados and the idealistic tendencies of Western thought with its long-held preference for the mind over the body. Cyberspace offers the seductive possibilities of pure, unencumbered mind, able to travel and transform itself, to float free of the messiness and disgust of decaying bodies, of what is contemptuously referred to as "the meat."[15]^13 It offers a technological dream of mastery, of the elimination of death and suffering bodies, which Sennett is critical of in respect to the urban plan: the city swept clean of the refuse of human misery. Yet it may well be that the new forms of association have potential to go beyond the type of opposition Sennett speaks of and that technological mastery of the planned kind ceases to have a coherent world view anymore in a time of greater pragmatism and syncretism. Indeed, some of the dichotomies between human beings and nature, humans and machines, are being actively deconstructed by social developments and theoretical formulations. We may well develop respect and emotional solidarity with a range of pre-and post-human natural and mechanic forms and fusions[16]^14--something which points to a range of citizenship possibilities and takes us away from the unitary models. ________________________ [17]^1 See John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 1995). ] [18]^2 See Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993). ] [19]^3 Jim McGuigan, Culture and the Public Sphere (London: Routledge, 1996) 182. ] [20]^4 Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Jaron Lanier Interview," Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture, ed. Hershman Leeson (Seattle: Bay, 1996) 51. ] [21]^5 See John Hartley, Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture (London: Arnold, 1996); and Mark Poster, "Postmodern Virtualities," Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technologial Embodiment, ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London: Sage, 1995) 79-97. ] [22]^6 Hartley 156. ] [23]^7 See J?rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). ] [24]^8 Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Sandy Stone Interview," Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture, ed. Hershman Leeson (Seattle: Bay, 1996) 105-115. ] [25]^9 Norbert Elias's The Court Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) is an important correction to this tradition; see also the discussion in Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) and in Gerhard Vowinckel, "Command or Refine," Theory, Culture & Society 4 (1987): 2-3. ] [26]^10 See Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). ] [27]^11 See John Shotter, Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric and Knowing of the Third Kind (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1993). ] [28]^12 See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: Norton, 1995). ] [29]^13 See Mike Featherstone, "Post-Bodies, Aging and Virtual Reality," Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, ed. Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick (London: Routledge, 1995) 227-244; and Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, introduction, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment (London: Sage, 1995) 1-20. ] [30]^14 See Mike Featherstone, "Beyond the Postmodern Future? Posthuman Development and the Question of Citizenship," ISS Global Futures Lecture, The Hague, June 19, 1997; and Mike Featherstone, "Global Networks and the Question of Technology: Some Considerations Arising from the Work of Norbert Elias," Elias 100 Years Conference, UNICAMP, S?o Paulo, November 21, 1997. ] From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 21 20:25:44 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 16:25:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Harvie Ferguson: Glamour and the End of Irony Message-ID: Harvie Ferguson: Glamour and the End of Irony The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=626719&textreg=1&id=FerGlam1-1 Irony has been closely linked with personal identity in modern times, Harvie Ferguson argues, and the changing nature of this link provides analytic purchase on new conceptions of the self in contemporary society. Tracing its historical interrelation, he suggests that irony emerged as a practical solution to a vexing identity problem. The self was conceived as wholly inward and unique, and thus could not be directly communicated, and yet self-expression was, at the same time, viewed as essential to freedom. Irony, a form of negative communication, dissolved the disjunction by allowing the authenticity of the inner self to be expressed indirectly by affirming its opposite. Essentially, irony became a device that allowed for a separation of the public self from the private self. In this seeming detachment, the fact of an inner self was revealed, yet its deep inner workings could remain hidden, protected from view. Ferguson turns to the question of identity in contemporary society and argues that with the decline of the notion of the self as an inner depth and a new preoccupation with surfaces, irony ceases to function in the communicative role it has long occupied. Harvie Ferguson is Reader in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. His most recent books include Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: S?ren Kierkegaard's Religious Psychology, The Lure of Dreams: Sigmund Freud and the Construction of Modernity, and The Art of Detachment: Forms of Subjectivity in Modern Society. Since the romantics, who advertised the stunning insights of the first moderns, irony has waned. Everyone, of course, must remain on nodding terms, so to speak, with the ironic. It remains significant as a technique of affirming membership in a specific "in-group." But irony in the Romantics' sense is no longer in evidence; as an all-embracing literary and metaphysical position, it seems to have had its day, and now it must be content with playing its part, with other figures, in the repertoire of modern rhetorical devices. Of course discourse has now become a matter of living and breathing, a style of life rather than a mode of speech alone; but all the same, few would confess to, far less boast of, living-out an ironic style of life. Irony as a social form of communication exists in the period of developing individualism, a period in which voluntary communities and exclusive social groupings can form. The period of high modernity is inimical to irony in that sense because, for the most advanced societies, all communities tend ideally to be dissolved in the continuous flux of civil society. The interchangeability of persons, the anonymity of large-scale organization, the division of labor, the legal-rational forms of authority, the decay of personal relations as a form of political organization and public life--all mean that, most of the time, social interaction takes place among strangers devoid of distinguishing inwardness. Identity thus becomes a purely "inward" and personal marker, rather than something to be displayed. "Communities" are conjured by special occasions, as in large sporting events, which are expressive only of a carefully staged show of emotion. Among the most fervent supporters, as among the most devout fashion worshipper, nothing, in fact, is being communicated about the "inner-person." Modes of identification are at the same time displays of "role-distance." The privacy of the modern self becomes a secret even from itself--an obscure inner region that, in spite of the interpretive efforts of Freud, ultimately resists clarification. The individual cannot, thus, even use irony on himself or herself as a maieutic device to bring forth the hidden personality, as no such being any longer clothes itself in the possibility of existence. Ought we to refer, indeed, to the end of irony like the end of ideology--and for much the same reason? If irony betrays the "depth" and hiddenness, the inwardness, of the soul and always works "from below the surface,"[3]^1 then the contemporary age is no longer an age of irony. Now the soul is exposed,open, spread flat like the page of a book; there is nothing interior, underneath, or hidden. There is no disjunction or rupture upon which irony can get to work and in which it might take root. The most advanced societies are notoriously insensitive to irony. Identity is no longer linked to irony, nor is it secreted in the "ego." Rather, it openly displays itself in a vortex of disconnected experiences. Now there is no need to be ironic because no one would imagine that "depth," authentic or otherwise, is being expressed. The non-ironic identity of contemporary society, unlike that of pre-modern society, is not based on trust, or on openness, but on superficiality--on the glamour of the modern personality and of modern identity. Personality, that is to say, is no longer that "deep" selfhood that can only be expressed indirectly and ironically, but has become an aspect of the network of relations in which it is implicated. Social and personal identities are reconciled in the unity of fashion. Personality and self-image are no longer fixed from within but easily adapt themselves to the continually changing circumstances of time and place. The personality, shiny and mirror-like, is a glamorous soul. This is not because the contemporary world has in some way lost sight of reality, or cut itself off from every form of humanly meaningful relation but, rather, that for the contemporary world, the surface of things has been consecrated as the paramount "reality." The contemporary world is conceptualized as continuous with the self, an extended, energetic, and sensitive surface upon which is registered the continuous flux of experience. Identity, in such a world, cannot be a function of interior self-expression or the outcome of a process of actualization; there is no interior to express or to actualize. The non-ironic mood--melancholic still, but no longer detached and superior, no longer heavy with suppressed passion--is very well expressed, for example, in the contemporary American writer Richard Ford. His celebration of the ordinariness of American life, or one section of it at any rate, seems, to a European reader still charmed by irony, to be so sincere that it must be ironic through and through; however, given that it might be read in two ways, Ford plausibly represents a non-ironic, and yet non-naive, central character who claims at one point, "I can't bear all the complications, and long for something that is fa?ades-only. . ."[4]^2 He depicts the amorphous, and more or less anonymous, drifting soul and the contemporary world of appearances on which it floats: "And for a moment I find it is really quite easy and agreeable not to know what's next . . ."[5]^3 Ford's character experiences the serenity of finding pleasure without identity: "All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life."[6]^4 The abandonment of the personal past, more than any other aspect of the novel, makes it clear that he is serious about rejecting the unequal struggle of self-actualization. Though, of course, he cannot really be serious about that either. This lightness, the floating quality of the sportswriter (an ideal postmodern occupation) is quite unlike the detachment of the ironist. And, in spite of the phenomenological similarity, he is not bored, not "seriously" bored in Heidegger's sense, not the "profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, [which] removes all things and men and oneself with it into a remarkable indifference."[7]^5 But this drifting is engagement. He is fully absorbed in and by reality; it is just that this reality remains ill-defined and fluid. He is borne effortlessly in the directionless and intermittent currents of life. This characterization of contemporary life as a ubiquitous sense of drifting, in contrast to the rectilinear motion of self-actualizing intentions, resonates with much of the literature of this century and is by no means confined to recent examples. Its most complete and (ironically) its most profound expression can be found in Robert Musil's masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. The abandonment of the personal past, more than any other aspect of the novel, makes it clear that he is serious about rejecting the unequal struggle of self-actualization. Though, of course, he cannot really be serious about that either. This lightness, the floating quality of the sportswriter (an ideal postmodern occupation) is quite unlike the detachment of the ironist. And, in spite of the phenomenological similarity, he is not bored, not "seriously" bored in Heidegger's sense, not the "profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, [which] removes all things and men and oneself with it into a remarkable indifference." Identity for a person without qualities becomes a more or less arbitrary matter of social relations. Identity can be multiple, transformative, and variable without impinging on the obstructive notion of an inner soul. Social identity is expressed not in terms of ego-based utterances but in terms of superficial signs: clothing, style of life, advertising, and so on. Glamour is non-ironic non-identity--a surface gloss, which, in fact, neither conceals nor reveals the "person." Glamorous personal accessories are, in this sense, non-ironic commodity consumables, taken up and put down as is convenient. Once the ego-self relation is split apart, it becomes possible to parade quasi-self-identities like any other aspect of fashion. Glamour is exciting; in it the self loses itself, abandoning itself to appearance. Whereas the classical ego recognized itself in melancholy, in a gloomy despair, the contemporary self (non-self) recognizes itself in the despair of glamour. Glamour is the exclusiveness of money alone, and it requires no effort, no refinement of taste, to consume. Glamour does not expose the private--it is not conspicuous consumption--so much as it transforms the private into the visible innocence of the "man without qualities." The lives of the rich and famous become glamorous not because they are unable to conceal how they live privately, or because they court publicity to become yet more rich and famous, but because glamour in itself de-individuates and disintegrates all boundaries; the glamorous is essentially public. Has, then, the "age of irony" passed to be replaced by an "age of glamour" in which appearance is consecrated as the only reality in which both personal and social identities are assimilated to a new culture of consumerism?[8]^6 Possibly. Where it does not matter what sort of person one is--even to that person himself or herself--then neither identity nor irony remains important, and there are only the continuously shifting boundaries of impersonal and transient life contents. In this context, identity is a transitory selfhood, momentarily distinguished from what might be termed the "background radiation" of self-presence. This hardly amounts to an alternative spectator ego, watching over the whole comedy. There remains not much more than a bare impersonal presence, a quality of hereness and nowness, which lends to the fleeting experience of conventionalized selfhoods their peculiar, but intermittent, primacy. Modernity thus moves through a period of "authentic" selfhood to one of "ironic" selfhood to a contemporary culture of what might be termed "associative" selfhood--a continuous "loosening" of the tie between an "inner" soul and an "outer" form of social relation. A certain contemporary infatuation with the notion of "irony" as the inauthentic is surely misplaced. The age of irony is primarily the age of high capitalism; the post-modern is, in contrast, the age of glamour. Yet we remain aware of ourselves as individuals; personal identities are not wholly dissolved into immediate relations. Or, rather, of the modes of identity and non-identity available to us, "old-fashioned" individualism remains a possibility. It seems that modes of experience persist in us, or through us, which not only have their origin in the past but also continue, as it were, to point to a vanished social and cultural context. We do not live only in the contemporary world, but at every period in the development of Western society--pre-modern as well as modern. We thus "feel" ourselves to be in one moment souls enclosed in bodies, and then, in the next moment, we are spread out as extended surfaces, or become primitive cosmological schemas. Identities, thus, are continuous oscillations, movements from one world to another. And irony, its protean form adapting to contemporary conditions, now expresses the freedom of this movement and the false limitations of accepting any position or perspective as genuine and authentic. Contemporary identity has the added advantage, as it were, of being a self-conscious form of historicism and perspectivism. Without irony we remain unaware of this and cannot commit ourselves even to the possibility of variety. Irony, thus, has become a technique of losing rather than gaining the soul. Indeed, contemporary irony has become self-consciously historical and social. It is a succession of forms, now "postmodern" superficiality, now the depth of the soul--a succession from which we do not detach ourselves but adopt in relation to it, at appropriate moments, an "ironic" or a non-ironic standpoint. This perspectivism might be regarded as itself a thoroughgoing irony. The idle playing with forms with which Hegel charged the Romantics has become, rather than an extreme measure of individuation, the general condition of contemporary life. More optimistically, it may be closer to Thomas Mann's understanding of irony as, "adopting, one after another, an infinity of points of view in such a way that they correct each other; thus we escape all one-sided centrismes and recover the impartiality of justice and reason." As in the postmodern world, all distinctions become fluid, boundaries dissolve, and everything can just as well appear to be its opposite; irony becomes the perpetual sense that things could be somewhat different, though never fundamentally or radically different. Modernity, that is to say, has become so well established (as postmodernity) that it can now allow individuals not simply the reconciling luxury of an inner and harmless freedom--a personal identity conceived as a soul--but also the freedom to express themselves, and, even more significantly, to act without expressing themselves and to abandon altogether the pursuit of personal identity. Modernity has become so effectively institutionalized that it no longer requires that its subjects be individuated, personalized, and identified in terms of the unique qualities of inwardness. In this perspective the inexplicable succession of events and images exercises a fatal power over us. The world becomes so confident in its appearance (glamour) that it parades itself before us and humiliates our puny efforts to assert ourselves, ironically or actually, over its objectivity. Now, rather than the exalted subject rising ironically above the world of its own limiting objectivity, the irresistible force of this very objectivity transforms every subject into a plaything of its casual irony. ________________________ [9]^1 Douglas C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969) 5. ] [10]^2 Richard Ford, The Sportswriter (London: Harvill, 1996) 37. ] [11]^3 Ford 147. ] [12]^4 Ford 30. ] [13]^5 Martin Heidegger, "What Is Metaphysics?" Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) 101, as quoted in Pat Bigelow, Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing, Kierkegaard and Postmodernism (Tallahassee: The Florida State University Press, 1987) 120. ] [14]^6 See Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1997). ] From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 21 20:26:58 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 16:26:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Jennifer L. Geddes: The Possibilities of Pragmatism: An Interview with Giles Gunn Message-ID: Jennifer L. Geddes: The Possibilities of Pragmatism: An Interview with Giles Gunn The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=645880&textreg=1&id=GedGunn3-3 Professor of English and of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Giles Gunn is author and editor of well over a dozen books, the most recent being the Penguin Classic of William James's Pragmatism and Other Writings and Beyond Solidarity: Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World. What Is Pragmatism and What's Its Use? For some, pragmatism conjures up a blank; we know little about it and certainly not enough to see why it would be relevant to thinking about the world today. Can you give us a working definition of pragmatism and a sense of what resources it offers? Pragmatism is probably most easily understood as a theory of intellectual inquiry. Charles Sanders Peirce first used the term "pragmatism" in an essay entitled "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" and associated it with a procedure for determining the rational meaning of an idea or concept. For Peirce that meaning could only be established by relating it to its implications for human conduct on the grounds that all distinctions in kind, no matter how fine, are nothing more than possible differences in practice. William James then took Peirce's insistence on the connection between ideas and their possible consequences and turned pragmatism into both a critical method and a theory of truth. As a critical method, for which James could find precedents in the work of everyone from Plato and Aristotle to Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Mill, pragmatism expanded into a belief that the full meaning of any proposition is to be found, if not in some particular to which it points, then in the particular difference it would make to the course of human experience if it were true. This gave pragmatism as a method a good deal more latitude than Peirce intended for it, but this latitude was eventually reinforced by Dewey when he further revised the pragmatic test or rule as the attempt to determine the meaning of anything in terms of both the probable, as opposed to merely verifiable, causes from which it emerged and the potential, as opposed to inevitable or predictable, consequences in which it may result. As a theory of truth, on the other hand, pragmatism was identified by James with the view that the true is less an inherent property of ideas than a property of their working relationship with those things which we already hold to be true. By truth, then, James referred to something that helps us get in better touch with other parts of our experience. What James meant by this was simply that truth is cumulative and also conservative. We can only accept as new truths those ideas that are somehow understood to extend or complement, even as they also modify, what we had already accepted as true. Since these convictions about truth and the procedures for ascertaining it carried with them a number of implications for understanding experience in general, pragmatism quickly developed for James and also for Dewey (and later for many others both in this country and abroad) into a more generalized perspective on life itself. Nor was this all. As pragmatism acquired this larger sense of itself as a general perspective, it also became in time, and especially as a result of transnational, really international, re-expressions, more pluralized, such that it would now be more accurate to speak of pragmatisms rather than pragmatism. How would you characterize this looser, more expansive view of pragmatism as a perspective or orientation? As a more general perspective on things, pragmatism has almost always entailed, whether for James and Dewey or for some of its European exponents like J?rgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu, a belief that experience is always on-going, open-ended, and unfinished, that it will never be complete until the last person has her or his say. It has also presumed that experience is inevitably plural, confusing, unpredictable, contradictory, contrary, and (an especially important attribute for James) vague. A pragmatic outlook or perspective also acknowledges that if truth is always partially hostage to the past, to the assemblage of things already accepted as true, then thought never starts from a position of complete neutrality and can never yield conclusions that are completely objective. Such terms as "neutrality" and "objectivity" when applied to thought processes possess at best only a relative kind of credibility. Just as there are no uncontestably stable foundations for thinking, so there are no absolute guarantees for certainty in our conclusions. Thinking is a reflective process that is best described for the pragmatist as tentative, provisional, improvisatory, experimental, even hypothetical, and always open to self-correction and revision, and is directed less at discovering final solutions than at posing questions, sorting out issues, and assessing alternatives. As Dewey stated, what life presents us with is not a hierarchy of answers but a hierarchy of problems. The challenge for the pragmatist, then, is not to resolve doubt but to figure out, case by case and moment by moment, what is the better option to select, what is the better life to be led. So, in its resistance to foundationalism, its openness to new experience, its belief that thought is never complete and must always be corrected, and its emphasis on the concrete and the ordinary, pragmatism quickly became much more than just a theory of truth and an intellectual method. It became a way of thinking and not just a system of thought, a mode of intellectually relating oneself to life as a whole. Are you saying that pragmatism is a way of life? That would be going too far, I think, though at the time he died, James was working on a full-blown metaphysics, the outlines of which were apparent in his theory of radical empiricism, and Dewey was always convinced that pragmatism led directly to democracy which he, indeed, did construe as a way of life. To put this another way, Dewey viewed pragmatism democratically, as a technique for enhancing our shared life with others by encouraging us to cooperate with them in the common task of testing hypotheses about experience against experience itself, not just for the sake of overcoming obstacles and smoothing out difficulties but also for the sake of enriching the qualities of life as such. What do you find most compelling about pragmatism? This is a tough question, but I guess my answer would lie in several features of what I just called its general orientation. As a general perspective on, or orientation toward, life, pragmatism shares with aspects of postmodernism, for example, the conviction that absolute certainty in thought is almost always out of reach. It moreover believes, again with aspects of postmodernism, that the philosophical "quest for certainty," as Dewey termed it, must be replaced, or at the very least complemented, by something like an aesthetic reconceptualization of experience as a form of art and the moral reformulation of the purpose of art as life's continuous revaluation of itself. At the same time, however, pragmatism is very clear that we can develop or attain varying degrees of assurance about any number of things. Hence it neither asserts that the search for the truth is ultimately futile nor that all truths are relative and therefore, in effect, equal. If it insists that none of us possesses all of the truth all or perhaps even part of the time, it also assumes that the only way that we can correct our ideas about any truths is by referring those ideas back to experience itself. Thus truth for pragmatism is always potentially social. Just as Peirce was looking originally for a test of truth that, in standing up to the laboratory's requirements for exactitude, consistency, and coherence, would convince all investigators and not just one, so James and Dewey held that the search for the true is always a communal rather than an individual enterprise and that its value can only be established in relation to its impact on others. You have suggested that pragmatism is "not so much an alternative to late modernist or postmodernist thinking as a useful intervention within it." What do you mean by that? What I mean is that though pragmatism shares postmodernism's anti-foundationalism, it does not conclude that we thereby lack the means to compare differing versions or assessments of experience. In other words, it doesn't reduce all of our negotiations with reality, as in at least some renderings of postmodernism, simply to a dispute between sentences or metaphors which are alleged to provide no basis for comparison. Through its reference to experience, and not just our experience but our attempts to understand the experience of others, it gives us ways to establish standards of evaluation that can be fairly widely shared and publicly warranted. How would our society change if we employed pragmatism as our means of coming up with what we think is true, which values we should pursue, and how we should set goals for our culture? I think we would be less confident about both our innocence and our righteousness. We would be more suspicious of our certitudes and less intolerant of difference. We would, in short, be far more attentive than we have ever been to the feelings and aspirations and convictions of other people in the world--not in the sense that we would necessarily wind up sharing those feelings and convictions, but rather in the sense that we would be in a somewhat better position both to understand them and to understand ourselves in relation to them. What pragmatism resists is any sort of presumption that truth or value resides within only one community of faith or practice. What it promotes, at least by implication, is the belief that the true and the good are most often the product of collaborative discoveries in which discussion, cooperation, negotiation, and even compromise among equals often plays a crucial part. Pragmatism and Difference Do you see a connection between pragmatism, multiculturalism, and difference? One way of defining pragmatism is to call it a philosophy of difference, a philosophy, that is, designed to measure and assess the different kinds of difference that difference makes, whether this difference refers to distinctions of identity, statement, action, or principle. Such difference is of course the basic signature of a pluralistic world, but this does not mean that pragmatism merely legitimates or replicates in its procedures the ideology of multiculturalism. From a pragmatic point of view, multiculturalism in America is in danger of foundering on the contradiction between, as David Hollinger has pointed out, its centrifugal pressures for cultural diversity and its centripetal pressures for some kind of shared sense of cultural identity. To me this means that we must rethink the meaning of multiculturalism in a way that fully takes account of what William James meant by "a certain blindness in human beings" (our inability to think our way into the feelings of other people) without succumbing to the belief that all our views of others are always already merely forms of ourselves. Does pragmatism assume or hope that we will all end up with the same view of things? Not at all. Dewey put it very well when he said that we must at least be tolerant of those who are not themselves intolerant, so any differences that are not inherently or declaredly destructive of human community can be refashioned to provide it with a stronger basis. But that basis will be found not in reconciling differences but in rendering them conversable and debatable. In a recent issue of The Hedgehog Review, Rorty stated that "religion is something that the human species would be better if it could outgrow." Religious difference is, in his view, not a helpful or useful difference. How does pragmatism as a method or a way of approaching differences help us with the very deep differences in the world today? On this matter I find myself seriously at odds with Rorty. As Isaiah Berlin noted long ago, it is one thing to decry religious authoritarianism or lament the effects of fundamentalist thinking on moral practice, but it is quite another to appreciate the deep, incurable metaphysical need that so many people in the world still possess, and not without reason, for greater moral and spiritual support. In addition, there is an enormous distinction to be made between those religions that think they can provide us with absolute certainty in the face of the world's confusion and evil and those which seek instead to provide us with moral guidance and support in the face of the world's uncertainty. A distinction that often accounts for those religions, or traditions within them, which seek to command and rule as opposed to those which seek to console and reform, it also helps illumine the relation between religion and violence. Those religious traditions which seek to command and rule tend to turn the religiously and culturally different into the absolutely other and thus resort to the ancient religious practice known as scapegoating, where people seek to cleanse themselves ritualistically by projecting onto others the burdens of their own undesired fears and pollution. Those traditions dedicated, on the other hand, to consolation and reform try to reverse, or at least counter, these processes by conceiving of the absolutely other on the contrary as simply the radically different and then employ another venerable religious practice which views the different not as opposites but rather as mirrors or, better, prisms which can refract back to the self undetected aspects of itself. Pragmatism thus furnishes us not one but two ways of approaching the deep differences at work in the world today. Negatively, pragmatism presents itself as a cautionary philosophy that seeks to warn us against the evils of absolutism and particularly the "dogmatization of difference," as the political philosopher William E. Connolly calls it, and the deprecation of the different which absolutism breeds. More positively, pragmatism offers us the record of its own genesis as a philosophy initially developed by James as a method for settling otherwise interminable ideological and metaphysical disputes and raises the question about whether it still might be employed--as, in actual fact, it is being informally employed throughout the world--to sort out and assess the comparative moral and religious merits of different perspectives--James called them "world-formulas"--in the new globalized world in which we now find ourselves. Richard Rorty and Pragmatism What are the strengths and weaknesses of Rorty's pragmatism? Rorty possesses an exceptionally acute eye for many of the right issues--the tyrannies of Enlightenment reason, the hazards of liberalism, the political centrality of solidarity, the emergence of a new kind of moral writing devoted to edification as much as to critique--and exhibits an enviable ability to develop these issues in arresting language. He has never lacked for courage in raising questions that others have ducked, and he is prepared to embrace allies wherever he finds them. By the same token he has sometimes revealed a tendency to pose these issues in overly simple, oppositional terms that are intended to make his opponent's arguments look bad and his own look good. At his best, Rorty has lent pragmatism a more contemporary look by associating it with concerns and motifs that are postmodernist and postructuralist, or what he calls textualist. At his worst, he has conflated the history of pragmatism itself with a coming-of-age narrative whose liberal project to de-divinize the world is but the obverse side of its tendency to reduce all intellectual inquiry to a question of personal advantage. At bottom these difficulties derive from the overly sharp philosophical distinction that Rorty wants to draw between those languages we use to describe what is good for ourselves and those languages we use to describe what is good for others. On his reading of the history of Western philosophy, the gap between these languages is simply unbridgeable. The public/private distinction? Right. Rorty views private narcissism and public responsibility as irreconcilable, but this is to forget that if our private lives are not dependent on our public lives with others, then we would have no way of explaining either why we should want to change ourselves or why we should be concerned for others. Rorty is rightly in favor of both, but he does not think we can supply any philosophical rationale for what the one has to do with the other. In this case, the fact that we support both is simply a matter of personal prejudice, albeit a commendable one. But this is to overlook the fact that there are other communities--the African American community is one--where the languages of public accountability have not been sequestered philosophically from the languages of personal self-recreation. Like many American academics, Rorty has failed to see that African American intellectuals have done most of their best thinking about such matters not in the realm of professional philosophy or Grand Theory but in the more public world of letters and political thought. Does Pragmatism Work When the Stakes Are High? While pragmatism may be a helpful procedure or way of talking about things in our everyday lives or experiences, some argue that it lacks a certain motivating force when we get into extreme situations. How would you defend pragmatism's ability to provide us with reasons to fight injustice or pursue the good when the stakes are high? I'm not sure that any defense is needed; or, to put it differently, I don't think that such arguments are really justified. James defied public opinion by taking dead aim at American imperialism in the Spanish-American War. Dewey weighed in for well over a half a century against social injustices wherever he could find them. And Rorty has gone on record as saying that nothing is more important than fighting cruelty and preventing humiliation. But if these examples are not by themselves sufficient to prove that pragmatism possesses a political consciousness, let me add that a philosophy devoted to translating questions of meaning and truth into questions of practice and to redirecting all forms of inquiry away from what James called "first principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins" and "towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power" is not a philosophy inclined to take lightly the challenges of extreme situations. Such arguments are not, however, altogether unexpected, given the influence of various neopragmatists like Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels who, not without Rorty's own support, tend to view culture as an intertextual system of signs capable of infinite redescription. Pragmatism then becomes the name of a theory, as Michaels and Stephen Knapp state in their essay "Against Theory," that is no theory at all but rather a practice critical of all other practices that resort to theory for the sake of governing practice from a position mistakenly assumed to operate outside of it. In such a world, shorn of any ontological or epistemological supports, language, rhetoric, and symbols go all the way down, and the stakes themselves are simply, as the saying goes, a matter of interpretation. Many of the ideals held in the past several centuries were founded on metaphysical ideas, systems, and understandings now in question, and without which it was feared, there would be no basis for upholding the ideals. Does pragmatism give us the ability to uphold those ideals because of its relatedness to our experience and because something in our experience tells us these ideals are worth fighting for? It is worth remembering that pragmatism was itself born out of the erosion of a religious world view once sedimented in different ways in the early lives of James and Dewey, and its emergence as a philosophy was thus in large part motivated by the conviction that the intellectual energies released as a result might help us rethink the meaning of the legacy of those more antiquated systems in a secular, or at least less conventionally orthodox, age. That said, it is clear that pragmatism is only one of many recuperative strategies which may be able to assist us in retrieving those ideals once locked in inherited traditions which still contain unspent potential that may help guide us through this difficult, terribly dangerous moment for the world. While Rorty argues that cruelty is the worst thing one person can do to another, and that we need to expand our sense of "we" in order to combat cruelty, he also says that we have no reason or foundation or basis by which to tell a torturer that what he is doing is wrong. Rorty is simply trying to be consistent, and philosophers have always made a virtue of consistency. If there are no foundations for thought, then there can be no rational basis for values, which turns values, Rorty reasons, into prejudices that are merely, after all, matters of taste. All of this was said earlier by Dewey, but Dewey was scarcely disheartened by the discovery. If everything is merely a matter of taste, he reasoned, then philosophy should be redefined as a critique of prejudices in which part of the challenge is to determine which are the more constructive, which the most destructive. Needless to say, Dewey would have had no more trouble than Rorty in deciding where torture falls on that scale, but he would also have been less troubled about why he felt that way. For the rest of us, however, I suspect that consistency is less a virtue than a kind of expediency, and no doubt an important one until it conflicts with our deepest sense of ourselves and our relation to others, whereupon we side with Walt Whitman who silenced most misgivings about inconsistency by declaring that if he contradicted himself, so much the worse for consistency because he was, he believed, large, and, like the rest of us, contained multitudes. Pragmatism and the Aesthetic How does the aesthetic relate to pragmatism? Pragmatism has always made a great deal of the aesthetic. Rorty has said this most clearly in recent years by noting that one of Dewey's greatest contributions to modern philosophy was his attempt to try to reground philosophical discourse not in terms of the scientific but in terms of the aesthetic. The great text was of course Art as Experience where Dewey argued that all experience is art in potential and the purpose of all art is to criticize the actual in light of the possible. But pragmatism's affirmation of the aesthetic is so strong that it actually reinstalls the imaginative at the center of its notion of cognition and thus challenges the classic Enlightenment notion of reason as purely analytic. One sees this most vividly in James' theory of the pragmatic method which identifies the meaning of ideas not only with outcomes and consequences but with outcomes and consequences many of whom cannot be verified and confirmed before we must act on them. For the most part we act not on the basis of confirmed facts but on the basis of surmises and conjectures. Thus, for James the imagination assumed a role in the operations of the intellect that was central because so much of the life of the mind is devoted to determinations whose results we can never substantiate in advance but can only guess at or speculate before we have to respond to them. But if thinking pragmatically is therefore as dependent on techniques of conjecture, surmise, intuition, and good guessing as it is on procedures of logic and deduction, then the rational properly conceived is not the enemy of the aesthetic but its ally, and all serious processes of reflection have a place, or at any rate a need, for the projective capacities of the poetic. Is There Truth in Pragmatism? Some argue that the notion of truth is unimportant to the pragmatist. What does it mean for something to be true in pragmatism? Pragmatism has gotten bad press about its views on truth, though some of the responsibility for this lies with James himself, and particularly with some of his formulations in his book Pragmatism, which forced him to publish another book immediately thereafter to explain himself called The Meaning of Truth. Pragmatism, as I said before, views truth in relational rather than substantive terms, as a working notion rather than as an inherited or self-evident norm. Truth represents a triangulated relationship between what has heretofore been accepted as true, what we now think might be true instead, and what we know or believe we have fathomed about the external world to which any notions of truth, old or new, must be applied. While it would be comforting to think that truth is one and unchanging, the pragmatist in most of us believes otherwise. What most of us know is that change is relentless and unpredictable and that, as a result, the fund of old truths, like our quiver of new truths, must be constantly tested and re-tested against the always unstable, ever-fluid field of experience itself. So truth isn't relativistic in the sense that one thing can't be judged as truer than another? Rather, pragmatism emphasizes the changing nature of our understanding of the world and ourselves? I think that's right. If truth is relative, this is not because all truths add up to the same thing but rather because all truths are related to the circumstances in which they arose and to which they apply. In pragmatism is there the possibility of affirming or proclaiming universal values or universal truths? Yes, but with a proviso. Pragmatism can easily concede that certain truths have held up over very long periods of time and been broadly supported and believed. At the same time it must acknowledge that few truths have lasted forever or gained assent from everyone. In this sense, "universality" is itself a relative term. But the point is not that particular truths have not been widely shared, for they most certainly have; the point is rather how to protect those same truths from becoming totalizing, absolutist, totalitarian. The real issue is not only to defend truth from its detractors but also to prevent truth from becoming fixed and dictatorial in the hands of its supporters. So we might be able to work for the acceptance of human rights or the sacredness of each human individual as a universal value, but without claiming a certain metaphysical foundation for that? Even if I thought that we possessed a metaphysical foundation for these values, I don't believe that either of them require its support for their legitimacy. They square with enough of the general wisdom of humankind to justify our allegiance and our advocacy. But there is a difficulty that attends the claim that these values are, as you describe them, "universal." Does this mean that they are self-evident to all people? That surely is not the case. Does this mean that all people everywhere interpret them in the same way? That, too, is surely not the case. Does this mean that their recognition is based on some common traits that all people share? That, too, is likely to be disputed. If human rights are construed rather differently, for example, in the East, the Middle East, and the West, if different moral and religious traditions place different values on human life, where does the term "universal" take us? Perhaps it is enough to say that while the universality of such values is deeply contested around the world, the disputes they attract nonetheless attest to the enormous stakes all of us everywhere have in their interpretation. While we clearly need to find better ways of saying what we mean by such values, we still more urgently need to find better ways of safeguarding what they variously represent to people throughout the world. One of the central intellectual tasks of the twenty-first century will be to devise strategies for addressing both issues in a less essentialist or exceptionalist, and a more pragmatic, manner. From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 21 20:30:11 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 16:30:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Deleting Junk DNA Does No Harm Message-ID: Deleting Junk DNA Does No Harm http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2004-10-20-3 Mouse experiment reinforces theory that large chunks of the human genome serve no function By Liz Brown Betterhumans Staff 10/20/2004 3:38 PM Process of elimination: Deleting large chunks of DNA in mice does them no harm, supporting the theory that the human genome contains lots of useless junk Large segments of our DNA may have absolutely no function and could apparently be removed without ill effect. At least, this is what researchers from the [1]US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and [2]Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California discovered when they deleted large parts of [3]DNA sequences shared by mice and humans in lab mice. The researchers set out to discover what function--if any--noncoding DNA had. When the human DNA sequence was mapped, scientists found that 98% of the [4]genome appeared to contain no genes. "In these studies, we were looking particularly for sequences that might not be essential," says [5]Eddy Rubin, director of the JGI. "We were surprised, given the magnitude of that information being deleted from the genome, by the complete lack of impact noted." Removing the walls The researchers began eliminating sections of mouse DNA to determine if the noncoding sections had any function. "To use an architectural analogy, we asked which walls in the room actually support the ceiling above," says Marcelo Nbrega, lead author of the study. "Remove the walls and you will know." Genetically engineering embryonic cells and then creating mice from these cells, the researchers deleted 2.3 million letters of DNA code from the 2.7 billion-base-pair mouse genome. When the researchers compared the genetically altered mice with normal mice, they could detect no differences in any areas, including viability, growth and longevity. "By and large, these deletions were tolerated and didn't result in any noticeable changes," says Nbrega. "An important caveat, however, is that no matter how detailed our analyses, our ability to test for a particular characteristic in mice is limited. All we know is that, in the time frame examined, there were no detectable changes in the specific features that we studied." The mouse genome is about 14% smaller than the human genome, but is surprisingly similar in its sequence. This means it is likely that eliminating these same areas in human DNA wouldn't have an effect on the human body, a finding that provides a better understanding of our genetic makeup. The research is reported in the journal [6]Nature ([7]read abstract). References 1. http://www.jgi.doe.gov/ 2. http://www.lbl.gov/ 3. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA 4. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome 5. http://www-gsd.lbl.gov/rubin/ 6. http://www.nature.com/nature/ 7. http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v431/n7011/abs/nature03022_fs.html From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 21 21:21:44 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 14:21:44 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Deleting Junk DNA Does No Harm Message-ID: <01C4B779.4C7E06B0.shovland@mindspring.com> No function? Not presently used? Function unknown? In making CD's, studios sample frequencies far higher than what people can hear because it affects the sound. Perhaps the "junk" DNA represents subroutines that are called when needed. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2004 1:30 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Deleting Junk DNA Does No Harm Deleting Junk DNA Does No Harm http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2004-10-20-3 Mouse experiment reinforces theory that large chunks of the human genome serve no function By Liz Brown Betterhumans Staff 10/20/2004 3:38 PM Process of elimination: Deleting large chunks of DNA in mice does them no harm, supporting the theory that the human genome contains lots of useless junk Large segments of our DNA may have absolutely no function and could apparently be removed without ill effect. At least, this is what researchers from the [1]US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and [2]Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California discovered when they deleted large parts of [3]DNA sequences shared by mice and humans in lab mice. The researchers set out to discover what function--if any--noncoding DNA had. When the human DNA sequence was mapped, scientists found that 98% of the [4]genome appeared to contain no genes. "In these studies, we were looking particularly for sequences that might not be essential," says [5]Eddy Rubin, director of the JGI. "We were surprised, given the magnitude of that information being deleted from the genome, by the complete lack of impact noted." Removing the walls The researchers began eliminating sections of mouse DNA to determine if the noncoding sections had any function. "To use an architectural analogy, we asked which walls in the room actually support the ceiling above," says Marcelo Nbrega, lead author of the study. "Remove the walls and you will know." Genetically engineering embryonic cells and then creating mice from these cells, the researchers deleted 2.3 million letters of DNA code from the 2.7 billion-base-pair mouse genome. When the researchers compared the genetically altered mice with normal mice, they could detect no differences in any areas, including viability, growth and longevity. "By and large, these deletions were tolerated and didn't result in any noticeable changes," says Nbrega. "An important caveat, however, is that no matter how detailed our analyses, our ability to test for a particular characteristic in mice is limited. All we know is that, in the time frame examined, there were no detectable changes in the specific features that we studied." The mouse genome is about 14% smaller than the human genome, but is surprisingly similar in its sequence. This means it is likely that eliminating these same areas in human DNA wouldn't have an effect on the human body, a finding that provides a better understanding of our genetic makeup. The research is reported in the journal [6]Nature ([7]read abstract). References 1. http://www.jgi.doe.gov/ 2. http://www.lbl.gov/ 3. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA 4. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome 5. http://www-gsd.lbl.gov/rubin/ 6. http://www.nature.com/nature/ 7. http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v431/n7011/abs/nature03022_fs.html _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 22 15:38:52 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:38:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Republic: The Death of the Author Message-ID: The Death of the Author http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=online&s=wolin101304 THE APPROPRIATE DECLINE OF DECONSTRUCTIONISM. The Death of the Author by Richard Wolin Only at TNR Online Post date: 10.13.04 A nyone who tries to account for Jacques Derrida's success in North America is faced with a paradox. During the early 1980s, when his fortunes began to ebb precipitously in France--articles on his philosophy had slowed to a trickle of two or three per annum--in the United States deconstruction became something of an academic cottage industry. Translations of his books, conferences devoted to his thought, as well as endless commentaries trying to explicate the obscurities of "so-called deconstruction" proliferated. The irony is that American academics--most of whom were clustered in comparative literature departments--attempting to ride the crest of the Parisian theoretical avant-garde were "always already" (to employ a pet Derrideanism) behind the times. For, by the mid-'70s, Derrida's exotic brand of "post-structuralism"--which had proclaimed that the ends of metaphysical "closure" pursued by first-generation, hard core structuralists like Claude L?vi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, could never be achieved--had become a dead letter. Nineteen sixty-seven was Derrida's breakthrough year. He published three successful books and, for a brief, shining moment, became the toast of the Left Bank. Structuralism had become intellectually hegemonic. The claims of Derridean "diff?rance"--viz., that all claims to determinate meaning were self-undermining--appeared revolutionary and refreshing. Yet, already by the following year, his hermetic, "negative semiotics"--a semiotics of "absence" rather than "presence"--had become an object of satirical derision. In Structuralist Mornings, the novelist Cl?ment Rosset subjected deconstructionist pretense (specifically, the Derridean habitude of writing sous rature or crossing out words) to biting parody: "I write a first sentence, but in fact I should not have written it, excuse me, I will erase everything and I'll start over again; I write a second sentence, but after thinking about it, I should not have written that one either." In France, the Derridean gambit foundered quite soon. Like the structuralists, Derrida prided himself on his discursive "illisibilit?," or "unreadability." But after the breakthrough of the May '68 revolt, when structuralist platitudes concerning the "end of history" and the "end of man" were refuted on the streets of the Latin Quarter, "unintelligibility" had become a distinct liability. In the eyes of the May generation, Derrida was associated with the structuralist old guard. Deconstruction was perceived, not unjustly, as part and parcel of an elitist, self-enclosed, mandarin academic idiom. In the eyes of his critics, Derrida was never able to live down his famous bon mot, "There is nothing outside the text." The exclusive emphasis on "textuality" in his work, combined with the studied indifference to the political exterior or "outside," constituted a final nail in deconstruction's coffin. Toward the late '80s, deconstruction also underwent a major crisis in North America. In the eyes of his acolytes, the Master's frequent proclamations concerning the "death of the subject" seemed to malign and belittle the idea of human agency itself--and, thus, the prospect of progressive political change. If all meaning were, as Derrida claimed, indeterminate, if moral and epistemological questions were ultimately "undecidable," what was the point of political commitment? When all was said and done, wasn't deconstruction merely an elaborate and convoluted prescription for political quietism? In 1987 the Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger scandals broke--coincidently, within months of each another. In a stroke, deconstruction's key North American benefactor (de Man) and its leading philosophical inspiration (Heidegger) were exposed for their compromising associations with Nazism. Derrida did nothing to enhance deconstruction's credibility when he claimed: 1) that Heidegger had become a Nazi due to a surfeit of "metaphysical humanism" and 2) de Man's 1941 newspaper articles endorsing the deportation of Europe's Jews were actually the work of a closet r?sistant. Could it be that the claims and suspicions of deconstruction's vigorous detractors were true after all? But the ultimate paradox besetting deconstruction lies elsewhere. It hinges on the fact that a methodology that promoted itself as "critical"--as the exemplar of political and textual criticism--quickly degenerated into a variant of run-of-the-mill academic corporatism. Each time deconstruction was exposed to criticism, the Derridean faithful predictably circled the wagons. Deconstruction had become a new Scripture or Holy Writ. And in the eyes of true believers, its progenitor could do no wrong. Anyone who dared to criticize the credo was branded as a heathen or non-believer. Deconstruction had its moment in the intellectual limelight. But, appropriately, that moment was fleeting. [4]Richard Wolin is the author of The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press). References 4. http://www.tnr.com/showBio.mhtml?pid=432 From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 22 15:39:28 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:39:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Religion and Culture: Views of 10 Scholars Message-ID: Religion and Culture: Views of 10 Scholars The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.10.22 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i09/09b00701.htm What role do or should religious institutions play in society? Does religion shape culture, or vice versa? Does it have a political content? How has the relationship of religion to American society changed in the contemporary world? Many new and forthcoming scholarly books on religion and American culture seek to answer questions like those, which are part of some of today's most pressing public debates, underlying such controversies as abortion, school vouchers, the roots of terrorism, and many more. In light of the recent scholarship and public debates, The Chronicle asked 10 leading scholars to give their views on religion in American life today. *** ROBERT WUTHNOW Still Divided, After All In 1984, George Gallup Jr. and I were the first to conduct a systematic study of the growing divide between those who designated themselves as conservative or liberal in religion -- a divide that pundits and scholars are still debating 20 years later. We found that 41 percent of the public regarded themselves as religious conservatives (19 percent as very conservative), while 43 percent regarded themselves as religious liberals (18 percent as very liberal). Conservatives thought liberals were unsaved and morally loose, and liberals thought conservatives were rigid and fanatical. Neither side had much contact with the other -- but those who had the most interaction regarded the other in the least favorable terms. During the 1992 Republican convention, Pat Buchanan proclaimed that America was being torn apart by a religious war. Such an exaggerated claim became an easy target. In 1998, in his One Nation, After All, Alan Wolfe argued that Americans were mostly in the unopinionated middle. And rebuttals of the culture-wars thesis continue. For instance, Morris P. Fiorina and his collaborators, Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope, wrote in the recent Culture War?: The Myth of a Polarized America that public opinion isn't nearly as divided as the red-states/blue-states image suggests. But other evidence points to a continuing and significant divide in American religion. National surveys that I have conducted in recent years show an even greater division between religious conservatives and liberals than in 1984. There is a strong correspondence between religious conservatism and political conservatism. In 2003 I found a near-perfect correlation between states that scored high on a scale of belief in America's being a Christian nation -- a view favored by evangelicals and others who believe that Christianity is uniquely true -- and states that voted for George W. Bush in 2000. John C. Green, a political scientist, has found similarly strong associations between religious traditionalism and political views during the 2004 election campaign. The surest indication that such divisions will continue comes from the emerging post-baby-boom generation. Adults ages 21 through 45 are more divided than their counterparts were in the early 1970s, with sharper divisions in beliefs and lifestyles between evangelical Protestants and those with no religious affiliations, and between those who attend religious services regularly and those who do not. Evangelicals in this age group are even more opposed to abortion than their predecessors were and increasingly vote for Republican candidates. The impact of higher education on the current divide is unclear. Historically, fundamentalist beliefs like biblical literalism have tended to decline with college going. But that is much less true than it once was. Anecdotal evidence suggests that fundamentalism is flourishing on many of our nation's campuses. The current religious divisions are hardly a threat to American democracy, although political operatives continue to exploit them for partisan purposes. It is not puzzling that religion is a vibrant part of the political discourse of our nation. It is misleading to assume that religious people have simply joined a complacent middle. Robert Wuthnow is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and director of its Center for the Study of Religion. *** STEPHEN J. STEIN A Decentered Religious World Religion in the United States is undergoing major change, undetected by many but clearly measured by the newest scholarship in the field: The religious agenda of the past is losing significance. Theological issues that were once prominent are now of less interest. Denominational identities have become less important. Traditional patterns of worship have been altered in multiple ways. Moral standards have shifted repeatedly. The net result is an emerging American religious bricolage that defies easy description. Several forces are at work. Globalization is one force reshaping American religious pluralism. The nation once described as Christian, and then as Judeo-Christian, now defies easy characterization. Post-1965 immigrants brought the traditions of Asia into the diverse religious mix at the same time that several truly indigenous communities, including the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses, have grown exponentially. The Latino presence in the Roman Catholic Church is reorienting that huge community, too. The challenge now facing scholars is to construct a new descriptive model for this decentered religious world in America. Privatization, another force altering American religion, is breaking up the controlling interests of mainline denominations and redistributing religious commitments. The second half of the 20th century saw televangelists invade American homes, followed by the expanding impact of cable TV on religion, and now the explosion of alternative religious options on the Internet. New Age spirituality in its infinite expressions allows individuals to participate in virtual religious communities in the privacy of their homes. Localization is another force affecting contemporary American religion. As loyalties to ecumenical, denominational, and even regional religious agencies diminish, Americans continue to support local congregations, parishes, synagogues, and temples in astonishingly high numbers. New kinds of local religious communities also are enjoying remarkable success. Mega-churches, comprising large, nondenominational Protestant congregations, are thriving as an expression of the primacy of the local. Polarization is a fourth force. Competition has always been present among religious communities. Often it has been accompanied by overt hostility. Sustained campaigns, for example, against Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and various so-called cults are well known. Residuals of those hostilities remain. But polarization between religious conservatives and religious liberals, without respect to denominational affiliation, has taken center stage. The divisive issues include abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage, prayer in the public schools, the role of women, the response to terrorism, and war. As they confront such changes, scholars of American religion are attempting to move beyond the categories established by traditional theology and the social structures of Western religious traditions. They are examining the expressions of personal spirituality, the ideas and practices crafted through interaction of diverse traditions, the violence sanctioned by religious prejudice, and the new forms that religion is likely to take in the future. Stephen J. Stein is a professor of religious studies at Indiana University at Bloomington. *** GEORGE MARSDEN The Paradox of American Religion The United States is one of the most religious of modern nations and also one of the most secular. Vast majorities of Americans profess belief in God, and more than two-thirds affirm such traditional Christian doctrines as the deity of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Bible. Probably only about half of those Christians are active in churches, but if you add practicing Jews, Muslims, and devotees of other religions, the proportion of seriously religious Americans is far higher than in other large highly industrialized nations. Yet as religious traditionalists abroad remind us, our culture is also strikingly secular, even profane. Part of the paradox is explained by the many essential activities in a technological capitalist society like ours that allow little room for religious groups to exercise substantive control. Our government is officially separated from religions and depends on coalitions that can bring people with different beliefs together. Businesses serve diverse markets and focus on what will turn a profit. The media's commitments to freedom, diversity, and profit foster mass entertainments that would have shocked older religious sensibilities. What is remarkable is that in the United States those traits of modernity have been accompanied by voluntary adherence to religion that has grown at rates comparable to those of the population. Even more remarkable is that these two cultures, the secular and the religious, coexist in relative peace, often within the same individual. Despite bitter political debates on a few notorious issues, most Americans who are very religious accept that life is many-sided and that religion has its own, limited place. Few, for example, challenge the secular nature of the world of business and industry. Religion flourishes as a largely private matter, while the public domain is dominated by the secular. At the same time, we must recognize that the divide between our public and private lives is and will remain far from complete. The secular and the religious inevitably overlap. Changes in secular culture constantly reshape religions -- as, for example, in the higher tolerance for divorce in most evangelical churches than, say, 40 years ago. Correspondingly, genuinely religious people in aspects of public life like politics, education, and social service can hardly avoid being influenced by viewpoints that are shaped by religion, even if they must temper how they speak or act to meet rules of the public domain. Much of the recent scholarship in my own field, American religious history, has dealt with why and where religion has flourished in such a modernized society. Two trends are especially striking. First, as in the historical profession generally, numerous studies emphasize previously marginalized people and groups. We have benefited vastly from studies of popular religious practice among women and laypeople and within ethnic and minority communities. The other trend is the remarkable growth in the past quarter-century of scholarship on evangelical Protestantism. Partly in response to the unforeseen resilience of evangelicalism in the late 20th century, a generation of scholars has tracked aggressive Protestantism's influence on countless dimensions of American history. While much of the scholarship about evangelicalism also leans toward rehabilitating the previously marginalized, some bucks the trend by recovering the multifaceted movement's influence on the American mainstream. Mark A. Noll's much-noticed recent work, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, tracks the cultural impact of something so un-trendy as theology in early America. Notable studies of Roman Catholicism have similarly traced the influence of the nation's largest religious minority on the larger culture. Leading commentators on American culture of a generation ago assumed that religion was an ephemeral -- or at least a diminishing -- force in American life and, as a result, tended to neglect its pervasive presence. The American historical profession as a whole is still shaped by those outworn assumptions -- few history departments integrate American religious history into their programs. Nonetheless, illuminating scholarship on American religion exists, as does the inescapable influence of religion itself. George Marsden is a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. *** YVONNE HADDAD Defaming Islam and All Religious Belief One of the most salient points about religion in American culture today is the extent to which the events of September 11, 2001, have tapped into a centuries-old heritage of demonizing Islam in the West. Islam has long been depicted as despotic and oppressive, a useful foil against which to define liberal democracy. That contrast has become central to justifying the war on terrorism. Americans today view Muslims as quintessential strangers, whose barbaric, sexist, and irrational beliefs must be denounced as violating an international consensus about the worth of human beings. Such a characterization defames Islam, Muslims in America, and, in insidious ways, all religious belief in America. The majority of American Muslims came to the United States as part of a migration that began after 1965. They came to a nation that had outlawed racial segregation and was increasingly defining itself as a pluralist country. Muslims set out to create a place for Islam in the American mainstream, establishing organizations that parallelled those of other religions, like mosques that provided social functions available in churches and synagogues, youth groups, and charitable organizations. That all changed on September 11. Since then U.S. government policies -- the USA Patriot Act, profiling Muslims, raiding their homes and the offices of their leaders, freezing the assets of their charities -- have been seen by Muslims at home and abroad as a declaration of war not only on terrorism but on Islam itself. That is why American Muslims were so shocked at the appointment last year of Daniel Pipes, a pro-Israel commentator and director of the Middle East Forum, to the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace -- which had been commissioned by Congress to promote peace -- despite opposition by Christian and Muslim religious and civic leaders. Pipes and other critics of Islam have called for "modernizing" the religion. They advocate a form of "religion building" that would challenge the legitimacy of many Muslim leaders and intellectuals, criticize Islamic fundamentalism, and promote Western values within Islam. Not only is that seen as demeaning Islamic belief; in essence, it also seems to be an attempt to isolate Islam as a purely spiritual phenomenon, to concentrate on it as a religion -- to separate it from public policy. American attitudes toward Islam are also exacerbating divisions within broad currents in American religion and culture. It's not just the "with us or against us" attitudes that increasingly appear to exclude Muslims and other newcomers and to redefine the country in Judeo-Christian terms. It's also that American culture appears to be of two minds about religious influences. On the one hand, the conversation surrounding today's war on terrorism sometimes draws on the longstanding religious beliefs that support liberal democracy -- the "nice" side of Judeo-Christian thought, which emphasizes the value of all people, regardless of their faith. That was reflected in the initial reaction to September 11, which saw an outpouring of support for American Muslims by helpful neighbors, rabbis, and ministers. On the other hand, increasingly the war on terrorism also draws on the "harsh" side of Judeo-Christian belief, promoting a God of vengeance who does not tolerate other faiths, especially Islam. God's plan for the end of time has begun, one in which Muslims are not major players. No wonder Muslims feel that they have been stripped of the right to define their own faith and teachings, which must be revised to accord with the interests of the U.S. government and Israel. They wonder what kind of Islam America will tolerate. Yvonne Haddad is a professor of the history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. *** HASIA DINER The Vanishing Middle Ground Like much in contemporary America, religion has separated into two extremes, veering off from what just a few decades ago seemed to be a liberal consensus, about both the nature of religion and its place in society, among Americans as a whole and within most faiths. That consensus, which reached its high point in the 1960s, assumed religion to be a progressive force that, despite clear denominational differences, united Americans through common values and shared ideas about progress and brotherhood. The liberal view of American religion accepted differences among Protestant, Catholic, Jew, the title of Will Herberg's 1955 book. Like him, Americans generally emphasized the connections among people across rigid divides. But in the final decades of the 20th century and into the early 21st, that widely accepted truth has been shattered. On the one hand, the boundaries between denominations have blurred, and previously clear sectarian lines seem less well defined. Soaring intermarriage rates complicate previously accepted definitions of what constitutes the core of particular religions and what membership means. "Exotic" practices have found their way into the sanctuaries of once staid churches and synagogues. Congregations experiment in their sacred services with modes of spiritual expression borrowed from other religious systems and from New Age sources. Individuals sample from the motifs of many religious repertoires without feeling obliged to buy into total systems. Probably no popular example could trump that of Madonna, a Roman Catholic by upbringing, who now presents herself by her "Jewish" name, Esther, and has announced that she is a devotee of kabbalah, a mystical Judaic tradition that flourished at the end of the 13th century. Additionally, individuals who in the past had no access to public roles of authority in religious organizations -- notably women and gay people -- now serve as members of the clergy and help shape forms of religious expression that challenge longstanding doctrines. On the other hand, the hardening of religious orthodoxies among the most fervently committed Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims -- and their increasing power within their respective faiths -- has shaken mid-20th-century ideas about the basically benign similarities among religions. That triumph of orthodoxy reflects a deep reaction against blurring of boundaries, which had, in its turn, challenged the assumption that "natural" categories of difference existed. Thus elements within each of the religious communities have come to stake out extreme positions, proclaiming certain incontrovertible fundamentals of their religions and lambasting anyone who questions doctrinal authority. Within Judaism, for example, the ultra-Orthodox who refer to themselves as "Torah true" have made modern Orthodox Judaism, long associated with the idea that faith and modernity could coexist, uncomfortable with accommodation. The latter now feel compelled to look to the right to make sure that they cannot be accused of being soft in matters of Jewish law as defined by the right. The purists make no room for either moral relativism or creative fusions. They want thicker walls. In a shorthand way, American religion, like American politics, has come to be defined by the "reds" and the "blues," with little in the middle to hold the center. Hasia Diner is a professor of American Jewish history and director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University. *** FREDRICK C. HARRIS From the Social Gospel to the Prosperity Gospel Religion and politics have increasingly become interwoven, often in nuanced, unexpected ways. In recent years American consumerism and corporate-management principles have joined with a steady rise of Protestant, mostly denominationally independent churches. The corporatization of that growing branch of American Protestantism, with its emphasis on transforming individuals into prosperous citizens and its de-emphasis of the communal values of the social gospel, will very likely influence American politics for years to come. This turn in American Protestantism, which is characterized by the ascendancy of megachurches and a "gospel of prosperity" suggesting that believers will be prosperous and healthy if they are financially committed to their churches, may especially affect the politics of black communities. The popularization of megachurches and the gospel of prosperity act as a counterpoint to some of the most important values that African-Americans armed themselves with in their challenge to racial segregation during the 1950s and '60s. Although most churches in Southern black communities were not engaged in the civil-rights movement, members of black churches, activist and nonactivist alike, used the organizational skills they developed in their congregations to help their communities work for social change. In similar fashion, black churches served as incubators for political organizing and voter-registration drives in the 1970s and '80s. As black churches become more professionalized and adopt management principles to run church operations, full-time church staffs are replacing lay participation. As a result, congregants may have to learn in other places the organizational skills that, for generations, they had learned in church. What effect this will have on political organization is not clear. What does seem clear is that, if current trends in black Protestantism continue, black churches will no longer be the birthplaces of civic and political change they once were. In tandem with the professionalization of black-church leadership is the emergence of the prosperity gospel, which is especially popular with radio and television ministries. This religious worldview, colloquially known as the "name-it-and-claim-it" gospel, measures salvation by material wealth rather than by reaching out and "saving souls" through community involvement. Although the social gospel was premised on the idea of transforming the poor by uplifting them with hard work and thrift, the prosperity ministry merely feeds on the misery of the poor and working class by convincing them that their station in life is caused by lack of financial commitment to God. The prosperity gospel's view of how to change communities is by creating righteous consumers rather than by uplifting the poor. Disentangling the impact of corporatization and the prosperity gospel on black churches and understanding how those forces influence political activism in black communities should be at the forefront of research on religion and black politics. Fredrick C. Harris is an associate professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of African-American Politics at the University of Rochester. *** PHILIP KEVIN GOFF Cultural Shifts: the Sacred and the Secular The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture was originally envisioned as a way to promote the understanding of religion in American culture. As I have come to realize, the modification to religion and American culture is significant. At issue is whether we are studying religion as a subset of American culture or its relationship to American culture. Over the past 15 years, scholarship on American religion has moved along the same trajectory as many of the humanities have, proceeding from the social categories of race, women, and class to cultural categories of ethnicity, gender, and material culture. This shift has changed our focus from religion in society to such topics occupying our religious lives as food, language (including shibboleths), dress, entertainment, fashion, aesthetics, and law -- that is, to religion and American culture. My own studies in religious radio have forced me to conclude that we are best served by analyzing both religion and the concept of "American" under the larger umbrella of culture. That helps explain the pliability of each, as well as their power when linked in the sense of civil religion -- that moment when faith and Americanism are one. I've watched with amazement as religious and secular entertainers borrow from one another. It is that dance between what we traditionally have called the "sacred" and the "secular" that most reveals the nature of the relationship between religion and American life. Look at the recent simultaneous growth in popularity of reality television programs and the charismatic-style worship of nondenominational congregations filled with the Starbucks-drinking, Internet-surfing, therapy-seeking and thrill-seeking Gen X and Gen Y crowds. The personal is no longer private. Both the personal and the sacred have gone public in a big way. People believe that others want to know about their deepest feelings and recent experiences -- including their religious experiences. And many do. It is not so much that religion has influenced America, or vice versa. Rather, both have been affected by larger cultural shifts. Recently that has included a combination of narcissism and voyeurism. We see it in all sorts of moments -- when fundamentalist-Christian pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions for medical procedures that run contrary to their consciences, or when citizens decide to vote for or against candidates who acknowledge themselves as people of prayer. Those are moments when the personal demands public attention. All of which makes me take a second look at America's religious history. Perhaps those 19th-century revival meetings emphasized personal testimony for more than just the sake of proselytizing. Perhaps railroad trains featuring Roman Catholic masses were meant not just as religious experiences but as spectacle, right up there alongside Rudolph Valentino films and gory wrestling matches. Looking at religion in contemporary America against the backdrop of the past, the wall separating the so-called sacred and secular seems less noticeable than the one fencing the two in the same yard of culture. Philip Kevin Goff is director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and a professor of religious studies and American studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. He also is coeditor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. *** ANDREW M. GREELEY The Assault on Religion in the News Media Perhaps the point that troubles me most about the relation between religion and American culture today is rarely discussed by our news media: the role of the press itself. Look at the public debate over school vouchers. When the U.S. Supreme Court approved a Cleveland school-voucher program in 2002, the editorial page of The New York Times was troubled by the breach in the wall of separation between church and state. Warning that taxpayers' money would be spent on Roman Catholic masses, crucifixes, and Bibles, the Times harrumphed, "It is hard to think of a starker assault on the doctrine of separation of church and state than taking taxpayer dollars and using them to inculcate specific religious beliefs in young people." Leaving aside that the "wall" is an analogy more than a legal theory, such commentators often reveal astonishing ignorance. Religion in America flourishes, yet there is a layer of elite opinion in both the academy (especially law schools) and the national media that religion is in decline and, moreover, should be in decline. Therefore it should be pushed back into the private sphere and kept there. There should be no place for religion in public life. Thus the Times assigns the review of a book by an atheist to another atheist. One of its religion writers begins a report on sexual abuse by priests with a statement that such abuse is spread all around the country, but she waits till the 12th paragraph to report that the proportion of priests who were abusers was less than 2 percent from 1950 to 2001 -- the obvious news lead. Ignorance? Bigotry? A combination of both? The mix of the two is not confined to the Times. The principal targets are Catholics and evangelicals. If media bias and inaccuracy about those two groups were as manifest when the subjects are Jews or African-Americans, there would be a hue and cry in the land. As it is, there is no sense that it is wrong to make sweeping generalizations about either Catholics or evangelicals without being very careful about what one says or writes. It's all right to go after evangelicals, because they are President Bush's most important base, and it's all right to attack Catholics, because they are against women and gay people and vote the way their bishops tell them to vote -- both of which assumptions are, by the way, false. Further, while much recent research in the sociology of religion casts grave doubt on the thesis that modernity has brought secularization, it remains a favorite dogma of not just the media but also the academic elite -- even among fellow sociologists. If religion is on the wane, why should one worry about fairness? Let's rejoice that finally enlightened thought sees through the fraud of religion, especially the fraud of Catholicism and evangelicalism. That's the cultural message. The Rev. Andrew M. Greeley is a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and a research associate with the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago. *** BRUCE B. LAWRENCE Crusades vs. Jihads: Religion and the Global Future What is the role of religion in today's politics? Or, rather, what is the political role of religion in contemporary America? The question has been recast since September 11, 2001, with President Bush playing the role of a modern-day crusader. Two wars against Muslim enemies -- first the Taliban, in Afghanistan, and then Saddam Hussein, in Iraq -- have been waged in the name of combating terror. But the rhetoric to justify those wars has tapped into a deeply religious Manichaean reflex in the American psyche. It is epitomized by the phrase "axis of evil." Like President Ronald Reagan's condemnation of the "evil empire" of Communism before it, with its biblical invocation of sin, the term memorably used by President Bush is nothing if not a reframing of religious rhetoric in political guise, just as Osama bin Laden's language tried to justify his terrorist acts as those of a "devout" Muslim opposing the "Zionist-American crusade." Our crusades versus their jihads -- both face the logic but also the limits of symmetric dualisms. The current phase of this mode of metaphysical scapegoating recast as political realism derives from the first Persian Gulf war. Soon after the end of that conflict, in 1991, Samuel Huntington, a political scientist, with an assist from Bernard Lewis, a noted scholar of Near Eastern studies, coined the phrase "the clash of civilizations." It became the basis for a 1993 article and then a 1996 book with the same binary argument: There is a clash of civilizations; it pits the West against the rest; the rest are Confucian and Islamic civilizations, but Islam is the prime enemy. While Huntington denounces Islam as the unredeemable "other," in the same way that Protestant patriots during the Progressive era once denounced Roman Catholics and Jews, the truth is that militant Muslims no more characterize Islam than the religious right characterizes Christianity. For Asian immigrants, African-American dissenters, and Anglo-American cosmopolitans in the United States, the urgent need is to find a future marked by convergent pluralism rather than confrontational parochialisms. If there is to be a global future marked by social and religious inclusion, it will be under the hybrid rubric of Abrahamic civilization, a civilization shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. That future also must have secular and Asian accents that go beyond the monotheistic imaginary. While this way is more complex than the dyads of good versus evil and us versus them, it offers a future more promising and finally more secure than its alternative, broadcast under the flag of an American empire pursuing and punishing the elusive but mostly Muslim axis of evil. Bruce B. Lawrence is a professor of religion at Duke University. *** JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN God Talk and American Political Life American civic life is indecipherable if severed from its entanglement with American religion -- most important, Protestant Christianity of a Methodist variety. (This Methodist variety was various indeed, with dozens and dozens of spinoffs.) As Alexis de Tocqueville observed about the young nation in Democracy in America, the action of religion on politics, and politics on religion, was "something new" under the political sun, as the rich associational intermingling took place absent a struggle for ascendance. That reciprocal relationship continues in American civil society today. Everybody now recognizes the fact, but it presents difficulties for scholars. It is almost impossible to argue that one influences the other disproportionately. Religion in its dominant American forms of Protestantism has paid a price for its cultural centrality, of course. One charge against the Protestant mainline is that in the past 40 years it has "followed" the culture and its tendency to value individualism and play down a sense of community. Rather than offering a bracing alternative to rapacious individualism, Protestantism has fallen in line. One important task of religion is to challenge the political world and what it makes most important, to raise questions when politics overreach. You cannot do that very effectively if you are simply absorbed within the forms of politics and lose a robust "separateness." Here is one place where the rubber hits the road. The First Amendment of the Constitution's section on protecting the free exercise of religion has come increasingly to mean "free religious expression," something that refers to a subjective belief. What the framers had in mind may have been more robust -- not just freedom of individual conscience but a form of institutional autonomy, real libertas ecclesiae. It is very difficult for religion to serve as "salt and light to the world" (that, at least, is what Christians are called to do, which is of some cultural import since the United States remains overwhelmingly Christian) if religion has no independent, vigorous institutional site. Yet we remain suspicious -- or many do -- when "churches" act, especially if the church in question happens to be Roman Catholic. In that I see not only the continuing echoes of our historic anti-Catholicism but a real fear, even animus, against the notion of "church" or "institutional religion." We are happier with "spirituality," but, as one wag put it, "What does that mean? That I've watched many episodes of Touched by an Angel?" Let's circle back to Tocqueville. He had in mind not only the subjective freedoms of believing citizens but also the mutual interaction of religious institutions and associations. That is what appears to have withered. And it is through religious institutions and communal bodies that the "politics" of religion comes through. It isn't a politics that dictates a particular policy outcome in any simple sense but that instead presents to a highly subjectivist culture an alternative understanding of persons and the common good. That may be the most important "political" contribution of all. If there are changes in the relationship of religion to American society, they very likely lie in accommodationism rather than continuing and sustained challenge. Of course, America's elites don't mind if "religion," speaking institutionally, shares their enthusiasms. But as soon as "religion" trenches on their turf -- on the abortion issue, say, or the cloning and destruction of human embryos for research -- they voice cries of the illicit intrusion of religion into politics. As to new directions for research: Here the issue of religion in civil society has certainly been joined. But there are fewer scholars than there should be reminding both religious and political forces how fractious the engagement can andI would insist -- ought to be. American society has all sorts of ways of working this out. But one party to the deep moral questions that vex us should not be forced to operate under a cloud of suspicion that it speaks from, and to, a "sectarian" perspective that is unacceptable in American life. Jean Bethke Elshtain is a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago. From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 22 15:44:36 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:44:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Google Answers: homosexual statistics Message-ID: Google Answers: homosexual statistics http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=271269 Question Subject: homosexual statistics Category: [7]Sports and Recreation > Hobbies and Crafts Asked by: roots11-ga List Price: $2.00 Posted: 30 Oct 2003 15:22 PST Expires: 29 Nov 2003 15:22 PST Question ID: 271269 Can you give me some demographic informatio about homosexuals in America? That is, some homosexual customs, leisure preferences, and prefered travel destinations of the average homosexual? Answer Subject: Re: homosexual statistics Answered By: [8]knowledge_seeker-ga on 31 Oct 2003 06:30 PST Good Morning Roots11, As Missy points out, your question presents a dilemma. Depending on who is doing the counting, between 2 and 6% of the US population is gay. Since being gay is a genetic trait, not a chosen lifestyle, it crosses the boundaries of every demographic. Sex. Race. Income. Occupation. Language. Education. Age. Religion. [note: For purposes of my description here I will use "he" as a generic pronoun with the understanding that this all applies to gay women as well.] The "typical" homosexual is your brother, your boss, your coworker, the first-baseman on your softball team, your doctor, your child's first-grade teacher, your rabbi, your police chief, your beer buddy, your uncle, your favorite rock star, your congressman, the guy who mows your lawn, your investment advisor, your golf partner, your tennis coach, your favorite author, your waiter, your attorney, and/or your son. So, you are asking, if we look at these people as A SINGLE GROUP, what are their typical customs, leisure activities, vacation destinations? That's impossible to say. Whether gay or straight, a construction worker is going to spend his leisure time differently than a high-rolling Wall Street stock broker. A 20 year old gay college student is going to vacation in a different place than his 67 year old gay professor. A pair of lesbian school teachers with a child might prefer to tour Yellowstone, while a pair of successful gay male artists might prefer to tour the Louvre. The customs of a gay rabbi are going to be very different from the customs of a gay biker. None of these things are dictated by sexual preference. Now, all that said, we do know something about the demographics of SOME homosexuals in the US. One section of the 2000 US Census gathered information in the following way: First it asked about people living in the home with the primary resident (that is, the person filling out the census form). One choice was "unmarried partner." Then it asked for the sex of that person. From this one could count: Total households. -Unmarried-partner households. -Male householder and male partner. -Male householder and female partner -Female householder and female partner -Female householder and male partner So, what we get from this is demographic data on homosexuals who share a household with a partner. This does not however, take into account underage homosexuals, single homosexuals, couples not living together, or those who are homosexual but who live a "straight" lifestyle with an opposite sex partner. And, most importantly, it tells us nothing about gays who choose not to reveal their sexual preference on census forms. But still, it gives us some idea of the demographics. As it turns out, rather than wade through the census data, someone has done that work for us. The folks at Gay Demographics.org have presented all of the Census data as it relates to same sex couples and have broken it down into easily read specific demographic categories. I'll give you the links at the end, but now let's take a quick look at a sampling of those results. *Please remember that this data only applies to the census count of same-sex couples, not necessarily to all homosexuals. Also remember that to be meaningful, the data should be compared to the population at large. In a few cases I've presented the overall population for comparisons. The rest you can find on the US census site. ========= LOCATION ========= There are 601,209 same-sex couples living in the US and Puerto Rico. By State: 3 leading states by same-sex-couple population: CA, NY, TX 3 leading states by percentage of couples being same-sex: DC, CA, VT Urban vs Rural: A comparable proportion of same-sex couples live in rural areas. This population of same-sex couples is usually more female than male. Counties: 50% of all same-sex couples live in just 91 counties. Conversely, 50% of the total U.S. population lives in 153 counties. 21 counties (out of 3,140), reported no same-sex couples. ===== AGE ===== The average age for lesbians is 42.8 years; for gay men 44.5 years The average age for all females 36.5* years; for all males; 34.0 * *lower because children are included. ============== PARENTING ============= Percentage of same-sex couples with their own children in the household: 30% Percentage of all households in US with own children: 48.2% ======= RACE ======= 78.8% of respondents are white. 89% of same-sex couples have partners of the same race. Racial diversity is 4x more likely in same-sex couples as in the general population. All racial categories are represented. 79.1% of the US householder respondents are white. ======================= EDUCATION & OCCUPATION ======================= 24.7% of same-sex couples have a college degree. 23.2% are high school graduates. 15.29% of members of same-sex couples are unemployed or in school. Average household income: $76,460 for same-sex couples who live with nobody else. Average household income for total adult population: $41,994 Top 5 jobs (by percentage) held by members of same sex couples: First-Line Supervisors/Managers of Retail Sales Workers Driver/Sales Workers and Truck Drivers Retail Salespersons Secretaries and Administrative Assistants Elementary and Middle School Teachers 15% of members of same sex couples report military service, either currently or in the past. ==================== THE CENSUS DATA ==================== Everything I've given you above is available, either as raw data from the US census Bureau or filtered from GayDemographics.org. GAY DEMOGRAPHICS [9]http://www.gaydemographics.org/index.htm US CENSUS DATA* [10]http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DTGeoSearchByListServlet?ds_name=DEC_2 000_SF1_U&state=dt *For same-sex couple data, choose the geographic data type you want (eg: State) and click ADD, then NEXT. On the next page, choose table PCT014 [it's there, scroll way down] then ADD then SHOW RESULTS ============ In summary Roots11, if you are looking for something like the "top-10 gay vacation spots" in the world, you may find lists and rankings (or at least claims to membership), but these are only going to apply to a certain percentage of the gay population. What may be considered a hot-spot for young single gay men may be of no interest to a "married" lesbian couple with children. And both of those are represented in the gay population. I do hope this has been a help to you. It's been an interesting search and I was surprised to find as much information as I did. I put a lot of time and detail into your answer and have given you more than your $2 worth just to make sure that it's clear that the demographics and preferences of gays is largely the demographics and preferences of the general population. Thank you for your question! -K~ search terms: gay demographics US Census Comments [11]Log in to add a comment Subject: Re: homosexual statistics From: [12]missy-ga on 30 Oct 2003 18:32 PST Sexual preference doesn't play a role in any of the things you mention. There's no such thing as the "average homosexual", just the average person who may or may not be gay. Subject: Re: homosexual statistics From: [13]czh-ga on 31 Oct 2003 11:31 PST Hello roots11-ga, I agree with my colleagues about the importance of recognizing and respecting homosexuals but I was a little surprised at the strong reaction to your question. Since I've seen several articles in the business press about businesses eager to market to the gay and lesbian market, I thought that's what you were looking for. I did a quick search on and came up with lots of resources. Call me na?ve, but I wanted to share a different point of view. ~ czh ~ [14]http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=marketing+to+gays [15]http://www.gaymarketexpress.com/ What is the Gay Market? Gays and lesbians are sometimes elusive to quantify, but major advertisers have increasingly found that their efforts are well worth the investment to find them and for good reason. A recent study conducted by the Connecticut-based Greenfield Online, found that the average annual household income for gays and lesbians is $57,000. The New York-based Company, Spare Parts, Inc., which helps companies market to gays, estimates that the United States gay and lesbian population is between 15 million to 23 million. According to another study (Inter at ctive Week, August 30, 1999. Pg. 20.), the US gay community consists of over 19 million people with an estimated buying power of $800 billion. Worldwide, these figures are much larger. Subject: Re: homosexual statistics From: [16]journalist-ga on 31 Oct 2003 18:29 PST Greetings Roots11: The term "gay friendly" would be appropriate in the keywords for a business looking to not exclude gays and lesbians. A Google search provides the results for that phrase at [17]http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22gay+friendly% 22 - and a friend suggested these ideas: Travel firms such as Olivia Cruises and Rainbow Holidays cater to same sex travellers so you may wish to examine their sites for visual advertising ideas. [18]http://www.olivia.com [19]http://www.rainbowholidays.com SEARCH: "gay travel" (with quotation marks) There are also a number of gay and lesbian publiations where a business may advertise such as the Gay Lesbian Yellow Pages (GLYP) or the Pink Pages [20]http://www.pinkweb.com [21]http://www.glyp.com/glyp/ SEARCH: "gay lesbian yellow pages" I believe you may learn from the information above and I wish you a very successful business for all persons whether gay, lesbian or straight. :) Best regards, journalist-ga References 7. http://answers.google.com/answers/browse?catid=1803 8. http://answers.google.com/answers/ratings?user=5008740654341461883 9. http://www.gaydemographics.org/index.htm 10. http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DTGeoSearchByListServlet?ds_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U&state=dt 11. http://answers.google.com/answers/login?qe_destination=%2Fanswers%2Fthreadview%3Fid%3D271269 12. http://answers.google.com/answers/ratings?user=7788423641277799351 13. http://answers.google.com/answers/ratings?user=1196724675050717033 14. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=marketing+to+gays 15. http://www.gaymarketexpress.com/ 16. http://answers.google.com/answers/ratings?user=2484632702243976073 17. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22gay+friendly%22 18. http://www.olivia.com/ 19. http://www.rainbowholidays.com/ 20. http://www.pinkweb.com/ 21. http://www.glyp.com/glyp/ From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 22 15:46:24 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:46:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Jennifer L. Geddes: Evil Lost and Found Message-ID: Jennifer L. Geddes: Evil Lost and Found The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=678549&textreg=1&id=GedLost2-2 Delbanco, Andrew. The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Introduction The number of books on evil has been increasing rapidly, especially in recent years. Choosing which ones to highlight in this review was a challenging task, but I decided on two very different works, each exemplifying a distinct facet of the study of evil--in fact, the two books under consideration could hardly be more different: One suggests that we have lost the sense of evil; the other argues that an answer to the theological problems raised by evil can be found. One is a book of history, narrative, and cultural analysis, written from a secular, liberal perspective; the other a combination of analytic philosophy and Christian theology. One focuses on how a culture understands evil; the other on how individuals who have suffered evil might come to understand their experiences. At issue in one is the spiritual health of a culture; at issue in the other is the possibility of individual belief in God in the face of evil. And yet, despite these major differences, both books suggest that how we think about evil is fundamental to the ways we understand our selves, our communities, our societies, and our world. Evil Lost: The Death of Satan The work of this book is therefore to think historically about the shrinking range of phenomena to which accusatory words like "evil" and "sin" may still be applied in contemporary life, and to think about what it means to do without them. I have written it out of the belief that despite the shriveling of the old words and concepts, we cannot do without some conceptual means for thinking about the sorts of experiences that used to go under the name of evil. (9) In The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, Andrew Delbanco argues that "a gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it" (3). In fact, he argues, "the repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak" (3). The newspapers are full of accounts of atrocities happening across the globe. Television offers us up-close images of far-away wars, intimate shots of the victims of anonymous crimes, friendly interviews with serial murderers, and talk shows that are designed to display the worst sorts of hostilities that those who used to love one another have grown to have. Horror movies bring large audiences to theatres, and crime novels line bookstore shelves. We have a growing fascination with images of evil at the same time that we find it harder and harder to speak about evil. Our ability to think about evil, to confront it in such a way that we take it seriously, resist it, and work towards preventing it, is, Delbanco argues, extremely deficient. Citing a recent book that described mass murderers, such as Stalin and Hitler, as suffering from "streaks of disorder," Delbanco exclaims, "Why can't we call them evil?" (4). The Death of Satan, he tells us, is about "how this crisis of incompetence before evil came about and how it has made itself felt in the United States" (3). The Death of Satan traces the decline of the meaningfulness of the term "evil" in the moral discourse of the American public, or, in more metaphorical terms, it tells the story of Satan's death. This "national spiritual autobiography" presents a history of the changes in how Americans have understood evil, a history of American moral life from "The Age of Belief" to "Modern Times." In "The Age of Belief," Satan was a live and active figure. But, with the rise of faith in reason, belief gave way to skepticism, at least where Satan was concerned, such that "the devil was being reduced to something that educated men could not believe in. This was the beginning of the end of the devil as a meaningful symbol of evil" (64). This skepticism, however, did not extend to Americans' understanding of human nature: while belief in Satan's existence decreased, faith in the goodness and unlimited potential of human nature increased. Rising individualism transformed ambition and pride, once evils to be resisted, into the crowning virtues of the self-sufficient individual. The Civil War marked a turning point away from a complete loss of the economy of good and evil. The glaring evil of slavery brought the subject of evil to the forefront of moral discussions. Delbanco notes that it was Lincoln "who did most to retrieve and renew the dormant power of the symbols of good and evil that had been slipping out of public life" (131). Rather than demonizing the South, Lincoln suggested that the evil of slavery was something that Americans had to confront as a national sin: Lincoln's idea of evil was extremely demanding--as it had been since Paul and Augustine first refined it into a theological formulation. It required every prospective believer to come to terms with himself, because, as Lincoln knew and said, no American was uncontaminated by the racist history of the Republic. (134) But this conception of evil as sin, as something in which "I" or "we" take part, gave way to the view of evil as having to do with others. The trauma of the Civil War left many with the belief that "the world was run by chance" (143), not divine providence, and "in what amounted to a new kind of paganism, the concept of evil devolved into bad luck, and 'good luck' became the American benediction" (153). The notion of sin was lost along with belief in providence. American culture became one of panic and scapegoating. Evil was the other; and the other was evil, whether he was foreign, black, un-American, or "unfit." Delbanco argues that the connection of evil with the other is related to the horrors of the Salem witch trials, slavery, racism, the eugenics movement, the Holocaust, and McCarthyism. Modern times, Delbanco suggests, have been characterized by a loss of transcendence and providence, the increase in scapegoating and blame, and a rising culture of irony. While scapegoating is moral energy turned towards an evil purpose, Delbanco sees irony as evacuating all moral energy. Both extremes lead to an inability to grapple with the reality of evil. Delbanco is worried that American culture simply oscillates between these two extremes. Concerning the culture of irony, he asks: Can irony yield any sense of evil? Is the ironist capable of making discriminations of value? Or is he condemned to live in a continuous world of morally indistinguishable actions and events, in which all ideas are designated ideologies? In the face of some new Stalin or Hitler, is it possible to shake off the lethargy induced by irony and rise to the fight? History does not encourage an affirmative answer to these questions...Without reverence for something, there can be no proscriptions--and it should be clear enough to any observer of contemporary culture that we are short on both. Irony has proven to be a more potent solvent of our erstwhile beliefs than any contending belief...Its energy is negative. (210-211) In a culture of irony, saturated with images of evil, how can we resist evil? The preponderance of images of evil anesthetizes us to evil, and the culture of irony evacuates any sense of responsibility or moral urgency that such images might raise in us. If we no longer think that there is any foundation on which to judge something evil, how can we proscribe certain actions, much less fight against them? And how can we affirm the good, a vision of the future towards which to work, an understanding of good character towards which to strive, without an understanding of what sorts of things to leave out, to avoid, to fight against? While Delbanco's analysis of American public culture is accurate, it is important to note that most Americans do not live by irony, but rather maneuver their way through the world with a moral system informed by particular religious traditions. Delbanco tells us that he has "left these people out of this book--because the story [he has] tried to tell is the story of the advance of secular rationality in the United States, which has been relentless in the face of all resistance" (221). Delbanco's use of the word "we" is problematic. When he suggests that "whether we welcome or mourn this loss, it is the central and irreversible fact of modern history that we no longer inhabit a world of transcendence" (220), he forgets that many of the "we" (if it is really to refer to "Americans") do see themselves as inhabiting a world of transcendence. While secular liberals "acknowledge that no story about the intrinsic meaning of the world has universal validity" (221), they should also acknowledge that a large number of Americans disagree with them. This diversity of beliefs in the United States is particularly important to note, especially given Delbanco's identification of an American cultural dialectic in which we seem to move between, on the one hand, pouring out our moral energies against an evil other--a fundamentalist demonizing that seems to characterize both sides of contentious debates, such as those on abortion, in which each side sees the other as evil and uses extreme rhetoric to prove it--and, on the other hand, withdrawing into an ironic stance of non-involvement and smug self-absorption. As Delbanco himself notes, the division between those who believe in some sort of transcendence and those who are committed to secular rationalism is a potential source of great unrest in this country: Now, at the end of the twentieth century, we are, I believe, dividing between two sensibilities that correspond to belief and irony. The conflict between these two sensibilities has, I believe, more potential for rancor and ferocity than any of the preceding oppositions. (223) But Delbanco is hopeful that these two sides may work together in renewing a language of evil that might serve us in our efforts to prevent and resist it. He suggests that there "may be reason to hope for a cooperative intellectual venture between religion and science that may lead to a revival of serious moral thinking, in which the category of evil might once again have meaning" (228). Just what form this cooperative intellectual effort might take is unclear. And it is at this point that the book's limitations are made clear. Delbanco's book is a wonderfully written and perceptive diagnosis of a current cultural crisis in the face of evil, but its constructive offerings are slim. Delbanco has little to offer in the way of solutions. Strangely enough for a self-professed secular liberal, he suggests that we revisit the Judeo-Christian notion of sin and the Augustinian view of evil as privation--that is, evil as an absence, lack, distortion of the good. Delbanco admits that the idea that "sin is finally best understood as a failure of knowledge--a lack, an obtuseness, a poverty of imagination" (232) may seem a meager offering, may seem "pathetically inadequate, even offensive" (232), in the face of twentieth-century atrocities, but he thinks that such a conception of evil resists both the temptation to demonize the other and the temptation to withdraw from grappling with evil. When we recognize our own potential for evil, Delbanco argues, we are less likely to look for it in the face of others; and, conversely, when we fail to acknowledge our own potential for evil, we leave ourselves open to be overtaken by evil. He tells us that his driving motive in writing [this book] has been the conviction that if evil, with all the insidious complexity which Augustine attributed to it, escapes the reach of our imagination, it will have established dominion over us all. If the privative conception of evil continues to be lost between liberal irony on the one hand, and fundamentalist demonizing on the other, we shall have no way of confronting the most challenging experiences of our private and public lives. (234) It is unclear, however, just how the view of evil as privation, divorced from the religious traditions in which it makes sense, can give us the ability or reason to confront a new Stalin or Hitler. And what exactly Delbanco means here by the "reach of our imagination" is one of the challenges of the book. What would it mean for our imaginations to have "grasped" evil? And yet, Delbanco himself is proof that we--even "we secular liberals"--have not altogether lost the sense of evil. His book has a compelling tone of moral urgency to it. He is worried about the world his children will inherit and believes that how we think about evil is constitutive of that world. And precisely because of its tone, the book suggests that that the situation is, perhaps, not as dire as he makes out. Found: Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God My central thesis in this book is that horrendous evils require defeat by nothing less than the goodness of God. My strategy for showing how this can be done is to identify the ways that created participation in horrors can be integrated into the participants' relation to God, where God is understood to be the incommensurate Good, and the relation to God is one that is overall incommensurately good for the participant. (155) While Delbanco focuses on a general cultural trend--our waning resources for responding to evil--Marilyn McCord Adams, in Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, explores what a particular religious tradition has to offer in response to the question: How can God be good given that there is so much evil in the world? And while Delbanco suggests that we need a cultural language of evil, one that can be used by Americans in confronting the worst sorts of things that people suffer and do to one another, Adams attempts to provide a language of evil through recourse to the resources of the Christian faith. At stake in Adams' book is not the ability to chart a moral landscape or to judge the health of a society, but rather the possibility of belief in the goodness of God in the face of evil. Adams provides the reader with helpful summaries of the major arguments that have been presented over the last several decades on the problem of evil, pointing out the connections and disagreements among them and between them and her own. For this reason alone, the book will be very useful to anyone interested in philosophical discussions of the problem of evil. Her own argument is rich in detail and multi-stranded; it draws deeply on the resources offered by numerous areas of study, including philosophy, theology, anthropology, and psychology. This is due in part to her belief that it is not possible to find one morally sufficient reason as to why God permits evil; only partial reasons can be found, but together these partial reasons give sufficient evidence to show that belief in the goodness of God is not irrational. Adams describes herself as writing in the two traditions of the philosophy of religion and Christian philosophy, and her book displays the virtues and limitations of each. The book's attention to detail and conceptual clarity, characteristic of analytic philosophy, make it challenging and provocative, though its prose style can be, at times, tedious. It provides Christians with both rich resources for responding to the problem of evil and a provocative theology of the afterlife; however, the argument is based on assumptions that those who are not Christians do not believe, limiting the usefulness such an argument has for those outside the Christian faith. Adams suggests that there are three major problems with current philosophical discussions of evil, all having to do with their high level of abstraction. First, these discussions consider evil in general--the mere fact of evil--rather than particular sorts of evil, especially the worst sorts of evil. Adams suggests that "our philosophical propensity for generic solutions--our search for a single explanation that would cover all evils at once--has permitted us to ignore the worst sorts of evil in particular" (3). The second problem, a corollary to the first, is that these discussions fail to confront the problem of evil in individuals' lives and instead deal with evil as a global concern. Furthermore, they seek either to disprove or prove the existence of a generic god, rather than a particular god believed in by followers of a particular religious tradition. Referring to J. L. Mackie, who worked out some of the strongest arguments against belief in God, Adams notes that it would be a hollow victory for the believer to stop with showing that the God that Mackie doesn't believe in (essentially omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good in Mackie's sense) could coexist with evils, if that God is not the one the believer confesses. (13) A fourth problem Adams finds in most philosophical discussions of evil is their failure adequately to take into account just how vast the difference is between Divine and human agency, and thereby, to understand properly the relationship between humans and God and between evils and the goodness of God. In contrast to these abstractions in relation to the kind and scope of evil and the nature of God, and in contrast to the misconstrual of Divine agency, Adams proposes to show how one might believe in the goodness of the Christian God given the "horrendous evils" that happen to individuals. By "horrendous evils" Adams means evils the participation in which (that is, the doing and the suffering) constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant's life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to him/her on the whole. The class of paradigm horrors includes both individual and massive collective suffering...examples include the rape of a woman and axing off of her arms, psycho-physical torture whose ultimate goal is the disintegration of personality, betrayal of one's deepest loyalties, child abuse of the sort described by Ivan Karamazov, child pornography, parental incest, slow death by starvation, the explosion of nuclear bombs over populated areas. (26) Adams argues that the goodness of God must be something that the very individuals who suffer these horrendous evils can affirm, something that they themselves experience. She does not argue that in the end the good of eternity will outweigh all the evils that have occurred in the world--a sort of happy mathematics in which the positive outweighs the negative. Global-good-over-global-evil arguments are open to the charge that they justify the suffering of some people for the benefit of others and justify the sacrifice of some people for the sake of others. Instead, Adams argues that after death, or "post-mortem," to use Adams' phrase, each individual, including the very individuals on whom the worst evils have been inflicted, will come to see his or her suffering "defeated" by the goodness of God. Exactly what Adams means when she suggests that evil will be "defeated" is hard to figure out. She means at least that God will restore and heal the broken person and that the individual will come to see a positive aspect to his or her suffering. God renarrates an individual's life story such that he or she can see the evil suffered as part of a good whole. Adams suggests that it is straightforward to credit God with [the] superlative imagination needed to make sense of horrors that stump us, and to think of the meaning-making God as also the Teacher Who coaches us to recognize and appropriate objective meanings already (Divinely) given, Who heals and helps us to make new meanings ourselves. (82) Adams proposes that we think of the relationship of God to humans as that like a mother to her infant: the difference in agency is just as vast, and the abilities of the individual to comprehend his own actions or his environment, when considered in relation to God's, are just as limited as a baby's are in relation to its mother. The goodness of God is so good, so beyond our possibility to quantify goodness, that it can outweigh and "defeat" evil. Adams' argument is extremely complex and nuanced--this short review cannot begin even to chart an outline of it, but can only highlight its main thrust--but there is one element of it that is glaringly troublesome: Adams erases the difference between perpetrators and victims of evil. According to Adams, both the child who was raped and the adult who raped her come to see a positive aspect to their participation in evil, both experience the goodness of God in such a way as to "defeat" their participation in evil, and both see their participation in evil as part of the good unity of their lives. Here the word "participation" serves a sinister purpose, in that it erases and ignores the difference between inflicting evil and suffering evil. Adams tells us that "the morally innocent participate in horrors both as victims and as perpetrators" (125). The problem with this statement is that unless the term "morally innocent" is a meaningless phrase (in which case it should not be used at all), it cannot be ascribed to perpetrators of horrors. Adams' mother-infant analogy reflects her sense that the evils that seem so horrifying to us here will post-mortem come to be seen, in the light of God's great goodness, as a child's mistake. A god who rewrites the history of an individual's life such that his active torture of a child is understood to be the foolish mistake of a vulnerable, immature human, is a god who, at least according to this reader, does not care about justice. Though I think it falters on its absorption of the demands of justice into a therapeutic logic of post-mortem healing, Adams' argument is an important contribution to recent philosophical and theological discussions on the problem of evil. Her suggestions that specific evils (and the worst kinds of evils) be considered, that the value of each individual life not be overlooked, that the god under consideration be one that is not the construction of philosophy but one in which individuals actually believe, that anthropomorphizing tendencies be resisted when discussing at least the Christian God--all of these are welcome corrections to discussions of generic evils and a generic god. Conclusion Though they have written extremely different books, Adams and Delbanco both grapple with the grip that evil has over our lives--whether it causes us to question our belief in God or leads us to oscillate between finding scapegoats, on the one hand, and ignoring the suffering and injustices around us, on the other. Both suggest that resisting evil involves careful and sustained thought, and both are themselves role models in such an endeavor. Evil is not something that we will "figure out," but it is certainly something that we must be continually in the process of preventing, confronting, and resisting. Whether one agrees with Delbanco's cultural diagnosis or embraces Adams' answer to the problem of evil, it is hard not to think that we are better off for the ways that their attempts to think about evil encourage and challenge us to take evil seriously. From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 22 15:47:59 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:47:59 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Jennifer L. Geddes: On Evil, Pain, and Beauty: A Conversation with Elaine Scarry Message-ID: Jennifer L. Geddes: On Evil, Pain, and Beauty: A Conversation with Elaine Scarry The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=705120&textreg=1&id=GedScar2-2 Elaine Scarry is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her highly acclaimed book, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World--described as an extraordinary, brilliant, and necessary book--is arguably the most important work on the experience of pain and torture. Her most recent books are On Beauty and Being Just and Dreaming by the Book. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World focuses both on the infliction of pain and on creativity. It's a jarring combination, and yet, you see a connection between them. You argue that the infliction of pain reverses the process of creation, suggesting that it undoes or deconstructs the victim's world and his or her ability to make a world. Could you say more about this? When I talk about pain and creation, I really do mean in the most literal way possible that they are opposites and opposites that are, as you say, jarring in their relationship. When I started writing the book, I actually had begun by thinking that if I wanted to write about pain, I should not begin to talk about creation. As a student and young teacher of literature, I knew that often in literary realms we refer to the fact that out of suffering comes creation, and I had originally felt resistance to that idea just because the relentless nature of cancer pain, or burn pain, or pain inflicted in political contexts, never has any room in it for creation and, therefore, to imagine that great acts of creativity could come about seemed to excuse and apologize for the existence of suffering in the world. So my original intention was to write only about pain and not to stray into creation. And, then, as I began to work on the question of torture--and I can almost remember the moment in which this happened, as I sat there reading piles and piles of Amnesty International materials--I suddenly saw that the structure of cruelty that I was observing was actually a kind of standing of creation on its head. Not only were suffering and creation not in league with one another; they were radical opposites. The work of pain is to deconstruct or unmake objects of consciousness, as we can see if suddenly you accidentally slam a hammer on your hand and your mind goes blank or you see stars. You can literally see the unmaking of the objects of consciousness in front of the mind's eye. So too with language. If one is suddenly put in pain for a moment or an hour or a day or, in a worse situation, several days or even longer, you can watch language deteriorate. One's ability to say sentences, and then even one's ability to say words, disappears. In the initial moment of pain, someone might say an expletive, and then a cry; these are half-way points in the disintegration of language until, finally, one just surrenders and is quiet. That is the rude physical fact of pain. In the cultural context I was looking at, in documents from the 70s, there was a literal acting out of the unmaking of the objects of consciousness and the unmaking of the objectifying power of language. For example, in torture not only did the torturer inflict pain, but there was actually a kind of miming of the unmaking of the world by enlisting all the objects of the world into the act. Even if the torturer was using a mechanism such as, let's say, a way of inflicting electrical discharge into the person, he would also refer to chairs and tables and windowsills and baskets and blankets and telephones and all kinds of cultural artifacts, and in that way made the body of the prisoner somehow a kind of agent for not only experiencing its own pain, but for witnessing the dissolution of the made world. Sometimes people say to me that bodily experiences are always language-destroying, that pain is language-destroying, but so is pleasure. I think that that's not correct. There are places where we can see that pleasure can interfere with language. Lovers, for example, in the moment of making love may begin to speak baby talk. But, lovers are also able to call on the greatest powers of language-building. They write hymns to one another and write poems and romances, and so we have a huge linguistic celebration of love. So, too, the pleasure of eating, which is a very physical act, is very compatible with conversation, with dinner parties, and that's been true from Plato's symposium forward, or actually much earlier, when the assemblies of people in Homer are sitting around feasting and talking. Physical pain is not just language-destroying, it also destroys the objects of consciousness, and conversely, pleasure is world-building, or, to put it the other way, world-building is pleasurable. I really do see them as opposed. How are good and evil related to creation and injury? The word "evil" isn't one that I spontaneously think of when I'm thinking about this, and yet, it certainly has many features in common with what I'm talking about when I describe cruelty or injustice. One of the virtues of using the vocabulary of good and evil is that it does register an oppositional ground--that is, it does state the fact that there are two alternatives, which is something I very much believe. My book is divided into Part I on unmaking and Part II on making, so that I place injury or the willful infliction of injury in opposition to creation. In our own intellectual time, I think we've been very discouraged from ever wanting to say: "Look, there are two distinguishable things." Instead, we've been asked again and again to say "Everything is just a version of its opposite; and it may seem that these things are different, but really they're just the same in the end." And I don't think that's true. Injustice or (using the word you introduced) "evil" not only likes to ape creation and turn it on its head, but also very much profits from our getting confused about whether what we're looking at is creation or cruelty. Whereas I think that genuine acts of making and creation, which are normally on the side of diminishing pain, have to, among other things, continually keep sorting out and de-coupling creation from its appropriative and opposite counterpart of cruelty. One definition of evil might be "using the language-destroying power of pain to unmake someone's world intentionally." Pain can be caused by unintentional actions, but the intentional use of that attribute of pain to unmake someone's world could be a definition of evil. What do you think about that? I think that that's right. The pain that has no human agent, such as certain forms of cancer pain or burn pain, are every bit as horrible for the person who suffers them, and yet, we can at least work to heal that pain, and no one's confused about whether it's a good or not. The idea that actually willfully inflicting those kinds and levels of pain--if there is such a thing as evil, then that is what it is. If I hesitate at all about the word "evil"--let me insert a parenthesis in here as to why I hesitate--in some ways "evil" is a very resonant term, and I'm sure that for some people it conveys a kind of absolute quality that explains why the cruel acts that it holds within it have to be absolutely prohibited. For me, for some reason, the word "evil" doesn't work in my intuitive, everyday world, to carry with it that absolute prohibition in the way that "injustice," or a more neutral-sounding word like "cruelty," does. It may be because "evil" sounds theological and, therefore, may have a slight feeling of excusing the human actors involved, as though it was a force beyond them, that they couldn't help participating in. But, I'm just saying that as a parenthesis, because I think, for the most part, what you mean by "evil" and what I mean by "injustice" or "willful infliction of cruelty" or "willful infliction of injury" are very close to one another. How does the idea of injury fit into your understanding of the relationship between evil and suffering? Whereas there are a lot of things in the world that are morally ambiguous, the willful infliction of injury is not ambiguous, and normally one can take that as a kind of center of gravity for understanding what's to be aspired to and what's to be avoided. And so I think that the language of evil absolutely should have the infliction of injury associated with it, if we use it at all. It has the benefit of asserting that there is a double ground. It's not that everything blends into, or smudges into, each other and that things that are good can't be differentiated from things that are evil. Some people claim that suffering is the result of evil. Others suggest that suffering is the evil against which we should fight. How do you see the relationship between evil and suffering? I certainly think that suffering that is not willfully inflicted is as hateful--as horrible and hateful and to be dreaded--as suffering that is willfully inflicted. I think, though, that there is a certain advantage in holding out the word "evil" to describe acts of agency, that is, acts that are intentional. If what the word "evil" does is to mark out something that we plan to work together to eliminate or avoid, then that's a virtue of the language. That is, it designates something against which we will stand. Your work is focused on pain as injury, with torture and war being the two primary situations of pain that you discuss. What do you think of those instances in which pain is not the infliction of injury, for example, the pain associated with medical operations in which the goal is the alleviation of an illness or a wound that has caused pain, or childbirth, or extreme physical exertion? How does the intention of the inflictor of pain relate to whether we view this infliction as injury or as evil? I think that at the very heart of pain is the felt experience of aversiveness. It is something that is immediately palpable as something we don't want or one doesn't want. Here again, is something that people sometimes get very confused about. They'll say: "Well, pain is neutral. It can either be positive or negative." No, that's not correct. Pain is negative. It's the felt experience of aversiveness. It's something that in the most vivid way possible one doesn't want and doesn't want it with all one's being; and therefore, it really is a kind of acting against one's will--both because one feels the helplessness of one's own will in getting rid of it and because, even before one's attempt to get rid of it, the mere fact of its existence seems to call into question the power of one's own volition, or the power of one's own will. So, to go on to your question: what about those situations in which there is some voluntary control on the individual's part? I think those situations are very different. If I will myself into a situation of pain such as a medical therapy, and I agree to go to a doctor and let her do something to me that hurts, then it's already very different. And it's not just different as an interpretative act, but, rather, to say that more clearly, the act of interpretation is so deeply grounded in the felt experience itself that if I am actually seeking it, it already has a kind of power to transform the pain. That is, it is no longer pain, since pain is centrally the felt experience of aversiveness. So it may have unpleasant sentient characteristics associated with it, but it doesn't fundamentally insult my whole being the way physical pain which is unwanted does. If you watch any child go into a medical office and watch his or her face as the needle or the scalpel approaches, it's a reminder that being able to willingly take on pain, as we do when we go to the physician, is a learned experience. It is deeply counter-intuitive. Isn't it the case that the pain is still unwanted, that there's still an aversiveness to pain, but that there's a greater good that makes the individual willing to bear it, in which case it's still physical pain and still has aversiveness at its core? I think that's right. It's certainly the case that one undergoes terrible pain by agreeing, say, to chemotherapy. It's just unquestionable. And it's certainly the case that childbirth involves extremely high levels of pain. But, in both of those cases, as you said, there's a good outcome, very great outcome, and also there's some recognition that the amount of time involved is limited, which it isn't if it's certain other forms of pain. The kind of repudiation that would be involved in unwanted pain is not the same. Now, here's another crucial element in all these situations: The person who's experiencing the pain is also the person who gets the benefits of the greater good. It's the person who's chosen the medical therapy who will derive the benefits, if there are benefits to be derived, from the medical therapy. And it's the person undergoing childbirth who will have this wonderful new creature in the world with her soon. The problem with these instances being cited is that they then get used by people to say that sometimes pain leads to a greater good, where it's one person who's being put in pain and somebody else who's getting to determine what the greater good is. And, of course, this is very clearly true in regimes that torture. I'm sure they're telling themselves that they don't really want to inflict pain, but for the good of the regime, they have to do it. What is absolutely crucial is that the location of sentience for the pain and for the assessment of the pleasure or what the good is to be derived have to be in the same location. And if they're not, then the thing is a very great falsification. Torture is one of the most extreme examples of the situation in which the suffering of one person is used for the supposed good of another: the pain of the victim of torture is directly inverse to the good for which the torturer claims he is doing this torturing. Is that why you see torture as "close to an absolute immorality"? I think you're exactly right that one person's pain is being appropriated and its attributes are being objectified and falsely conferred on someone else or something else. And, therefore, it does represent an absolute of immorality. That's my judgment, but it's also a widely shared judgment. It's why international prohibitions on torture are stated in unqualified form, and it's why torture has extra-territorial jurisdiction in the United States where, unlike any other political crime, it doesn't have to have happened on our soil or even to involve a U. S. citizen for it to be tried in the country. Those are, legally, very unusual circumstances. But it is just for the reason you point to: there is a complete lack of consent in the situation so that the location of the pain and the location of the asserted good to be derived are wholly severed from one another. The example of torture shows this in its global features and also in the minute workings of it. Very literally you can watch in slow motion this transfer across the two locations, so that, for example, certain features of pain, like its totalizing power, are transferred over to the regime; in this mime that's going on in the prison room, it seems to be the regime that's total. Well, the regime isn't total at all. It's usually because the regime's in a lot of trouble and doesn't have ordinary forms of popular verification and authorization that it's resorting to torture, and, yet, for the duration of the act of torture, it seems as though the regime is total and totalizing because the felt experience of pain is total and totalizing. But it does seem to me an absolute standard. Once in a while, you'll hear somebody try to make an argument like: "Let's imagine a situation where we would all agree to torture. Imagine someone has a key secret to some kind of terrible weapon, like a nuclear bomb, and only by torturing him or her do you find out where it is." Leaving aside the fact that it's been demonstrated over and over again that torture leads to a mountain of false information, not to true information--even if we can allow that it leads to true information, it doesn't change the fact that there's no reason to want to change the fact that torturing the person is wrong. It's just that in that situation one would be willing to accept carrying out a very wrong act in order to do something else. But to say that as though what you really want is to absolve somebody--I mean, why would anyone in that situation even want to absolve themselves in wrongdoing? Presumably they're going to do something for humanity. They are not going to ask to be absolved from that. There's no reason to try to say that torture is a good thing--even if, for example, it does save the world from this nuclear bomb. It's still a very bad, destructive thing to torture someone, but you might say it was a necessary evil for that particular situation. I think that's exactly right. Let's talk about beauty and evil, which is a strange combination, but you went from writing a book about pain and to writing a book about beauty and justice. How do you understand the relation between injury and beauty? I think the whole sequence of questions you've been asking me underscores the bridge, the structure, that connects the earlier work I did on pain and the more recent work on beauty. It's in part because The Body in Pain is so much about the opposition between pain, on the one hand, and creation, on the other, so that creation, which is very bound up with beauty, really does stand in opposition to pain. Some people who have read the book, On Beauty and Being Just, even when they've been incredibly generous to the book, have said: "Well, she never talks about ugliness." But, beauty, like anything else, can have many different opposites. And the thing that, for me, is the opposite of beauty is injury. There is a straightforward continuity between the two works. Beauty makes us want to diminish injury in the world. When I say that beauty makes us feel adverse to injury, what I'm trying to say is that one never wants to cease being opposed to injury. The felt experience of standing in the presence of beauty is life-affirming; it both makes us salute the aliveness (or if it's an artwork, the kind of life-likeness) of the thing before which we stand, and ignites or vivifies our awareness of our own aliveness, making the pleasurable facts of sentience more emphatic. It's always the work of creation to diminish pain, but not to diminish sentience. It's the work of creation to amplify the pleasurable forms of sensation, such as seeing. Creation helps us see farther, or hear better, or with more acuity, or to touch better, but it's only the adversity of sentience, of physical pain and injury, that creation opposes. Beautiful things incite in us the desire to do one of two things: to protect and take care of beautiful things that are already existing in the world, to engage in acts of stewardship, and to perform new acts of creation. When you're in the presence of something beautiful, it often leads you to want to bring yet more beauty into the world. So you see a beautiful tree, and now you want to take a photograph of the tree, or make a drawing of the tree. The tree is already beautiful and yet, now it's going to be supplemented with one more beautiful thing, this sketch or this photograph. And the outcome may be incredibly great, as is the case if you're Leonardo doing this sketch, or it may be something as modest as just the fact of staring. When one stares at a beautiful building or a beautiful flower or stares acoustically at a beautiful piece of music by playing it again and again and again, what one is doing is perpetuating its existence in the world, that is, perpetuating, giving it more standing, giving it more ground to stand on. And, therefore, that act, though it seems very ordinary--the act of staring either with your ears or your eyes or your hands or whatever--is very closely bound up to the act of creating, since what it tries to do is bring about more of this thing that already is. I was thinking about your descriptions of pain as the shrinking of the world to just the body or the part of the body that is in pain, and of seeing beauty or experiencing beauty as a sort of duplication or reproduction--there's a certain fecundity to it that is a multiplier of sensations, a desire to reproduce the beautiful object or to share it or to insure its existence along with one's own. I think that that's true: beauty really is distributive in nature; pain and injury do throw you back on yourself. One thinks of that great definition of aging by Stravinsky as the ever-shrinking perimeter of pleasure, where there's only the felt fact of aversiveness. And yet, beauty wholly carries one out of oneself, as in the descriptions given by Simon Weil and by Iris Murdock as a kind of de-centering, in which your own preoccupations about yourself fall away. You're actually in the very unusual position of being willing to be secondary to or adjacent to or lateral to the figure, and yet being at the same time in a great state of pleasure. There are lots of things in the world that can make us feel secondary or tertiary or lateral, and there are lots of things in the world that can make us feel acute pleasure, but usually they don't happen simultaneously, and in beauty, they really do. But I hadn't quite seen it so clearly in the way that you've just made me see it, as really clearly the opposite of the soul-destroying throwing back on the adversity of the body that can happen in the brute forms of extreme and sustained physical pain. Do visit these References: 2. http://religionanddemocracy.lib.virginia.edu/hh/index.html 3. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/ From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 22 15:49:29 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:49:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] (no subject) Message-ID: Kenneth J. Gergen: The Self: Death by Technology The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=730656&textreg=1&id=GerSelf1-1 Kenneth Gergen asks whether in the midst of a techno-cultural revolution the traditional conceptions of self and community continue to secure a morally viable society. Gergen examines the erosion of both individualism and communalism (and their associated institutions) by the accumulating "technologies of sociation," the host of relatively low-cost technologies that dramatically expand and intensify social connection. He considers the effects of these technologies on the experience of a private self and argues that cumulatively they undermine the presumption of the individual as the locus of moral agency. Kenneth J. Gergen is Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College. A prolific author, his most recent books include The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life and Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Construction. Drawing from early Greek, Judaic, and Christian traditions, and particularly from the Enlightenment, we have typically viewed the single individual as the atom of the moral society. Whether we speak in terms of psyche, soul, agency, rational deliberation, or conscious choice, we generally hold that moral action is derived from particular conditions of the individual mind. Thus, philosophers seek to establish essential criteria for moral decision making, religious institutions are concerned with states of individual conscience, courts of law inquire into the individual's capacity to know right from wrong, and parents are concerned with the moral education of their young. The general presumption is that the virtuous mind propels meritorious conduct, and that with sufficient numbers of individuals performing worthy acts, we achieve the good society. Yet, as Walter Ong's exploration of oral as opposed to literate or print societies suggests, our conception of individual minds is vitally dependent on the technological ethos.[3]^1 The shift from an oral to a print culture, Ong proposes, significantly alters the common forms of thought. Thus, for example, in oral societies people are more likely to depend on recall, concrete as opposed to abstract categories, and redundancy as opposed to precision. Yet, there is an important sense in which this fascinating thesis is insufficiently realized. While Ong wishes to locate forms of mental life within a cultural context, he has no access into mental conditions themselves. That is, the analysis may be viewed as a treatise not on mental conditions but on cultural constructions of the mind. It is not thought in itself that changed but our way of defining what it is to think.[4]^2 To extend the implications of Ong's analysis, we may ask whether the conception of the mind as a critical focus of study--something we must know about--was not solidified by the expansion of printed media. In an oral society, where the determination of the real and the good grows from face-to-face negotiation, there is little reason to launch inquiry into the speaker's private meaning. Through words, facial expressions, gestures, physical context, and the constant adjustments to audience expression, meanings are made transparent. However, when print allows words to spring from the face-to-face relationship--when the discourse is insinuated into myriad contexts separated in time and space from its origins--then the hermeneutic problem becomes focal. To wonder and speculate about "the mind behind the words" is to create the reality of this mind. To grant this mental condition the status of originary source of action is to solidify its importance. Both hermeneutic study and psychological science have since assured the reality of a meaning/full mind with moral intent. Given the potential dependency of conceptions of self on technological conditions, let us consider our contemporary ethos. In particular, what is to be said about the increasing insinuation of the technologies of sociation into our lives and its effects on our beliefs in individual minds? In my view the transformation of the technological ethos slowly undermines the intelligibility of the individual self as an originary source of moral action. The reasons are many and cumulative; I limit discussion here to several concatenating tendencies.[5]^3 Polyvocality. The dramatic expansion of the range of information to which we are exposed, the range of persons with whom we have significant interchange, and the range of opinions available within multiple media sites make us privy to multiple realities. Or, more simply, the comfort of parochial univocality is disturbed. Having become privy to multiple realities, we do not know where to limit ourselves. From the spheres of national politics and economics to local concerns with education, environment, or mental health, we are confronted with a plethora of conflicting information and opinion. And so it is with matters of moral consequence. Whether it is a matter of Supreme Court nominees, abortion policies, or affirmative action, for example, one is deluged with conflicting moral standpoints. To the extent that these standpoints are intelligible, they enter the compendium of resources available for the individual's own deliberations. In a Bakhtinian vein, the individual approaches a state of radical polyvocality. If one does acquire an increasingly diverse vocabulary of deliberation, how is a satisfactory decision to be reached? The inward examination of consciousness yields not coherence but cacophony; there is not a "still small voice of conscience" but a chorus of competing contenders. It is one's moral duty to pay taxes, for example, but also to provide for one's dependents, to keep for oneself the rewards of one's labor, and to withhold monies from unjust governmental policies; it is one's moral duty to give aid to starving Africans, but also to help the poor of one's own country, and to avoid meddling in the politics of otherwise sovereign nations. Where in the mix of myriad moralities is the signal of certitude? If immersion in a panoply of intelligibilities leaves one's moral resources in a state of complex fragmentation, then to what degree are these resources guiding or directing? Or more cogently for the present analysis, if "inward looking" becomes increasingly less useful for matters of moral action, does the concern with "my state of mind" not lose its urgency? The more compelling option for the individual is to turn outward to his or her social context--to detect the ambient opinion, to negotiate, compromise, and improvise. And in this move from the private interior to the social sphere, the presumption of a private self as a source of moral direction is subverted. As negotiating the complexities of multiplicity becomes normalized, the conception of the mind as a moral touchstone grows stale. Plasticity. As the technologies of sociation increase our immersion in information and evaluation, they also expand the scope and complexity of our activities. We engage in a greater range of relationships distributed over numerous and variegated sites, from the face-to-face encounters in the neighborhood and workplace, to professional and recreational relationships that often span continents. Further, because of the rapid movement of information and opinion, the half life of various products and policies is shortened, and the opportunities for novel departures expanded. The composition of the workplace is thus in continuous flux. The working person shifts jobs more frequently, often with an accompanying move to another location. In the early 1990s one out of three American workers had been with his or her employer for less than a year, and almost two out of three for less than five years. As a result of these developments, the individual is challenged with an increasingly variegated array of behavioral demands. With each new performance site, new patterns of action may be required; dispositions, appetites, personas--all may be acquired and abandoned and reappropriated as conditions invite or demand. With movements through time and space, oppositional accents may often be fashioned: firm here and soft there, commanding and then obedient, sophisticated and then crude, righteous and immoral, conventional and rebellious. For many people such chameleon-like shifts are now unremarkable; they constitute the normal hurly burly of daily life. At times the challenges may be enjoyed, even sought. It was only four decades ago that David Riesman's celebrated book, The Lonely Crowd, championed the virtues of the inner-directed man and condemned the other-directed individual for lack of character--a man without a gyroscopic center of being.[6]^4 In the new techno-based ethos there is little need for the inner-directed, one-style-for-all individual. Such a person is narrow, parochial, inflexible. In the fast pace of the technological society, concern with the inner life is a luxury--if not a waste of time. We now celebrate protean being. In either case, the interior self recedes in significance.[7]^5 Repetition. Let us consider a more subtle mode of self-erosion, owing in this instance to the increasing inundation of images, stories, and information. Consider here those confirmatory moments of individual authorship, moments in which the sense of authentic action becomes palpably transparent. Given the Western tradition of individualism, these are typically moments in which we apprehend our actions as unique, in which we are not merely duplicating models, obeying orders, or following conventions. Rather, in the innovative act we locate a guarantee of self as originary source, a creative agent, an author of one's own morality. Yet, in a world in which the technologies facilitate an enormous sophistication in "how it goes," such moments become increasingly rare. How is it, for example, that a young couple, who for 20 years have been inundated by romance narratives--on television and radio, in film, in magazines and books--can utter a sweet word of endearment without a haunting sense of clich?? Or in Umberto Eco's terms, how can a man who loves a cultivated woman say to her, "`I love you madly,'" when "he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland"?[8]^6 In what sense can one stand out from the crowd in a singular display of moral fortitude, and not hear the voices of John Wayne, Gary Cooper, or Harrison Ford just over one's shoulder? Should one attempt to secure confirmation of agency from a public action--political remonstrance, religious expression, musical performance, and the like--the problems of authenticity are even more acute. First, the existing technologies do not allow us to escape the past. Rather, images of the past are stored, resurrected, and recreated as never before. In this sense, the leap from oral to print memory was only the beginning of a dramatic technological infusion of cultural memory. Thus, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid observations of how any notable action is historically prepared. To perform publicly is to incite incessant commentaries about how one is, for example, "just like the 60s," "has his roots in Billy Sunday revivalism," or "draws his inspiration from Jimmy Hendrix." Should the public demonstration gain media interest, there is also a slow conversion from the authentic to the instrumental. That is, what may have once seemed spontaneous is now converted to a performance "for the media" and its public. Indulgence in political passion, for example, becomes muted by the attentions one must give to wardrobe, voice projection, and facial expression. One cannot simply "play the music," but must be concerned with hair styling, posture, and girth. In a world in which the local is rapidly transported to the global, the half-life of moral authenticity rapidly diminishes. Transience. To the extent that one is surrounded by a cast of others who respond to one in a similar way, a sense of a unified self may result. One may come to understand, for example, that he is the first son of an esteemed high school teacher and a devoted mother, a star of the baseball team, and a devout Catholic. This sense of perdurable character also furnishes a standard against which the morality of one's acts can be judged. One can know that "this just isn't me," that "If I did that I would feel insufferable guilt." However, with the accumulating effects of the technologies of sociation, one now becomes transient, a nomad or a "homeless mind."[9]^7 The continuous reminders of one's identity--of who one is and always has been--no longer prevail. The internal standard grows pallid, and in the end, one must imagine that it counts for little in the generation of moral action. There is a more subtle effect of such techno-induced transience. It is not only a coherent community that lends itself to the sense of personal depth. It is also the availability of others who provide the time and attention necessary for a sense of an unfolding interior to emerge. The process of psychoanalysis is illustrative. As the analyst listens with hovering interest to the words of the analysand, and these words prompt questions of deeper meaning, there is created for the analysand the sense of palpable interiority, the reality of a realm beyond the superficially given, or in effect, a sense of individual depth. The process requires time and attention. And so it is in daily life; one acquires the sense of depth primarily when there is ample time for exploration, time for moving beyond instrumental calculations to matters of "deeper desire," forgotten fantasies, to "what really counts." Yet, it is precisely this kind of "time off the merry-go-round" that is increasingly difficult to locate. In the techno-dominated world, one must keep moving, the network is vast, commitments are many, expectations are endless, opportunities abound, and time is a scarce commodity. Each of these tendencies--toward polyvocality, plasticity, repetition, and transience--function so as to undermine the longstanding presumption of a palpable self, of personal consciousness as an agentive source, or of interior character as a touchstone of the moral life.[10]^8 Yet, while lamentable in certain respects, the waning intelligibility of moral selves is much welcomed in other quarters. Both intellectually and ideologically the concept of the self as moral atom is flawed. On the conceptual level, it is not simply that the conception of moral agency recapitulates the thorny problems of epistemological dualism--subject vs. object, mind vs. body, minds knowing other minds--but the very idea of an independent decision maker is uncompelling. How, it is asked, could moral thought take place except within the categories supplied by the culture? If we subtracted the entire vocabulary of the culture from individual subjectivity, how could the individual form questions about justice, duty, rights, or moral goods? In Michael Sandel's terms, "To imagine a person incapable of constitutive attachments . . .is not to conceive an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth."[11]^9 These conceptual problems are conjoined to widespread ideological critique. Alexis de Tocqueville's observations of 19th century American life set the stage: "Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows . . .he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself."[12]^10 Within recent decades these views have been echoed and amplified by many. Christopher Lasch has traced linkages between individualist presumptions and cultural tendencies toward narcissism;[13]^11 Robert Bellah and his colleagues argue that certain forms of individualism work against the possibility for committed relationships and dedication to community;[14]^12 for Edward Sampson the presumption of a self-contained individual leads to an insensitivity to minority voices, suppression of the other, and social division.[15]^13 Ultimately, the conception of an interior origin of action defines the society in terms of unbreachable isolation. If what is most central to our existence is hidden from the other, and vice versa, we are forever left with a sense of profound isolation, an inability to ever know what lies behind the other's visage. By constituting an interior self we inevitably create the Other from whom we shall forever remain alien. ________________________ [16]^1 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). ] [17]^2 Such a conclusion would also be congenial with a rapidly growing body of literature on the historical and cultural construction of the mind. See, for example, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Catherine Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Carl F. Graumann and Kenneth J. Gergen, eds., Historical Dimensions of Psychological Discourse (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ] [18]^3 For a more extended analysis of the "loss of self" in the media age, see Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); and Kenneth J. Gergen, "Technology and the Self: From the Essential to the Sublime," Constructing the Self in a Mediated Age, ed. Debora Grodin and Thomas R. Lindlof (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1996) 127-140. ] [19]^4 See David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). ] [20]^5 See, for example, Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic, 1993). ] [21]^6 Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) 67. ] [22]^7 Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Vintage, 1973). ] [23]^8 These conclusions are surely resonant with other accounts of "the loss," "decentering," or "deconstruction" of the self in recent scholarship. However, where key writings by Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida derive their conclusions from theoretical premises, the present analysis attempts to trace the sense of dissolution to particular circumstances of cultural technology. In effect, one might suppose that the very intelligibility of the theoretical analyses may be derived from common experiences in contemporary culture. ] [24]^9 Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 179. ] [25]^10 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Doubleday, 1969) 506. ] [26]^11 See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979). ] [27]^12 See Robert N. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). ] [28]^13 See Edward E. Sampson, Celebrating the Other: A Dialogic Account of Human Nature, Psychology, Gender, and Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993). ] References (do visit) 2. http://religionanddemocracy.lib.virginia.edu/hh/index.html 29. http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/ From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 22 15:51:44 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:51:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: John Gray: Two Liberalisms of Fear Message-ID: John Gray: Two Liberalisms of Fear http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=753928&textreg=1&id=GraLibe2-1 [Gray is always worth reading. I know of no other think who has reconsidered and changed his mind as much as he has, always unpredictably, which is what rethinking will do.] The root of liberal thinking is not in the love of freedom, nor in the hope of progress, but in fear--the fear of other human beings and of the injuries they do one another in wars and civil wars. A liberal project that seeks to diminish the fear that humans evoke in one another is open and provisional in its judgments as to the institutions that best moderate the irremovable risk of social and political violence. It does not imagine that any one regime is the only legitimate form of rule for all humankind, and it does not assess political regimes by the degree to which they conform to any doctrine of universal human rights or theory of justice. It rejects the view--which in the United States is treated as an axiom of political discourse--that democratic institutions are the only basis for legitimate government. It views democracy as only one among a range of legitimate regimes in the late modern world and does not subscribe to the Enlightenment hope--revived recently by Francis Fukuyama--that peoples everywhere will converge on democracy as a political ideal. The original and best exemplar of this liberalism of fear is Thomas Hobbes. In Hobbes, the principal obstacle to human well being is war. Wars arising between practitioners of different religions are to be feared the most. They are the most destructive of the human John Gray is School Professor of European Thought in the European Institute at the London School of Economics. Among his publications are Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought; After Social Democracy; and False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. good and generate a war of all against all in which no sovereign power exists to keep the peace. Writing in a time of religious civil wars, Hobbes was clear that, aside from the human passion of vainglory or pride, the chief impediment to a modus vivendi was the claim to truth in matters of faith. On no account should the sovereign make or act upon any such claim. The sovereign does not hold to any worldview but seeks to craft terms of peaceful coexistence among the divergent worldviews that society harbors. Here the liberal project is not a plan for universal progress, but a search for peace. In this liberalism of fear, the institutions of the state are not what is most terrifying. What is most to be feared is the condition of anarchy in which human life is ruled by the summum malum--death at the hands of one's fellows. A liberal state is one that aims to deliver its subjects from this evil. Today, there will be many who deny that such a project could embody liberal thought in any of its many varieties. Yet a reasonable argument can be made that this liberalism of fear is, in fact, liberalism in its most primordial form. Such a liberalism of fear may seem to late moderns unambitious and timid, lacking in noble hopes for the species. For that very reason, it is the liberalism that speaks most cogently and urgently to us, that addresses the needs of a time whose ruling project is peaceful coexistence among diverse and potentially antagonistic communities and regimes. This Hobbesian liberalism of fear is inherently tolerant of diversity in polities and communities, because of its indifference to private belief. The authority of a Hobbesian state does not derive from its embodying any doctrine or creed, but only from its efficacy in promoting peace. In early modern times, this meant ruling without partisan regard to the religious beliefs of subjects. A Hobbesian state is not bound to attempt to disestablish or to privatize religious practice. In a late modern context, the Hobbesian indifference to private belief has an application to ideological commitments. In our historical context, a Hobbesian state does not make allegiance to political authority conditional on subscription to any creed. A peace-making state can hope to command the allegiance of the religious and the irreligious, those who share Enlightenment hopes and those who do not. It can be accepted as legitimate by communities and cultural traditions that are not, and will never be, "liberal." The original liberalism of fear does not aim to subject the late modern world to democratic institutions. It recognizes a democratic regime as one among many devices, potential and actual, for containing and moderating conflict, but it denies that democracy has any universal authority. Hobbes's liberalism of fear can be contrasted sharply with a second fearful liberalism--the anti-statist liberalism, grounded in theories of universal human rights or justice, which is the ruling orthodoxy of contemporary political philosophy. Nearly all liberal theory today is a program for limiting the state. Yet, in the conditions of late modern societies, anti-statist liberalism is bound to issue in a significant enhancement of the state's most purely repressive functions--without, however, significantly enhancing the security of the citizenry. Conversely, regimes that aim for peace and are not burdened by an agenda of anti-statism may be better able to assure their subjects security without enhancing the state's repressive role. The demonization of the state may have been unavoidable during the totalitarian period that spanned much of this century. As we near the century's end, it has become unreasonable. This second liberalism of fear--the liberalism of Rawls, Dworkin, Nozick, Hayek, and many others--which is a liberalism of fear of the state, does not serve our needs in a time in which the state is a desperately fragile and often inefficacious institution. The state must be rehabilitated as an instrument of individual well being and the common good. We must not look to the institutions of the state for universal rights, strong communities, or moral regeneration. To do so risks some of the worst evils of the age. Neither should we regard it with such suspicion that we strive to limit it by foolish doctrines of minimum government. We must rehabilitate the state as a protective institution. This rehabilitation, Hobbesian liberalism, duly amended, may be able to achieve. Hobbesian Liberalism vs. Liberal Imperialism Hobbes's liberalism of fear rejects, as anachronistic and indefensible, the Enlightenment philosophy in which we are the telos of history. Perceiving the dilemmas of modernity from a standpoint near the beginning of the modern age as acutely as Weber and Nietzsche did towards its end, Hobbes remains an instructive critic of the conception of progress with which liberal thought came later to be identified. Hobbes's thought shares with that of other early modern, proto-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Spinoza, an underestimation of the cultural variability of human motives; lacks altogether the insight of Herder that individual well being requires participation in strong communities; and shares with later Enlightenment thinkers, such as Hume, the illusion that civilized human beings have everywhere the same values. Even so, unlike later liberal theory, Hobbes's thought is not committed, essentially and inescapably, to the "hubristic" and dangerous project of deploying the power of the state to promote a universal civilization. It sees the institutions of the state as indispensable--variable and alterable instruments for the achievement of security against the chief evils of human life. In this Hobbesian account, the state is not the embodiment of a civil religion or a philosophy of history, nor the vehicle of a project of world-transformation, nor a means of recovering a lost cultural unity, but rather an artifice whose purpose is peace. Hobbesian liberalism rejects the other liberalism of fear--the dominant liberalism of our time, which responds to evidence of deep cultural differences in the relations of liberal democracies with nonliberal regimes and a fundamentalist reassertion of "Western values" and which understands the state as a vehicle for the defense of these threatened values. At present, liberal political philosophy in all its standard varieties is fundamentalist in style and apologetic in strategy. Its goal is a transcendental deduction of western institutions as the only legitimate form of government. The political consensus, which conventional liberal political philosophy articulates, asserts the universal authority of liberal human rights, individualist ethical life, and (more often than not) free market capitalism. In the context of international relations, it is a late blossoming species of liberal imperialism. It is a triumphal reassertion of the western project at just the historical moment when non-Occidental peoples are demonstrating that westernization and modernization are not one and the same, but different and sometimes conflicting paths of development. In domestic political practice in the United States, this other liberalism of fear is a project of return--an attempt to recover "traditional values," forms of family life, of law, and of national sovereignty that belong to early rather than late modernity. If the Hobbesian liberalism of fear can reasonably claim a universal root in the generic human evil of civil war, this latter-day liberalism of fear is evidently an historically highly specific phenomenon. Its aggressive affirmation of universality ties and dates it irrevocably to the loss of American ideological identity that has followed the Soviet collapse. The fearful reality that the dominant contemporary liberalism screens from the perceptions of western societies is the polycentric diversity of the post-totalitarian world. In the late modern world all western ideologies are of declining global significance, and western institutions no longer function as the cutting edge of modernity. Indeed, for parts of the world--the societies of East Asia, for example--further westernization could mean a retreat from late modernity. The perception that this other liberalism of fear is meant to occlude is a perception of western decline. If, in international relations, this other liberalism of fear is a reaction against the passing of western global hegemony, in domestic political life, it is an attempt to recover a national culture that has irretrievably vanished. That is the significance of the cultural preoccupation with relativism. The neoconservative discourse of "relativism" is not used to conduct a debate in moral philosophy. "Relativism" signifies views of which neoconservatives disapprove in a dispute about American identity. This is a debate that has arisen with multiculturalism and the erosion of popular confidence in American exceptionalism. It is a local affair. The discourse of relativism is not a moment in the history of philosophy. It is an episode in the dissolution of American global hegemony. The centrality and power in contemporary American political discourse and practice of this other liberalism of fear is a perilous dominance. No universalist political project can do without enemies. In an incorrigibly plural world, they are soon found. The imagined threat to "the West" emanating from Soviet Communism--itself pre-eminently an artifact of western Enlightenment ideology--has been swiftly supplanted, in the writings of Samuel Huntington and elsewhere, by a discourse of "civilizational conflict." Now, if it means anything, "civilizational conflict" means that cultural differences of themselves occasion war. Yet this is a dangerously unhistorical claim. In the longer perspective of history, "multiculturalism" does not denote one moment in a local debate about American identity; it signifies the normal condition of humankind. Most polities of which there is historical record, and all empires, have been "multicultural," and the destruction of multicultural human settlements in our century--such as the destruction of the city of Alexandria by Nasserist nationalism--has typically been the work of decidedly modernist nation-building movements. Huntington's polemic against multiculturalism in the United States is not a contribution to historical inquiry or to political theory, but rather a move in a campaign to recover an early modern culture of nationhood that is foredoomed by the conditions of late modernity. In this climate of debate, it is unsurprising that longer historical perspectives are foreshortened and distorted. The diverse cultural traditions of Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity--which until quite recently had coexisted for long periods in the Ottoman Empire, the Hapsburg Empire, and the British Raj--are perceived as inherently rivalrous. The very existence of cultures that have not embraced westernization is perceived as a danger to peace, particularly if--like the present regime in mainland China--these cultures reject the universal authority of liberal rights. The existing reality in some East Asian contexts (such as Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan) of societies that have modernized without westernizing, that have matched or surpassed western levels of prosperity without importing an individualist culture of capitalism, and that have assured low levels of crime-related insecurity for their citizens without adopting a western culture of rights is comprehensively denied. The most feared and repressed possibility is that these achievements were possible only because such countries have rejected or limited westernization. For if this possibility were allowed, the Enlightenment philosophy of history and the civil religion of American exceptionalism--in which the creation of wealth depends on institutions that embody a culture of individualism, progress, and rights--would be falsified. In domestic contexts, this other liberalism of fear is expressed in the poisonous politics of "family values," in the atavistic legalist reduction of all policy issues to questions in the arbitration of (supposedly) Lockean rights, and in the recuperation of an early modern understanding of national sovereignty. This liberalism supports "welfare reform," whose effect is social exclusion, and penal policies in which mass incarceration is adopted as a central institution of social control. This other liberalism of fear cannot yield a modus vivendi of any kind in the late modern societies in which it has arisen. It is, on the contrary, an ideological rationale for social division and cultural warfare. The history of the abortion issue in the United States may be a marker for a future in which a legalist culture of unconditional rights becomes an arena of political conflict where compromise--and therefore politics, considered as an abatement of war--is impossible. Indeed, in its combustible fusion of a legalist culture of nonnegotiable rights with a repressive culture of mass incarceration and radically exclusionary social policies, the new liberalism of fear is a recipe for low-intensity civil war. Hobbes's Abstract Individualism and Anti-Political Liberalism In our historical context, the Hobbesian liberalism of fear has many decisive advantages over the conventional liberal philosophies of the late modern period. Yet it cannot be adopted unamended. I will in the last section of this paper comment on the respects in which Hobbes's thought requires most radical revision. Here I note, first, that Hobbes's thought belongs to the early modern period in its abstract individualism and its proto-Enlightenment project of deriving political obligation from a rational choice of individual advantage. No doubt it is immeasurably closer to political realities than most subsequent liberalisms, but its individualist philosophical anthropology is ill suited to thinking about how communities and cultures can coexist in peace. As the author of one of the great neglected twentieth-century classics of political thought, Crowds and Power, has observed in a different work: Hobbes explains everything through selfishness, and while knowing the crowd (he often mentions it) he really has nothing to say about it. My task, however, is to show how complex selfishness is: to show how what it controls does not belong to it, comes from other areas of human nature, the ones to which Hobbes is blind.[3]^1 Second, Hobbes's thought has in common with the dominant Rawlsian liberalism of our time the illusion that the principal impediment to peace is the rivalrous diversity of individual purposes. The banal Rawlsian pluralism of individual life-plans, each expressing a specific conception of the good, lacks the stark realism of Hobbes's insistence on the insatiability of human desires, but these very different liberalisms share in common a neglect of rivalrous cultural identities as a cause of social conflict and--in the worst case--war. Rawls is right in seeing the liberal problematic as the search for peaceful coexistence that issued from the Wars of Religion and the Reformation, but he is mistaken in supposing that, in late modern conditions, peace can be pursued by relegating worldviews, conceptions of the good, and cultural identities to the sphere of voluntary association. Liberal institutions in which divisive commitments are privatized are successful as devices for promoting peace only when the background moral culture of society is already individualist. Where it is not--as in most of the world--the search for terms of peace leads not to liberal civil society, but to various kinds of pluralist institutions. Third, Hobbes's seeming hope that a form of rule can be constructed in which politics has been marginalized links him with that tradition of legalist utopianism that has had so paralyzing an effect on liberal thought in our own time. Commonly, Hobbes is criticized for his illiberal unconcern with the limits of state power, and his apparent approval of tyranny, and it is true that we who know, as he could not, the evils that go with totalitarian states cannot rest content with his account of the sovereign's powers. What is wrong with Hobbesian thought is not, however, its neglect of constitutional limitations on governments, but its attempt to render political life redundant--a project it shares with today's anti-political liberalisms. In our conditions, peace cannot be the construction of a sovereign, if indeed any such thing still exists in late modern contexts; it must be an artifact of political activity. This is not to say that a modus vivendi can be achieved in the late modern world only through democratic institutions. It means that in societies that already possess a highly developed tradition of political activity, peace cannot be secured by trying to suppress politics. In arguing that Hobbes's thought has an application to the conditions of late modernity, I am not meaning to pass over those aspects of Hobbesian liberalism that belong with a superseded Enlightenment project. Hobbes's Cartesian understanding of political reasoning, the unyielding universalism and individualism of his philosophical outlook, together with his conception of political obligation as arising from a calculus of rational advantage, all tie his thought irrevocably to the Enlightenment project and cannot speak to us today. The aspect that does speak to us--that must inform the attempt to articulate a postliberal pluralism--aims to identify universal and generically human evils and understands political life as an enterprise of moderating and mitigating these evils. This aspect of Hobbes's thought is far removed from the unrestricted cultural relativism (such as Richard Rorty's) that animates most attempts at formulating a postmodern liberalism. Prospects for a Postliberal, Postmodern Pluralism Thinking about the future roles of the two liberalisms of fear begins with the recognition that there is no single trajectory of modernity on which diverse societies stand at earlier and later points. Our world contains pre-modern, early modern, late modern, and postmodern states.[4]^2 In much of post-imperial Africa, in parts of postcommunist Russia, and perhaps in some areas of China, there is nothing that resembles the institutions of a modern state. Economic and social life goes on, but in a context of near-anarchy where the protective functions of the state are lacking or are exercised by local military production centers. The disappearance in many parts of the world of effective state institutions of any kind is one of the most important but least considered developments of the past decade. It represents an acceleration in the declining leverage of the modern state that has led prominent theorists of strategy to argue that along with the decline of the modern sovereign state, which was inaugurated with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, we are now witnessing the disappearance of Clausewitzian war.[5]^3 Considered as military conflict conducted between agents of sovereign states, Clausewitzian war appears to have been largely supplanted by intractable low-intensity conflicts in which the principal actors are not states and their agents, but political organizations, clans, and ethnic groups. Clausewitzian war has not disappeared, as the Falklands War and the Gulf War testify, but the ability of states or associations of states to direct organized violence has declined dramatically in many parts of the world. The control of war, taken in modern times to be the central constitutive power of sovereign states, has slipped from states' grasp. Where this has happened, the result has been the emergence of something not far from a Hobbesian state of nature. At the same time, late modern societies are imbued by post-military cultures. It is hard to mobilize democratic publics in support of any interventionist policy that threatens to be risky, costly, and protracted. In these circumstances, the anarchic, pre-modern conditions of some post-communist countries may persist indefinitely. Alternatively, these countries may attempt to reinvent their imperial traditions--an option particularly attractive in Russia, which has never been a modern nation-state. There is no reason to think that states in such circumstances will be forced towards modernity in their political institutions. The first signs of postmodern political institutions are most clearly observable in Europe. The institutions of the European Union are not the institutions of a modern state writ large. The EU is not, and will not become, a modern federal state. It is an association of nation states that have embarked on a common project of shedding much of the sovereignty that distinguished the modern, "Westphalian" state. This project embodies the wager that nineteenth-century balance-of-power relations between the Union's nation-states can be rendered redundant in the context of the EU's common institutions. The wager this project entails is on the possibility of enduring and stable political institutions that do not presuppose a common political culture and are not legitimated by a unifying ideology. This is the postmodern dimension of the European project. It is the attempt to found political institutions whose cultural identities are not singular, comprehensive, or exclusive (after the fashion of nineteenth-century nationalism and twentieth-century weltanschauung-states), but complex, plural, and overlapping. This is not the project of privatizing cultural identity in the realm of voluntary association that is advanced in the standard liberalisms of today. That project, in practice, can only entrench the dominant cultural identity of a generation or more ago. This project instead attempts to enable plural identities to find collective expression in overlapping political institutions. The institutions of the European Union constitute the single most convincing exemplar thus far of the postmodern project of founding political legitimacy not on a common national culture or on any universalist ideology, but on a common acceptance of cultural difference. In East Asia, the fascinating experiment that is underway in Singapore may amount to an exercise in postmodern state-building and the conditions of postmodernity may have been present for generations in Japan. There may be a future for postmodernity in East Asia by virtue of the fact that some of its diverse cultures have modernized very successfully without thereby accepting any Enlightenment ideology. It is in this historical context that an amended Hobbesian liberalism of fear may be salient. The animating interest of European institutions, as they have developed over the past 30 years or so, is an interest in peaceful coexistence without loss of cultural diversity. This points to the first radical revision that is needed in the Hobbesian view--namely, an acknowledgment of the political relevance of the human need for strong and deep forms of common life. Hobbes's thought needs to be fertilized with the insights of Herder. The abridgment of Hobbesian individualism that this entails is plainly considerable and necessitates consideration of how participation in common cultural forms can find political expression. The second large revision to the Hobbesian account is to provide for the permanent necessities of politics. Unlike later anti-political liberals, Hobbes never supposed that the institution of law could secure the conditions of peace. Such an unreasonable optimism about law was alien to the spirit of his thought and foreign to his experience of the fragility of legal orders. Yet, aside from his insistence on the necessity of unfettered judgment by the sovereign, there is little in Hobbes's thought that acknowledges the role of political practice in negotiating the terms of peace--a lack that derives from its debts to an early modern rationalist project of conferring Cartesian certainty on thinking about politics. Hobbes's thought must be modified to accommodate Machiavelli's perception that politics is an ineradicable activity in common life. This postmodern Hobbesian view does not hold that a condition of postmodernity is the fate of all societies. That is only the illusive Enlightenment idea of a universal history refracted through a late modern prism, a kind of Enlightenment fideism. It may well be that only a few societies will ever enter a postmodern condition, and that, even for them, it may not be irreversible. We need to learn to think of a world, integrated by innumerable economic and technological linkages, which nevertheless contains societies, cultures, and polities that are set on radically divergent developmental paths. The alteration in thinking that goes with such a postmodern perspective is substantial and requires adopting an instrumental, rather than doctrinal, view of state and market institutions. At the same time, it means accepting that the institutions that best serve human needs will vary quite radically over time and in differing cultural contexts. This is partly because the role served by social institutions is never entirely instrumental; it is also always expressive. The cultural forms that economic and political institutions express are changeable, diverse, and complicated; and the development of social or political institutions does not conform to any universal laws. Much in the application of this Hobbesian view will depend on highly contingent circumstances. In our present historical context, however, the postmodern view I have sketched will tend to undermine the vast claims made on behalf of the social institutions of law and the market and to focus on the indispensable place of the state and of the practice of politics among the conditions of a peaceful modus vivendi.[6]^4 Postmodern Politics: Searching for a Modus Vivendi An amended Hobbesian liberalism repudiates the Enlightenment expectation that the world's peoples and cultures will converge in a universal civilization and accepts cultural difference to be a permanent feature of the human condition. It conceives political life as the search, never completed, for a modus vivendi in which the human goods of cultural diversity can be harvested, while the unavoidable evils arising from the conflict of evils are tempered and moderated. Among the diverse and changeable forms that such a modus vivendi can take, democratic institutions are only one; they have no special privileges of the sort conferred on them in recent versions of the Enlightenment project. The dominant fearful liberalism of today is part of the problem, not the solution. By making the legitimacy of political institutions dependent on ephemeral and contested ideologies--hubristic theories of rights and discredited Enlightenment expectations of a universal civilization--it works to exclude all those who do not subscribe to an early modern worldview in which these beliefs were central. For the majority of humankind today, such beliefs are not credible. Like all western secular faiths, they have a declining leverage on human allegiance throughout the world. The coming century may be no better, or even worse, than the one that is ending, but it will be profoundly different in that its central conflicts will not be family arguments amongst western political faiths. For the United States, there is no alternative to liberal democracy. Its traditions and present circumstances do not allow the luxury, or tragedy, of radical political experiment. It would be alien to the spirit of the present argument to engage in prescription. But there are clear implications of the argument I have developed: the legalist cult of unconditional rights must be moderated; the suspicion of the state, and of politics, with which the current liberalism of fear is imbued is intemperate; and the evangelical faith in the free market as the only acceptable mode of economic organization is a danger both to domestic social peace and to international order. America's present public philosophy and policies need some large revisions. The present argument suggests that more weight must be given to political practice, less to the arbitration of rights; more emphasis given to collective choices, and less to free markets. The faith that law can supplant the murky compromises of politics, that societies that lack a moral consensus can cohere through the practice of rights, that the legitimacy of a democratic state must depend on its embodying universal principles--these beliefs are poor guides to the world in which Americans, along with the rest of humankind, must henceforth live. Clearing away the debris of today's fearful liberalism may contribute modestly to the large changes in public philosophy and public policy that will be unavoidable in the United States in the coming years. ________________________ [7]^1 Elias Canetti, The Human Province (London: Picador, 1986) 115-6. ] [8]^2 On this point, see Robert Cooper, The Post-Modern State and the World Order (London: Demos, 1996). ] [9]^3 See Martin van Craveld, On Future War (London and Washington: Brassey's, 1991). ] [10]^4 I have considered what such a shift in our evaluation of state and market institutions might mean, primarily in the context of Britain today, in my monograph After Social Democracy (London: Demos, 1996) republished in my book Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity, 1997). ] From checker at panix.com Fri Oct 22 15:52:56 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:52:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: David Harvey: The Body as Referent Message-ID: David Harvey: The Body as Referent The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=788461&textreg=1&id=HarBody1-1 Discourses in the academy and in the movements that engage in identity politics have increasingly framed identity in terms of the body as the basis for understanding and values. Opposite this micro-level "body talk," another key discourse has emerged around a macro-level issue, the globalization of the market economy. These two discourses seldom overlap and little attempt has been made to integrate them, David Harvey argues, in part because the body has been conceptualized in individual terms and as an irreducible given. Drawing on insights from Marx, he links the two discourses, describing how the body is deeply affected by the conditions under which people work and how conversely the globalization process has changed these conditions for massive numbers of people. Recognizing the role of labor on the body makes it possible to conceive of the body not simply in individual terms but also as a referent for collective identities, drawing together those similarly situated in the labor process. Harvey briefly traces the rise of interest in the body and argues that it is not an irreducible referent but is itself shaped by the social forces that operate upon it. David Harvey is Professor of Geography at the Johns Hopkins University. His many books include The Limits to Capital, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, and Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. The extraordinary efflorescence of interest in "the body" as a grounding for all sorts of theoretical inquiries over the last two decades has a dual origin. In the first place, the questions raised particularly through what is known as "second-wave feminism" could not be answered without close attention to the "nature-nurture" problem, making it inevitable that the status and understanding of "the body" would become central to theoretical debate. Questions of gender, sexuality, the power of symbolic orders, and the significance of psychoanalysis also repositioned the body as both subject and object of discussion and debate. And to the degree that all of this opened up a terrain of inquiry that was well beyond traditional conceptual apparatuses (such as that contained in Marx), so an extensive and original theorizing of the body became essential to progressive and emancipatory politics (this was particularly the case with respect to feminist and queer theory). And there is indeed much that has been both innovative and profoundly progressive within this movement. The second impulse to return to the body arose out of the movements of poststructuralism in general and deconstruction in particular. The effect of these movements was to generate a loss of confidence in all previously established categories (such as those proposed by Marx) for understanding the world. This in turn provoked a return to the body as the irreducible basis for understanding. Lowe argues that: There still remains one referent apart from all the other destabilized referents, whose presence cannot be denied, and that is the body referent, our very own lived body. This body referent is in fact the referent of all referents, in the sense that ultimately all signifieds, values, or meanings refer to the delineation and satisfaction of the needs of the body. Precisely because all other referents are now destabilized, the body referent, our own body, has emerged as a problem.[3]^1 The convergence of these two broad movements has refocused attention upon the body as the basis for understanding and, in certain circles at least, as the privileged site of political resistance and emancipatory politics. Viewing the body as the irreducible locus for the determination of all values, meanings, and significations is not new. It was fundamental to many strains of pre-Socratic philosophy, and the idea that "man" or "the body" is "the measure of all things" has had an extraordinarily long and interesting history. The contemporary return to "the body" as "the measure of all things" provides, therefore, an opportunity to reassert the bases (epistemological and ontological) of all forms of inquiry. The manner of this return is crucial to determining how values and meanings are to be constructed and understood and how politics can be imagined. Foucault, for one, strove to shift our political horizons away from monolithic categories such as class and hence away from class politics to embrace the micro-politics of the body as an alternative site for radical politics. Foucault writes: This work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take. This means that the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical. In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions.[4]^2 The warning is salutary and deserves to be taken seriously. But the turning away from all projects that claim to be global is, in my view, deeply damaging. It leads Foucault to prefer projects that are "always partial and local" and to hope these realize generality in a different way. It drives a wedge between the discourses of "globalization" and "the body" so as to conform to Foucault's other view on the inherent heterogeneity, radical pluralism, and incompatibility of multiple discourses. While not everyone has followed Foucault into such a political position, it is undeniable that much of the recent discourse about the body has been constructed as an antidote to discourses about class and has played an important role in generating a massive discursive shift away from interest in Marx. And it has, pari passu, made it not only undesirable but seemingly impossible to try to link discourses about globalization and the body in any systematic way. Yet there is something odd about how this has occurred for there is much in the contemporary literature on the body that is perfectly consistent with the fundamentals of Marx's argument. Consider, for example, the two fundamental themes that dominate the recent literature. Writers as diverse as Elias, Bourdieu, Stafford, Haraway, Butler, Diprose, Grosz, and Martin, agree that the body is an unfinished project, historically and geographically malleable in certain ways.[5]^3 It may not be infinitely or even easily malleable, and certain of its inherent ("natural") qualities cannot be erased. But the body is evolving and changing in ways that reflect both an internal transformative dynamics (often the focus of psychoanalytic work) and external processes (most often invoked in social constructionist approaches). This idea is powerfully present in Gramsci's analysis of Fordism and can be traced back, as I have shown elsewhere, to the very core of Marx's work from The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to Capital.[6]^4 The second theme, broadly consistent with (if not implicitly contained in) the first, is that the body is not a closed and sealed entity, but a relational "thing" that is created, bounded, sustained, and ultimately dissolved in a spatio-temporal flow of multiple processes. This entails a relational-dialectical view (most clearly articulated in queer theory) in which the body (construed as a thing-like entity endowed with transformative powers) internalizes the effects of the processes that create, support, sustain, and dissolve it. Here, too, an argument can be made that a relational dialectical reading of Marx's work is entirely compatible with such a view.[7]^5 The body which we inhabit and which is supposedly the irreducible measure of all things is not itself irreducible. There is far more agreement between, say, Marx and Foucault on this point than there is fundamental difference. Much of what Foucault has to say, particularly in his early works such as Discipline and Punish, is prefigured in Marx's chapters in Capital on "The Working Day" and "Primitive Accumulation." Conversely, there is much in Foucault that can be read as a friendly and thoughtful extension of Marx's concerns rather than as a rejection and rebuttal. But here we encounter a conundrum. On the one hand, to return to the human body as the fount of all experience is presently regarded as a means (now increasingly privileged) to challenge the whole network of abstractions (scientific, social, political-economic) through which social relations, power retaliations, institutions, and material practices get defined, represented, and regulated. But on the other hand, no human body is outside of the social processes of determination. To return to it is, therefore, to instanciate the very social processes being purportedly rebelled against. If, for example, workers are transformed (as Marx suggests in Capital) into appendages of capital in both the work place and the consumption sphere (or, as Foucault prefers it, bodies are made over into docile bodies by the rise of a powerful disciplinary apparatus from the eighteenth century onwards), then how can their bodies be a measure, sign, or receiver of anything outside of the circulation of capital or of the various mechanisms that discipline them? To take a more contemporary version of the same argument, if we are all now cyborgs (as Haraway in her celebrated manifesto on the topic suggests),[8]^6 then how can we measure anything outside of that deadly embrace of the machine as an extension of our own body and the body as an extension of the machine? So while returning to the body as the site of a more authentic (epistemological and ontological) grounding of the theoretical abstractions that have for too long ruled purely as abstractions may be justified (and provide a proper grounding, as in the cases of feminism and queer theory, for an emancipatory and progressive politics), that return cannot in and of itself guarantee anything except either the production of a narcissistic self-referentiality or the sacrifice of any sense of collective political possibilities. So whose body is it that is to be the measure of all things? Exactly how and what is it in a position to measure? And what politics might flow therefrom? Such questions cannot be answered without a prior understanding of exactly how bodies are socially produced. ________________________ [9]^1 David M. Lowe, The Body in Late-Capitalist USA (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) 14. ] [10]^2 Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 46. ] [11]^3 See Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilisation, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984); Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991); Judith P. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993); Rosalyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference (London: Routledge, 1994); Elizabeth Grosz, "Bodies-Cities," Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, NJ: Princeton School of Architecture Press, 1994) 241-253; Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture--From the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston: Beacon, 1994). ] [12]^4 See David Harvey, "The Body as an Accumulation Strategy," Society and Space (forthcoming). ] [13]^5 See David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). ] [14]^6 See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991). ] From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Oct 23 02:55:02 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 19:55:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] REBT cognitive distortions Message-ID: <20041023025502.16709.qmail@web13422.mail.yahoo.com> Can't remember what book this was from, something on REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy)...These are "Cognitive distortions as disempowering thinking patterns": 1. Over-generalizing: jumping to conclusions on little evidence or without facts 2. All-or-nothing thinking: Polarizing at extremes. Black and white thinking. Either-or thinking that posits options as two-valued choices 3. Labeling: Name-calling that uses over-generalizations which allow one to dismiss something via the label, or to not make important distinctions, or that classifies a phenomenon in such a way that we do not engage in good reality-testing 4. Blaming: Thinking in an accusatory style, transferring blame, guilt, and responsibility for a problem to someone or something else. 5. Mind-reading: Projecting thoughts, feelings, intuitions onto others without checking out one's guesses with the person, over-trusting one's "intuitions" and not granting others the right to have the last word about their internal thoughts, feelings, intentions, etc. 6. Prophesying: Projecting negative outcomes onto the future without seeing alternatives or possible ways to proactively intervene, usually a future pacing of fatalistic and negative outcomes. 7. Emotionalizing: Using one's emotions for filtering information. 8. Personalizing: Perceiving circumstances, especially the actions of others, as specifically targeted toward oneself in a personal way, perceiving the world through ego-centric filters that whatever happens relates to, speaks about, or references oneself. 9. Awfulizing: Imagining the worst possible scenario and then amplifying it with a non-referencing word, "awful" as in, "This is awful!" 10. Should-ing: Putting pressure on oneself (and others) to conform to "divine" rules about the world and life, then expressing such in statements that involve "should" and "must". 11. Filtering: Over-focusing on one facet of something to the exclusion of everything else so that one develops a tunnel-vision perspective and can see only "one thing". Typically, people use this thinking style to filter out positive facets, thereby leaving a negative perception. 12. Can't-ing: Imposing linguistic and semantic limits on oneself and others from a "mode of impossibility" and expressing this using the "can't" word. Anyone who can find one of the above that isn't a constant feature in the current election cycle gets a cookie. _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 23 08:49:50 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 04:49:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Richard V. Horner: Two Cheers for Pragmatism Message-ID: Richard V. Horner: Two Cheers for Pragmatism The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=803435&textreg=1&id=HorChee3-3 Formerly a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, Dr. Horner is now Director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, in Gainesville, Florida. His research interests range from biblical studies to contemporary culture, with publications and papers on pragmatism and Continental thought. Introduction Those of us who do not think of ourselves as pragmatists would do well, nonetheless, to accept the pragmatists' invitation to exit "the increasingly tiresome pendulum swing" [3]^1 between dogmatism and scepticism by pragmatic means. We may give the pragmatists only one or two cheers out of three, and a lot of us will hurry on to list our caveats and provisos, but when the pragmatists offer us a "third way of understanding critique that avoids...`groundless critique' and...rationally grounded critique that `rests' upon illusory foundations," they are on to something. [4]^2 Begin with the questions and problems that arise in the course of experience, the pragmatists tell us. Try on alternative hypotheses for how best to solve these problems and answer these questions, and then test these alternative hypotheses against each other by tracing their consequences back into experience. As simple as this modest way forward sounds, when it comes to framing worthwhile inquiry and argument, this modest pragmatic means can go a long way toward delivering us from the frustrations that follow either from our failure to attain the unattainable standards of certainty and necessity or from attempting to live in the absence to which that failure seems to lead. A Pragmatic Means of Inquiry and Argument The first cheer for pragmatism, then, is for its simple method of framing inquiry and argument. Following William James one can think of this modest means of proceeding as the practice of trying on beliefs in order to see which of them carries us about in experience most satisfactorily. Try on ideas and beliefs, James writes, in order to see which of them "help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience." We should make the most, he continues, of "any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily." [5]^3 We choose between these hypotheses on the basis of what James calls the "principle of practical results," [6]^4 which "is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences." [7]^5 This is pragmatism's "usual question. `Grant an idea or belief to be true,' it says, `what concrete difference will its being true make in any one's actual life?'... What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms." [8]^6 Though Richard Rorty takes this modest method several steps further in the direction of modesty, he too recognizes that a simple, pragmatic strategy, or means of proceeding, is what remains once the swing between dogmatism and skepticism has been set aside and the quest for method dissolved. Though Rorty talks about "pragmatism without method," he does so in order to make the same points James made nearly a century ago when he wrote about pragmatism as method. Rorty prefers the term "muddling" over "method," but the practices are largely the same as those that James describes. One begins with bits of experience, texts, or lumps in Rorty's parlance, and one tries on alternative hypotheses for how best to understand and work with these lumps and texts. Where big questions are in view one faces the "slow and painful choice between alternative self-images." [9]^7 Where specific problems are in view, one encounters "Deweyan requests for concrete alternatives and programs." [10]^8 In every case one's reasons for choosing one hypothesis over another lie in the consequences that follow from holding to that hypothesis. As Rorty notes, "We pragmatists say that every difference must make a difference to practice." [11]^9 It is on the basis of these differences, Rorty argues, that we opt for one alternative over another. In other words, we opt for one understanding of how to link certain bits of experience together over another understanding because it is "a more useful belief to have than its contradictory." [12]^10 Whether one sets aside the swing between dogmatism and scepticism by way of James' method or Rorty's muddling, then, one still has a means of proceeding. It consists in trying on alternative hypotheses for how to link certain bits of experience together and comparing those hypotheses against each other by tracing their consequences in experience. While this simple means of proceeding emphasizes consequences, it also values coherence, consistency, and completeness. For various reasons, some deserved and some not, James and his pragmatist heirs have often been thought of as disdaining such values. They have been written off as irrational or even anti-rational, as if notions of coherence, consistency, and completeness had no value to them. Those who hold to this caricature of pragmatism would do well to remember that the following statements all come from the pen of William James. The truth of any of our beliefs, he writes, "will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged." [13]^11 Pragmatism's "only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted." [14]^12 Therefore, "what is better for us to believe is true unless the belief incidentally clashes with some other vital benefit.... In other words, the greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths." [15]^13 Any particular belief, then, "has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths. It is on trial by them and they on trial by it, [and] our final opinion about [it] can be settled only after all the truths have straightened themselves out together." [16]^14 There is no contradiction, then, between proceeding by pragmatic means and wanting to make the most of our ability to be reasonable. "We find consistency satisfactory," [17]^15 wrote James, and from a pragmatic standpoint, one can say the same of coherence and completeness too. We would do well, then, to think of pragmatism primarily as an answer to the question: How shall we proceed now that we have let go of the quest for method? By thinking of pragmatism in this way, we acknowledge, with Rorty, that pragmatism places itself beyond the modern quest to identify the one method that will give us the certainty that no other method can give, while we also acknowledge, with James, that pragmatism is concerned with the question of how we carry out activities such as pursuing lines of inquiry, having worthwhile arguments, and arriving at settled beliefs. [18]^16 Pragmatism's understanding of the processes of inquiry and argument reassures us that our inquiries and arguments have substantive consequences in experience, but it does so without burdening us with lofty aspirations we cannot fulfill or abandoning us to the excesses or despair that so easily follow from our inability to achieve those higher aspirations. It takes Catherine Elgin's question, "What's the use?," seriously. Having set aside the quest for method, pragmatism does not leave us with no way forward. It leaves us with a modest, non-methodological means for arriving at settled, albeit fallible, beliefs. A Pragmatic Reading of the History of Reason Pragmatism gets a second cheer for its story of modern reason. The pragmatist account of the story of modernity suggests that in our best moments, over the past few centuries, we have managed quite nicely by pragmatic means, though we haven't always called them that. Whether we have been dealing with literary texts or scientific data, taking on the challenges of politics or of personal relationships, we have done our best work by trying on alternative hypotheses and weighing them against each other by tracing their consequences in experience. This is the process that led to the creation and development of democratic institutions and to extraordinary breakthroughs in science from the seventeenth century to the present. Ironically, we enjoyed so much success through these means that we began to think that what we were doing was something much more than merely coming up with the best available solution to a problem. As a result, we have too often become dogmatic about our ability to think and about the conclusions to which that ability has led, and we have paid for this sin by falling into the skeptical absence into which the path of rationalist dogmatism leads. In other words, we have swung from dogmatism to skepticism. The sad consequence has been that genuine advances in knowledge have been eclipsed by the tendency toward exaggerated claims and by the tendency for our more exaggerated claims to collapse under their own weight and dissolve at the hand of doubt and skepticism. At the dawn of modernity, during the period that we now call the scientific revolution, scientists proceeded by pragmatic means. No one called it that, of course, but that is what it amounted to. Aided by helpful devices such as microscopes and telescopes, which were themselves the products of pragmatic inquiry and experimentation, scientists worked with the bits and pieces and lumps and texts that their inquiries served up to them, and they attempted to answer the questions that arose in the context of those inquiries. "How shall we link the new lumps and texts with the old lumps and texts?" they wondered. "How shall we link all the celestial bits together?" "How shall we link the terrestrial lumps together?" "How shall we link the celestial bits with the terrestrial bits?"--and so on. Sometimes their questions had to do with concerns over how to build more accurate clocks, sail their ships on course, or heave cannon balls at their enemies more accurately and effectively than their enemies were heaving cannon balls back. At other times the questions focused on finding more satisfying ways to think about things. For instance, some scientists sought more satisfying ways to make sense of the fact that a mercury barometer gives one reading at the foot of a mountain and another reading at the mountain's summit, and others attempted to make better sense of the puzzling fact that a few lights in the night sky move differently from all the other lights in that same sky. In each case, scientists addressed their questions by trying on alternative hypotheses for how to link various bits together in more satisfying ways, and they judged these hypotheses against each other by tracing the consequences that followed from holding one hypothesis rather than another. Worthwhile arguments focused on just which hypotheses these were. Just when everything was going along nicely in this pragmatic mode, disaster struck in the form of too much success. As Pope put it, "God said `let Newton be' and all was light." [19]^17 By linking the new and the old and the celestial and the terrestrial, Newton's law of gravity performed the "marriage function" to an extent that few ideas have ever managed to do. In Jamesian language Newton linked parts of experience together in more satisfactory ways than anyone to date had done. In Rortyan terms he wove lumps and texts together in more useful ways than anyone else had ever managed to do. For understandable reasons, however, Newton's contemporaries concluded that what he had done was not simply succeed at the humble pragmatic task of coming up with a compelling set of action-guiding beliefs, but that he had succeeded at the Cartesian task of identifying the one certain and necessary truth that Reason had been waiting to give us all along. As James observed, "When the first mathematical, logical, and natural uniformities, the first laws, were discovered, men were so carried away by the clearness, beauty and simplification that resulted, that they believed themselves to have deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty." [20]^18 In a similar vein, Rorty notes that the Enlightened of the eighteenth century believed that "the New Science [had] discovered the language which nature itself uses." [21]^19 "The new vocabulary," they concluded, "was the one nature had always wanted to be described in." [22]^20 Newton's remarkable success propelled successive generations into a quest that has more recently been called the Enlightenment Project. What Newton had done for astronomy, it was hoped, others would do for every other area of inquiry. What Condorcet called the "infallible methods" of reason [23]^21 would achieve truth that is certain (beyond the reach of doubt), objective (beyond the reach of personal prejudice), and necessary (essential to being fully human). As many students of the modern era have observed, however, this Enlightenment project did not turn out as it was supposed to. What was supposed to have been reason's ability to achieve certainty turned out to be "the ability to question everything and the capacity to affirm nothing." [24]^22 Reason's ostensible ability to achieve objectivity led to the discovery that the "trail of the human serpent is...over everything." [25]^23 And reason's supposed ability to achieve necessity led to the negation of the very notion of necessity and to the exploration of limitless possibilities for thinking differently without any assurance that any one difference actually makes a difference. As J?rgen Habermas' analysis of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity suggests, the modern world came under the spell of "the violence of a subjugating subjectivity," [26]^24 and once it came under this "regime of a subjectivity puffed up into a false absolute," [27]^25 reason fell prey to its own totalizing critique. As Horkheimer and Adorno observed, "the spirit of the Enlightenment dictates that `every specific theoretic view succumbs to the destructive criticism that it is only a belief--until even the very notions of spirit, of truth, and indeed, enlightenment itself...become animistic magic.'" [28]^26 In short, the story of modern reason became the story of the swing from dogmatism to skepticism, a story in which the seemingly glorious highway of reason deteriorated and eventually led into a cul-de-sac. While pragmatist and non-pragmatist students of the history of modern reason often share this story of reason's collapse under its own weight, pragmatists suggest that we move forward by rediscovering the pragmatic ways that have always been available in this story. We should recapture the modest means that stay close to experience and proceed on the basis of the best reasons that pragmatic considerations can provide. This approach was at work before the modern project was put in place, it has been there throughout the modern era, and it remains available to us today. It enables us to see that when reason has done its best work over the past several centuries, a period in which it has done lots of good work, it has tried on alternative hypotheses and weighed them against each other by tracing their consequences in experience. Pragmatism, then, can help us understand how we got ourselves into the aggravating swing between dogmatism and skepticism in the first place, enable us to acknowledge this history as our own, and yet not leave us trapped in the cul-de-sac into which that history so easily leads. We can recapture the simple pragmatic means by which we have done our best work throughout the past few centuries and ask again, not in exasperation but in hope, "What's the use?" The Cheering Stops Having freed us from the swing between dogmatism and skepticism, the question arises as to why any pragmatist would hold to the morally lightweight, detranscendentalized understanding of homo sapiens that seems to accompany the skeptical swing of the pendulum of modern reason. What would the pragmatic reasons be for holding to such beliefs? Why, for instance, does Richard Rorty hold to what he himself calls the "morally humiliating" view that "there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves"? [29]^27 Why does he hold to views that lead him to conclude with Sartre that, when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form, "There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you." Rorty admits that "this thought is hard to live with," [30]^28 and yet he is quite willing to follow Sartre and Nietzsche into that place of absence created by the death of God, where Rorty has worked consistently to "prevent us from inventing God surrogates like Reason, Nature, CSP, or a Matter of Fact about Warrant." [31]^29 In this place that is devoid of both gods and idols, even the self or the subject turns out to be no more than "drawing a line around a vacant place in the middle of the web of words." [32]^30 Nothing is allowed to stand in for God and his doubles. One wonders, however, why Rorty holds to this understanding of himself and of the featherless bipeds who inhabit the planet with him. Does he hold these views because he sees them as compelling on pragmatic grounds, or has the swing from dogmatism to skepticism pushed even a thinker as original and independent as Rorty into a place of absence and emptiness to which pragmatic considerations alone would never lead? In asking this question we are not arguing that Rorty's liberal and humanitarian ethics are inconsistent with his understanding of the human condition. His understanding is open to numerous ethical conclusions, and one of these possibilities is the ethical stance to which he holds. There is nothing the least bit inconsistent, therefore, in his sharing a first-order narrative with Nietzsche and still preferring a liberal and humanitarian ethics. One can say the same with regard to the position for which John Stuhr argues in this issue of The Hedgehog Review. While his thoroughly detranscendentalized understanding of life is open to several ethical stances, it certainly allows him to opt for the "preferred differences" he does, and so he is in no way inconsistent to hold to the ethical stance that he holds. Both Stuhr and Rorty demonstrate that one's first-order narrative need not be a deep metanarrative in order for one to prefer the ethical commitments and behaviors valued by modern democratic societies. Both Rorty and Stuhr have "good morals," and they do so without deep reasons and without being inconsistent. Every indication, furthermore, is that one can not only opt for the ethical stance to which Rorty and Stuhr hold, but also live largely in accordance with that stance. One can be a faithful spouse, a loving parent, a supportive colleague, an encouraging teacher, and a conscientious citizen who seeks to alleviate suffering and care for the disadvantaged, while also viewing the self as an empty place in the middle of a web of words and viewing the world as thoroughly detranscendentalized. The difficulty in the positions that Rorty and Stuhr hold, however, lies in the fact that their action-guiding beliefs are inadequate as guides to action. While their beliefs allow for the ethical choices they prefer, their beliefs do not require these choices. If one begins with the Nietzschean understanding to which Rorty holds or the detranscendentalized understanding to which Stuhr holds, one is clearly free to choose liberal and humanitarian ethics, but one can just as easily opt for alternative ethical commitments as well. Yes, Rorty and Stuhr both demonstrate that one can begin with Nietzsche and still turn out to be a gentleman who values kindness, meekness, and humility, but if one begins with Nietzsche one can just as easily turn out to be an arrogant, albeit inventive and brilliant elitist, who views kindness, meekness, and humility as wormlike. On pragmatic considerations alone, therefore, Rorty and Stuhr fall short. They do not provide us with beliefs that are sufficient to guide action. In a pragmatic frame we are looking for a set of beliefs about ourselves and our fellow inhabitants of this planet that will not simply allow for good behavior by making that behavior a legitimate possibility. We are looking for action-guiding beliefs from which good behavior follows as a consequence. It is not clear that Rorty's and Stuhr's beliefs are generative of action. While we are all encouraged to see them work from the first-order narrative that they hold to moral preferences that they share with modern democracies, we remain less than sanguine about equally viable alternative preferences that could flow just as easily from those first-order narratives. We need to offer the same challenge to Rorty and Stuhr, therefore, that James raised to the philosophers of his day. Until they can demonstrate that their beliefs make a difference in practice, and that they generate actions as consequences and not simply as possibilities, we will remain doubtful about their basic understanding of the human condition. The problem with Rorty's and Stuhr's moral commitments comes into focus more clearly when we remember that the search for action-guiding beliefs is embedded in the deeply troubled experience of daily life. The attempt to establish settled, action-guiding beliefs is not an abstract project that takes place in some neutral setting but rather a living struggle that takes place in the face of the trials, temptations, and evils of day-to-day human experience. In this context it becomes more apparent that we are not simply looking for beliefs that will allow us to be good, but for beliefs that will lead us to be good. Here we are not only talking about what Habermas and his American counterparts refer to as the "depth and pervasiveness of normativity" which "has been too often ignored and always underanalyzed," [33]^31 but also pondering the unmasking of knowledge/power/evil, in which both the prophets of old and the prophets of extremity have led the way. We are talking about the world where each of us actually lives, where without and within, we experience darkness as well as light, confusion as well as clarity, hatred as well as love, war as well as peace, and shame as well as glory. In this world where we actually live, we need exactly what the pragmatists say we need: settled beliefs that will not simply allow us to act but guide our action. Others have, of course, raised these same issues with pragmatism, and they have often done so in ways that are sympathetic toward the pragmatist tradition. In "Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic," for instance, Cornel West pushes the pragmatist tradition to confront the "challenge of a deep sense of evil in the tragic." [34]^32 Critical of what he considers to be Dewey's shallowness in response to the evils of the twentieth century, West looks to Josiah Royce for a more satisfying response. "To Royce," West observes, James' and Emerson's promotions of heroic action, "in and of themselves, are insufficient or Sisyphysian, pushing a rock up a hill, but no progress, unless there is a deeper struggle with the sense of the tragic." [35]^33 West continues by quoting Royce: "the full seriousness of the ...problem of evil..." or of pessimism in the pure sense, isn't the doctrine of the merely peevish man, but of the man who to borrow a word of Hegel's "has once feared not for this moment or for that in his life, but who has feared with all his nature; so that he has trembled through and through, and all that was most fixed in him has become shaken." There are experiences in life that do just this for us.... When the fountains of the great deep are once thus broken up, and the floods have come, it isn't over this or that lost spot of our green earth that we sorrow; it is because of all that endless waste of tossing waves which now rolls cubits deep above the top of what were our highest mountains. [36]^34 There may be a few who are so innocent or indifferent that these words have no meaning, but most of us know something of what West and Royce and Hegel are talking about. These are not the "mere pangs of our finitude that we can easily learn to face courageously," [37]^35 West reminds us. These are the tragic times and evils of life that demand a deeper understanding than anything Dewey or Emerson, James or Rorty have offered us. This is not to suggest that just any deep narrative will do. To the contrary, as Rorty and others have pointed out repeatedly, horrible things have been done in the name of metanarratives, and these days we need not think hard to come up with examples. On September 11^th we confronted this tragic truth in as horrifying a manner as we North Americans have experienced in a long time. We concur with Rorty, therefore, in condemning inhumane actions and in judging the action-guiding beliefs behind these actions to be false. We also concur with Rorty in maintaining a pragmatic frame of inquiry and argument in the face of these horrors. All too often, the sort of horrifying actions we have recently witnessed come at the hands of people who have taken leaps to authority. We would do well, therefore, to continue with the pragmatic consideration of action-guiding beliefs that can be tested by their consequences. The basic notion of pragmatism, remember, is that the true is that which is good by way of belief, and this judgement is to be made by judging the consequences of any given candidate for belief. Whether these beliefs arise from imaginative but empty self-fashioning that does not think anything runs deep, or flow from metanarratives that distort or exploit sacred texts, when these beliefs lead to inhumane action, we know by this consequence that these beliefs are to be rejected as false. Whereas the problem with Rorty's and Stuhr's action-guiding beliefs is that they are under-determinative, then, the problem with the beliefs of Nazis and terrorists is that they are clearly generative of action that is evil. When we judge this action as consequence, we are justified in concluding that the beliefs behind these actions are false. We need, therefore, to do some hard work. We need to try on alternative sets of action-guiding beliefs about humans to see which of them does the work demanded by life itself. Rorty's Nietzschean understanding is not enough and allows too easily for ethical principles and practices that neither he nor we would want to endorse. Stuhr's detranscendentalized understanding of life is similarly inadequate. While his taste in "clothing" may be similar to our own, all attire turns out to be optional. Not just sports coats but trousers too become matters of personal taste. Royce, coming to us by way of West, points us toward Christian ideas about the suffering of God in Christ who bears the sins of the world, and then points beyond this symbolism to what he calls the deeper truth of philosophical idealism. "[I]t is this thought," Royce says, "that traditional Christianity has in its deep symbolism first taught the world, but that, in its fullness, only an idealistic interpretation can really and rationally express..." [38]^36 Royce may be right, but given life's demand not simply for depth but for the will to engage the darkness and evil of this world, it might be the other way around. Perhaps idealism points toward the deeper truths given to us by sacred texts. In any case, he has, at least, located the conversation in which we are most likely to find action-guiding beliefs that might just be adequate to life. As West continues he points his readers toward those understandings that are adequate to human experience and to the challenges of the tragic and the evil in this world--deeper understandings that enable us to face up to and fight against evil. West moves by way of pragmatic considerations, comparing alternative hypotheses against each other on the basis of their consequences in experience, not on the basis of authority, whether scientific or religious. Again he looks to Royce who finds these deeper understandings in the symbolism of Christianity and in the philosophical idealism to which that symbolism, according to Royce, points. Conclusion One hundred years ago William James observed that life feels like a fight: "If this life be not a real fight in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success," he wrote, "it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which we may withdraw at will." "It feels," he said, "like a fight." [39]^37 A century later it still feels that way, and we find ourselves still wondering how we might think about this feeling. Rorty admits that this is a tough question and recognizes that it is in the experience of this sort of moral intuition that his own conclusions find their greatest challenge. Rorty understands that for a lot of people, some sort of "metaphysical comfort" is needed in order to stay in the fight and not give up. Without such comfort there is a sort of moral humiliation with which they cannot cope, a humiliation that can have real and harmful consequences. Despite these real and harmful consequences, Rorty concludes that it felt the way it did to James because over two thousand years of cultural history had pushed him in that direction: For us, footnotes to Plato that we are, it does feel [like something eternal is at stake]. But if James's own pragmatism were taken seriously, if pragmatism became central to our culture and our self-image, then it would no longer feel that way. We do not know how it would feel. We do not even know whether, given such a change in tone, the conversation of Europe might not falter and die away. We just do not know. [40]^38 Rorty does not deny James' feelings, nor does he deny that we need to be able to link these feelings together with other parts of experience. In good pragmatic style, furthermore, he looks to consequences in his attempt to sort this question out. In the end, however, Rorty sets aside immediate consequences and puts his hope in the more distant possibility that we might someday think and feel differently about moral experience. Though we can give Rorty credit for being far-sighted in a way that pragmatists are rarely known for, there may be a more compelling alternative hypothesis for how to think about the feelings that James describes. Perhaps the reason life feels like a fight in which something eternal is at stake is because life is a fight in which something eternal is at stake. This hypothesis has far more resonance than the footnotes-to-Plato hypothesis, and it does so because of the consequences that follow from it. Not the least of these consequences is the fact that holding to an understanding of the human condition that brings deep significance to the fight enables us to sustain the strenuous mood for which Stuhr and other pragmatists have called. In a similar manner, seeing the fight as deeply significant also encourages us not to give up on the hope of "existential transformation" to which Rorty urges his audiences these days. Why does Rorty call us to such transformation unless he sees a rather constant need for it? And how shall we hope to see such transformation become real in our lives apart from the sense that there is something at stake in this matter. Rorty is right. There is something fundamentally wrong with us, and we do need to be transformed. The question is whether cheering us on and encouraging us to maintain the strenuous mood is going to be adequate. Rorty is a good preacher, and he can often be inspiring, but if he hopes to see "existential transformation" become a reality in our lives, he may need to have more to offer than the thin self-understanding from which he argues. He may need to get more completely in touch with whatever it is that resonates for us in the very call to existential transformation. Popular caricatures notwithstanding, the genre of pragmatism is probably not the instruction manual but the confessional. To trace the consequences of beliefs and to assess their value for life is finally a deeply personal story. Pragmatist writers are often engaging not only because they write lucidly and talk about practical matters, but also because they write autobiographically and confessionally. Both James and Rorty are at their best in their most confessional moments, and when Stuhr writes in the personal manner that he does in this issue of The Hedgehog Review, he is again writing as a pragmatist might be expected to do. The pragmatist's concern is life--what works and what doesn't, what is good and what is not--and the pragmatist knows that the best place to carry out this inquiry is one's own life, in conversation with others. Good pragmatist writing, then, is deeply personal. In my case, it is about facing the challenges of being an understanding and faithful husband, a patient and encouraging father, an appreciative and thoughtful son, a constant and supportive friend, a humble and unintimidated colleague, an active and caring citizen, and simply a human being who is ready to make sacrifices for strangers and to love his enemies. Still more to the point, it is about facing these challenges as someone who is troubled by his failings in these roles. The pragmatists are right. We do need action-guiding beliefs. If, however, these beliefs are truly going to guide our action in that realm of moral failure and moral hope where we all live, they will need to offer deep understandings of who we are. They will need to offer an understanding characterized by spirituality and transcendence, by incarnation and redemption, for these are the beliefs that are capable of guiding action in all those times when life continues to feel like a deeply significant fight. ________________________ [41]^1 Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 4. ] [42]^2 Writing at the beginning of the 1990s, Richard Bernstein framed these extremes in terms of the modern and postmodern--a way of speaking that not many would choose presently. In doing so he suggests that all the fuss over the terms may be little more than a way of talking about the grand swing from dogmatism to skepticism, from the lofty aspirations of modernity to the empty postmodern space into which those aspirations seemed to dissolve. ] [43]^3 William James, Pragmatism in Writings, 1902-1910 (New York: The Library of America, 1987) 512. ] [44]^4 James 531. ] [45]^5 James 506. ] [46]^6 James 573. ] [47]^7 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) xliv. ] [48]^8 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 87. ] [49]^9 Rorty, "Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions?," Academe: Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 80. 6 (1994): 58. ] [50]^10 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xxiii. ] [51]^11 William James, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) 41. ] [52]^12 James, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, 44. ] [53]^13 James, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, 43. ] [54]^14 James, Pragmatism, 521. ] [55]^15 James, The Meaning of Truth in Writings, 1902-1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987) 923. ] [56]^16 See Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism Without Method," Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 63-77; and William James, Pragmatism, 505-22. ] [57]^17 As quoted in Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958) 199. ] [58]^18 James, Pragmatism, 511. ] [59]^19 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 191. ] [60]^20 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 193. ] [61]^21 Marquis de Condorcet, "The Future Progress of the Human Mind," The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1995) 29. ] [62]^22 John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: The University of Chigago Press, 1994) 95. ] [63]^23 James, Pragmatism, 515. ] [64]^24 J?rgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1987) 33. ] [65]^25 Habermas 56. ] [66]^26 As quoted in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 57. ] [67]^27 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii. ] [68]^28 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii. ] [69]^29 Rorty, Truth and Progress, 54. ] [70]^30 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xxxvi. ] [71]^31 David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) 63. ] [72]^32 Cornel West, "Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic," The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas, 1999) 179. ] [73]^33 Cornel West, Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times (Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1993) 47. ] [74]^34 As quoted in West, The Cornel West Reader, 181. ] [75]^35 As quoted in West, The Cornel West Reader, 181. ] [76]^36 As quoted in West, The Cornel West Reader, 181-2. ] [77]^37 As quoted in Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 174. ] [78]^38 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 174. ] From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 23 08:53:01 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 04:53:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Richard V. Horner: Maintaining the Trajectory of Freedom Message-ID: Richard V. Horner: Maintaining the Trajectory of Freedom The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=849753&textreg=1&id=HorMain2-1 Richard V. Horner is a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is currently working on a book entitled, Possibilities of Pragmatism, which focuses on pragmatic responses to the post-modern impasse into which modernity has led. Introduction The hope of American democracy does not lie in the reassertion of self-evident truths, nor in the reconstruction of moral foundations, nor in a renewed faith in human reason. It does not lie in a revitalized republicanism rooted in civic virtue nor in a communitarian consensus rooted in a shared view of human nature. The hope of American democracy lies just where the pre-eminent pragmatist of our day says it does: in continuing along the trajectory defined by the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, the building of the land-grant colleges, female suffrage, the New Deal, Brown vs. Board of Education, the building of the community colleges, Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement.[3]^1 The hope of democracy, in other words, lies in continuing along a trajectory of freedom shaped by the conviction that one of the basic ends of government is still to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," or as Richard Rorty would put it, to serve the "endless, proliferating realization of Freedom"[4]^2 by guarding the live and let-live attitudes of bourgeois liberal democracy. Rorty is right again when he suggests that the only shared reason we need for continuing on this trajectory is that when we put it up against the alternatives, the pursuit of freedom beats the competition. In other words, our best shared defense of our political practices is likely to be a pragmatic one. This is not to say that there is a uniquely pragmatic justification of liberal democracy, but that we would do well to place our discussion of political theory and practice within a pragmatic frame. We should begin with the questions and problems that arise in experience, try on alternative answers and solutions, and weigh those alternatives against each other by tracing their consequences back into experience. As Rorty observes, we need not attach our conviction in favor of political liberalism to "a view about universally shared human ends, human rights, the nature of rationality, the Good for Man, nor anything else."[5]^3 To the contrary, recognizing that "a liberal society is badly served by an attempt to supply it with `philosophical foundations,'" we can "drop the idea of such foundations [and] regard the justification of liberal society simply as a matter of historical comparison with other attempts at social organization--those of the past and those envisaged by utopians."[6]^4 While Rorty does us a favor by moving us toward a pragmatic frame and pointing us in the direction of freedom, his own liberal vision does not hold up well when placed within this frame. Rorty's utopian vision leads to just the sort of illiberal consequences that he and a lot of the rest of us want to avoid. When he tells us that "the citizens of [his] liberal utopia...would be liberal ironists," and that the culture of this utopia would be one "in which no trace of divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized world or a divinized self,"[7]^5 Rorty demonstrates that his utopia is an ironist utopia but not a liberal utopia. His utopia would be a culture of and for liberal ironists that would have no room for those who do not share the ironic vision. When, in addition, Rorty asks all of us to frame our defense of political liberalism in a vocabulary that privileges the ironic and contingent, he again goes against his own good advice that we share only a pragmatic defense of freedom. In the end, Rorty does want to connect the practices of political liberalism to a particular understanding of the human condition. His understanding drops terms such as "comprehensive theory" or "foundations," but it is an understanding nonetheless, and by asking all of us to see it as offering the one defense of freedom to which we all must hold, Rorty excludes those who do not share his controversial and partisan vision. Ironically, the liberal ironist works against the endless proliferation of freedom. If we are to continue on the trajectory of freedom, then, we need an alternative hypothesis that serves the cause of freedom more effectively than Rorty's call for an ironist utopia. Cultural Disestablishment William Galston points us toward such an alternative when he argues that our "best hope for maximizing opportunities for individuals and groups to lead lives as they see fit" lies in a liberalism that applies a strategy of "cultural disestablishment parallel to religious disestablishment."[8]^6 Galston understands that while the strategy of disestablishment focused initially on religious differences, its genius does not lie in anything unique to religion, but rather in the recognition that where understandings of the human condition, interpretations of personal experience, and questions of meaning are in view, it is better for people to live by conviction than by constraint. Because so many citizens gave religious answers to questions about meaning in the eighteenth century, the strategy focused initially on differences drawn along religious lines. From the outset, however, the strategy not only accommodated those who found life's meaning in organized religions, it also accommodated those who constructed answers to their most basic questions in secular terms. The First Amendment granted freedom to specific religions across the spectrum of religious pluralism, and it granted freedom across the line between religious and secular understandings of life as well. As Jefferson put it, the American experiment provided a place not only for a range of religious orthodoxies, but also for the belief in twenty gods or in no god at all. Having identified this strategy as central to the genius of political liberalism, Galston also notes that modern liberalism has lost its way by taking sides where it ought to have guaranteed freedom. Instead of applying a strategy of cultural disestablishment to the deep difference between autonomy and tradition that runs through American society, Galston argues, modern liberalism has come down on the side of autonomy and made the problem of deep difference even more troubling than it needs to be. By imposing a high valuation of individual autonomy on groups and individuals who do not share that value in the same way, liberalism has fallen into an establishment stance that favors autonomy over its alternatives. As a result, freedom has been restricted and democracy is in trouble. Galston argues that liberalism should be "about the protection of diversity, not the valorization of choice." Therefore, "to place an ideal of autonomous choice...at the core of liberalism is in fact to narrow the range of possibilities available within liberal societies." The autonomy principle has come to represent "a kind of uniformity that exerts a pressure on ways of life that do not embrace autonomy."[9]^7 In the end, therefore, by marginalizing or excluding those who cannot embrace autonomy as the highest good, modern liberalism works against freedom rather than for it. Whereas some of Galston's peers want to solve this problem by freeing liberalism from its ties to autonomy and then linking liberalism to a traditionalist framework, or by establishing a communitarian or republican alternative in its place, Galston wants to address the problem by employing the strategy of cultural disestablishment. By utilizing this strategy Galston hopes to provide a place for those who value autonomy above all and for individuals and associations that do not value autonomy in the same way. "A liberal state need not and should not take sides on issues such as purity versus mixture or reason versus tradition," Galston writes.[10]^8 "Rather than taking autonomy or critical reflection as our points of departure, what we need instead is an account of liberalism that gives diversity its due." We need a "`Diversity State'...that afford[s] maximum feasible space for the enactment of individual and group differences, constrained only by the requirements of liberal social utility."[11]^9 To his credit Galston does not want to drive devotees of autonomy from the field. Instead, while practicing disestablishment across a variety of traditions, he also wants to practice disestablishment between autonomy and its alternatives. Autonomy should be disestablished, but devotees of autonomy should be granted free exercise, along with all who hold competing views of the highest good, within a diversity state. By taking this approach to lines of deep difference, Galston captures the genius of the First Amendment's disestablishment strategy. First, he affirms the view that it is good for people to be free to live by conviction rather than constraint when answering life's deepest questions. Second, he demonstrates that the genius of the disestablishment strategy does not lie in anything unique to religion but in its ability to deal effectively with deep cultural differences that can take a number of forms. Third, he reminds us that a disestablishment strategy often has to work on more than one level of difference at a time so as not to fall unwittingly into establishment patterns. Galston recognizes that while granting free exercise to a variety of traditions, we fell unwittingly into establishing a comprehensive doctrine of autonomy. He refuses, however, to react against autonomy by attempting to drive it from the field. Instead, he argues that what we should have been doing all along, and need to do now, is practice disestablishment with regard to specific traditions and also practice it across the line between traditionalism and autonomy, just as the founders did when they brought the strategy to bear not only on religious differences but also on the difference between religious and secular ways of thinking. Differences That Make a Difference Perhaps the reason we have not built on the precedent of cultural disestablishment as well as we might have is that the lines of deep cultural difference that divide us most have become more complex and difficult to identify than they were two hundred years ago. In the late eighteenth century one could visit the places of worship located within a few blocks of Independence Hall in Philadelphia and, at least with regard to religious pluralism, come away with a pretty good understanding of the lines that marked the major differences. If the name on the outside of the building and the furnishings inside did not tell you everything you needed to know, you could visit with a congregant, rector, priest, or pastor of the church, or with the lay president of the synagogue, and fill in the missing information readily enough. This is no longer the case, and with every passing year the task of identifying the lines of cultural difference that make a difference only becomes more complicated. Diversity gives birth to diversity, not only multiplying lines of division but weaving them together in multi-dimensional complexity. As a result the significant lines of difference are continually shifting and constantly challenging our intention to continue on the trajectory of freedom. Today, the lines of cultural difference that come most readily to mind are probably those that center on the body. Lines of difference defined by gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, and disabilities stand alongside differences of class and religion as lines that mark just the sort of deep cultural differences to which the only adequate response is the strategy of cultural disestablishment. If we are to enjoy freedom, those of us who think of ourselves primarily along these lines of difference need to be able to do so without fear that the government or public institutions are going to attempt to coerce us to do otherwise. Indeed, we need to know that public institutions will be there to assure us of our freedom to live according to our own understandings, convictions, and designs. Recognizing that these lines identify deep cultural differences that parallel eighteenth-century lines of religious pluralism constitutes an important step in the trajectory of freedom, and we would do well to continue to guard against the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which one group, or overlapping solidarity of groups, becomes established at the expense of others. What William Simon has written about sexuality, however, one could also write about race, gender, ethnicity, disability, class, age, and religion: "For all the significance we attach to it," he writes, "sexual behavior does little to signify by itself....It becomes articulate by being transformed into sexual conduct--that is, behavior given meaning, evaluated." Sexual behavior is meaning-dependent and "in its very meaning-dependency, sexuality must reflect the broad changes taking place at both cultural and individual levels."[12]^10 Otherwise, "to know about an individual's sexual history--even to know it in great detail--is to know very little, to have little understanding of why it occurred or the meaning it will have for that person."[13]^11 We must be careful, therefore, not to assume that there is a single homosexual culture or a single heterosexual culture, and we must guard against thinking that by categorizing people with regard to sexual practice we have thereby understood them. The same applies to other lines of division as well. To identify someone as being a member of some specific category (woman, black, Asian, gay, retired, Jewish, or working class) is not necessarily to have identified the core of that person's self understanding, and where that identity is central to the individual, it still needs to be given its meaning. While we do well to continue to work hard to guard freedom across all of these lines of identity, therefore, we also need to be sensitive to the fact that there are other lines of difference that inform our identities and beliefs and give meaning to them. One such line of deep cultural difference lies between essentialist and non-essentialist understandings of human experience. On the essentialist side of the line, one finds a variety of ahistoricist understandings of the human condition that make claims to universality. On the non-essentialist side of the line, one finds understandings of human experience that are historicized and contingent. On the essentialist side, one finds stories about what we humans share with each other that are long and detailed and have lots to say on the subject. On the non-essentialist side one finds rather brief narratives whose main point is that there is not much to say about what human beings share and that we would do well not to put too much emphasis on the question. Essentialist stories are deep and binding, and flow from the authority of reason, science, or religion. Non-essentialist stories emphasize self-creation and lead to ways of thinking about experience because they are possible. The one sort of story sees the self as a work of discovery, the other holds that the self is a work of imagination, and both stories say of the true, the good, and the beautiful what they say of the self. For the one these are notions of depth whose essences are to be discovered, and for the other they are notions that will run only as deep as whatever we put into them. This deep line of difference between essentialism and non-essentialism informs and cuts across lines drawn by the body, class, and religion. It separates those for whom racial or sexual identities are central to their understanding of human nature from those for whom these identities provide alternative descriptions of non-essentialist solidarities. In a similar way the essentialist vs. non-essentialist line separates those for whom sexual orientation is a given that defines who they are from those for whom sexuality identifies a domain of self-creativity and imagination. The line also runs through religious discourse and belief, demonstrating that the deeper religious differences at work today are not among Catholic, Protestant, and Jew, but between those believers who view "the various truths and practices of a religion as socially constructed" and those believers "who are desperately striving to keep the old faith" as the ahistorical and absolute faith that they consider it to be.[14]^12 In short, a line of deep division between those who see their identities and beliefs as contingent and created, on the one side, and those who see their identities and beliefs as deeply enduring and discovered, on the other, informs and cuts across other lines of deep division drawn by differences of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, class, age, and religion. The question is: how shall we respond to this line of deep difference? The answer is that we should employ the strategy of cultural disestablishment that Galston finds in the First Amendment. Rather than committing liberalism, on the one hand, to "curing us of our `deep metaphysical need,'"[15]^13 or, on the other hand, to unifying us around transcendence or tradition, we can grant free exercise to both essentialist and non-essentialist understandings of human experience and refuse to establish either one over the other. As the writers of the First Amendment guaranteed freedom among religions and between religious and secular understandings of life, and as Galston preserves a place for specific traditions without establishing either autonomy or traditionalism in the process, so we can grant freedom across a variety of beliefs and identities without falling unwittingly into rendering all our identities and beliefs either essentialist or non-essentialist in the process. The strategy of disestablishment often needs to function on more than one level at a time, and it can do so here once again. If freedom is to go all the way down to what matters most to us, then it must extend across differences drawn by lines of identity, without establishing essentialism at the expense of those who see their identities as contingent and created or establishing non-essentialism at the expense of those who see their identities as absolute and discovered. The line of difference between essentialists and non-essentialists can and must stand alongside differences of religion, class, age, disability, race, gender, and sexuality without either overshadowing those differences or being obscured by them. These are all lines of deep difference that make a difference, and we will continue on the trajectory of freedom only if we apply the strategy of cultural disestablishment to this line of difference as we have to the other lines of difference that have divided us most deeply. The Free Defense of Freedom If freedom is to be genuine, furthermore, we will need to apply the strategy of cultural disestablishment particularly when our deep differences emerge in the defense of freedom. The stories that give us our best arguments in support of the principles and strategies of political liberalism are also the stories by which we make sense of our lives. If there is to be freedom regarding the stories by which we make sense of life, then there must also be freedom with regard to the ways that these stories lead us to support the ideals and strategies of political liberalism. Where the justification of political liberalism is at issue, we are still dealing with deep differences to which the only adequate response is a strategy of cultural disestablishment that allows no single line of defense to be established at the expense of others. When we do allow any single line of reasoning, whether based in tradition or autonomy, orthodoxy or irony, to be elevated above its alternatives, we cut into the very freedom we hope to secure. If the desired consequence is freedom, and if freedom is to be genuine, it must go all the way down to the differences that divide us most deeply and extend all the way out to the reasons we give for preserving the freedom that we cherish. Freedom, furthermore, is not the only thing at stake. Extending freedom all the way out to our defense of freedom would not only enlarge the experience of freedom, it would also lend broader support to the liberal regime that grants that freedom. If people are free to defend freedom in ways that flow from the stories that matter most to them, freedom will flourish and so will support for the liberal regime that provides that freedom. If, to the contrary, faithful supporters of political liberalism must share a particular justification, then political liberalism deprives itself of the support of all who do not come to its defense by means of this justification. Despite their desire to be seen as good political liberals and to lend their support to the regime, potential supporters find themselves excluded, and their resistance to the party line with regard to justifying liberalism comes to be seen as resistance to liberalism itself. As the misunderstandings deepen, the rhetoric sharpens, and both insiders and outsiders forget how much of political liberalism they genuinely share. As a result, individual freedom suffers, and the liberal regime undermines its own support. Once again, Galston's analysis of the marriage between liberalism and autonomy is helpful. Galston argues that it was when political liberals began to see an autonomy philosophy as offering the one legitimate justification of the ideals and strategies of political liberalism that political liberalism got into trouble. Galston understands that: Autonomy-based arguments are bound to marginalize those individuals and groups who cannot conscientiously embrace the Enlightenment Project. To the extent that many liberals identify liberalism with the Enlightenment Project, they limit support for their cause and drive many citizens of good will--indeed, many potential allies--into opposition.[16]^14 By demanding that we all hold to a justification of liberalism that is based in giving priority to autonomy, and thereby driving would-be supporters into an antagonistic stance, the supposed devotees of liberal ism turn out to be liberalism's own worst enemies As a result, the friends of liberalism do a disservice not only to freedom and to their fellow citizens, but also to the liberal regime they hope to support. As Galston observes, "It would not be difficult to explain the disasters of recent American progressive politics along these lines."[17]^15 To continue on the trajectory of freedom, then, parties on both sides of the lines of deep difference that divide us most would do well to allow the justification of freedom to reflect these deep differences. The liberal ironist need not enlist us all in the "cause of providing contemporary liberal culture with a vocabulary which is all its own, cleansing it of the residues of a vocabulary which was suited to the needs of former days."[18]^16 He need not supply liberalism with a single vocabulary "which revolves around notions of metaphor and self-creation rather than around notions of truth, rationality, and moral obligation."[19]^17 In a similar manner, the liberal essentialist, and her republican and communitarian allies, need not unite us all around a single essentialist justification, whether rooted in higher-level intersubjectivity or autonomy, in theistic faith or republican virtue. There is no more virtue in driving non-essentialists to the margins than there is in excluding essentialists, and a political liberalism that insists on doing so only undermines itself and opposes the cause of freedom. Whether we are making a case for the strategy of disestablishment, arguing for the ideal of individual liberty, or justifying political liberalism more broadly, we need not view either a non-essentialist vocabulary or an essentialist line of argument as providing the one justification to which all political liberals of good faith must subscribe. We can, instead, welcome the justifications of liberal freedom that both essentialists and non-essentialists bring and guard the freedom by which both parties bring those justifications. Conclusion The good news in all of this is that so many of us, coming from such deeply rivalrous cultural traditions, have agreed in affirming liberal freedoms when allowed to do so on our own terms. Over the past couple of centuries presbyterians, congregationalists, anabaptists, and Quakers have concurred. Catholics, Protestants, Jews and other religious communities have agreed. The religiously inclined and the secular-minded have agreed. People from across the racial and ethnic spectrum, men and women, young and old, heterosexuals and homosexuals, and a whole range of social classes have agreed. Advocates for autonomy and adherents to tradition have lent their support, and now we find that essentialists and non-essentialists concur. Richard Rorty, on the one side, assures us that seeing "one's language, one's conscience, one's morality, and one's highest hopes as contingent products, as literalizations of what once were accidentally produced metaphors, is to adopt a self-identity which suits one for citizenship in such an ideally liberal state."[20]^18 Richard Neuhaus, on the other side, assures us that the Catholic church is "intellectually and institutionally, the world's most influential champion of human freedom," and even that "the principles and practices of the free society are made necessary by Catholic teaching."[21]^19 This consensus is good news, and we would do well to make the most of it both for the sake of freedom and for the sake of the liberal regime that secures that freedom. The bad news is that the lines of deep difference that make a difference are drawn most clearly by our fears. Whether they focus on the body, class, and religion, or on the lines of thought that inform these differences, the lines of deep difference that matter most are also lines of fear. They are marked, for instance, by homophobia and the fear of fundamentalism, by the fear of feminism and the fear of populist masculinities. They are marked by racial and ethnic fears and by fears across classes and generations. They are marked by the fear that open-minded, autonomous individualists have of narrow-minded traditionalists and by the fear that community-minded traditionalists have of self-centered individualists. Now, increasingly, they are marked by the fear that makes good-hearted, freedom-loving essentialists question whether democracy can survive the dissolvents of smirking ironists, and good-hearted, freedom-loving ironists question whether democracy can survive the dogmatisms of blinkered essentialists. These fears, however, need not lead us to despair. As John Gray observes, it was in the context of fear that the liberal strategy of granting freedom across lines of deep difference first proved to be such a good idea.[22]^20 Yes, the founders were sadly inconsistent in applying this strategy, but they did at least teach us that the strength of political liberalism lies in its ability to see our fears not as marking the limits of freedom, but as marking the points at which freedom matters most. Unfortunately, over the past two centuries too many of us have come to think that the strength of liberalism lies in its ability to overcome our fears by unifying all of us around a single understanding of life, or a single vocabulary, or a single line of justification of liberalism itself. We have forgotten that liberalism's strength does not lie in its ability to impose a common way of thinking about life or even about liberalism, but in its willingness to respond to lines of deep difference and fear by refusing to establish one party to difference over another. As unnerving as our fears may be, therefore, we do well to take note of them, for if we will allow them to, they will identify the lines of difference that make a difference. They will identify the deep differences we cherish most and out of which liberalism's best justifications flow. Our fears, in short, will identify the places where freedom matters most, and if we will face our fears both honestly and liberally, they will plot the course of the trajectory of freedom. ________________________ [23]^1 Richard Rorty, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," Common Knowledge 1 (Winter, 1992): 150. ] [24]^2 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) xvi. ] [25]^3 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 84. ] [26]^4 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 52, 53. ] [27]^5 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 61, 45. ] [28]^6 William Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," Ethics 105 (April, 1995): 527, 528. ] [29]^7 Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," 523. ] [30]^8 Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," 523. ] [31]^9 Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," 524. ] [32]^10 William Simon, "The Postmodernization of Sex and Gender," The Truth About the Truth: De-confusing and Re-constructing the Postmodern World, ed. Walter Truett Anderson (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1995) 158. ] [33]^11 Simon, "The Postmodernization of Sex and Gender," 159. ] [34]^12 Walter Truett Anderson, "Introduction: What's Going On Here?" The Truth About the Truth, 9,10. ] [35]^13 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 46. ] [36]^14 Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," 526. ] [37]^15 Galston, "Two Concepts of Liberalism," 526. ] [38]^16 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 55. ] [39]^17 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 44. ] [40]^18 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 61. ] [41]^19 Richard John Neuhaus, "Forward," Catholicism, Liberalism, and Communitarianism: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the Moral Foundations of Democracy, eds. Kenneth L. Grasso, Gerard V. Bradley, and Robert P. Hunt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995) ix, xi. ] [42]^20 See John Gray's "Two Liberalisms of Fear" in this issue of The Hedgehog Review. ] From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 23 08:55:08 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 04:55:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Jonathan B. Imber: Twilight of the Prosthetic Gods: Medical Technology and Trust Message-ID: Jonathan B. Imber: Twilight of the Prosthetic Gods: Medical Technology and Trust The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=885242&textreg=1&id=ImbPros4-3 Jonathan B. Imber is Class of code 1949 /code Professor in Ethics and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. Formerly editor of The American Sociologist, he has been editor-in-chief of Society since 1997. He is a former fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. His books include: Trusting Doctors: The Decline of Moral Authority in American Medicine (forthcoming); The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings of Philip Rieff (1990); and Abortion and the Private Practice of Medicine (1986). It was Sigmund Freud's lamentation about happiness in Civilization and Its Discontents that introduced the idea of a prosthetic God: Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. Nevertheless, he is entitled to console himself with the thought that this development will not come to an end precisely with the year code 1930 /code a.d. Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character. [3]^1 The unhappiness to which Freud refers may be about mortality itself, but it may also be about how extensively the "Godlike character" of human beings, and the technology that makes it possible, is associated with what is meant by happiness. For the past half century, the material progress of medicine has given rise to two types of debates about technology and the human person: one has to do with the limits of such progress, the other with the autonomy of those who are subject to it. In this essay I will argue that these two debates are, in reality, reflections of one enduring problem about the nature of trust in persons and, in particular, "corporate" persons, that is, professionals. The significance of technology in relation to this problem of trust arises not so much in the nature of technology itself but in its application to problems that arise as a result of confrontations with disease and death. Autonomy and the End of Life Surely Friedrich Nietzsche's moral code for physicians establishes one basis for understanding the cultural meaning of autonomy as it has come to take its place in modern life: A Moral Code for Physicians.--The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life has been lost ought to entail the profound contempt of society. Physicians, in their turn, ought to be the communicators of this contempt--not prescriptions, but everyday a fresh dose of disgust with their patient.... To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, in all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending of life, demands the most ruthless suppression and sequestration of degenerating life--for example in determining the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to live.... To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave taking is possible while he who is still living is still there, likewise an actual evaluation of what has been desired and what achieved in life, an adding-up of life--all of this is in contrast to the pitiable and horrible comedy Christianity has made of the hour of death. [4]^2 Nietzsche did not advocate a private dying; on the contrary he regarded the deliberate choice to end one's life as something to be "consummated in the midst of children and witnesses." Why children? I suppose for the purpose of impressing upon them from an early age the contempt for decrepitude that Nietzsche championed. Children do not easily and readily pay attention to adults; they are more often served by adult attention, especially today. It is entirely better in Nietzsche's view that they learn early on to forget about needing to attend to those who cannot give them attention. What better way than to witness suicide, perhaps regularly, and, even better, that kind of suicide we now call "assisted" at the skilled hands of physicians? If I read such autonomy correctly, it requires a corporate assent that includes family, friends, and friendly physicians. It is a socially and culturally defined autonomy of a particular kind. Nietzsche's idea of autonomy found resonance, of course, among Nazi ideologists, but the idea of having some sort of control over one's departure from life is not destined to be murderous. William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903), the Irish historian whose two works, History of Rationalism (1865) and History of European Morals (1869) established him as one of the major mediators between natural theology and modern rationalism in the nineteenth century, stated the dilemma less polemically than Nietzsche did: But the time must come when all the alternatives of life are sad, and the least sad is a speedy and painless end. When the eye has ceased to see and the ear to hear, when the mind has failed and all the friends of youth are gone, and the old man's life becomes a burden not only to himself but to those about him, it is far better that he should quit the scene. If a natural clinging to life, or a natural shrinking from death, prevents him from clearly realizing this, it is at least fully seen by all others. [5]^3 Two notions of autonomy compete for our acceptance. On one side--which is our Nietzschean inheritance--we define liberty not only as freedom from others but also as freedom from ourselves, from that aspect of our bodily and mental capacities we wish to change in some way or another. This would not be especially troubling except for the specific kinds of choices such freedom offers. On the other side--which is represented by the cultural inheritances from our major religious traditions--we define the limits of our liberty as a way of determining our responsibilities to others and ourselves. We understand the recognition of the divide between personal liberty and social responsibility to be one of the enduring features and tensions of modernity. The "right" to kill oneself, in the same way as the "right" to abortion, has always struck me as peculiar to and indicative of the modern sensibility about how personal liberty and social responsibility go together. All of modern public health is a testament to this sensibility, one in which the ancient motivations of shame and guilt have been recycled into the modern motivations of self-improvement and self-convenience. A Shift in Moral Sensibilities In his chapter on "Saintliness" in The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James remarked: A strange moral transformation has within the past century swept over our Western world. We no longer think that we are called on to face physical pain with equanimity. It is not expected of a man that he should either endure it or inflict much of it, and to listen to the recital of cases of it makes our flesh creep morally as well as physically. The way in which our ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal ingredient of the world's order, and both caused and suffered it as a matter-of-course portion of their day's work, fills us with amazement. [6]^4 The "strange moral transformation" that James described paved the way to our present circumstances in which the endurance of pain is unacceptable except as we may choose to endure it. The ever louder cultural protest has been, for at least a hundred years, against the blind acceptance of any inevitability about the human condition, including how we depart this life. What has happened in the course of truly great achievements in the history of public health and of modern medicine is that larger numbers of our fellow human beings are conscious that only one thing yet remains unavoidable, that final relieving of anxiety, which our more refined anxieties obviously anticipate. This is why James' remark about the strange moral transformation marks a cultural turning point in what the quest for health and well-being means in an era when only death, if not disease, seems defiant of rational apprehension. Genetic determinants of illness will be, I expect, for some time to come reflected in public opinion as something akin to bad luck. But even this will change, perhaps in some series of dramatic breakthroughs, leaving us with the following sense of fate: only the accident of consciousness (or what was once put philosophically and sociologically as the "accident of birth" [7]^5 ) and accidents themselves (now high on the list of causes of mortality in those under fifty years of age) will not yield to complete invention or prevention. What demographers have pointed out for some time is that with the decline in birthrates, helped by the decline in infant mortality, and with the steady increase in longevity, due to a steady improvement in public health measures and medicine over the same time, we have created a world in some places, certainly not all, where individual health and wellness are not only indirect benefits of centuries-long scientific and technological progress but have also become intense sources of investment, anxiety, and expense. In recent years, expenditures on healthcare in the United States have reached around 14% of the gross domestic product, or approximately $ code 4,390 /code per capita. When compared to the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare in the United Kingdom, the number is about half. The significant point of comparison, however, is that the United States and England have comparable figures with respect to morbidity and mortality rates, longevity, and other principal measures of health and well-being. For most analysts of public health, and in particular, economists, such a comparison is the equivalent of exposing not only inefficiency but immorality. Otherwise insistent about the imperatives of the rational actor, more than a few economists over much of the past century have never been entirely persuaded that the medical profession is anything other than, to use George Bernard Shaw's memorable remark, a conspiracy against the laity. Of course, Shaw was condemning the medical profession's concealment of malpractice, but he meant to convey that all professions, including the profession of economics, are "conspiracies against the laity." It would be better to look beyond this remark to his even more powerful summation of the situation: "Invited to contribute a series of articles in a Manchester paper in reply to the question, `Have We Lost Faith?' Mr George Bernard Shaw gives his answer in this single sentence: `Certainly not; but we have transferred it from God to the General Medical Council.'" [8]^6 Shaw's humor, the truth of which we recognize more clearly today perhaps than readers did a century ago, had more to say about doctors than about patients, who are, I think, equally deserving of being reminded that when physicians profitably acquiesce to requests for more examinations and tests, we see that the road to wellness has also been paved with better intentions than either astute economists or complaining patients are necessarily ready to acknowledge. The fact that the United States leads the world in the consumption of healthcare resources may have less to do with the nature of medical practice than with the remarkable convergence of science, technology, faith, and affluence that serve to inspire American complaints about everything to a finer degree than is possible anywhere else. To be exquisitely anxious is a kind of cultural resignation to the absence of more immediate and momentous problems that have beset so much of humanity for so long. There is something wonderful about this kind of progress and wonderfully empty, as Freud lamented in his observations about "prosthetic Gods" in Civilization and Its Discontents. [9]^7 The goal of complete prosthetic replacement parallels the obsessive avoidance of all that may imperil us. The logic of such developments, sociologists and anthropologists long ago recognized, defines the nature of institutions in which those aspects of individuality, including the individual himself, are necessarily dispensable. No individual is an institution, at least not for long. Freud recognized that discontents were not principally based on the organization of our environment--although the central dogma of public health would so contend--except for that vast internal environment within each of us that is inaccessible to others and often to ourselves as well. The unintended consequence of living longer has been that we expect, indeed demand, that less happen to us in terms of adversity along the way. Such yearning for clear sailing is nothing new, and I am hesitant to call this being selfish or spoiled in some new way, because I think it represents a problem that was just as familiar to Plato in his Dialogues as it was to John Wesley and Cardinal Newman in their respective sermons on "The Danger of Riches." This problem for our time is that health and well-being, although quite understandably conceived of as material things, are something we either have or do not have in terms of blessings rather than rights. Newman, for example, knew that having such riches and putting our trust in them were two different things entirely. The trust, as he and many others after him have observed, is misplaced, a sight lower, as it were than where such trust should be placed. But this is our fate after the backdrop of heaven and hell has fallen away and in its place we put our trust in physicians, in their science and their technologies. The intensity of distrust in doctors, I would contend, is in fact evidence of the demand for trust in things that we believe will keep us alive longer, if not forever. William Osler and Public Trust in Doctors That public confidence in the motives and actions of doctors has never been thoroughly secure should not surprise us. What is interesting, quite apart from some expected frequency of deviance among those otherwise trusted in their medical vocation, is when ridicule is directed at the most distinguished rather than the least reputable. A spectacular, and thus revealing, instance occurred upon the occasion of William Osler's departure from the Johns Hopkins University in 1905. In my reading of such an incident, the illuminations of authority are most important to examine. It is the character of this authority in its personal and corporate manifestations that defines the nature of trust and directs our attention to those anxieties that such trust is intended to appease if not eliminate. Osler (1849-1919) is regarded as the doctor's doctor, and his name remains synonymous with humanistic medicine. He was in every sense an iconic figure, larger than life, and an embodiment of vocation and dedication. [10]^8 Osler's appointment at Hopkins as Professor of Medicine began in 1889, where he remained for sixteen years. He was instrumental in the founding and subsequent fame of the Medical School at Hopkins (which opened in 1893), and it was during this same time that his reputation and fame increased greatly. In 1904, he accepted the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford and left Hopkins on May 15, 1905. [11]^9 How and why was it, then, that for a brief period he was widely regarded as an advocate of forced retirement and euthanasia? Various analyses of the specific incident that led to the ridiculing of Osler's reputation have been written defensively. They blame journalists but take little notice of what the widespread upset may have revealed about the public's perception of doctors. The canonical account is given by Harvey Cushing in The Life of Sir William Osler. [12]^10 In preparing for his final address to his Hopkins' colleagues in February 1905, Osler selected the title "The Fixed Period," after Anthony Trollope's novel of the same name. The novel, published in code 1882 /code at the end of Trollope's life, is set in code 1980 /code and recounts the imaginary country of Britannula where the citizens pass a law whose purpose is to rid themselves of the infirmities of old age by fixing an exact age when all people should be euthanized. The Fixed Period is narrated by the President of Britannula, John Neverbend, who writes his account while returning to England after his efforts to carry out the plans for a fixed period are prevented by British authorities. Neverbend's sincerity never wavers about the merit of fixing a time when a person, by virtue of age (in Britannula, 67), should give up his life, in effect, for the good of all. It would also be a death with dignity: "I had felt it to be essentially necessary so to maintain the dignity of the ceremony as to make it appear as unlike an execution as possible." [13]^11 The first candidate for "deposition" in a "college" where, after a year, he would be put to death is Neverbend's "almost dearest" friend, Gabriel Crasweller. The naming of the college, Necropolis, is a source of some debate, with Neverbend preferring "Aditus," while another proposes "Cremation Hall." Those around Neverbend, including his wife, are not convinced of the idea itself or that Crasweller's time has come in any case. Their resistance and reasons for it are thick with common sense and everyday experience, despite the euphemisms that abound about its being anything but an execution. Critics at the time described the novel as a jeu d'esprit. Robert Tracy concludes that it "is not a satire on Victorian England. It is instead--as the President's name suggests--a satire on the narrow-mindedness and the lack of human sympathy that characterize abstract reformers." [14]^12 When Osler took Trollope's jeu d'esprit and tossed it merrily into American public notice in 1905, it did not occur to him that he was introducing a bit of British satire that Americans might take literally. Here is Osler: It is a very serious matter in our young universities to have all of the professors growing old at the same time. In some places, only an epidemic, a time limit, or an age limit can save the situation. I have two fixed ideas well known to my friends, harmless obsessions with which I sometimes bore them, but which have a direct bearing on this important problem. The first is the comparative uselessness above forty years of age. This may seem shocking, and yet read aright the world's history bears out the statement.... The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty--these fifteen golden years of plenty, the anabolic or constructive period, in which there is always a balance in the mental bank and the credit is still good.... To modify an old saying, a man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty--or never My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political and in professional life if, as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age. In his Biathanatos Donne tells us that by the laws of certain wise states sexagenarri were precipitated from a bridge, and in Rome men of that age were not admitted to the suffrage and they were called Depontani because the way to the senate was per pontem, and they from age were not permitted to come thither. In that charming novel, The Fixed Period, Anthony Trollope discusses the practical advantages in modern life of a return to this ancient usage, and the plot hinges upon the admirable scheme of a college into which at sixty men retired for a year of contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform. [15]^13 That incalculable benefits might follow such a scheme is apparent to any one who, like myself, is nearing the limit, and who has made a careful study of the calamities which may befall men during the seventh and eighth decades.... Whether Anthony Trollope's suggestion of a college and chloroform should be carried out or not I have become a little dubious, as my own time is getting so short. [16]^14 The reactions in newspapers to Osler's address were thunderous, leading him to speak out in his own defense on the front page of The New York Times. Five days after his address, following numerous news reports with headlines such as "Useless at 40" and "Professor Osler Recommends all at code 60 /code to be Chloroformed," Osler responded: I have been so misquoted in the papers that I should like to make the following statement: "First--I did not say that men at sixty should be chloroformed; that was the point in the novel to which I referred, and on which the plot hinged. Second--Nothing in the criticisms have shaken my conviction that the telling work of the world has been done and is done by men under forty years of age. The exceptions which have been given only illustrate the rule. Thirdly--It would be for the general good if men at sixty were relieved from active work. We should miss the energies of some young-old men, but on the whole it would be of the greatest service to the sexagenarii themselves." [17]^15 Osler's insistence that he was primarily misunderstood, and that Trollope's ideas were Trollope's and not his, allowed him to distance himself from the more hyperbolic claim that he endorsed the idea of literally disposing of the old. In the third edition of his deservedly famous book of essays Aequanimitas, Osler wrote from England: To one who had all his life been devoted to old men, it was not a little distressing to be placarded in a world-wide way as their sworn enemy, and to every man over sixty whose spirit I may have thus unwittingly bruised, I tender my heartfelt regrets. Let me add, however, that the discussion which followed my remarks has not changed, but has rather strengthened my belief that the real work of life is done before the fortieth year and that after the sixtieth year it would be best for the world and best for themselves if men rested from their labors. [18]^16 It is impossible, from such a distance in time, to estimate the effects of Osler's remarks on the public, however much they may have been taken out of context. He rationalized, for example, that newspapers might have been having their own fun at his expense. Twelve days before his departure from America, The New York Times published a cartoon depicting old men coming out from hiding as Osler walks off in the distance. His impression that the papers did have some fun at his expense was not unreasonable. However, a few reports appeared of people committing suicide, their bodies found with news clippings of Osler's address nearby. [19]^17 His apology to "every man over sixty" and his continued insistence about the rightfulness of his views about aging raise an interesting problem about the role of professional advice--individual and corporate--especially in light of the association of reports of suicides with his remarks. It is entirely possible that a few older people took his words to heart, that is, they recognized the diminution of their own powers along with their social standing. Of course, Osler's was a social prescription, a vague statement of public policy, rather than a form of individual counsel. He failed to recognize the powerful connection in some minds between his authority as a physician with patients in his care and the meaning of his words outside that context to those not in his immediate care but who accepted his wisdom as a physician. In so failing, he illustrates one of the profoundest dilemmas of where to draw the line between personal responsibility and public good. Another problem emerges from this cautionary tale, in terms of the meaning of anecdotes and statistics. Osler based his social pronouncements on a literary text, a flight from a social reality which itself was captured, distorted, and missed in Trollope's imaginary musings. The missing part was reiterated in the newspapers in the form of examples of old people still vital and productive. Osler dismissed these examples as being exceptions to the rule, thus proving it. He never gave up his conviction that institutional mechanisms must be used to make room for the young in the pursuit of knowledge. He favored incentives to retire. The arguments he provoked have continued to inspire debates about retirement and euthanasia, two things lately that seem to have been separated in the public mind. But that retired physician, now imprisoned, Jack Kevorkian, whether or not he knows of Osler or Trollope, has called attention once again to the question of whose authority it is, in principle, to give and take away life. Appeals to a mix of anecdotal testimony and relentlessly gathered statistical overviews have put the matter of principle out of focus. Osler proposed a philosophical way of seeing that, like Trollope's, was contradicted in two ways: by the voice of experience and common sense and by the accumulating social-epidemiological evidence of continued vitality into old age. Nevertheless, he reminded that the principle of authority rises above the demands of experience and the facts of social science, for the betterment of both. Control and the Absence of Certainty The example of Osler, in his personal authority as a physician, seems familiar to us but evermore at a distance--today the stakes appear higher in many respects, especially given the fact that the individual actions of physicians are exposed more for malpractice than celebrated for greatness. What we allow to be done or not to be done is no longer so consistently mediated by personal authority, and so looking for answers by looking for people to provide them may misconstrue how serious the stakes have become. But what is the alternative? Part of the absence of certainty about what is not to be done in particular arises from the hope of progress itself. Max Weber, in such formulations as "the disenchantment of the world" and "the rationalization of the world," envisioned a cold, brisk wind blowing across Occidental ideas about the connection between hope and progress. Progress proceeds, as it were, with neither a sense of divine intervention nor implication. Among his most brilliant insights, C. S. Lewis observed that when the apostles preached to the pagans, the pagans had and feared their gods, even as we have so many who doubt even that one exists. The pagan fear was about a choice among divine powers, whereas ours is a fear that no power is decisive. The religious mission has become doubly difficult because the laity has to be persuaded that it actually possesses a spiritual condition before it can be offered a cure, whatever that cure may be. Such was the older meaning of hope in the hope of progress. Torn from any number of spiritual moorings, this hope is now a will to power, at which complaints for over a century have been directed. Unfortunately these complaints have not succeeded in changing the character of this progress. The Weberian imperative of a science and technology projecting onto the world a vision of control of that world gives no indication of any kind of mediating authority about who is in control other than who succeeds at being in control. Taking control of your life, as the therapeutic prescription now requires, means trusting in others only to the extent absolutely necessary, and no more. Perhaps this shallowness of trust is inversely related to the intensity of our disappointments. At the center of this control, from opposite ends of the continuum of life, abortion and physician-assisted suicide, both employing relatively simple technologies, are manifestations of the shallowness of trust and the bitter heart of disappointment. But they are the pre-conditions for much of the prosthetic technologies and subsequent hopes that have followed for the individual. In a collectivist sense, the era of social engineering gave tyrants a license to imagine themselves as prosthetic gods. Perhaps the next utopian idea after the repudiation of collectivism will come to be seen as the complete exercise of "private" control over human beings in their removal from the world. Both abortion and physician-assisted suicide are the private abandonment of hope for and beyond this life. They are constantly heralded as public rights against which any resistance, however construed, is called infringement. But an enormous cultural inversion has taken place, since what is now perceived of as an infringement, at least in moral terms, was once regarded as protection based on a general prohibition against the taking of life. Some years ago in one of the many iterations of debate over the "right" to die, I came across the following three sentences in a letter to The New York Times: I prefer to die without being able to ask for a doctor to help me kill myself. Come the time, I will not even want to think about that. I surely will not want the people around me thinking I should be thinking about that. [20]^18 This observation made by Mr. Julius B. Poppinga in code 1994 /code clearly stands in stark contrast to the pronouncements of secular elites who are central to envisioning and thus promoting a world in which the pain of living may be as much a pain to others as it is to the person in pain. Mr. Poppinga, an attorney and an elder of Grace Presbyterian Church in Montclair, New Jersey, suggested a plausible alternative to Nietzsche's proposed solution of 1889: the "that" in his plea ("I surely will not want the people around me thinking I should be thinking about that") is a form of double forgetting, a double not thinking about "that." Mr. Poppinga was asking not only that he not have to consider the subject of physician-assisted suicide "come the time" but also that he not have to think about such an "option" as something on the minds of others "around" him. The term "around," as in "I surely will not want the people around me thinking," defines the social context, that is, the role of the will of others, in this kind of double-forgetting. A cultural repression is a form of prohibition that exists prior to consciousness and its deliberations. In this case the idea of physician-assisted suicide would be repressed both as something that one would consider for oneself and as something that one would know others would expect one to consider. Individual "autonomy" is presently credited as the source and arbiter of thinking about physician-assisted suicide. Yet such a widely debated expectation should be seen as the failing of a cultural repression that was once sufficient in its capacity to judge the individual consideration of all suicide to be a kind of self-doubt, a failure on the part of the individual. The next step in a failing cultural repression is the replacement of that self-doubt with collective affirmation that such self-doubt is instead a species of self-control. In the case of assisted suicide, the failing cultural repression does not, by the fiction of autonomy or by the collective indifference to suffering, necessarily lead to a widespread practice of euthanasia. This would require a wholly different degree of public coercion. Instead, an uneasy balance exists between those who are intent on hastening their own deaths by active intervention and those who acknowledge that pain, as William James observed, does not have to be endured for its own sake. This must be seen as a vast improvement, leading to more attentive hospice care, for example. In democratic societies especially, the resistance to shifting this balance too far in the direction of support for assisted suicide is likely to remain fairly strong, thus avoiding a broad transformation in the social patterns of how we die. Conclusion In contemporary debates about the corruptions of the medical profession, the harshest criticisms have been aimed at the entrepreneurs of managed care and for-profit medicine. They certainly have something to answer for, although it seems that patient satisfaction in general has not suffered as much as some critics would like to contend. Various social and intellectual movements, in and around medicine, however, have diminished the status and importance of the individual practitioner in ways that have yet to be fully accounted for. Such practitioners operate, literally, in the twilight of moral sensibilities about the meaning of human life. When he examined comparable problems of physician authority twenty-five years ago in Ethics at the Edges of Life, the theologian Paul Ramsey concluded: [O]ur children and our children's children will not even have been cognizant of the fact they have journeyed on into the setting sun of Western law and morality, not seeing the shadows. We may even now be living "between the evenings" (a beautiful--and, I believe, Jewish--expression for "twilight"). That's the sum of it. [21]^19 ________________________ [22]^1 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI (1927-1931) (London: Hogarth, 1961) 90-1. ] [23]^2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (New York: Penguin, 1968) 88. ] [24]^3 William Edward Hartpole Lecky, The Map of Life: Conduct and Character (London: Longmans, Green, 1899) 340-1. ] [25]^4 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 239-40. ] [26]^5 See Herbert Spiegelberg, "`Accident of Birth': A Non-Utilitarian Motif in Mill's Philosophy," Journal of the History of Ideas code 22 /code (1961): 135-46. ] [27]^6 Bernard Shaw, Doctors' Delusions, Crude Criminology, and Sham Education (London: Constable, 1932) 1. ] [28]^7 Exemplifications of such emptiness abound, represented in science fiction in such stories as Brian Aldiss's "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," the basis for Stanley Kubrick's final film, A.I. In real life, the family quarrel over the disposition of the remains of the legendary Ted Williams, whether put into cryogenic perpetuity or cremated, exemplified a pathos in which remembrance and preservation became hopelessly entangled. Along with cloning and artificial intelligence, the material extension of consciousness leaves open the question of its authority over others in each succeeding generation. See Leon Kass, "Mortality," Powers that Make Us Human: The Foundations of Medical Ethics, ed. Kenneth Vaux (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985) 7-27. ] [29]^8 Osler's canonization as a medical saint has been assured in recent years by the publication of the proceedings of the American Osler Society. See Jeremiah A. Barondess, John P. McGovern, Charles G. Roland, eds., The Persisting Osler: Selected Transactions of the First Ten Years of the American Osler Society (Baltimore: University Park, 1985); and Jeremiah A. Barondess and Charles G. Roland, eds., The Persisting Osler II: Selected Transactions of the American Osler Society, code 1981-1990 /code (Malabar: Krieger, 1994). ] [30]^9 See W. Bruce Fye, M.D., "William Osler's Departure from North America: The Price of Success" in Barondess and Roland 245-57. ] [31]^10 Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler (two vols.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925) 664-74. ] [32]^11 Anthony Trollope, The Fixed Period (New York: Penguin, 1993) 39. ] [33]^12 Robert Tracy, Trollope's Later Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) 287. See Donald Smalley, ed., Trollope: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) 487-92. ] [34]^13 In fact, Trollope's proposed means of departure in the novel was not chloroform: "As to the actual mode of transition, there had been many discussions held by the executive in President Square, and it had at last been decided that certain veins should be opened while the departing one should, under the influence of morphine, be gently entranced with a warm bath. I, as president of the empire, had agreed to use the lancet in the first two or three cases, thereby intending to increase the honors conferred" (39-40). ] [35]^14 William Osler, "The Fixed Period," Aequanimitas, With other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine, 3^rd ed. (Philadelphia: Blakiston's Sons, 1932) 381-3. ] [36]^15 The New York Times ( code 27 /code February 1905): 1. For accounts of this episode, see Henry R. Viets, "William Osler and `The Fixed Period,'" Bulletin of the History of Medicine code 36 /code (1962): 368-70; Steven L. Berk, MD, "Sir William Osler, Ageism, and `The Fixed Period': A Secret Revealed," in Barondess and Roland 297-301; Michael Bliss, William Osler: A Life in Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 321-8. ] [37]^16 William Osler, preface, Aequanimitas, viii. An early biographer of Osler noted that his convictions about such matters were deeply self-referential, attributing their strength to his own early maturity. See Edith Gittings Reid, The Great Physician: A Short Life of Sir William Osler (London: Oxford University Press, 1931) 174-7. ] [38]^17 See David B. Hogan, "Sir William Osler: Fixed Terms, Fixed Ideas, and `Fixed Period,'" Annals of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada code 28.1 /code (February 1995): 25-9. ] [39]^18 Julius B. Poppinga, letter to the Editor, The New York Times ( code 13 /code June 1994): A14. ] [40]^19 Paul Ramsey, Ethics at the Edges of Life: Medical and Legal Intersections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) 42. ] From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 23 08:59:33 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 04:59:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Berel Lang: The History of Evil, the Holocaust, and Postmodernity Message-ID: Berel Lang: The History of Evil, the Holocaust, and Postmodernity The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1019848&textreg=1&id=LanHolo2-2 Berel Lang argues for thinking about evil within a context of historical continuity. He finds connections and continuity between the pre-Holocaust and the post-Holocaust, between the modern and the post-modern, in the existence of a moral history, a history of evil. He suggests that the Holocaust be viewed as occurring within a history of evil (rather than as rupturing that history, as some scholars suggest) and as bringing into that history radically new possibilities for evil. Berel Lang is Professor of Humanities at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His work has spanned a wide range of topics, including Marxism and art, philosophical style, the humanities and the academy, genocide, and the Ethics of language. Most recently, he has focused on the Holocaust, with such books as: The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, and Holocaust Representation: Art Within the Limits of History and Ethics. I propose to look at "evil" as postmodernity itself first looked at it, in contrast to reading backward to it through the baroque superstructure more recently built on it; that is, to consider "evil" as postmodernity found it before going postmodern--in this way, also learning something of why it decided on that career in the first place. The framework to be proposed here is in part a reconstruction, close to a genealogy, of the moral inclination or direction of postmodernity. Obviously, even with our own proximity to postmodernity's divorce from modernity (it is difficult to say exactly when this occurred, but it can't be long past), the lineage remains conjectural, although no more, I should argue, than conceptual genealogies ever are and, in any event, no more than the categories of "modernity" and "postmodernity" themselves. A view of these categories as historical will in any event level the playing field, if it does not make it quite transparent. Nor is the issue at stake a history of the development from one to the other as that "actually" occurred, since I shall be attempting only to place them against a common background of moral history or more specifically, the (at least, a) history of evil.[3]^1 It seems to me clear that any attempt to describe a connection among these several factors from the vantage point of the present must sooner or later address the event of the Holocaust, or so consciously avoid it as also to address it: that extraordinary design for genocide which, whether or not it is unique, whether or not (more moderately) it was unprecedented, occludes the view, certainly the progress, of twentieth-century history and, more generally, of any moral (and so also, immoral) history that does not simply avoid this century altogether. For Lyotard, the Holocaust defines the break between modernity and postmodernity as a moral chasm marking the end of one and the beginning (less tendentiously, the onset) of the other.[4]^2 This is a dramatic view of the role of the Holocaust within history in general, perhaps as far as one can take it without placing the Holocaust outside history altogether. And it is indeed to stress this limitation--the place of the Holocaust within history--that the present discussion is directed. I mean to argue, in other words, that notwithstanding, or more precisely, because of its moral enormity, the Holocaust is nonetheless to be registered and understood in empirical and historical terms. The traditional question of evil in its classical context asks quite simply how evil is possible--that is, given the divinely or morally-ordered world in which it supposedly occurs--and yields the (also simple) answer that evil is not possible. However one otherwise analyzes or depicts an event like the Holocaust, in the end, for "the question of evil," even that extraordinary instance of moral enormity makes no difference. And this possibly startling conclusion follows for one or both of two reasons. The first of these is that the question in its traditional setting does not depend at all on the size or scope of the evil involved, on its duration or the extent of its consequences. When we recall Dostoyevsky's challenge to God's justice on the basis of the single tear of an innocent child, we confront the large issue of theodicy in brief: why, if everything happens for the best, should that single tear be shed? And for this question, the addition of millions of tears (or millions of lives) alters nothing. Without a justification for the one, there can be none for the other; and by the same token, to find a ground for the one would also assure a basis for the other. The second sense in which the Holocaust does not change anything significant in the traditional response to "the question of evil" is this: that given the premise of a morally ordered universe, evil has at most only relative or apparent standing. All local occurrences (that is, historical events) must be judged in the context of the whole. That whole, furthermore, (by hypothesis) has justice or the Good or God on its side--which means in turn that when all has been said and done, it is better to have things the way they are than otherwise, with the implication then, that whatever is judged evil is only apparently so. In these terms, evil as such is also only apparent, at most a privation of reality (as the Platonic tradition has it), at its least a failing of human comprehension to grasp the totality of which humanity's limited comprehension is itself part; human events thus occur on a cosmic and transcendent stage, with the wings of that stage spreading well beyond history. Evil is not actual or real; it is thus historical only as a "likely story" (in Plato's phrase)--a variety of fiction and thus provisional, a station on the way to a larger truth. In reference to an event like the Holocaust, the implausibility of this view seems especially stark, but we cannot ignore the fact that it has the weight of significant traditions behind it. For the moment, however, its role here is to mark out one position on the map of moral history which I'm sketching and which thus sets this one boundary at the denial of that history's possibility. This denial surfaces not only on a cosmic level, furthermore, but also in a related feature of the human domain. For a side-eddy in the rejection of the notion of a history of evil argues also against the notion of human perfectibility, and thus against a moral history even in respect to human history alone. So, for example, the doctrine of Original Sin asserts the moral finitude of human nature--and the non-metaphorical point of that doctrine is constant and unforgiving even in its more moderate versions, as in the "evil impulse" described in the Hebrew Bible or through the concept of the body as the prisonhouse of the soul asserted in classical rationalism. On these views, since there is no hope of escape from the limits cited, there is also little to say about the detail of their disclosure or indeed about any other incidents or acts in our common experience; what might otherwise constitute a moral history amounts here to only a recitation of episodes, a virtually random chronicle; any apparent pattern is no more than that of a constant present--proof of what is already known and what, under the aegis of eternity, has no significance. A second moment in the reconstruction of the history of postmodernity against the background of the Holocaust goes like this: Explanations of the Holocaust's occurrence have moved between two poles. At one of these--one which draws still on the first moment referred to above--the Holocaust is also (still) placed outside time and causality. In one such version, it appears as a fit of national madness in an otherwise rational German history; in a second, quite different version, it appears as an instance of divine retribution for failings on the part of the victims; in the largest number of such accounts, it is viewed as simply inexplicable or (in related tropes) as incomprehensible or ineffable. By contrast, the opposite pole of explanatory attempts replace transcendent explanation with historical explanation. All these attempts include reference to the most obvious historical feature of the Holocaust's temporal and spatial location--the fact that it occurred, after all, in post-Enlightenment Europe, in the Europe of modernity, in one of the centers there of the high culture nourished by that humanist and liberal project. And "the question of evil" as it is in this way forced to be historical asks about that new setting in which it is found: why and how is the connection between the two possible? This question itself, admittedly, faces a charge of circularity, as it first juxtaposes two events and then asks how that juxtaposition is possible. But the writing of history is inevitably a matter of historians lifting themselves (and their histories) up by their own bootstraps (the hermeneutic circle here bridging the past and the present), and there is, at any rate, no shortage of responses to the question itself. There is the evidence, for one thing, in the Enlightenment ideals of universality, addressed to pure and practical reason (that is, in both science and ethics) and positing also an essential and common human nature. These essentialist dispositions leave little room for any except the most superficial differences or particularity of individual commitments. Followed to their extreme, these principles yield conclusions that by now have become only too evident in the varieties of tyranny and totalitarianism which are all the more menacing in their exclusions or repression because they act in the name of truth. Admittedly, associating the Holocaust with such basic principles of modernity runs the danger of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy; it ignores the possibility, for example, that the Holocaust represented a reaction against the modernity project (that would be a very different sense of "propter"), and there is no doubt that much of the Nazi rhetoric, at least at its manifest level, was directed against the Enlightenment's social principles of equality and liberty. Notwithstanding these qualifications, the evidence seems to me compelling of the "filiation" of principles central to Enlightenment ideals and to the "emancipation" they heralded as those same principles later surfaced in practices of exclusion and domination; as the latter became embodied in nationalism and racism, they characterized the "totalitarian democracies" of which Jacob Talmon spoke[5]^3 and left signs of their presence even in the more liberal and non-totalitarian democracies. Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment advances an extreme version of this view, but its central objection to the abstraction in Enlightenment claims of universality--the assumption in such claims that the universality asserted not only goes beyond all particulars but supercedes and dislodges them, in effect leaving them no place at all--is, it seems to me, compelling.[6]^4 This is not, it should be clear, a claim of "No Enlightenment, No Holocaust," but few historical explanations ever purport to find necessary conditions for the events they explain. Even a qualified version of this causal relation, furthermore, would provide a justification for the turn from modernity to postmodernity, with that turn then a reaction against the ideas dominant in the former. In this sense, the Holocaust would indeed represent a rupture marking the end of modernity as justified in principle, with history and Ethics for once acting there in concert. And indeed, even if the syntax of "postmodernity" inscribes it as a "condition," in the way that I earlier suggested, its advocates have been much more involved with marshalling objections against the universalist of the past it claims to supercede than in considering what is alleged to be its accomplishments (for example, the advance in moral history in the modernist discourse of universal human rights). But this discourse is by no means tied to the political or social principles that conduce to the exclusion or denial of particularity, notwithstanding the historical link of such principles to the Enlightenment. Thus, the search for an alternative might rest on this very ground: the possibility of legitimizing differences among individuals or groups without precluding the possibility of likeness or trans-personal principles that hold notwithstanding those differences. The danger in the postmodernist reaction against such universal principles is the familiar one of throwing the baby out with the bath water. What I propose in contrast is thus meant, in relation to both the "post-Holocaust" and the "postmodern," to save the difference between baby and bathwater and so also to save the one without the other. An alternate way of describing the need for this revision is by noting that although the Enlightenment pitted itself against the obscurantism and superstition of religious or metaphysical thinking that imagined it could reach beyond history, it seems itself in the end to embody a similar impulse. For reason in the abstract, as Voltaire or Diderot or even Kant conceived of it, functions quite apart from any (and so also, it turns out, from every) instantiation; only so, it seems, can we understand the antipathy of these figures to parochialism or (in Kant's term from his essay on "What Is Enlightenment?") to "tutelage" of any sort, even, presumably, if its consequences were uplifting or enlightening. In other words, the effort to displace whatever was claimed as transcendent turned out to produce another version of the same; like the other, it too was a-or even anti-historical. Scoffing at Pangloss's naive faith in this "best of all possible worlds," Voltaire himself espouses an optimism on behalf of the power of reason which seems not much different; certainly it nourished in Voltaire, at least as much as it did in Pangloss (or Leibniz), an antagonism to particularity which in retrospect was at once ominous and prescient: I refer here (for one example) to his anti-semitism and most immediately to his promise of a "holocaust" for the Jews in that very term (in his Philosophical Dictionary). In this way, the turn to modernity, which, after all, had anticipated postmodernity by reacting vigorously against the grand narratives of its past with their transcendent and universalizing impulses, fell victim to the same a-or anti-historicism of those accounts. In respect to their origins, the histories of modernity and postmodernity are very much alike--a fact which both of them have been eager to obscure or ignore. The difference between them, then, must be found not in their origins but in their futures, with the future of postmodernity remaining at this point still (to some extent) open, poised between two main alternatives. The first of these would be to declare an end, well-earned and-deserved, to modernity, marking a breach in history accentuated by the claim that in addition to the human agents responsible for the moral breach, the writing of history itself has been also at fault. For the same "totalizing" impulse that expressed itself in political action, in the "total" state and then also in the Nazis' "Final Solution," would also express itself rhetorically in the total or grand narratives for which typically there was not simply a beginning, middle, and end, but the beginning, middle, and end. The reaction against that principle then insists that for postmodernity, the units of discourse must be so small and discrete that they exclude, or more strongly, give the lie to, any efforts to place them in a larger narrative, to view them as pieces of a whole. The purpose of this tactic is to break the lockstep of standard historical discourse without, however, losing the force of historical narrative. Also this option, however, whatever its intentions to the contrary, seems to me to place certain events, as well as everything that falls under the heading of values, outside of history; certainly, in the absence of any pattern of relative connectives--causal, temporal, comparative--there would be no historical ground or order among them. The alternative that I propose here to the postmodern conception of a rupture in history is to view the evidence of history--the same history--as attesting to a kind of filiation or linkage among historical events, including also and even the Holocaust, in such a way as to allow (and then, of course, to compel) us to speak of a moral history, as well as of a causal or explanatory material history. Certain historical events can undoubtedly be described apart from any reference to moral history, not only as an exercise in abstraction but also because the latter is not especially relevant (the Industrial Revolution might be a possible example of this, but even that only until one begins to fit it into the general framework of technology and the relationship of humans to nature). And certainly its place in moral history is as central historically to accounts of the Holocaust as any of the other aspects; indeed one can imagine that moral history without the others more readily than one can imagine the converse. The claim cannot be developed as fully here as it deserves, but I would begin that justification by repeating my earlier assertions about the retroactive status of the Holocaust; that is, with the historian himself as moral agent, responsible for the account he reaches back to in the past, and with the representation of the past then part of a continuum and, in a perverse sense, of a progression. What I mean by this point can be stated in quasi-figurative terms. It would by now require a radical thought-experiment to conceive of a world from which the murder of individuals is absent, whether in fact or idea. Yet it is also evident that there would have been a point in human history when that was the case; we might think of this emblematically through the Biblical account, as the interval between the expulsion from Eden and, subsequently, Cain's murder of Abel. Viewed thus, individual murder would, in Cain's hands, have the character of an invention, a new stage in the progress of evil. In a similar sense, I mean to suggest, genocide marks a further stage in the same progression, designating the murder not of individuals but of the group qua group, including individuals but including them through their identification with the group and then also (or rather, first) requiring the destruction of the group. Considered from this perspective, the concept of genocide not only designates individual historical events (like the Nazi genocide against the Jews), but also inscribes itself as a new element--no less indelible than the earlier ones--of social and moral consciousness. The features of this phenomenon, moreover, are recognizable only in relation to its historical place; that is, in respect to what is found or can be imagined on the two sides of the Holocaust: the difference between the pre-Holocaust and the post-Holocaust consciousness. Much more would need to be said on theoretical grounds to elaborate the reasons for locating the Holocaust on an historical continuum that, with the addition of its own distinctive contribution, constitutes a history of evil. But this is, again, a continuum, not a broken line or rupture; a single history, not one which has been shattered and which now has to start over again, beginning with its newest fragment. Moral history has a purchase in fact no more doubtful or tenuous than other historical modalities--and the Holocaust figures largely in this history just because of the changes it introduces there. This emerges, however, only as we view that history historically, placing the Holocaust within history, not outside it--and finding it together there not only with modernity but also--however reluctant its appearance--postmodernity itself. Why should postmodernity be rudely pushed into this position that it has worked so ardently to escape? In the first place, because the post-Holocaust has provided no basis, at least none that does not seem only arbitrary or ad hoc, for claiming a split in history which might then point to postmodernity as a novum; and then, still more conclusively, because postmodernity does not offer any more compelling evidence or explanation of its own. ________________________ [7]^1 For a fuller account of the concept of the "history of evil," see Berel Lang, The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) chs. 1-3. ] [8]^2 See Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, Heidegger and "The Jews," trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). ] [9]^3 Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1960). ] [10]^4 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972); see also on this issue Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). ] From checker at panix.com Sat Oct 23 13:27:17 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 09:27:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Cornell Daily Sun: Cornell Reflects on Derrida's Legacy Message-ID: Cornell Reflects on Derrida's Legacy http://www.cornellsun.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/10/13/416c9bac290bc?in_archive=1 Monday, October 18, 2004 RED LETTER DAZE Cornell Reflects on Derrida's Legacy October 13, 2004 By Professors Philip Lewis and Richard Klein By Prof. Philip Lewis Philip Lewis is a Professor of Romance Studies and was the host of Jacques Derrida when he was an A.D. White Professor-at-Large from 1982 to 1988. He is the author of Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault. By conventional measures, Jacques Derrida was perhaps the most successful professor-at-large in the history of the program. His lectures in English drew overflow audiences of hundreds of faculty and students from all over campus. Even when speaking French he would attract 200-300 people prepared to listen for 2-3 hours. He spent endless hours talking with students and colleagues, more about their work than about his. The director of the program extended his term beyond the usual five years in recognition of his exemplary contributions. In those early years (the Seventies), when Derrida's ideas and analytic strategies had not been reduced to themes or concepts, his influence on most of us was that of an incredibly rigorous, learned and incisive reader. He changed our understanding of what strong, intensive reading does and how its implications have to be constantly rethought and remobilized on multiple horizons. The least one can say is that Derrida's analytic practice -- probing the great works of the Western canon in their openness, density, and complexity -- showed us why we have to read more critically, more respectfully and more patiently. In recent years, my perception of Jacques Derrida's importance has shifted toward the broad, socio-historical horizon on which his activity as a public intellectual took place. His writings on democracy and on human rights, his dialogue with Habermas on the world after September 11, 2001, and his advocacy for an enlightened European Union constitute an incomparable engagement with political justice that none of us can measure adequately at this juncture. From the standpoint of the French, their language and their culture, Jacques Derrida's singularity as one of the twentieth century's seminal thinkers has much to do with his status as an international or "supernational" intellectual. The risks he took in all aspects of his work, including the reform of French higher education, were often more seriously appreciated in other countries, including the United States, than in France. His experiments in and with language-and-thought were sometimes more efficacious in translation than in his artful and transformative French, which he deployed with dazzling inventiveness. The French are belatedly discovering why their resistances to Derrida make his challenges to them uniquely telling and enduring. As a nomadic intellectual articulating the call of hospitality for all peoples and all places, Derrida has put them and us on trial. He has had and will have no peers. If his passing thus differs from all those deaths we assimilate through mourning and position in the past, it is because it confronts us with his coming, hereafter, into his and our own. By Prof. Richard Klein Richard Klein is a Professor of Romance Studies and was selected to the French Order of Arts & Letters in 2003. He is the author of Cigarettes Are Sublime and Eat Fat. I was remarkably well prepared to encounter Derrida in the late '60s. I was just finishing graduate studies in French (at Yale), but it was my Cornell undergraduate education (Class of '62) that had trained me. I had had seminars here and wrote an honor thesis with Paul de Man, who was then Chair of Comparative Literature. I had heard lectures by M.H. Abrams and Vladimir Nabokov. I had taken philosophy classes with Norman Malcom and John Rawls. I was an editor of the Cornell Writer and a budding critic who regularly rejected the poetry of his fellow student, Thomas Pynchon. Encountering Derrida, I was taken first by the fact that he had developed to a high degree the art of close reading, which I had been taught to appreciate by my Cornell professors -- a way of reading they had learned at the feet of the New Critics, whose work focused on the close analysis of short, single lyric poems. Like Derrida, those critics frequently discovered, at the heart of the poem, some unresolved conflict or tension that the text simultaneously displayed and sought to conceal. As if the poem was the performance of the attempt to conceal the contradiction at its origin. But at the same time, Derrida brought to this practice an immensely informed philosophical critique of, say, each one of the terms I just used in the previous fragment: performance, conceal, contradiction, origin. Derrida has written extensively about each one of those notions, bringing the power of his philosophical skepticism to bear on them in order to transform the way we use those categories and think about their concepts. Deconstructing texts is a form of radical skepticism towards traditional categories, a form of iconoclasm, breaking idols. For me, that's where his Jewishness resides, not in any secret devotion to God or some Kabalistic mysticism. He was highly suspicious of all claims about human nature or what is natural in general. He was always showing that what seems natural in fact consists of multiple, historically determined, psychologically motivated, social and political choices. Trained at the elite ...cole Normale Sup?rieure, Derrida had devoured the whole history of philosophy. He knew ancient Greek, Latin, German, and English, and he read the texts, from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Kant, from Locke to Searle, in the original. Derrida practiced a kind of philosophical close reading of texts, paying attention to the works of philosophers and poets, with the most acute and scrupulous attention. That kind of reading differentiates the style of his philosophizing from the Anglo-American style practiced in the Cornell Philosophy Department, where frequently one addresses philosophical problems with only passing, perfunctory reference to older arguments in the philosophical literature. Derrida begins by treating a philosopher's work as a whole, in order to discover, criticize and transform the problems and questions that most concern it. He was not just a radical skeptic, but an inventor of new conceptions, new logic machines, with which to demonstrate the coherence of arguments that seem to be flatly incompatible. The attention he gave to other texts was reflected in the way he responded to individuals. He was the most remarkable responder to questions. He was constantly being asked very stupid questions and he always tried to discover what legitimate issue could be contained in them or made of them. Unlike many philosophers who are in themselves, totally in their own head, he was entirely in the world, in relation to Others. Unlike many arrogant intellectuals, he was modest, charming, and very, very funny. He was writing in those years in the wake of existentialism -- there is an implicit anti-Sartreanism in Derrida, which appears explicitly in several oblique but devastating passages. He came to intellectual maturity under the influence of structuralism, that movement, begun in the Sixties, which sought to apply the methods and categories of structural linguistics, as defined by Ferdinand de Saussure, to the analysis of social, psychological, and artistic phenomena. He was deeply critical of it, even as he made cautious use of some of its premises. But what he conveyed most powerfully was the stake he had in trying to think critically about our conventional concepts and categories. For him it was necessary not merely to criticize old ways of thinking but to elaborate new ways of conceiving old ideas. Derrida furiously rejected the notion of the end of history. For him the future was always the focus of his speculation, the possibility of thinking something new, or anew. I can barely express my anger at the New York Times obituary that dismissed his work as abstruse and ridiculous, if not sinister. Never was there any evidence that the journalist had tried to read Derrida's writing, or even considered the possibility that there was something new and valuable in this work that has excited so much interest. It would suffice to read one of Derrida's essays, and to discuss it with one competent person, to understand the value and the implications of his philosophies. It's sometimes hard work, as George Bush likes to say. I can't begin to say in a newspaper article what is implied and implicated in the task of deconstruction. If anyone is interested in finding out, they might start by reading Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction, a book of immaculate clarity, or taking a course in which Derrida is taught. From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 23 19:49:12 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 12:49:12 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] REBT cognitive distortions Message-ID: <01C4B8FE.B3150640.shovland@mindspring.com> Bush Supporters Still Believe Iraq Had WMD or Major Program, Supported al Qaeda (in spite of the facts on the ground- skh) Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant WMD program, 72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points. Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions. These are some of the findings of a new study of the differing perceptions of Bush and Kerry supporters, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, based on polls conducted in September and October. Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments, "One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming them. Interestingly, this is one point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree." Eighty-two percent of Bush supporters perceive the Bush administration as saying that Iraq had WMD (63%) or that Iraq had a major WMD program (19%). Likewise, 75% say that the Bush administration is saying Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda. Equally large majorities of Kerry supporters hear the Bush administration expressing these views--73% say the Bush administration is saying Iraq had WMD (11% a major program) and 74% that Iraq was substantially supporting al Qaeda. Steven Kull adds, "Another reason that Bush supporters may hold to these beliefs is that they have not accepted the idea that it does not matter whether Iraq had WMD or supported al Qaeda. Here too they are in agreement with Kerry supporters." Asked whether the US should have gone to war with Iraq if US intelligence had concluded that Iraq was not making WMD or providing support to al Qaeda, 58% of Bush supporters said the US should not have, and 61% assume that in this case the President would not have. Kull continues, "To support the president and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance, and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about prewar Iraq." This tendency of Bush supporters to ignore dissonant information extends to other realms as well. Despite an abundance of evidence--including polls conducted by Gallup International in 38 countries, and more recently by a consortium of leading newspapers in 10 major countries--only 31% of Bush supporters recognize that the majority of people in the world oppose the US having gone to war with Iraq. Forty-two percent assume that views are evenly divided, and 26% assume that the majority approves. Among Kerry supporters, 74% assume that the majority of the world is opposed. Similarly, 57% of Bush supporters assume that the majority of people in the world would favor Bush's reelection; 33% assumed that views are evenly divided and only 9% assumed that Kerry would be preferred. A recent poll by GlobeScan and PIPA of 35 of the major countries around the world found that in 30, a majority or plurality favored Kerry, while in just 3 Bush was favored. On average, Kerry was preferred more than two to one. Bush supporters also have numerous misperceptions about Bush's international policy positions. Majorities incorrectly assume that Bush supports multilateral approaches to various international issues--the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the treaty banning land mines (72%)--and for addressing the problem of global warming: 51% incorrectly assume he favors US participation in the Kyoto treaty. After he denounced the International Criminal Court in the debates, the perception that he favored it dropped from 66%, but still 53% continue to believe that he favors it. An overwhelming 74% incorrectly assumes that he favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. In all these cases, majorities of Bush supporters favor the positions they impute to Bush. Kerry supporters are much more accurate in their perceptions of his positions on these issues. "The roots of the Bush supporters' resistance to information," according to Steven Kull, "very likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally in the near pitch-perfect leadership that President Bush showed in its immediate wake. This appears to have created a powerful bond between Bush and his supporters--and an idealized image of the President that makes it difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect judgments before the war, that world public opinion could be critical of his policies or that the President could hold foreign policy positions that are at odds with his supporters." The polls were conducted October 12-18 and September 3-7 and 8-12 with samples of 968, 798 and 959 respondents, respectively. Margins of error were 3.2 to 4% in the first and third surveys and 3.5% on September 3-7. The poll was fielded by Knowledge Networks using its nationwide panel, which is randomly selected from the entire adult population and subsequently provided internet access. For more information about this methodology, go to www.knowledgenetworks.com/ganp . Funding for this research was provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, October 22, 2004 7:55 PM To: Paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] REBT cognitive distortions Can't remember what book this was from, something on REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy)...These are "Cognitive distortions as disempowering thinking patterns": 1. Over-generalizing: jumping to conclusions on little evidence or without facts 2. All-or-nothing thinking: Polarizing at extremes. Black and white thinking. Either-or thinking that posits options as two-valued choices 3. Labeling: Name-calling that uses over-generalizations which allow one to dismiss something via the label, or to not make important distinctions, or that classifies a phenomenon in such a way that we do not engage in good reality-testing 4. Blaming: Thinking in an accusatory style, transferring blame, guilt, and responsibility for a problem to someone or something else. 5. Mind-reading: Projecting thoughts, feelings, intuitions onto others without checking out one's guesses with the person, over-trusting one's "intuitions" and not granting others the right to have the last word about their internal thoughts, feelings, intentions, etc. 6. Prophesying: Projecting negative outcomes onto the future without seeing alternatives or possible ways to proactively intervene, usually a future pacing of fatalistic and negative outcomes. 7. Emotionalizing: Using one's emotions for filtering information. 8. Personalizing: Perceiving circumstances, especially the actions of others, as specifically targeted toward oneself in a personal way, perceiving the world through ego-centric filters that whatever happens relates to, speaks about, or references oneself. 9. Awfulizing: Imagining the worst possible scenario and then amplifying it with a non-referencing word, "awful" as in, "This is awful!" 10. Should-ing: Putting pressure on oneself (and others) to conform to "divine" rules about the world and life, then expressing such in statements that involve "should" and "must". 11. Filtering: Over-focusing on one facet of something to the exclusion of everything else so that one develops a tunnel-vision perspective and can see only "one thing". Typically, people use this thinking style to filter out positive facets, thereby leaving a negative perception. 12. Can't-ing: Imposing linguistic and semantic limits on oneself and others from a "mode of impossibility" and expressing this using the "can't" word. Anyone who can find one of the above that isn't a constant feature in the current election cycle gets a cookie. _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 24 15:25:52 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 11:25:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Charles T. Mathewes: Operationalizing Evil Message-ID: Charles T. Mathewes: Operationalizing Evil The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1044217&textreg=1&id=MatOper2-2 In "Operationlizing Evil," Charles T. Mathewes suggests that we need to confront the doubts we have about the language of evil in order more fully to incorporate that language into our moral discourse. He outlines some of the things that we need the concept of evil to do and addresses concerns that scholars have raised about our very use of the term, defending it as both necessary and helpful in our efforts to understand and act in our world. Charles T. Mathewes is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. His book, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. "There is radical evil in the world," writes Susan Sontag in an essay about Kosovo.[3]^1 And I judge that many of us, given some time to reflect, would agree. But we live in a time that has done better at formulating misgivings about the language of "radical evil" than at exploring what follows from our acceptance of it. We lack an operationalized concept of evil--a concept that has a unique purpose in the discourse of society and is integral to the proper functioning of that discourse. Our problem is that the doubts that we can, or ought to, operationalize "evil" hold the field almost unopposed. This essay aims to help us develop such an operationalized concept of evil, by confronting some well-developed concerns about the cultural imagination and language of evil. I want to see how far we can go towards addressing those concerns and to see what that achievement reveals to us about how we might go forward in employing the concept of evil in understanding and living our private and public lives. What do we gain in using this term? Conversely, what dangers inhere in it? The dangers are real, but operationalizing "evil" helps us transcend some fundamental difficulties vexing our discussions of morality, moving us towards both a more sober assessment of moral malformation and a more hopeful vision of our moral possibilities. What Do We Need the Concept of "Evil" To Do? If it is true that, as Andrew Delbanco puts it, "a gap has opened up between our awareness of evil and the intellectual resources we have for handling it,"[4]^2 then a good place to begin is by attempting to sketch what it would mean for the word "evil" to circulate in our intellectual economy as real currency and not counterfeit tender. Because any attempt at definition might well reflect more our own provincial antipathies than any useful adequation of the manifold realities of wickedness, it is more useful not to try to define evil, but rather to sketch a picture of what any useful concept of evil must do for us. A useful concept of evil will, I judge, capture two important and essentially interrelated dimensions of wickedness and our affective responses to it. First, it will acknowledge the inner individual psychological dimension of evil. Much malice is rooted in individual temptations towards wickedness and cruelty, sprung from old psychological wounds or from malformed desire sets--what Augustinians like myself call disordered loves. There is such a thing as villainy; there are wicked individuals. But inner perversion cannot capture (not straightforwardly, in any case) the whole scope of evil; there is a second, sociopolitical dimension as well. As Hannah Arendt suggested, individuals can do great evil and not necessarily be great villains themselves. One lesson of the Third Reich was that humans can do horrific things not simply out of a million individual spasms of viciousness but out of a "banal" obedience to the norms of their society--none of which exculpates, much less forgives, the perpetrators, but simply sets the real nature of their flaws in perspicuous light for us.[5]^3 We need a way of understanding evil's reality when it doesn't tempt us, but "goes without saying" as the social atmosphere we breathe. Evil does not occur in a vacuum; there must be both a social context and an individual wicked-doer. A useful concept of evil should capture both these psychological or "vertical" and sociopolitical or "horizontal" dimensions of wickedness, if it is to attempt to encompass the multitudinous phenomena understood to be evil. In addition to, and intricately related to, the psychological and sociopolitical dimensions of evil, an operationalized concept of evil must acknowledge evil as both internal and external to those who use the word: the evil or temptation to evil within ourselves and the evil with which we are confronted in others. We need a way of understanding evil as individuals tempted towards wickedness, who must acknowledge that temptation and refuse it; we also need a way of understanding the evil which confronts us when other individuals do horrifying things to which we must respond. It is not enough to speak of evil as something outside of ourselves, we also need to acknowledge our internal temptations to it. Likewise it is not enough to talk about a singular "heart of darkness" on the one hand, or a demonic perversion of the individual's basically good primitive desires by a civilization's repressive perversities on the other; at least on the surface level of explanation, we need both. Should We Operationalize "Evil"? Even though we noted the tasks that "evil" must perform, some critics will not want us to use the term "evil" at all. And they have their reasons, all rooted back, though in very different ways, to Nietzsche's challenge to get "beyond good and evil" by more fully inhabiting our natures (though it is part of those natures, on Nietzsche's picture, to be in some sense "supra-natural," involved in the self-overcoming of one's "natural" constraints). They see the language of evil as a fundamentally moralistic language, one fostering an essentially distanciated form of basically condemnatory judgment. While they reveal some broader cultural tensions about the language of evil, these criticisms are expressed and made plausible by flawed assumptions about the nature of human moral agency, assumptions which I will try to flush into the open and critique. Some critics, looking at representations of evil in the cultural imagination, argue that we have too tightly tied together evil and otherness, so that we see in "the other," the alien, only things that we fear. Mark Edmundson, for example, in his searching Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic, argues that our culture oscillates between a glib optimism of "facile transcendence" and a frightened, pessimistic "gothic" foreboding.[6]^4 Edmundson thinks we should demystify our fear of others by defusing their connections with the idea of evil and toss that idea into history's dustbin of discarded words. We are much better off with a more mundane vocabulary of social ills, one without any sense of demonic power or presence in our lives. Were we to do this, we'd see our problems for what they are--not insurmountable, but simply requiring a lot of effort to overcome. We could, in the end, manage to escape the revenge tragedy that is history, the endless cycle of mourning and retribution, and be born fully into the present, unconstrained by our pasts.[7]^5 Edmundson's worry is that we have so totally identified evil and otherness that all externality, all that is strange, is evil to us. But this position replicates in its own proposal the very activity it aims to condemn: it seeks to "get over" the gothic fear of the outside by putting this fear outside; it intends to overcome our externalizing reaction by externalizing it. This is not so much a solution to the problem as a further symptom of it. Rather than indulging in the thing we are disparaging, it seems the wiser course to begin to resist it; and we can do that not by expelling the language of evil from our consciousness, but rather by more fully appropriating it, and internalizing it, seeing its presence in our lives, fully acknowledging, and not being terrified by, our capacity to do evil. In other words, because we must accept Edmundson's acute diagnosis of our problems, we should refuse his odd prescription. Unless we do so, we will fall ever deeper into a "gothic" attitude towards evil--just because the experience of evil, however rare it is for most of us, remains stubbornly irreducible, in its phenomenological quiddity, to anything but itself. Edmundson errs in thinking that the problem is that we've gotten only partially free from evil's grip and that we must struggle to get completely free of it. Against Edmundson's account I would place Karen Halttunen's Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Halttunen provides a genealogy of the present "gothic" morality that Edmundson identifies; but on her account, the root cause of our gothic indigestion of the concept of evil lies not in "evilling others," in identifying others as evil, but rather in "othering evil," in making it so totally foreign to our understanding of human nature. She writes: Modern Gothic horror was the characteristic response to evil in a culture that provided no systematic intellectual explanation for the problem. The Gothic view of evil at work in the cult of horror was not an irrational reaction against an excess of Enlightenment rationalism, but an indispensable corollary to it, which ultimately served to protect the liberal view of human nature. The prevailing concept of human nature as basically good, free, and self-governed in the light of an innate moral sense, was protected from the potential threat of major transgressions by the imaginative creation of a monstrous moral alien, separated from the rest of humankind by an impassable gulf.[8]^6 The othering of evil was not just an intellectual problem, but was reflected in our institutions (such as the legal system and the medical establishment) through the procedures they developed, largely in the nineteenth century, to adjudicate their power, in which criminals and those deemed mentally unfit were sent away, unseen and outside the bounds of "rational" society.[9]^7 One way to resist both of these tendencies--to deem all others evil and to deem evil as totally other and foreign--is more adequately to digest and internalize the concept of evil through something like the concept of sin. Reinhold Niebuhr captured the real pathos of our situation when he pointed out that moderns err most basically by ignoring this concept and so misrepresenting to themselves human nature: "Both the majesty and the tragedy of human life exceed the dimension within which modern culture seeks to comprehend human existence."[10]^8 But in affirming this, we come face to face with a second set of concerns, most lucidly voiced today by the philosopher Richard Rorty. Rorty thinks requests like the one I am making, for a further internalization of the concept of evil through the language of sin, can actually end up crippling our ability to act. For Rorty, the language of evil and sin is not primarily dangerous because it is superstitious, but because it is disabling and morally paralyzing. This is because the language of sin, as he understands it, is a permanent stain on the soul of the offender: it suggests "that the commission of certain acts ...is incompatible with further self-respect."[11]^9 This makes the language socially as well as psychologically inhibiting, and inhibiting of just the sort of open-ended experimental attitude to life that Rorty thinks we good pragmatists ought to have. To have to think that our experiments with life may appear unforgivably morally horrifying from their other end, so to speak, is already, for Rorty, to stifle the very sources of moral energy that might help us move beyond the crimes and injustices of the past and present. But that is what we condemn ourselves to do, he thinks, if we permit the language of evil any real purchase on our lives. We should instead think of evil as merely a failure of imagination, an inability to reach as far as one hopes to reach. In this picture, tragedy is possible, but it is hard to see just what tragedy means, apart from a provisional break-down in the system.[12]^10 According to Rorty, we ought studiously to avoid giving evil anything approaching such a dramatic significance, for that can only cause us to fear and distract us from the important world-and self-building tasks at hand. Well, it is true, and importantly so, that we have, at times, as a culture and as individuals, approached the moral life with the wrong sorts of moralistic questions, asking "how can I avoid blame in this situation?" rather than "what is the most fruitful thing to do here?" It is surely the case that such moralistic questions have paralyzed us at points, and that the language of sin and evil is implicated in these failures of nerve. But the misuse of language is not necessarily a devastating condemnation of its proper use. And, properly used, the language of sin and evil gives us resources Rorty's account notably lacks. Patricia Greenspan's excellent book Practical Guilt shows the manifold and sophisticated ways in which something like a concept of guilt can operate to stabilize or pin down our moral framework, alongside (I would add) other concepts like regret, and possibly remorse.[13]^11 Similar things can be said about sin. "Sin" helps us resist the sort of smug self-righteousness that Rorty's work does little to defuse (and indeed, I think, does much to promote). This self-righteousness is in fact the idol we must keep free of moral stain, because it suggests that we are, or ought to aim to be, morally pure.[14]^12 Sin disputes this prescription vigorously: in its terms, no one is righteous. But sin is not cynicism. It does not excuse guilt, it only allows our moral energies not to be dispersed in a wrong-headed quest for moral purity. It is enabling, not enervating; to feel sinful is already not to despair, it is only to know that one's hands are always already dirty, and what water we have to wash them in is just as muddy. Thus, the language of sin can be profoundly empowering in both our private lives and our public ones. Furthermore, the very vagueness that renders it susceptible to misuse works to its advantage in the unboundedness of its applicable range. It allows us to understand and to act in a way more flexible, because more ambiguous, than can any more local, "scientific" discourses, such as biology or psycho-pharmacology. Indeed those languages (or, in Rorty's helpful term, "vocabularies") are not really rivals of the language of sin but rather of sin's more fine-grained sub-categories--that is, for particular sorts of sins. But it is in our self-understanding that the language of evil has the most to teach us, because it suggests something about the nature of our agency that we must heed. It suggests that we be very mindful of what we do, that we be deliberate in our actions, because we have a very important role to play in the sort of world we inhabit. Too often we picture ourselves either wholly as ex nihilo choosers, ontological shoppers with no real past to our actions and no permanent affect on the future (our shopping is always a useless passion, a form of existentialist nihilistic consumerism, Jean-Paul Sartre at the Wal-Mart); or we picture ourselves as medicalized patients determined by our pasts and slaves to our genes (as Jessica Rabbit says in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, "I'm not bad; I'm just drawn that way"), so that, as Jean Bethke Elshtain has said, we don't believe in sins but in syndromes. This effort to so basically de-moralize us, to re-conceive the human "as a component with a stipulated function" threatens to deprive humans of their inviolability, a move with chilling consequences; as Andrew Delbanco puts it: If it [i.e., the human] fails to perform properly, it is subject to repair or disposal; but there is no real sense of blame involved--no more than with a ball bearing or a hose that has gone bad. We think in terms of adjusting the faulty part or, if it is too far gone, of putting it away.[15]^13 But thinking about us as agents who have morally weighty choices is, in this setting, a well-nigh revolutionary idea. It is a form of respect, both for ourselves and others. So in a way the question of whether we will operationalize the concept of evil is a question about whether we want to keep thinking of ourselves, and our neighbors, as worthy of that respect. Conclusion In thinking about operationalizing evil, we face less a problem than a choice. We must choose whether or not we wish to affirm our received view of the moral character of human existence, particularly when we realize that it is premised upon a wager, the wager that we are genuinely what we think we are: in some measure free, responsible agents, capable of harming ourselves disastrously and doing so not out of medical causality but just because we choose to do so.[16]^14 The language of freedom and the language of evil are inextricably intertwined in this way. Today, we fear that our agency is not what this picture suggests. And this picture can be easily misperceived as overly optimistic, even naive. I wouldn't want too thoroughly to silence those fears; if we accept the wager on the usefulness of the language of evil, we must remember that it is a wager, and cannot be irrefutably proved to be true. This position is predicated on the empirically refutable idea that human action can at times find no determinant causal antecedents, and on the philosophically controversial idea that this sort of indeterminism is of the essence of human freedom. And these predications are invariably open to doubt. It may be the case that this picture of freedom may need to go, or that we ought actually to wish it gone. And it may be the case that our culture's current tectonic drift away from an operationalized language of evil is part of a larger transformation of our self-understanding, which may have larger historical causes. Our increasing incomprehension of evil may be due to our increasing domesticity, our (happily) increasing willingness rather "to negotiate differences than to take up arms to settle them,"[17]^15 so that our domestication and increasing moral aphasia concerning "evil" go hand-in-hand. But not everyone is becoming so domesticated, and I strongly doubt that even total domesticity will warrant us jettisoning this language entirely. Or it may be the case that our culture has decided to refuse to live with evil and pain, has decided to deny their presence in our lives and to seek to extirpate them entirely. That seems unwise to me; we will always have suffering, and while we should not stop seeking to reduce its reality and combat it, we have no warrant to cease thinking about it because such thinking scares or depresses us. To be human--at least in any way which seems relevantly continuous with our current humanity--is to be creatures for whom the language of evil, or some functional equivalent thereof, must remain viable. There are many thinkers today who wish to transform us into something new, creatures who do not have the concept of evil available to them; and the picture such thinkers paint, of agents and indeed of a world without "evil," is by no means a wholly unattractive one. But it is, I think, unreachable; and its attractions are outweighed by the moral costs attendant upon it. The solution to our current perplexities lies not in further weakening the grip of the concept of "evil" upon us, but in the direction of improving our understanding and use of it. For only by having a viable concept of evil can we hope to make sense of the idea of goodness. ________________________ [18]^1 Susan Sontag, The New York Times Magazine (Sunday, May 9, 1999). ] [19]^2 Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995) 3. ] [20]^3 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1965). It is important to note that, contrary to popular belief, Arendt's concept of "banality" does not entail that anybody in Eichmann's position would have done what he did; he was not ordinary, but "banal," and there is a difference. Furthermore, we must not let the banality thesis blind us to the possibility that sometimes genocide can involve the willful violence of many thousands of individuals; see Philip Gourevich's We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). ] [21]^4 Even critical theorists are not immune to this; according to Edmundson, they "invite us to be afraid, but not, in general, to fight back." See his Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) 62. ] [22]^5 See Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street, 150-160, on the outline of this liberatory program. ] [23]^6 Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) 59; cf. 56, 239. ] [24]^7 Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 240: "The Gothic narrative of the crime of murder played a primary role in shaping the modern response to criminal transgression, both mandating the social quarantining of criminals in penitentiaries and mental hospitals, and reinforcing the radical otherness of the criminal deviant on which that quarantining rested." ] [25]^8 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Volume I: Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941) 122. ] [26]^9 Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) 32, 33. Rorty thinks the language of sin is anathema to "the secular, antiauthoritarian vocabulary of shared social hope." ] [27]^10 See Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 33. Rorty's theodicy of the Gulag seems to me far too weak and consoling; he suggests that we come to see such moral atrocities as part of a narrative "in which we leftists, often with the best intentions, tricked ourselves, fooled ourselves, outsmarted ourselves, yet gained a lot of useful experience" (Truth and Progress [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998] 241). Which means, after the Holocaust, that what we should do is "pick ourselves up and try again" (175)! The idea that the basic flaw is really a failure of moral energy is almost breathtaking in its naivet?. ] [28]^11 Patricia Greenspan, Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). ] [29]^12 Indeed, perhaps the concept of sin can be therapeutically useful, to illuminate the full complexity of psychosis; on this, see A. A. Howespian's "Sin and Psychosis," 264-281 in Limning the Psyche: Explorations in Christian Psychology, ed. Robert C. Roberts and Mark R. Talbot (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1997). See also A. O. Rorty, "The Social and Political Sources of Akrasia," in Ethics 107.4 (July 1997): 644-657. ] [30]^13 Delbanco, The Death of Satan, 12. ] [31]^14 My argument here is deeply indebted to Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). ] [32]^15 Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 9. ] From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 24 15:26:44 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 11:26:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Gilbert Meilaender: Genes as Resources Message-ID: Gilbert Meilaender: Genes as Resources The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1072411&textreg=1&id=MeiGene4-3 Having taught at the University of Virginia and Oberlin College, Gilbert Meilaender is currently the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Professor of Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. He is also the Associate Editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics and a Fellow of the Hastings Center. His books include: Working: Its Meaning and Its Limits (2000); Things That Count: Essays Moral and Theological (2000); Bioethics: A Primer for Christians (1996); and Body, Soul, and Bioethics (1995). "I happen to believe that you can't study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing." --C. S. Lewis [3]^1 "So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes." --Stephen Jay Gould [4]^2 I begin with some sentences from Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water. He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there.... I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish.... He urinated outside the shack and then went up the road to wake the boy. He was shivering with the morning cold.... Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him?... That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly.... The boy did not go down. He had been there before and one of the fishermen was looking after the skiff for him. [5]^3 Hemingway's prose is, of course, generally regarded as clear and straightforward. And I suspect that any single sentence in the passage above is probably simple and transparent to you. I also suspect that the whole of it probably makes almost no sense at all. There's a reason for that. The sentences were drawn from pages 29, 104-5, 22, 74, 48, and 123--in that order. One of the great blessings of the computer age, our students are sometimes told, is that you can move sentences or whole paragraphs around with ease. You needn't really have a thesis and its accompanying arguments worked out when you sit down to write a paper. Just write--and then move the pieces around later. This advice is given as if the argument of the paper were somehow built up from below--from words, phrases, and sentences moved around, combined and recombined. As if a thesis would just emerge without an organizing intelligence, an authorial perspective, at work from the outset. As if we could explain what is lower, the argument of the paper, without what is higher, the author. My thesis is that we ought not make a similar mistake when we think about genes. Consider the image at work in the following frequently quoted passage from Thomas Eisner, a biologist from Cornell University: As a consequence of recent advances in genetic engineering, [a biological species] must be viewed as...a depository of genes that are potentially transferable. A species is not merely a hard-bound volume of the library of nature. It is also a loose-leaf book, whose individual pages, the genes, might be available for selective transfer and modification of other species. [6]^4 Of Eisner's analogy, Mary Midgley comments: "The idea of improving books by splicing in bits of other books is not seductive because in books, as in organisms, ignoring the context usually produces nonsense." [7]^5 I have tried to provide a humble illustration of this by splicing together sentences from different pages of just one book--producing thereby something unintelligible. Letting our imaginations roam just a bit, I might also have spliced in sentences from Anna Karenina and A Christmas Carol--producing thereby a kind of horror. The problem with doing this is not only, as Midgley suggests, that we completely ignore context. It goes yet a little deeper. Such an image of a book ignores the presence of an authorial hand. It ignores the fact that a book is not just the sum of a number of words, sentences, or paragraphs. A book is a whole, with its own integrity. Human Beings as Collections of Genes This train of thought was first suggested to me by one of the findings of the Human Genome Project, a finding that got quite a bit of attention in news articles announcing (in February, code 2001 /code ) the completion of that project by two groups of researchers. We were told that the number of genes in the human genome had turned out to be surprisingly small. Thus, for example, human beings have, at most, perhaps twice as many genes as the humble roundworm, and the degree of sequence divergence between human and chimpanzee genomes is quite small. Considering the complexity of human beings in relation to roundworms and, even, chimpanzees, it seemed surprising that, relatively speaking, much less complex organisms do not have far fewer genes than human beings. Why, one might ask, should that seem surprising? It is surprising if you assume that the complexity of a "higher" being is somehow built up and explained in terms of "lower" component parts. If we explain the higher in terms of the lower, it makes a certain sense to suppose that a relatively complex being would need lots of component parts--at least by comparison with a less complex being. And, of course, one might argue that the Human Genome Project is "the ultimate product of an extreme reductionist vision of biology that has held that to understand better one need only to go smaller." [8]^6 Thinking about human beings that way is, in a sense, just the last stage in a long movement of Western thought. First we learned to think that qualities of objects are not really present in the object but are supplied by the knowing subject. Then some philosophers suggested that the objects themselves--and not just their qualities--are simply constructs of the knowing subject. But what happens when even that subject disappears? When this reductive process is applied to the human subject, we get, as C. S. Lewis noted in a witty passage, a result uncommonly like zero. While we were reducing the world to almost nothing we deceived ourselves with the fancy that all its lost qualities were being kept safe (if in a somewhat humbled condition) as "things in our mind." Apparently we had no mind of the sort required. The Subject is as empty as the Object. Almost nobody has been making linguistic mistakes about almost nothing. By and large, this is the only thing that has ever happened. [9]^7 In The Abolition of Man Lewis powerfully depicts the movement by which things came to be understood as simply parts of nature, objects that have no inherent purpose or telos, and which can then become resources available for human use. Hence, the long, slow process of what we call conquering nature could more accurately be said to be reducing things to "mere nature" in that sense. "We do not," Lewis writes, look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety.... Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyze her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. [10]^8 Although my central focus, like Lewis's, is on what happens to human beings when we think of them simply as collections of genes, it is important to note that this reductive understanding may be misplaced even when applied to lower creatures. Lewis himself suggests as much--that science does a kind of violence even to trees when understanding them simply as natural objects. In our own day, we have gone beyond the kind of quantitative reduction to parts that Lewis pictures. We are on the brink of losing organisms altogether. When organisms become things entirely lacking any self-definition, they become malleable and available for reprogramming. Biological boundaries between organisms become "historically contingent products of gradually accumulated genetic change," and, therefore, those boundaries can be "slightly breached with only slight consequences." [11]^9 Living beings, including human beings, become collections of bits of genetic information to be combined and recombined in countless possible ways. At one time we might have thought that the scientific attempt to understand the higher in terms of the lower was just that: a search to understand. Now, however, wisdom gives way to power. For now there may be nothing there to know--except what we assemble and create. And genes are the resource we use in this creative process. Within the discipline of bioethics, this approach will have its effect via a theory of justice. Begin in this genetic age to think of human beings as constituted by their parts, and you will find yourself thinking of genes as resources that may or may not be justly distributed. Even as we might think about the just distribution of wealth, or food, or education, or medical care, so also we might think of the bundles of genes that, on this view, constitute our selves as simply another resource, which can be distributed justly or unjustly. In an older way of thinking, there were human beings and there were resources. We did justice or injustice to human beings by what we did with those resources. But now we will be invited to think of justice or injustice in the making of human beings--which is what we do when we distribute genetic resources. [12]^10 And, in fact, going one step further, there will be no compelling reason to think that the genetic resources to be distributed need be confined to DNA from the human species. [13]^11 Human beings are simply creatures to be fashioned out of available genetic resources, and the only moral question will be whether those resources are fairly distributed. The Mythic and Religious Dimensions of Genes as Resources Somewhere back in the depths of that consciousness which we will still imagine ourselves to have, we may detect a nagging worry. Who exactly are these beings who make decisions about how to distribute our genetic resources? What entitles them to make such judgments? In a world devoid of any inherent value or purpose, in which organisms lack any self-definition, it is not clear that we should be talking about justice or injustice. Why should we think some people wronged if they do not get a fair share of genetic endowments? That may be their misfortune, but what responsible agent has wronged them? In such a world, we cannot blame God or, even, Nature. Justice or injustice can be nothing more than a construct we impose--not only upon ourselves, but also upon those future generations whom we fashion from the genetic resources we distribute. We have, in fact, no more moral ground for anointing one particular distribution as just than another. What we have is creative power. This is what happens when we can no longer blame something higher--God or Nature--for our condition. Unless, of course, we are god--or, at least, some of us are. Let us suppose that neither God nor Nature can any longer be held responsible for the future of the human condition. But suppose also that we remain morally serious; we believe it makes a difference, a moral difference, how genetic resources are distributed to future generations. If neither God nor Nature is available to shoulder that moral burden, but if seriousness requires that someone shoulder it, who remains as a likely candidate for such responsibility? Only, I think, humanity--now conceived as godlike in its utterly free creative power and its responsibility for the future. The vision that underlies the view of genes as resources is powerful and appealing precisely because of its mythic dimension. Rather than thinking of organisms as the result of an evolutionary process (generated by natural selection), we may think of organisms as self-creators, constantly organizing and reorganizing themselves by reordering their genes. Thus, genetic engineering is in accord with nature; it is nature's way of generating the ongoing evolutionary process. If we miss the powerful mythic and religious dimensions of this account--if we think of it simply as a neutral, scientific picture of the universe--we will miss much of its appeal. For example, Lee Silver ends his book, Remaking Eden, imagining some future generation of "GenRich" creatures, for whom homo sapiens had been a distant ancestor: These beings have dedicated their long lives to answering three deceptively simple questions that have been asked in every self-conscious generation of the past. "Where did the universe come from?" "Why is there something rather than nothing?" "What is the meaning of conscious existence?" Now, as the answers are upon them, they find themselves coming face to face with their creator. What do they see? Is it something that twentieth-century humans can't possibly fathom in their wildest imaginations? Or is it simply their own image in the mirror, as they reflect themselves back to the beginning of time...? [14]^12 This is not science, of course; it is myth. It could not possibly appeal to us as powerfully as it does were it not for that mythic dimension, and as such it invites our sustained attention and critique. This myth is, first and most important, radically dualistic. [15]^13 When genes become resources and organisms lack self-definition, they become amenable to indefinite reprogramming. For a long time human beings contented themselves with the pleasant thought that they were subjects who objectified and constructed the rest of the world. Now, however, we too become constructs, as our genes are spliced and exchanged. But, then, who is doing the programming? Whose project are we? Clearly, there is a ghost in the machine, as dualists have always believed. We are both programmer and programmed, both manufactured body and ethereal manufacturer. And where do these two come together, if not in the pineal gland? We cannot say. But it appears that the real self can hardly be a body; for the body can be shaped and reshaped as we distribute genetic resources. The initial dualism, therefore, is metaphysical. In what looks at first to be a materialist, reductionist age, bodily form is indefinitely malleable. But the real self--that powerful, creative, ordering intelligence--is not body; it must be something different. For any future our impoverished imaginations can conceive, that real self no doubt needs the body as a kind of beachhead in our world--a mode of entry by means we cannot fathom--but the body is, finally, mere natural object. For the real self--the creative, constructive self--we will have to look elsewhere. Were this the end of the dualism, were it merely an idea, perhaps it would do little harm. But ideas have a way of taking shape in life, and if sheer metaphysical dualism of body and self cannot really be lived, those who think in its terms will find a vulgar translation. In place of the dualism that separates the ghost in the machine from the body will come the dualism that separates some human beings (the programmers) from others (the programmed). Who will undertake to design our future descendants? "It cannot be the human race as a whole," Mary Midgley writes, they wouldn't know how to do it. It has to be the elite, the biotechnologists who are the only people able to make these changes. So it emerges that members of the public who complain that biotechnological projects involve playing God have in fact understood this claim correctly. That phrase, which defenders of the projects have repeatedly dismissed as mere mumbo jumbo, is actually a quite exact term for the sort of claim to omniscience and omnipotence on these matters that is being put forward. [16]^14 In short, the very first moral casualty of this dualism is human equality in the relation between the generations; for Midgley is, in effect, echoing the point made by C. S. Lewis a half century earlier: "Each new power won by man is a power over man as well." [17]^15 There is a second thing to notice about this myth: namely, how powerfully religious it is. Perhaps it is good to remember that when the magician Merlin makes his appearance in Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century History of the Kings of England, he is both magician and engineer. In the kingdom of Britain, there is no one more skilled "either in the foretelling of the future or in mechanical contrivances." [18]^16 It is Merlin who oversees and enables the engineering marvel of moving to Britain the rocks that form Stonehenge; it is also he who magically disguises King Utherpendragon so that, seeming to be Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, he may sleep with the Duke's wife Ygerna, by whom Arthur is conceived. That powerful capacity to engineer and reconstruct is intimately related to the magician's desire to tap into power more-than-human, and for precisely that reason genuine science must be governed by a sense of limits. We should not underestimate how deeply this desire for godlike power infects our humanity. It is, after all, central to such stories as the Fall of Adam and Eve, or that of Prometheus. Because this desire--which is ultimately a desire not for wisdom but for power--infects us so deeply, we do well to anticipate that even the most altruistic of our projects may be corrupted by it. When a religious quest goes bad, after all, it becomes demonic. The sense that we can treat our genes as resources to be combined and recombined indefinitely has been called "algeny," a name intended to remind us of "alchemy," the quest to transform base metals into gold, which was itself both scientific and religious in character. If we do not see these connections, we miss the human meaning of what is happening in genetic advances, and we fail to see how the thirst that drives and underlies the bioengineering project may sometimes be idolatrous. Dualistic and religious in character, this great mythic vision of genes as resources, this sense that we might have within our grasp a power very near the secret of life, is also utopian. The project of human improvement, of overcoming suffering and enhancing capacities, knows no end. There will always be another disease to overcome, more years to be added to life, more points to be added to the intelligence quotient. Jeremy Rifkin, who was largely responsible for popularizing the term "algeny," has noted how the alchemical quest "was to help nature in its struggle to `perfect itself.'" [19]^17 Likewise, Rifkin suggests, the "algenist is the ultimate engineer." [20]^18 Cooperating with a nature understood to have only very fluid boundaries between organisms, treating genes as resources to be combined in ever new and better ways, we place our hope--and, in a sense, our virtue--in the future. If that perfected future never comes, or, if it comes and turns out to be one marked by power rather than wisdom, we will have to be justified by only our good intentions, and I doubt that they are adequate for the task. Thinking of Human Beings from Above If this does not sound like a desirable path into the future, perhaps we need to rethink the image of genes as pages in a loose-leaf book, to be transferred and combined at will. We need, that is, to rethink the meaning of our humanity. Writing about human embryo research, Courtney Campbell contrasts reproduction and procreation in order to express a point not unlike the one I have been making. [21]^19 When today we speak of reproduction, we are likely to think of genes as the "`building blocks of life'" and of the person as "conceived, as it were, from the genes up." The embryo is then simply a cluster of dividing cells. Often, however, as Campbell notes, such an angle of vision may detach reproduction from its larger human context and from "the meaning and purposiveness" we find in procreation. Taken alone, reductionist thinking about the embryo turns out to subvert "the primary ethical rationale for engaging in research on the human embryo." For that rationale is understood in terms of "advancing particular human purposes." From one angle we entirely empty our vision of human purpose or meaning; yet everything we propose to do depends on the presence of such fundamentally human understandings. Can we at least begin to contemplate other, more satisfactorily human, ways of thinking about our humanity? Anything I say here must be inadequate, but it is important that we begin this process of rethinking. Rather than understanding the human being--the higher organism--in terms of what is lower, we may need to recapture a way of thinking that begins with what is higher and does not think of human beings as collections of bits of genetic information. "[T]he key to complexity," Stephen Jay Gould wrote shortly after the findings of the genome project were announced, is not more genes, but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code--and many of these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes. [22]^20 If we insist on starting from below in thinking about our human nature, we will miss much of the depth of the human person. [23]^21 Imagine someone who wants to translate from a language with a large, varied, and subtle vocabulary into a language with a much smaller and less varied vocabulary. How can one do this? Only by giving more than one sense to words in the language into which one is translating. And, of course, a speaker of that language--who knew only it--might obstinately insist, "No, that's not the right way to use this word." He would be approaching the richer language from below, as if the richer could be made up simply of words drawn from the limits of his own, less subtle language. Likewise, a man in love with a woman and a man lusting after a woman may experience many of the same physiological "symptoms." If we have never been in love, or if we insist on acting as if we have never been in love--if that is, we persist in looking at the experience only from below, in terms of its physiological symptoms--we might argue that there is no difference between love and lust. Only one who began from above, who knew what it was to be in love, would see at once that these experiences are not the same. If, however, we insist that love must be analyzed and understood entirely in terms of those physiological symptoms, we cut ourselves off from an entire realm of human wisdom. We will never know what it means to be in love. Were we really to think of human beings from above, to eschew, at least for certain moments and purposes, reductionistic modes of thought, it would be no surprise for us to learn that the relative "richness" of human life is not simply a matter of our having more genes than other organisms. Thinking from above, we would stop thinking about human beings simply as collections of resources, which it was our duty to distribute in creatively fashioning the next generation. We would be protected, at least somewhat, against thinking of our relation to future generations chiefly as an exercise of power in the making and remaking of humanity--even if such power is cloaked in the language of a theory of justice. In short, if we were to master the genies who invite us to think and desire in certain ways, we would have far less to fear from the ongoing attempt to master our genes. ________________________ [24]^1 C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York: Macmillan, 1965) 71. In the novel, these words are spoken by a chemist, William Hingest. ] [25]^2 Stephen Jay Gould, "Humbled by the Genome's Mysteries," The New York Times ( code 19 /code February code 2001 /code ): A21. ] [26]^3 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Scribner's, 1952) 29, 104-5, 22, 74, 48, 123. ] [27]^4 Thomas Eisner, "Chemical Ecology and Genetic Engineering: The Prospects for Plant Protection and the Need for Plant Habitat Conservatition," Symposium on Tropical Biology and Agriculture, Monsanto Company, St. Louis, MO, code 15 /code July 1985; as quoted in Mary Midgley, "Biotechnology and Monstrosity," Hastings Center Report code 30 /code (September-October 2000) 11. ] [28]^5 Midgley 12. ] [29]^6 Alfred I. Tauber and Sohotra Sarkar, "The Human Genome Project: Has Blind Reductionism Gone Too Far?" Perspectives in Biology and Medicine code 35 /code (Winter 1992): 228. I have eliminated the italics from this citation. ] [30]^7 C. S. Lewis, preface, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, by D. E. Harding (London: Farber and Farber, 1952) 10. ] [31]^8 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947) 82-3. ] [32]^9 Stuart A. Newman, "Carnal Boundaries: The Commingling of Flesh in Theory and Practice," Reinventing Biology, ed. Lynda Birke and Ruth Hubbard (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) 222. ] [33]^10 Allen Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wikler, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 85. ] [34]^11 Buchanan, et al., 87. ] [35]^12 Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World (New York: Avon, 1997) 250. ] [36]^13 Cf. Newman 221-2; Midgley 12. ] [37]^14 Midgley 14. ] [38]^15 Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 71. ] [39]^16 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (New York: Penguin, 1996) 195. ] [40]^17 Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1998) 34. ] [41]^18 Rifkin 35. ] [42]^19 Courtney Campbell, "Source or Resource? Human Embryo Research as an Ethical Issue," Cloning and the Future of Human Embryo Research, ed. Paul Lauritzen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, code 2001 /code ) 41f. ] [43]^20 Gould A21. ] [44]^21 The examples in this and the next paragraph are drawn from C. S. Lewis, "Transposition," The Weight of Glory (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949) especially 19-21. ] From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 24 15:27:34 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 11:27:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: David B. Morris: The Transformations of Evil and Suffering Message-ID: David B. Morris: The Transformations of Evil and Suffering The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1105448&textreg=1&id=MorEvil2-2 David B. Morris compares modern and postmodern views of suffering and looks at how our cultural narratives of suffering often serve to increase, rather than alleviate, the pain and isolation of those most in need. Viewing suffering as embedded in events, situations, and relations resists a static view of suffering that can lead to inaction and hopelessness and pushes for an exploration of its causes and consequences. David B. Morris is the author of several books, including two prize-winning works on British literature--The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th Century England and Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense--and, recently, The Culture of Pain, which won a PEN prize, and Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Evil: Modern and Postmodern Evil has been transformed by postmodern culture. It doubtless constitutes a truism of contemporary thought that evil has shared in the same loss of credulity suffered by the comprehensive explanatory systems or--as Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard famously calls them--"metanarratives" that formerly explained or contained it.[3]^1 This truism is surely accurate, if incomplete. Paul Ricoeur in The Encyclopedia of Religion, summarizing and extending his earlier work, describes four dominant myths worldwide that have addressed the origin of evil: chaos myths, myths of an evil god, myths of the exiled soul, and myths of a lost paradise.[4]^2 Myths of origin fall among the metanarratives that come under suspicion in postmodern thought, but in Western cultures the most powerful and still intermittently persistent myth describing the origin of evil is doubtless the vision of a lost paradise. John Milton's epic Paradise Lost gave influential expression to the long-standing view that evil is an omnipresent threat and central event in human history. The threat of evil is felt as so powerful that in effect Milton writes within the formal tradition of theodicies that explicitly set out to justify God's ways to humans, especially in creating or permitting evil. Milton depicts human history, in contrast to the timeless innocence of Eden, as beginning with the temptation scene and the triumph of evil, when Eve disobeys God and succumbs to the wiles of Satan. William Blake's illustration of the scene is faithful to the spirit of Milton's text in depicting Adam, at the fateful moment, looking away from Eve, with back turned. Adam's back-turned posture carries a crucial moral meaning: he simply cannot see or will not attend to the presence of evil, as embodied in the well-spoken serpent. Attention is an important ethical state for Milton, more significant at times than heroic action. They too serve God, he says in the sonnet on his blindness, who only stand and wait, attentively. The flowery garland that Adam has been weaving for Eve--now fallen beside his left foot--is more than a sign of love or perhaps, for Milton, even of uxorious folly: it is a prophecy of their own impending fall. It locates the triumph of evil in the failed attention that ignores the dangers--from within and without--that continuously surround us. Human history, for Milton, is life lived, uncloistered, in the heat and dust of constant temptation and in the all-too-easily ignored presence of evil. Evil in the West has never regained the prominence, theological and dramatic, that it achieved in Paradise Lost. Little more than half a century later, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, its central position had been subtly but thoroughly eroded. An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope announces its ambition to rival Milton in the creation of a theodicy. Pope aims to "vindicate" (not merely "justify," as Milton claimed to do) the ways of God to humankind. Pope's lengthy vindication of divine goodness in four verse epistles, however, manages with only two appearances of the word "evil." His preferred term to describe catastrophes and wrongdoing is not evil but the milder, evasive term "ills." In effect, while Milton struggles with the problem of evil, including the omnipresent threat, dire consequences, and deep mystery that evil represents, Pope worries about the appearance of evil. Evil for Pope is not a cosmic force continuously at war with humankind, daily tempting the soul and threatening to plunge us into everlasting fire, but rather a cognitive illusion: what we misinterpret as evil is, if understood rightly, a component of "universal good." True, Pope retains a trace of the older vocabulary of evil when he employs a distinction between "physical or moral ill" common in theological accounts. If the distinction remains, however, its force is lost in the light of a rational theology that has no room for mysteries so potent that they once demanded nothing less than a mythic imagination. Now evil (under a new name) can be handled in a single line as the effect of errant will and natural change. The postmodern world--despite our skepticism about grand narratives and our erosion of trust in mythic accounts--has not witnessed the absolute disappearance of evil, nor has Satan wholly died. In its notorious eclecticism, postmodernism retains elements from the past, which are of course deracinated and transformed in their new context, like an ancient Greek portico stuck onto a skyscraper. Televangelists regularly thunder against sin and evil in their fund-raising ministries. The so-called death of Satan becomes the occasion for an academic critique of liberal failures to understand the reality of evil and to give it a needed place in our civic and moral imagination.[5]^3 Less tendentiously, a few theologians, historians, feminists, and philosophers continue to study the perennial issues associated with evil and to offer insightful analysis.[6]^4 The fact is that evil in the postmodern era--even as a topic of conversation--has not so much disappeared as taken on the changed shapes of a period in which theological and mythic accounts of a lost paradise no longer ring true. Indeed, the twentieth century has witnessed catastrophes (from world war to genocide) so immense and so chilling as to demand and, on occasion, to receive serious discussion, such as Hannah Arendt's influential treatment of Adolph Eichmann and the banality of evil.[7]^5 Arendt's view of Eichmann is especially helpful in suggesting that evil has not disappeared but rather taken on distinctive new shapes. It seems clear that she detects a modernist transformation of evil in the Nazi employment of such invisibly omnipresent inventions as the assembly line, mass transit, and the bureaucratic routine. The decades that have passed since the close of World War II and the advent of postmodern times have seen evil not so much transformed as turned inside out. Evil has been long understood by theologians and by popular audiences as the cause of suffering.[8]^6 The postmodern era has redefined suffering as evil. Suffering becomes one of the few agreed-upon new shapes that evil assumes in the postmodern world. The postmodern reformulation of the bond between suffering and evil finds examples not only throughout popular culture, where prolonged suffering is construed as the worst thing that can befall someone, but also, surprisingly, in the sciences and social sciences. Timothy Anders, for example, is unusual mainly in employing the postmodern tools of evolutionary psychology to argue that "the ultimate source of all evil is the biological capacity for suffering."[9]^7 Here again we see the traditional relation between evil and suffering turned inside out: evil is no longer the source of suffering, but rather suffering is the source of evil. French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas provides an especially thought-provoking account of this reversal in his essay "Useless Suffering." Levinas writes self-consciously from a late twentieth-century stance in which our awareness of massive cruelty and of unprecedented suffering exceeds any possible justification in the language of traditional theology. "This is the century," he reminds us, "that in thirty years has known two world wars, the totalitarianisms of right and left, Hitlerism and Stalinism, Hiroshima, the Gulag, and the genocides of Auschwitz and Cambodia."[10]^8 The millions of victims crushed in all this torture and destruction cannot for Levinas be encompassed within traditional religious perspectives which understand evil through its relation to God's will. In this new context, which he believes requires a radical rethinking of evil, Levinas seeks the basis for what he calls a faith without theodicy. "All evil," he asserts starkly, "refers to suffering."[11]^9 Suffering, in Levinas's account, takes on the quality of evil from its combination of destructive pain coupled with absolute and intrinsic uselessness. Suffering, for the person who suffers, is in his view wholly without meaning. It is simply the experience of an overwhelming, violent, and cruel negation--"extreme passivity, impotence, abandonment and solitude"[12]^10 --in which every human effort to affirm coherence or value drains away into absurdity. It is, Levinas writes, the "impasse of life and being."[13]^11 Such impasse for Levinas finds its archetype in the Holocaust of the Jews under Hitler: "the paradigm of gratuitous human suffering, where evil appears in its diabolical horror."[14]^12 Within the darkness of such diabolical evil redefined as an extreme and useless suffering, within the horror of utter meaninglessness and of crushing impersonal force, however, Levinas also finds the hope for a saving transformation. The source of this transformation lies in what he calls "the inter-human order." The "inter-human order" for Levinas signifies not merely the everyday political or social worlds but the ethical position of the self (prior to all practical politics or implied social contracts) as inescapably bound up with others. From this ethical perspective based upon a recognition of the Other, the suffering of another person--while absolutely useless, meaningless, and inexorably evil to the person who suffers--can take on a meaning through the "inter-human" claim it makes upon us as witnesses: it solicits and calls us, invoking the recourse that people have always recognized to help one another. Further, where such solicitation finds an answering response, absolute and meaningless suffering does not lose its quality of evil for the sufferer but instead becomes transformed, in the self who responds, into what Levinas calls a meaningful suffering for the suffering of someone else. This difficult reciprocity within suffering makes sense in the context of Levinas's distinctive style of postmodern thought, where an Ethics of the inter-human is not an obligation derived from higher principles but rather the principle from which philosophy and Ethics must begin. The importance of Levinas here lies not only in his identification of evil with suffering but also in his demonstration that postmodern suffering--cut free from traditional theodicies--clearly differs from suffering as it was understood at least from the time of Milton through the modernist era. Suffering: Modern and Postmodern Postmodern thought differs from modernist thinking not only in the creation of an absolute identity between evil and suffering but also in the development of a new idea of suffering. The famous poem "Mus?e des Beaux Arts" (1938) by W. H. Auden offers a strong example of the modernist view that is rejected or revised in postmodern versions of suffering. Auden's poem--based upon the famous painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1555), by Pieter Brueghel the Elder--depicts suffering as a quintessentially individual, private, and solitary experience. This modernist view construes the act of suffering, even though embedded in a rich social context, as occurring in an almost impenetrable solitude, like Icarus falling into the sea as the workaday world goes about its business, with only his lower legs visible in the extreme right corner of Brueghel's canvas. As Auden depicts it, such impenetrable solitude is almost built into the structure of suffering. The problem is not that we turn away from evil and disaster, Adam-like, as if unable to foresee or to bear it, or as if deliberately refusing to assist. While suffering regularly disturbs and threatens us, Auden does not represent the turning away from suffering as moral failure, a lapse, say, of foresight, charity, or courage. He depicts aversion or detachment, instead, as the outcome of a structural position we cannot help but occupy. Suffering occurs in a social world where non-sufferers always find their own lives more absorbing and immediate, where nature and commerce continue in their appointed course oblivious to individual disaster. The plowman never looks up; the expensive ship sails on. If suffering should fall unavoidably within our field of vision, Auden insists that we cannot escape our built-in position of detachment. Not even the Old Masters, he suggests, could somehow place us in direct relation to another person's suffering. Their triumph--straining the limits of art--lies in forcing us to recognize and to contemplate our fated detachment as each of us, like Icarus, suffers alone. The significance of Auden's poem lies in the clarity with which it presents the modernist myth (a myth it represents as uncontestable truth) that suffering is an individual, private, and solitary state of inwardness. From a postmodern perspective, it seems clear that Auden invokes Brueghel and the Old Masters in effect to universalize and confirm what is a historically and culturally specific modernist interpretation of suffering, as recognizably modernist as the gaunt, skeletal, solitary human figures sculpted by Alberto Giacometti. As heirs of modernism, of course, we respond to a persuasiveness in Auden's view that the normal human "position" in relation to suffering mandates a glasslike separation and detachment. Yet, this modernist myth concerning the inwardness and isolation of suffering is not necessarily confirmed by Brueghel's painting. It is uncertain, in fact, whether Brueghel's painting deals with suffering at all. The painting could equally depict violent death or the consequences of over-reaching. Even if we grant that the painting deals with suffering, Brueghel's luminous depiction of everyday life--the shining furrows, dazzling sea, and dreamlike city--might suggest that suffering lies wholly outside the realm of daily experience: it is not so much private and inward as utterly alien. We cannot grasp it any more than we can make sense of a demigod falling from the sky. Auden's reading of Brueghel is powerful precisely because it seems to validate as universal what is at last merely a limited and historical modernist interpretation of suffering. From a postmodern perspective, suffering is never wholly individual, private, inward, and solitary, despite our inability to inhabit another human consciousness. Postmodern suffering contains important public and social--or inter-human--dimensions. The postmodern interpretation of suffering as necessarily public and social stands in vivid contrast to the modernist emphasis on isolation and silence. The silence attributed to suffering in modernist views is almost a clich?: a corollary of the argument that suffering is private, inward, and unknowable. There are obviously no words to convey an experience construed as so inaccessible to others that it lies beyond language. The clich? of silent suffering, however, while it recognizes real limitations of speech and knowledge, must somehow be reconciled with an equally obvious and proliferating discourse of lament, elegy, litigation, and victim-mongering. Postmodern suffering not only seeks a voice but also, however imperfectly, enters vigorously into the public discourses and speech genres of specific communities. A postmodern approach thus recognizes that suffering in some sense follows the contours of various established discourses, much as an academic analysis like this one will follow the conventions of scholarly discourse, including footnotes, reference to contemporary thinkers, and correct grammar. Methodist hymns, by contrast, treat human suffering within a speech genre where none of the social patterns that govern scholarly essays applies--or even makes sense. Suffering, from a postmodern perspective, cannot be disentangled from the linguistic and narrative turns that so deeply color contemporary knowledge. Postmodern suffering belongs inside--inextricably connected with and shaped by--the public, social domain of story and language. The specific question at issue here is quite basic: Why does it matter for an understanding of evil that postmodernism asks us to recognize how every voice is shaped and constrained by the speech genres of a specific social community at a particular historical moment? It matters because the public discourses of distinct historical communities also shape and constrain how we talk about suffering, how we talk when suffering, and, ultimately, how we suffer. The major change that typifies postmodern versions of suffering and of evil can be identified in the concept of social suffering. "Social suffering," as Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock contend, "results from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people and, reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems."[15]^13 Contributors to the book-length volume Social Suffering discuss the forms of affliction that characterize such political, economic, and institutional applications of power as the rape of women in India during the struggle for independence from Britain, the imposition of Maoism in China, and, inevitably, the Holocaust. Moreover, the writings of Michel Foucault have shown how social power works not only through traditional top-down political, economic, and institutional hierarchies but also through widely distributed informal networks of professional knowledge and cultural discourse. Suffering, when viewed in this postmodern perspective, is never strictly private, inward, and individual. It is transpersonal, discursive, or, as Levinas says, inter-human. Its sources lie not in some unknowable or ungraspable fatality--like the will of the gods or the operations of a mysterious curse--but rather in social structures and in cultural practices. Individuals suffer only within the context of far larger social forces and actions that give their suffering its distinctive historical shapes. One way to think about this postmodern conception of evil as social suffering is to imagine a shift from myth to plot. Myths deal with archetypal patterns or large abstract structures of experience that always exceed the dimensions of a single culture or society. In discussing myths of evil, Paul Ricoeur emphasizes how myth "incorporates our fragmentary experience of evil within great narratives of origin."[16]^14 The postmodern skepticism concerning grand narratives carries over into a skepticism concerning myths of evil. Myth and plot clearly overlap, of course, in the sense that every myth tells a story, but plot introduces us to a more detailed and prosaic level of narrative. It moves us from timelessness to time. Plot gives us heroes or heroines who are not the thousand-faced figures of myth but distinctive people with local addresses: Quixote, Crusoe, Pip, Mrs. Dalloway, Joseph K. Plots, too, tend to focus on a specific, concrete, and unique sequence of actions. They describe a world in which this unique sequence of actions and choices, not an underlying mythic pattern, is what determines individual destinies. Plot, moreover, invites a detailed analysis of causation. It gives wider play than myth to the operations of chance and contingency, while also allowing readers or spectators to recognize elements of narrative structure, such as the recognition scene or turning point, that distinguish causal sequences from mere happenstance or fate. Plot, in short, immerses us in a world where suffering and evil emerge as distinct from the universal forces represented in myth. It allows us to understand evil and suffering as, no matter how deeply imbued with ineradicable traces of mystery, at least in part the outcome of specific inter-human actions and distinctive social arrangements. These heuristic differences between myth and plot--evoked as a framework for analysis of suffering and evil in the postmodern age--find a clear illustration in the work of Gustavo Guti?rrez.[17]^15 Guti?rrez, known as the founder of Liberation Theology, is a Catholic priest who works in the slums of Lima, Peru. For Guti?rrez, the suffering of the innocent and impoverished masses who inhabit the slums of Lima does not raise traditional theological questions about God's will. He is not concerned with mythic explanations of evil as originating in a lost paradise. For Guti?rrez, we will understand the suffering in the slums of Lima only by identifying the historical oppression of the poor by powerful landowners who receive the support (if not outright blessing) of the Catholic Church. Plot here is not merely an analytical tool that helps clarify the social causes of suffering in the historical actions of wealthy landowners and churchmen. Unlike myth, where the outcome is already foretold, plot has access to the realm of contingency, where human actions may change the outcome of events. Suffering in the slums of Lima, Guti?rrez insists, will not be reversed by medicines or compassion or improved social services, however welcome they might be, but only by the creation of a new and just historical plot that redresses the oppression of the poor. A postmodern vision that understands suffering as inter-human and historical (not solitary, private, inward, and inscrutable) matters for Guti?rrez precisely because it contains an implicit imperative for mobilizing effective social resistance to evil. Conclusion Evil, from a postmodern perspective, is as malleable as the suffering with which it has increasingly come to be identified. Filmmakers, of course, continue to create stories depicting evil as an indestructible cosmic force, breeding new legions in a distant galaxy, or as a deathless Gothic legacy that lives on in vampires, swamp creatures, and ax murderers. As we might expect, there is no single postmodern voice of evil. Some postmodern voices prove especially gripping because they call upon an archaic and primitive dread that may belong to the evolutionary history of humankind. The malleability of evil, of course, ranks among its most ancient features: Satan is the archetypal shape-shifter. Yet, a postmodern perspective provides a major difference in viewing the malleability of evil as, at last, a cultural artifact. Moreover, the new identification between evil and suffering throws a new light onto suffering. Suffering, from a postmodern point of view, now appears not a permanent, ungraspable mystery of the human condition--something always enigmatic and beyond comprehension--but rather an event, even when locked within the privacy of an individual consciousness, that expresses much of what our cultures have taught us. In the extended social history of evil, one solid advantage that accrues to the postmodern moment lies in the implicit promise that we may, at least in part, address and redress the suffering that we have so thoroughly helped to shape. We may, unlike Adam, begin to turn towards the evil around us. ________________________ [18]^1 Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 34-37. ] [19]^2 Paul Ricoeur, "Evil," The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: MacMillan, 1987) 200. Ricoeur's text is based in part on his well-known study The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). ] [20]^3 Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). ] [21]^4 See, for example, Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil From Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); John S. Feinberg, Theologies and Evil (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979); Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay (London: Routledge, 1984); John T. Wilcox, The Bitterness of Job: A Philosophical Reading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); Nel Noddings, Women and Evil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); David Rey Griffin, Evil Revisited: Responses and Reconsiderations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); and Lyall Watson, Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). ] [22]^5 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1965). ] [23]^6 See, for example, Anthony B. Pinn, Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1995). ] [24]^7 Timothy Anders, The Evolution of Evil: An Inquiry into the Ultimate Origins of Human Suffering (Chicago: Open Court, 1994) 334. See also Leonard W. Doob, Panorama of Evil: Insights from the Behavioral Sciences (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978); and Howard K. Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995). ] [25]^8 Emmanuel Levinas, "Useless Suffering," trans. Richard Cohen, The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (New York: Routledge, 1988) 161-162. ] [26]^9 Levinas, "Useless Suffering," 157. ] [27]^10 Levinas, "Useless Suffering," 158. ] [28]^11 Levinas, "Useless Suffering," 157. ] [29]^12 Levinas, "Useless Suffering," 157. ] [30]^13 Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, introduction, Social Suffering, eds. Kleinman, Das, and Lock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) ix. ] [31]^14 Ricoeur, Encyclopedia of Religion, 200. ] [32]^15 See especially Gustavo Guti?rrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1973) and On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987). ] From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 24 15:33:34 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 11:33:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Himmelbarb) 'The Roads to Modernity': Freedom Philosophers Message-ID: 'The Roads to Modernity': Freedom Philosophers New York Times Book Review, 4.10.24 By SCOTT MCLEMEE THE ROADS TO MODERNITY The British, French, and American Enlightenments. By Gertrude Himmelfarb. 284 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25. IN 1995, William Kristol published a manifesto-like essay called ''The Politics of Liberty, the Sociology of Virtue'' -- reprinted, the following year, as the final chapter of ''The Essential Neoconservative Reader.'' It was a heady time for the American right. There was the defeat of the Soviet Union, of course, and the containment (until further notice) of Saddam Hussein -- not to mention the '94 midterm elections, a k a the Gingrich revolution. Drawing up his ideological balance sheet, Kristol resisted the distractions of triumph. For the moment of victory seemed to present neoconservatives with an especially urgent and demanding task. It was not enough to foster the politics of liberty by turning as many functions as possible over to the free market's wise discipline. You also had to get people to behave themselves -- to maintain two-parent households, to defer to authority and to police their own unruly impulses. And you needed them to feel appropriate levels of shame and disgust when they did not. How was social order to be restored in a culture that was suffering the depredations of postwar liberalism? Especially when so many people claimed not to be suffering at all, but having a good time? To answer questions like these, neoconservative intellectuals required a ''sociology of virtue.'' Demanding it was one thing; producing it, another. Geopolitics remains the field over which the neocons send their fastest and heaviest think tanks rolling. But with ''The Roads to Modernity,'' by Gertrude Himmelfarb (who, as it happens, is Kristol's mother), we now have a historical and philosophical prologue to the sociology of virtue. In recent years, Himmelfarb has moved from studying the Victorian mind in her role as intellectual historian to championing the Victorian moral sensibility as a partisan in the culture wars. Here she shifts the focus of both her research and her polemic back a century, to the Enlightenment -- an era she wants to annex (with certain caveats) for cultural conservatism. The very idea once would have been unthinkable. It was the left that proclaimed itself the legitimate heir of the 18th century's faith in progress. Those days are long gone. The philosophes spoke of Man and of subjecting the world to Reason, abstractions under assault by a host of neo-Marxist, post-structuralist and anticolonialist critics, who suspect that the Enlightenment's rhetoric of emancipation conceals a lust for domination. Surprisingly, perhaps, Himmelfarb spends little time arguing with the academic left -- and none with the strain of conservative thought best exemplified by Russell Kirk, for which the Enlightenment was, almost literally, the devil's own doing. Instead, she plunges directly into the 18th century, quickly and neatly distinguishing between two opposed sets of thinkers -- the British (who are the good guys) and the French (who are, well, French). The scheme makes for exciting intellectual pugilism. The thinkers of the Parisian Enlightenment (she focuses on Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, Holbach and a few lesser figures) are rationalists, hostile to religion and adherents of a universalism that Himmelfarb finds disingenuous. For all their talk of progress and brotherhood, they remained elitists. She quotes Diderot: ''The general mass of men are not so made that they can either promote or understand this forward march of the human spirit.'' Since the rational powers of the downtrodden have been stultified, not least by religious superstition, it's best that the power to make decisions for the good of all rest in the hands of an enlightened sovereign (or, failing that, in a state run by an aristocracy of the really smart). Here were the makings, she writes, of liberal paternalism and the welfare state. The thinkers of the British Enlightenment and their American cousins, Himmelfarb says, present a countertradition that has been neglected, indeed almost written out of history. At first glance, this claim is puzzling. Voltaire's ''Lettres Philosophiques'' (one of the really avant-garde books of the 1730's) is devoted to describing how advanced a society England is, compared to poor backward France. True, the notion of a British Age of Reason never really caught on in the history books. But how significant is that omission measured against the actual influence of Locke, Newton and Hume on Enlightenment thought? Himmelfarb's claim that the British Enlightenment has gone unrecognized seems driven by something other than historiographic concerns. And so it is. She finds in some English and Scottish thinkers of the 18th century (Adam Smith, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, for example) something like the first effort to create a sociology of virtue. The French savants exalted a bloodless notion of Reason to bloody effect. The British philosophers emphasized the moral sentiments, the spontaneous capacity to recognize another person's suffering and to feel it as one's own. This power need not be delegated to the state. Himmelfarb mounts a vigorous argument that the British philosophy was ''reformist rather than subversive, respectful of the past and present even while looking forward to a more egalitarian future.'' It was also egalitarian in a practical and spontaneous (rather than ruthlessly Jacobin) sense -- for the moral sense was common to everyone, ''not merely the educated and well-born.'' Nor was this Enlightenment necessarily at war with religion, as such. Himmelfarb quotes the jibes of Edward Gibbon (no orthodox religious believer by any stretch) against those French thinkers who ''preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists.'' Her list of British Enlightenment figures extends to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who preached among the poor not only to stiffen the common people's spines against the temptations of gin, but also to educate them in science, literature and philosophy. As a result of this early instance of a faith-based initiative, England ''was able to survive the economic revolution of the 18th century without succumbing to a political revolution.'' When Himmelfarb's attention turns to colonial America and the early United States the results are less persuasive, and indeed reveal far more than she may intend about the limits of moral sentiment she extols. ''For economic if for no other reasons,'' she writes, ''the displacement of the Indians was the precondition for the very existence of the settlers.'' As for slavery, Himmelfarb acknowledges it as an evil, but is curiously silent about its cumulative effect, over 400 years, on the nation's stock of moral capital. I was reminded of something the ''elitist'' Diderot wrote, in a moment of bitter hatred for the slave trade: the Africans ''are tyrannized, mutilated, burnt and put to death, and yet we listen to these accounts coolly and without emotion. The torments of a people to whom we owe our luxuries are never able to reach our hearts.'' A more robust sociology of virtue might begin with the realization that the power of moral sentiment so often fails us. Yet when it does, our moral obligations remain. Meeting them is, arguably, one function of the state. But in the eyes of the neocons, I suppose, such thoughts smack of John Rawls -- or even, worse, Le Monde. Scott McLemee is a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/books/review/24MCLEMEE.html From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 24 15:34:46 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 11:34:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Excerpts from 'The Roads to Modernity' Message-ID: First Chapter: 'The Roads to Modernity' By GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB The British did not have "philosophes." They had "moral philosophers," a very different breed. Those historians who belittle or dismiss the idea of a British Enlightenment do so because they do not recognize the features of the philosophes in the moral philosophers-and with good reason: the physiognomy is quite different. It is ironic that the French should have paid tribute to John Locke and Isaac Newton as the guiding spirits of their own Enlightenment, while the British, although respectful of both, had a more ambiguous relationship with them. Newton was eulogized by David Hume as "the greatest and rarest genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species," and by Alexander Pope in the much quoted epitaph: "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night;/God said, Let Newton be! and all was light." But Pope's An Essay on Man sent quite a different message: "The proper study of mankind is man" implied that materialism and science could penetrate into the mysteries of nature but not of man. In an earlier essay, the allusion to Newton was more obvious; it was human nature, not astronomy, Pope said, that was "the most useful object of humane reason," and it was "of more consequence to adjust the true nature and measures of right and wrong, than to settle the distance of the planets and compute the times of their circumvolutions." While Newton received the adulation of his countrymen (he was master of the Royal Mint and president of the Royal Society, was knighted, and given a state funeral), and his scientific methodology was much praised, he had little substantive influence on the moral philosophers or on the issues that dominated the British Enlightenment. (His Opticks, on the other hand, was an inspiration for poets, who were entranced by the images and metaphors of light.) John Locke, too, was a formidable presence in eighteenth-century Britain, a best-selling author and a revered figure. But among the moral philosophers he was admired more for his politics than for his metaphysics. Indeed, the basic tenets of their philosophy implied a repudiation of his. What made them "moral philosophers" rather than "philosophers" tout court was their belief in a "moral sense" that was presumed to be if not innate in the human mind (as Francis Hutcheson thought), then so entrenched in the human sensibility, in the form of sympathy or "fellow-feeling" (as Adam Smith and David Hume had it), as to have the same compelling force as innate ideas. Locke himself could not have been more explicit in rejecting innate ideas, whether moral or metaphysical. The mind, as he understood it, so far from being inhabited by innate ideas, was a tabula rasa, to be filled by sensations and experiences, and by the reflections rising from those sensations and experiences. The title of the first chapter of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding was "No Innate Speculative Principles" (that is, epistemological principles); the second, "No Innate Practical Principles" (moral principles). Even the golden rule, that "most unshaken rule of morality and foundation of all social virtue," would have been meaningless to one who had never heard that maxim and who might well ask for a reason justifying it, which "plainly shows it not to be innate." If virtue was generally approved, it was not because it was innate, but because it was "profitable," conducive to one's self-interest and happiness, the promotion of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Thus, things could be judged good or evil only by reference to pleasure or pain, which were themselves the product of sensation. Locke's Essay was published in 1690. Nine years later, the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote an essay that was, in effect, a refutation of Locke. This, too, had its ironies, for this Shaftesbury, the third earl, was brought up in the household of his grandfather, the first earl, who was a devotee of Locke and had employed him to supervise the education of his grandchildren. It was this experience that had inspired Locke's Thoughts Concerning Education-and inspired as well, perhaps, the pupil's rejection of his master's teachings. Shaftesbury's essay, "An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit," was published (without his permission but to great acclaim) in 1699 and reprinted in 1711 in somewhat revised form in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. That three-volume work, reissued posthumously three years later and in ten more editions in the course of the century, rivalled Locke's Second Treatise (a political, not metaphysical tract) as the most frequently reprinted work of the time. The hundred-page essay on virtue was the centerpiece of those volumes. Virtue, according to Shaftesbury, derived not from religion, self-interest, sensation, or reason. All of these were instrumental in supporting or hindering virtue, but were not the immediate or primary source of it. What was "antecedent" to these was the "moral sense," the "sense of right and wrong." [Shaftesbury's "moral sense" was very different from John Rawls's recent use of that term. For Shaftesbury it was an innate sense of right and wrong; for Rawls it is an intuitive conviction of the rightness of freedom and equality.] It was this sense that was "predominant ... inwardly joined to us, and implanted in our nature," "a first principle in our constitution and make," as natural as "natural affection itself." This "natural affection," moreover, was "social affection," an affection for "society and the public," which, so far from being at odds with one's private interest, or "self-affection," actually contributed to one's personal pleasure and happiness. A person whose actions were motivated entirely or even largely by self-affection-by self-love, self-interest, or self-good-was not virtuous. Indeed, he was "in himself still vicious," for the virtuous man was motivated by nothing other than "a natural affection for his kind." This was not a Rousseauean idealization of human nature, of man before being corrupted by society. Nor was it a Pollyannaish expectation that all or even most men would behave virtuously all or most of the time. The moral sense attested to the sense of right and wrong in all men, the knowledge of right and wrong even when they chose to do wrong. Indeed, a good part of Shaftesbury's essay dealt with the variety of "hateful passions"-envy, malice, cruelty, lust-that beset mankind. Even virtue, Shaftesbury warned, could become vice when it was pursued to excess; an immoderate degree of "tenderness," for example, destroyed the "effect of love," and excessive "pity" rendered a man "incapable of giving succour." The conclusion of the essay was a stirring testament of an ethic that, by its very nature-the "common nature" of man-was a social ethic: "Thus the wisdom of what rules, and is first and chief in nature, has made it to be according to the private interest and good of everyone to work towards the general good; which if a creature ceases to promote, he is actually so far wanting to himself and ceases to promote his own happiness and welfare.... And, thus, Virtue is the good, and Vice the ill of everyone." The contrast, not only with Thomas Hobbes but with Locke as well, could not be more obvious. Neither was explicitly named by Shaftesbury, perhaps out of respect for Locke, who was still alive when the essay was written (although he had died by the time it was reissued). But no knowledgeable reader could have mistaken Shaftesbury's intention. In 1709 he wrote to one of his young proteges that Locke, even more than Hobbes, was the villain of the piece, for Hobbes's character and base slavish principles of government "took off the poison of his philosophy," whereas Locke's character and commendable principles of government made his philosophy even more reprehensible. 'Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world.... Virtue, according to Mr. Locke, has no other measure, law, or rule, than fashion and custom: morality, justice, equity, depend only on law and will.... And thus neither right nor wrong, virtue nor vice are any thing in themselves; nor is there any trace or idea of them naturally imprinted on human minds. Experience and our catechism teach us all! As Shaftesbury did not mention Locke in the Inquiry, so Bernard Mandeville did not mention Shaftesbury in The Fable of the Bees-at least not in the first edition, published in 1714. But appearing just then, a year after Shaftesbury's death and at the same time as the second edition of the Characteristics, Mandeville's readers might well take it as a rebuttal to Shaftesbury's work. The subtitle, Private Vices, Public Benefits, reads like a manifesto contra Shaftesbury. The original version of the Fable, published in 1705 as a sixpenny pamphlet (and pirated, Mandeville complained, in a halfpenny sheet), consisted of some thirty verses depicting a society, a hive of bees, where everyone was a knave, and where knavery served a valuable purpose. Every vice had its concomitant virtue: avarice contributed to prodigality, luxury to industry, folly to ingenuity. The result was a "grumbling" but productive hive, where "... every part was full of Vice,/ Yet the whole mass a Paradise." A well-intentioned attempt to rid the hive of vice had the effect of ridding it of its virtues as well, resulting in the destruction of the hive itself, as all the bees, "blest with content and honesty," abandoned industry and took refuge in a hollow tree. Lest the moral escape his readers, Mandeville reissued the poem in 1714 with a prefatory essay, "The Origin of Moral Virtue," and a score of lengthy "Remarks" amplifying lines of the poem; the editions of 1723 and 1724 added still other essays and remarks. In the enlarged version (now a full-length book), Mandeville elaborated upon his thesis. Self-love, which was reducible to pain and pleasure, was the primary motivation of all men, and what was generally called "pity" or "compassion"-the "fellow-feeling and condolence for the misfortunes and calamities of others"-was an entirely spurious passion, which unfortunately afflicted the weakest minds the most. Moralists and philosophers, he conceded, generally took the opposite view, agreeing with the "noble writer" Lord Shaftesbury that "as man is made for society, so he ought to be born with a kind affection to the whole of which he is a part, and a propensity to seek the welfare of it." Maudeville's conclusion was sharp and uncompromising: After this I flatter my self to have demonstrated that neither the friendly qualities and kind affections that are natural to man, nor the real virtues he is capable of acquiring by reason and self-denial are the foundation of society; but that what we call evil in this world, moral as well as natural, is the grand principle that makes us sociable creatures, the solid basis, the life and support of all trades and employments without exception; that there we must look for the true origin of all arts and sciences, and that the moment evil ceases, the society must be spoiled if not totally dissolved. The Fable of the Bees profoundly shocked contemporaries, provoking a frenzy of attacks culminating in a ruling handed down by the grand jury of Middlesex condemning it as a "public nuisance." Joining in the near-universal condemnation were most of the eighteenth-century greats-Bishop Berkeley, Francis Hutcheson, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith. Smith expressed the general sentiment in pronouncing Mandeville's theory "licentious" and "wholly pernicious." [Smith was offended not only by Mandeville's amoralism, his refusal to distinguish between vice and virtue, but also by his mercantilist views, which were a by-product of that philosophy. Because there was no natural moral sense and thus no natural harmony among men, Mandeville assumed that the government had to intervene to convert "private vices" into "public benefits." Mandeville is sometimes taken to be an apologist for capitalism; but it was mercantilism that was the logical deduction from his philosophy.] Mandeville's was a spirited but futile attempt to abort the social ethic that was the distinctive feature of the British Enlightenment. That ethic derived neither from self-interest nor from reason (although both were congruent with it) but from a "moral sense" that inspired sympathy, benevolence, and compassion for others. Thus, where Locke, denying any innate principles, looked to education to inculcate in children the sentiment of "humanity," "benignity," or "compassion," Shaftesbury rooted that sentiment in nature and instinct rather than education or reason. "To compassionate," he wrote, "i.e., to join with in passion.... To commiserate, i.e., to join with in misery.... This in one order of life is right and good; nothing more harmonious; and to be without this, or not to feel this, is unnatural, horrid, immane [monstrous]." Two years after the publication of the expanded version of the Fable, Francis Hutcheson entered the debate with An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, reissued the following year with Virtue or Moral Good replacing Beauty and Virtue. The subtitle of the original edition gave its provenance: In Which the Principles of the Late Earl of Shaftesbury Are Explained and Defended, Against the Author of the Fable of the Bees. It was here that Hutcheson first enunciated the principle, "The greatest happiness for the greatest numbers." Unlike Helvetius and Jeremy Bentham, who are often credited with this principle and who rooted it in the rational calculations of utility, Hutcheson deduced it from morality itself-the "moral sense, viz. benevolence." [* Bentham himself variously attributed this principle to Montesquieu, Barrington, Beccaria, and Helvetius, "but most of all Helvetius." Smith mistakenly attributed the origin of the "moral sense" to Hutcheson rather than Shaftesbury.] These words, "moral sense" and "benevolence," appear as a refrain throughout the book. The moral sense, Hutcheson repeatedly explained, was "antecedent" to interest because it was universal in all men. "Fellow-feeling" could not be a product of self-interest because it involved associating oneself with such painful experiences as the suffering and distress of others. So, too, the "disposition to compassion" was essentially disinterested, a concern with "the interest of others, without any views of private advantage." It was also antecedent to reason or instruction. Like Burke later, Hutcheson warned of the frailty of reason: "Notwithstanding the mighty reason we boast of above other animals, its processes are too slow, too full of doubt and hesitation, to serve us in every exigency, either for our own preservation, without the external senses, or to direct our actions for the good of the whole, without this moral sense." Continues... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/books/chapters/1024-1st-himme.html From checker at panix.com Sun Oct 24 15:35:49 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 11:35:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'Extreme Measures': Eminent Victorian, Alas Message-ID: 'Extreme Measures': Eminent Victorian, Alas New York Times Book Review, 4.10.24 By DICK TERESI EXTREME MEASURES The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton. By Martin Brookes. Illustrated. 298 pp. Bloomsbury. $24.95. SLITHERIN' BILL'S face appeared just above my cup of latte at the local coffeehouse. Bill undulates along the ground, kissing it and picking up litter, and often appears at latte height because he prefers to walk on his knees. Homeless, but the son of a prominent scientist, Bill likes technical matters. The topic of the day was eugenics. He wanted to combine the genes of Tom Brokaw, Steve Jobs, Warren Beatty, Cal Ripken Jr. and Jennifer Aniston. ''That's a lot of sperm for one egg,'' I said. ''Don't worry,'' he said. ''We can find perfectly good non-celebrity eggs on the street. It's the men who are the problem.'' Francis Galton (1822-1911), the father of eugenics, was also looking for a few good men. Unfortunately, he wasn't one of them. Martin Brookes's ''Extreme Measures'' is a relentlessly readable book about this comical British bonehead. One has to admire Brookes's guts. The general rule for biographers is to choose a subject who is successful and revered (Winston Churchill, say) as opposed to one who is unsuccessful and reviled (say, Joey Buttafuoco). This biography is in the Buttafuoco tradition. Galton was born rich, and early on was anointed a genius by a phrenologist because of his large head. He is credited with many inventions, including special glasses for reading newspapers underwater and the ''gumption reviver,'' a bucketlike contraption that drips water on students' heads to keep them awake. He broke with his half cousin Charles Darwin on natural selection, favoring large mutational jumps over Darwin's incremental change. Galton decided that J. S. Bach represented a brand-new species. He also formulated an equation to explain male-pattern baldness. The balding Galton hypothesized that his mighty brain had become a furnace fueled by his great knowledge, burning up his hair follicles. This also explained why women rarely go bald. And these were his good ideas. As it turns out, a tiny brain rattled around inside Galton's skull. He could not learn geometry, algebra or trigonometry at Cambridge University. He was also unsuccessful as a medical student. A letter states: ''Cut a brace of fingers off yesterday and one the day before. -- Happy to operate on any one at home -- I am flourishing -- wish I could say same of my Patients.'' He began a lifelong fascination with measurement as a 13-year-old in school, where he was caned and birched frequently (though, in my opinion, not frequently enough). He timed his Greek teacher thrashing 11 pupils in eight minutes. Galton was a good explorer. On a thousand-mile excursion through Africa, he charted previously unmapped Namibia. There he became enraptured by a well-endowed African woman, but, afraid to approach her, measured her curves from afar using his sextant. When an African king, as a gift, sent his half-naked niece, smeared in butter and red ocher, to Galton's tent for a night of passion, Galton ejected her, fearing stains to his white linen suit. Eugenics? Galton couldn't make it to first base. His African cartography gained him entree to scientific societies, which lent credibility to a torrent of sloppy ideas; the most famous was eugenics. In an article, ''Hereditary Talent and Character,'' Galton listed 330 eminent men of science and literature. Many were related, and he concluded that ''eminence'' was hereditary. Other research convinced him North American Indians were ''melancholic''; Negroes possessed ''neither patience, reticence nor dignity''; and the Irish, after the potato famine, became ''low and coarse.'' Galton rated upper-class Victorians near the top, surpassed only by the ancient Greeks. This sparked a plan: man (if not woman) could elevate himself to the level of the Greeks. Galton envisioned what Brookes calls ''a stud farm for intellectuals,'' a totalitarian nation of Newtons and Mozarts. (Women were just willing wombs.) Undesirables who procreated would be, in Galton's words, ''enemies to the State.'' The idea had legs. In America 35,000 citizens were sterilized by 1940. The effort in Nazi Germany was even more effective. One flaw in eugenics was evident in Galton's book ''English Men of Science.'' English scientists had big heads, but one in three was childless. In natural selection, reproduction is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, and Galton's proposed studs were anything but. Galton himself was childless -- his major contribution to the species. How did this buffoon gain such influence? Perhaps it was his track record. He pioneered psychological questionnaires, identical-twin studies, the modern weather map and statistical analysis, if we are to believe Brookes, which I don't. Brookes, a former evolutionary biologist -- in the Galton Laboratory, no less, at University College London -- backs up few of these claims. The book has no endnotes, no source notes, no bibliography and few citations in the text itself. Brookes is oblivious of details. For example, how could Galton have ''redefined what it meant to be a meticulous cartographer'' after flunking geometry and trig, two skills essential to surveying? Brookes also describes Galton shooting at more than 40 hippos in Africa without hitting one. How did he line up his sextant? Did Brookes read Galton's own paper on his African expedition? Galton writes about a gorge ''20 or 30 miles'' long, another gorge ''about 300 feet wide,'' and reports that with his sextant he ''guessed at'' the height of a cliff. ''Guessed at'' is not language one likes to see from a meticulous cartographer. As for his giant head, a portrait in this book shows a rather pinheaded young Galton. Victor L. Hilts of the University of Wisconsin has pointed out that Galton included his own head circumference in ''English Men of Science.'' He was comparatively microcephalic, ranking 95th out of 99 measured scientists. A refreshingly comprehensive chapter on fingerprints hints at how Galton may have piled up so many accomplishments. Perhaps he stole them. Galton used his social position to usurp the work of Henry Faulds, the real pioneer, a story documented in the book ''Fingerprints,'' by Colin Beavan. Brookes's account, without attribution, is eerily similar to Beavan's. Brookes is a clever writer, but has apparently picked up some Galtonesque habits. One yearns for the originality of Joey Buttafuoco. Dick Teresi is the author of ''Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - From the Babylonians to the Maya.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/books/review/24TERESIL.html From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 24 17:36:13 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 10:36:13 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The bill will come due Message-ID: <01C4B9B5.49848FE0.shovland@mindspring.com> Bush is the embodiment of our collective shadow. It is a shadow poisoned dozens of legal and illegal drugs ranging from Alcohol to Prozac to TV. It is a shadow filled with "spiritual beliefs" that are at least 1,000 years out of date. Many people agree with what he says, but that does not make his positions true. It may only mean that a lot of people are wrong. Bush is not Hitler, but like Hitler he was put in place by industrialists who thought that he would be their puppet. But with the power of his office in hand he was able to cut the puppeteer's strings. Hitler suffered from tertiary syphilis during the last years of his life, and there is some evidence that Bush also suffers from organic brain disease. As Dr. Werbos says, good luck to us all. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 25 14:48:27 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 10:48:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: John Steadman Rice: Romantic Modernism and the Self Message-ID: John Steadman Rice: Romantic Modernism and the Self The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1152442&textreg=1&id=RicRoma1-1 Conceptualizations of the self have been central to postmodern thought, but, John Rice asks, from what sources do these conceptualizations draw? In an historical analysis, he traces the roots of postmodern theorizing to one strain, the romantic strain, of modernist critique. While Romantic Modernism has a long history, it was only with its incarnation in the human potential movement after mid-century that it began its ascent to victory over another strain of modernist critique, what Rice calls "social scientific modernism." The triumph of Romantic Modernism, he argues, has come in the form of the growing cultural authority of a therapeutic ethic, and it is this selfsame ethic that informs much postmodern thinking about the self. Rice explores the Romantic Modernist view of the self and early attempts to institutionalize it. Especially concerned with the relationship between the individual and his or her community, he discusses the various ways by which the Romantic self attempts to assert its authority over society. John Steadman Rice teaches in the Watson School of Education at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He is the author of A Disease of One's Own: Psychotherapy, Addiction, and the Emergence of Co-Dependency, and a forthcoming book on the institutionalization of therapeutic culture. Romantic modernism espouses and rests upon a distinction between formal rationality and emotion, intuition, spirituality, and individual expressive freedom. This distinction is reflected in the Romantic Modernist view of the appropriate relationship between the individual and society, which is predicated upon a distinction between a true self and a false self, with the latter understood in terms of the social roles that society imposes upon and demands of the individual. This societal imposition, in turn, is seen as a violation of the self's integrity and the individual's expressive freedom. Indeed, a "feeling of being violated by an inimical society...lies at the root of Romantic alienation,"[3]^1 an alienation born of the Romantic Modernist's apprehensive "consciousness of the void beneath the conventional structures of reality."[4]^2 This premise of the self's violation at the hands of an "inimical society," however, is but the dark side of the Romantic Modernist world view. This "negative Romanticism" is perhaps most clearly embodied in American literature by the work of Edgar Allan Poe, whose oeuvre repeatedly emphasizes the horrors of the age--horrors, in turn, that resonate with the Romantic Modernist convictions that rationalism is bankrupt and that the modern self is doomed to estrangement, isolation, alienation, madness, and so on. Nor are these uniquely American strains of Romanticism. Indeed, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is also a Romantic allegory as to the consequences of modernity's heedless reliance on scientific versions of rationalism. Romantic Modernism, however, is not solely focused on or oriented by this negative view. In contrast both to rationalism and its bleak consequences, another theme in Romantic Modernism posits the self as the source of value in the world. As such, the dedicated (Romantic) individual bears special burdens and is presented with special opportunities as well: "a Romantic figure was first of all faced with discovering a way to project his will upon the external world in order to reassert the dominance of human value and thereby his own identity."[5]^3 This more positive strand of Romanticism is most clearly embodied in the American Transcendentalist movement of the early nineteenth century.[6]^4 Sharing in negative Romanticism's dark assessment of the emerging social structures of bureaucratic industrialism, "the principal cause of human failure seemed obvious to [the Transcendentalists]: it was society, that mass of forms and conventions and institutions by which men were held captive, alienated from their true selves."[7]^5 Indeed, "for a Transcendentalist all social structures can become oppressive institutions...that perpetuate themselves by restricting moral choice."[8]^6 The assumption that conventional society and culture obstruct the self's natural development is coupled, in Romantic Modernism, with the assumption that humans contain within themselves all of the requisite capacities and impulses needed to construct and maintain a just and equitable social order. The Transcendentalists, for example, maintained that humans possess, by nature, a divine inner being, an innate and benevolent spirituality. As such, individuals must be free to develop these innate capacities through "a process of growth, unfolding and ripening, a gradual realization of inherent qualities latent in the organism from its very birth"--a process, again, believed to be "thwarted in its development by a...conformist society."[9]^7 These assumptions about human nature, and about the relationship between the individual and society, express a profoundly anti-institutional orientation. That orientation, moreover, translates into a clear course of action in which the self's expressive and experiential freedom receives ultimate priority over conventional social expectations. Thus, the Transcendentalists called for "the liberation of [hu]mankind, the release of a power everywhere latent but everywhere suppressed or unawakened."[10]^8 The assertion of the individual's will--the projection, as noted above, of that will onto the external world--was, of course, an abiding theme in Transcendentalist essays and poetry. Thoreau, for one, repeatedly stressed precisely this theme. For example, in Civil Disobedience, he baldly asserts that "the only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right."[11]^9 Emerson espoused precisely the same point even more succinctly: "The individual is the world."[12]^10 One mechanism for cultivating and releasing the individual's latent powers was expressed in Emanuel Swedenborg's concept of "correspondence," especially as that idea was interpreted and articulated by Swedenborg's student, Sampson Reed. Emerson, in particular, was much taken with Reed's Observations on the Growth of Mind, which, following Swedenborg, asserts that the basic endowments of self, when carefully and meticulously cultivated, correspond with a realm of divine truth. Reflecting this presumed equivalency between the divine and our true human nature, the moment at which correspondence ostensibly occurs is called "the experience of `self-remembering,'" an experience in which "the perceiver not only records his perceptions but also experiences himself in the act of perception."[13]^11 For the Transcendentalists, correspondence could be realized in and through exposure to and contemplation of the divine truths of nature--a theme that plainly infused, for example, Thoreau's Walden, and that was also expressed in Emerson's famous "transparent eyeball," featured in the essay, "The Oversoul": Standing on the bare ground--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.[14]^12 The Romantic Modernists' convictions regarding the divine essence of humankind were the basis for their antipathy toward social conventions and institutions. Conventional social structures merely sought to bring people into line with standards external to the self, rather than operating in ways that would facilitate the individual's "natural" process of development. Summarizing the inherent conflict between self and conventional society built into this convergence of convictions, Elizabeth Peabody contended that, "if there is a divine principle in man, it has a right, and it is its duty to unfold itself from itself. . . A social organization, which does not admit of this, which does not favor, and cherish, and act with main reference to promoting it, is inadequate, false, devilish."[15]^13 In addition to concisely expressing Transcendentalism's view of human nature, Peabody's remarks regarding social organization also underscored a key challenge for Romantic Modernists: to devise institutions which facilitated rather than thwarted self-cultivation. This effort to institutionalize Romantic Modernism was plainly the impetus for Bronson Alcott's experiments with alternative education. In his journal of 1828, Alcott outlined some key tenets of Transcendentalist educational philosophy, all of which resonate with the presumptions underlying the Romantic Modernist world view. For example, reflecting that world view's assumption that human talents and capacities are present from birth, Alcott believed that it was counter-productive to require children to learn, master, and remember lessons gleaned from books: instead, the instructor "should look to the child to see what is to be done. . . .The child is the book."[16]^14 Further reflecting his impatience with the view of education as a matter of imparting--and imposing, really--standardized knowledge to students, and then evaluating them as to the degree that they demonstrate understanding and mastery of that knowledge, Alcott maintained that the appropriate approach to education was to "let [the instructor] follow out the impulses, the thoughts, the volitions of the child's mind and heart."[17]^15 As George Hochfield notes, with this approach: The focus is shifted from subject matter or social outcome to the child as an end in himself; the inner world takes priority over the outer; and the teacher's function is to stimulate the independent growth of his pupil rather than force upon him an extraneous burden of learning.[18]^16 Ultimately, Alcott's alternative school failed to survive, as have other attempts to transmute Romantic Modernism into enduring social form. The key point here, and one to which we will necessarily return, is that such failures reflect just how inordinately difficult it is to institutionalize a fundamentally anti-institutional world view--a point the Transcendentalists also learned in their unsuccessful attempt to construct an alternative society oriented around their shared premises. That attempt, of course, was the short-lived (1841-1847) Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education.[19]^17 Brook Farm was to be an economically self-sufficient community, which, at the same time and more fundamentally, was also to serve as a context in which each member could pursue his or her own self-cultivation. The combination of these goals was reflected in, among other things, the original charter's stipulation that each person's contribution to the labors of the Farm was to be strictly on a voluntary basis (a provision which--not incidentally--proved hugely unsuccessful, as volunteers were few and irregular in their commitments). Ultimately, and despite the introduction of Fourierist principles in an attempt to salvage the Farm after the first three singularly unsuccessful years, Brook Farm failed, and the community disbanded. Brook Farm's demise again illustrates the point with which we are concerned, as its failure was primarily the product of the anti-institutional premises upon which it was based. Because of the Romantic Modernist's understanding of the relationship between self and society, the principal shared value among the Brook Farmers was that the self must not submit to group constraints. As such, although the Transcendentalists "may have had some sort of vague admiration for the vision of a cooperative community,...when it came to cooperating in fact, the members [of Brook Farm] tended to be excessively tender about compromising the integrity of their personalities."[20]^18 This "tenderness," this unwillingness to submit to the expectations of others, issued from and reflected the core convictions of Romantic Modernism itself. Indeed, "the transcendental virtues...militated against [Brook Farm's] success,"[21]^19 and those virtues were Romantic Modernist in nature. ________________________ [22]^1 Michael J. Hoffman, The Subversive Vision: American Romanticism in Literature (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1972) 46. ] [23]^2 Hoffman 9. ] [24]^3 Hoffman 11. Rather than clutter up the text with excessive uses of "sic," it seems more appropriate to simply point out that a number of the sources for this article antedate sensitivity to gender in language. ] [25]^4 The literature on Romanticism and Transcendentalism is, of course, voluminous. In addition to those cited, I have found the following to be especially insightful and informative: Morse Peckham, "Towards a Theory of Romanticism: II. Reconsiderations," Studies in Romanticism I (Autumn, 1961): 1-8; Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Braziller, 1962); Peckham, Romanticism: The Culture of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Braziller, 1965); Peckham, The Triumph of Romanticism: Collected Essays (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1970); Catherine Albanese, Introduction, The Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau, ed. Albanese (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988) 1-28; Arthur E. Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism: A Study of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott (1932; New York: Octagon, 1978); Perry Miller, ed., The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957); Francis O. Mathiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941); Philip F. Gura and Joel Myerson, eds., Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982). For an excellent and explicitly sociological analysis of Transcendentalism, see Anne C. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement 1830-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). ] [26]^5 George Hochfield, "New England Transcendentalism," Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism, ed. Philip F. Gura and Joel Myerson (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982) 461. ] [27]^6 Hoffman 50, 54. ] [28]^7 Hochfield 462. ] [29]^8 Hochfield 461. ] [30]^9 Henry David Thoreau as quoted in Hochfield 477. ] [31]^10 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry, ed. Perry Miller (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957) 5. ] [32]^11 Elizabeth A. Meese, paraphrasing Robert S. De Ropp, "Transcendentalism: The Metaphysics of the Theme," Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism, ed. Philip F. Gura and Joel Myerson (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982) 514. ] [33]^12 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Oversoul," The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 1, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) 10. ] [34]^13 Elizabeth Peabody, "A Glimpse of Christ's Idea of Society," The Dial 2 (October, 1841): 499. ] [35]^14 Hochfield 464. ] [36]^15 Bronson Alcott as quoted in Hochfield 464. ] [37]^16 Hochfield 465 (emphasis mine). ] [38]^17 The discussion of Brook Farm draws upon Rose's excellent monograph Transcendentalism as a Social Movement 1830-1850. ] [39]^18 Duane E. Smith, "Romanticism in America: The Transcendentalists," Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism, ed. Philip F. Gura and Joel Myerson (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982) 497. ] [40]^19 Smith 497. ] From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 25 14:50:56 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 10:50:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Richard Sennett: The New Political Economy and its Culture Message-ID: Richard Sennett: The New Political Economy and its Culture The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1210867&textreg=1&id=SenPoli2-1 Democracy today takes form within a public culture that is profoundly influenced by the new political economy. In this economy, work and place are changing in ways that a mere twenty years ago seemed unimaginable. In the 1970s, the great corporate bureaucracies and government hierarchies of the developed world appeared to be securely entrenched, the products of centuries of economic development and nation-building. Commentators used to speak of "late capitalism" or "mature capitalism" as though earlier forces of growth had somehow entered an end-game phase. But today, a new chapter has opened. The economy is global and makes use of new technology; mammoth government and corporate bureaucracies are becoming both more flexible and less secure institutions. As a result, the ways we work have altered: short-term jobs replace stable careers, skills rapidly evolve, and the middle class experiences anxieties and uncertainties more confined in an earlier era to the working classes. Richard Sennett is Professor of History and Sociology and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. His many publications include The Corrosion of Character; Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization; The Conscience of the Eye; and The Fall of Public Man. Place has a different meaning now as well, in large part thanks to these economic changes. An earlier generation believed that nations--and within nations, cities--could govern their own fortunes. Now, the emerging economic network is less susceptible to the controls of geography. A divide has thus opened between polity--in the sense of self-rule--and economy. This then raises the question, where can democracy really happen? What interests me in particular is the dramatic impact that underlying economic conditions have on the pursuit of democracy in the postmodern community and the postmodern workplace. I look at the practice of democracy not so much as a fixed set of procedural requirements, but as a process that needs to have certain kinds of symbolic markers and consummations that define where people are in relation to each other. In other words, all democratic processes need to culminate in symbolic forms that are provisional but defined. And one of the ways that the postmodern economy is challenging democracy has to do with the destruction of those sign posts, especially those sign posts that mark how people are to make sense of their lives in terms of place and time. Postmodernity has managed to challenge the notion that time should have a coherent, narrative shape--it has had a disorienting effect. The flexible economy has not only fragmented workers' lives, but also made it very difficult for workers to understand how the project of survival itself has a history in time. How do we experience institutional changes in work and place and, more generally, changes in our concept of time as a cultural shift? Old Marxist notions, which argued that the economy directly represents itself in consciousness, will not serve us. Allow me to put forward instead two simple propositions that seem to be emerging at the end of the twentieth century. First, today's material conditions are impoverishing the value of work. Flexible, short-term work is ceasing to serve as a point of reference for defining durable personal purposes and a sense of self-worth. Sociologically, work serves ever less as a forum for stable, sociable relations. Second, the value of place has thereby increased. The sense of place is based on the need to belong not to "society" in the abstract, but to somewhere in particular. As the shifting institutions of the economy diminish the experience of belonging somewhere special at work, people's commitments increase to geographic places like nations, cities, and localities. The question is: commitments of what sort? Nationalism or ethnic localism can indeed serve as defensive refuges against a hostile economic order, but at a steep human price, fostering hatred of immigrants or outsiders. These two propositions might suggest an unrelievedly bleak view of the culture of the emerging political economy. But this is not my view. Work is a problematic frame for the self, since it tends to equate worldly success and personal worth. Of more civic consequence is the fact that troubled fortunes might actually induce people to see themselves as other than economic animals. Rather than act defensively, they might instead put a certain distance between themselves and their material circumstances. They might recognize that their value as citizens is not dependent upon their riches. Such detachment could enrich the ways in which people use the places where they live. If work now restricts the self, place could expand it. At least this was Hannah Arendt's hope a generation ago, when she articulated in The Human Condition her famous distinction between labor and politics.[3]^1 She hoped in particular that in urban life, with its large scale and impersonality, people could conduct a civic existence that did not merely reflect or depend upon their personal fortunes. Today, the uncertainties of the new economy argue more than ever for a selfhood, as well as civic behavior, unchained from the conditions of labor. Yet, the places in which this might occur can neither be classical cities, like those Arendt admired, nor can they be defensive, inward-turning localities. We need a new kind of civic life to cope with the new economy. Growth To make sense of the culture of the emerging political economy, we might begin by defining its key word, "growth." Growth occurs, most simply, in four ways. The simplest is a sheer increase in number, an increase in supply (such as more ants in a colony or more television sets on the market). Growth of this sort appears in economic thinking among writers like Jean Baptiste Say, whose loi des debouches postulated that "increased supply creates its own demand." This increase in number can lead to an alteration of structure. This is how Adam Smith conceived of growth in The Wealth of Nations.[4]^2 Larger markets, he said, trigger the division of labor in work. Growth in which size begets complexity of structure is familiar to us in government bureaucracies, as well as in industry. A third and quite different kind of growth occurs through metamorphosis. A body changes its shape or structure without necessarily increasing in number. A moth turning into a butterfly grows in this way, so do characters in a novel. Finally a system can grow by becoming more democratic. This kind of growth is anti-foundational. As John Dewey argued, the elements in a system are free to interact and influence one another so that boundaries become febrile, forms become mixed. The system contracts or expands in parts without overall coordination. Communications networks, such as the early Internet, are obvious examples of how growth can occur democratically. Such a growth process differs from a market mechanism, in which an exchange ideally clears all transactions and so regulates all actors in the system. Resistances, irregularities, and cognitive dissonances take on a positive value in democratic forms of growth. This is why subjective life develops through something like the practice of inner democracy--interpretive and emotional complexity emerges without a master plan, a hegemonic rule, and an undisputed explanation. My own view is that the freedom and flexibility of democratic growth is not a matter of pure process, but gives rise to the need for signposts, defined forms, tentative rituals, and provisional decisions that help people to orient themselves and evaluate future conduct. Yet, the flexible economy is destroying exactly these formal elements, which orient people in the process of democratic growth. Put another way, what we need to cope with the emerging political economy is more democratic forms of flexible growth. The question is: where should such growth be promoted? At the workplace? In the community? Are they equally possible, or equally desirable, sites for democracy? Smith's Paradox Let me begin to look at these questions by examining the cultural deficits to the new capitalism. For example, one paradox of growth has dogged the development of modern capitalism throughout its long history. With material growth comes the impoverishment of qualitative experience. The age of High Capitalism--which for convenience's sake can be said to span the two centuries following the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776--was an era that lusted for sheer quantitative growth, of the first sort I've described, but had trouble dealing with the human consequences of the second sort, in which the increase in wealth occurred through more complex economic structures. Adam Smith argued that the division of labor, which was a structural complexity, was promoted by the expansion of free markets with ever greater numbers of goods, services, and laborers in circulation. To Smith, a growing society seemed like a honeycomb; each new cell was a place for ever more specialized tasks. A nail-maker doing everything himself could make a few hundred nails a day. Smith calculated that if nail-making were broken down into all its component parts, and each worker did only one task, a nail-maker could process more than 48,000 nails a day. Work experience, however, would become more routine in the process. Breaking the task of making nails into its component parts would condemn individual nail-makers to a numbingly boring day; hour after hour nail-makers would be doing the same small job. I call this coupling of material growth with qualitative impoverishment "Smith's Paradox," after Adam Smith. Though Smith did not coin this term, he did recognize the existence of this paradox, which came down to us in what we call "Fordist Production," monotonous assembly-line work, the kind of assembly-line work prevalent in Ford's Highland Park plant in Michigan during the First World War. Today, proponents of the new capitalism claim that Smith's Paradox is now coming to an end. Modern technology promises to banish routine work to the innards of machines, leaving ever more workers free to do flexible, non-routine tasks. In fact, however, the qualitative impoverishment recognized by Smith has simply taken new forms. New technology frequently "de-skills" workers, who now tend to machines as electronic janitors. Meanwhile, the conditions of job tenure also compound de-skilling. Workers learn how to do one particular job well, only to find that work-task at an end. The reality now facing young workers with at least two years of college is that they will change jobs, on average, at least eleven times in the course of their working lives. More brutally, the division of labor now separates those who get to work and those who don't. Large numbers of people are set free of routine tasks only to find themselves useless or under-used economically, especially in the context of the global labor supply. Geography no longer separates the skilled First World from the unskilled Third World. Computer code is written efficiently, for instance, in Bombay for a third to a seventh its cost in IBM home offices. Statistics on job creation do not quite get at people's fear of uselessness. The number of jobs, even good skilled jobs, does not dictate who will have access to them, how long the jobs can be held, or, indeed, how long the jobs will exist. Ten years ago, for instance, the U.S. economy had a deficit of computer systems analysts. Today, it has a surplus. And many of these highly skilled workers, contrary to ideology, do not retrain well. Their skills are too specific. In sum, the specter of uselessness now shadows the lives of educated middle-class people, and this specter now compounds the older experiential problem of routine among less-favored workers. The young suffer the pangs of uselessness in a particularly cruel way, since an ever-expanding educational system trains them ever more elaborately for jobs that do not exist. The result of uselessness, de-skilling, and task-labor for the American worker is the dispensable self. Instead of the institutionally induced boredom of the assembly line, this experiential deficit appears more to lie within the worker--a worker who hasn't made him-or herself of lasting value to others and so can simply disappear from view. The economic language in use today--"skills-based economy," "informational competence," "task-flexible labor," and the like--shifts the focus from impersonal conditions like the possession of capital to more personal matters of competence. As this economic rhetoric becomes more personal, it gradually de-symbolizes the public realm of labor: economic inequality, power, and powerlessness are facts that are difficult to translate into self-knowledge. Similarly, the process of flexibilization in the workplace destroys permanent categories of occupation. Ironically, while work inequality has grown, the map for evaluating this inequality has been lost. While this shift in language seems personally empowering, it, in fact, can serve to increase the burdens on the working self. This sense of "dispensability"--a sense of failing to be of much value in this economy--has great sociological implications. What Michael Young feared in his prophetic book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, has come to pass: As the economy needs ever fewer, highly-educated people to run it, the "moral distance" between the masses and the elite widens.[5]^3 The masses, now comprising people in suits and ties, as well as those in overalls, appear peripheral to the elite, productive core. The economy profits by shrinking its labor base. Its emphasis on personal agency helps explain why welfare dependency and parasitism are such sensitive issues for people whose fortunes are now in doubt. Labor is disposable. Some tough-minded economists argue that current forms of unemployment, under-employment, de-skilling, and parasitism are incurable in the emerging economic order, since the economy profits from doing "more with less." But this qualitative impoverishment, this re-organization that makes increasing numbers of people feel that they personally have no footing in the process of economic growth, poses a profound political challenge. There is no easy solution to Smith's Paradox, the problem of impoverished work experience. The postmodern vision of a project-less life is only for the elite. In the lives of most people, it is a form of oppression--a cultural ethos that is inhumane. There is a loss of the notion that you can guarantee something for your children, a profound loss of social honor. It is possible to live with a flexible self only if you are so empowered economically, culturally, and politically that "possibility" requires choices of the sort made by consumers in a mall. Durable Time Because sheer quantitative growth and the division of labor offer no remedy to the subjective, experiential problems of work, some policy makers have turned to the third model of growth, metamorphosis. In the political arena, such a form of development is called variously "auto-gestion," "self-management," or simply "change from within." The practical and worthy aim is to make work more humane by having workers themselves control their work. The goal is to have workers reform their institutions of work through a decisive act of collective will. In the political arena, metamorphosis occurs through rupturing established institutions. While management gurus practice rupture from the top down, socialists have aimed to remake work institutions from the bottom up. The practical record of such efforts at work re-organization is mixed. Some forms of change from within and workers' auto-gestion succeed, mostly in small, niche enterprises; others fail, overwhelmed by the larger currents of the global economy. Change from within supposes order can be made out of chaos by an act of will; in political terms, the polity is self-creating. The social difficulty with the model arises, though, from the very act of will it supposes. Basic social bonds like trust, loyalty, and obligation require a long time to develop and have diminished as people do shifting, task-centered jobs. Loyalty requires that personal experience accumulate at an institution over time, but the emerging political economy will not let it accumulate. Personal time, like civic time, must possess duration and coherence. Workers form a sense of subjective strength and positive agency through making things last. But will alone is insufficient to accomplish that task. Max Weber's famous image of modern life confined in an "iron cage" slights stability as a positive even in the lives of ordinary people. Weber feared the rise at the beginning of the twentieth century of large national bureaucracies and corporations that made use of the service ethic, earning the loyalty of those whom they made secure. Weber doubted that loyal servants make objectively-minded citizens. Yet petty bureaucrats, time servers, and the like derived a sense of status and public honor from their stations in bureaucracies. T. H. Marshall, the intellectual father of the modern British welfare state, understood this well: however static big institutions may be, however resistant to change from within, they provide their members a scaffolding of mutual loyalty and of trust that events can be controlled, which are prerequisites of citizenship. The bureaucrat as good citizen is not a pretty picture, but then, Jay Gould had no interest in the subject at all. The current rush to take apart this institutional architecture is undoing the social, civic dimensions of durable time. Take loyalty, for example. When career paths are replaced by intermittent jobs, loyalties to institutions diminish. This generalization, of course, needs all sorts of qualification. For instance, one study of dismissed IBM programmers found that the people with more than twenty years of service remain enthusiastic about the company, while accepting their firing as a matter of fate. A more diminished sense of loyalty appears among younger workers, who have had more brutal dealings with the new economic order; many of these younger workers view the places where they work mostly as sites to make contacts with people who can get them better, or simply other, jobs. In this, the young have not failed to do their duty, since new economic institutions make no guarantees in return. They routinely replace permanent workers with temporary workers, or "off-shore" work. Loyalty requires that personal experience accumulate in an institution, and the emerging political economy will not let it accumulate. Indeed, the profitable ease with which international capital today assembles, sells, and re-assembles corporations erases the durability of institutions to which one could develop loyalty or obligation. Time, then, is everything in reckoning the social consequences of the new political economy. And as a cultural value, rupture--that favored child of postmodernism--is less politically challenging than the assertion that people ought to have the right to develop loyalty and commitment within institutions. If the dominant powers of the political economy violate durable time, can individuals provide for themselves--formally or informally--amongst one another the sign posts that institutions deny them? This question is less abstract than it might seem at first. The modern economy did not simply wipe out the social struggles and personal values formed in an earlier phase of capitalism. What has been carried into the present from the past is a set of subjective values--values for making time coherent and durable, but in entirely personal terms. This personal, durable time intersects with the new economy of work in particularly disturbing ways. The Coherent Self The Victorians founded their sense of self-worth on life organized as one long project: the German values of formation, the English virtues of purpose, were for keeps. Careers in business, military, or imperial bureaucracies made the life-long project possible; these careers graded work into a clear sequence of steps. Such expectations devalue the present for the sake of the future--the present that is in constant upheaval and that may tempt the individual into byways or evanescent pleasures. Weber described future-orientation as a mentality of delayed gratification. Yet, this Victorian experience of cohering time has another side, which was subsumed under the ethical category of taking responsibility for one's life, though in a way quite opposite from the innovatory character of the will to change from within. Today, late Victorian values of personal responsibility are as strong as a century ago, but their institutional context has changed. The iron cage has been dismantled, so that individuals struggle for security and coherence in a seemingly empty arena. The destruction of institutional supports at work, as in the welfare state, leaves individuals only their sense of responsibility; the Victorian ethos now often charts a negative trajectory of defeated will, of having failed to make one's life cohere through one's work. Take what happens when career paths are replaced by intermittent jobs. Many temporary workers are put in the unenviable position of knowing that their job insecurity suits obligation-resistant companies, yet these temporary workers none-the-less believe that they are themselves responsible for the mess made of their careers. This sense of personal responsibility deflects workers' anger away from economic institutions to themselves. Meanwhile, the new economic map, which devalues the life-long career project, has shifted the optimal age curves of work to younger, raw employees (employees who range in age from the early twenties to early forties, instead of employees who range in age from the late twenties to middle fifties) even though adults are living longer and more vigorously. Studies of dismissed middle-aged workers find these workers both obsessed and puzzled by the liabilities of age. Rather than believing themselves to be faded and "over the hill," these older workers feel that they are more organized and purposeful than younger workers are. Even so, they blame themselves when they are perceived by management to be obsolete. Likewise, they blame themselves for not having prepared better for this contingency. 21 [6]^1 Workers' sense of personal responsibility and personal guilt is compounded by the rhetoric of modern management, which attempts to disguise power in the new economy by making the worker believe he or she is a self-directing agent--managers are now called "coaches," "facilitators," and the like. It is not the workers' "false consciousness" that makes these titles credible, but rather a twisted sense of moral agency. In modernity, people take responsibility for their lives because the whole of their lives feels their making. But when the ethical culture of modernity--with its codes of personal responsibility and life purpose--is carried into a society without institutional shelters, there appears not pride of self, but a dialectic of failure in the midst of growth. Growth in the new economy depends on gutting corporate size, ending bureaucratic guarantees, and profiting from the flux and extension of economic networks. People come to know the resulting dislocations as their own lack of direction. The ethic of responsibility becomes, ironically and terribly, a subjective yardstick to measure one's failure to cohere. In contrast, I would like to see discussions about democracy in the workplace enlarged beyond references to worker self-management. When we talk about democracy in the workplace, we must address the cultural dimensions of work, a different and literal kind of self-management in which coherence rather than rupture is a primary value. We must think through worker democracy in terms of this legacy of subjectivity. Is there some way to lighten workers' burden of self-responsibility, while acknowledging workers' desire for coherence and durability? Place The city is democracy's home, declared Hannah Arendt, a place for forming loyalties and practicing responsibilities. It also is a social setting in which personal attributes fade somewhat in a milieu of impersonality. Thus, Arendt imagined that the city--or more properly, "urbanity"--could relieve burdens of material circumstances in the social relations between people. Could Arendt's vision somehow be combined with the ideal of democratic growth invoked by John Dewey--that of the city as a place of ever increasing complexity of values, beliefs, and cultural forms? The cities, as well as the smaller communities, we know in America bear little relation to this ideal place. In communities, people do indeed try to compensate for their dislocations and impoverished experience in the economy, but often in destructive ways--through communal coercion and shared illusion. Many current building projects are exercises in withdrawal from a complex world, deploying self-consciously "traditional" architecture that bespeaks a mythic communal coherence and shared identity in the past. These comforts of a supposedly simpler age appear in the New Englandish housing developments designed by the American planners Elizabeth Platter-Zyberg and Andreas Duwany, among the architects in Britain working for the Prince of Wales to reproduce "native" English architecture, and in the neighborhood renovation work on the Continent undertaken by Leon Krier. All these place-makers are artists of claustrophobia, whose icons, however, do indeed promise stability, longevity, and safety. In order to avoid place-making on these conservative terms, we need to clarify what signposts and markers of form might successfully orient an alternative, open, and democratic community life. Let me cite three. First, communities must not shy away from confronting hostile forces. Communities can indeed challenge the new economy rather than react defensively to it. Modern corporations like to present themselves as having cut free from local powers--they may have a factory in Mexico, an office in Bombay, and a media center in lower Manhattan; these all appear as nodes in a global network. Today, localities fear that if they exercise sovereignty, as when they tax or regulate a business locally, the corporation could just as easily find another node. I believe, however, that we are already seeing signs that the economy is not as locationally indifferent as has been assumed. You can buy any stock you like in Dubuque, Iowa, but not make a market of stocks in the cornfields. The ivy cloisters of Harvard may furnish plenty of raw intellectual talent, yet lack the craziness, messiness, and surprise that makes Manhattan a stimulating if unpleasant place to work. Similarly, in South-East Asia, it is becoming increasingly clear that local social and cultural geographies indeed count for a great deal in investment decisions. And because the new political economy is not, in fact, indifferent to location, there exists the possibility for making communal demands--contracting with corporations to assure jobs for a certain number of years in exchange for tax relief, or enforcing strict work-place rules on age discrimination. What matters is the will to confront. Up until now, polities have tended to behave like weak supplicants rather than necessary partners. Put simply, place has power. Second, strong communities need not turn inward in a repressive fashion. Planning, especially in large-scale environments, can avert this and open groups up to one another by focusing on the borders of local sub-communities as active zones. For instance, "active edge" planners today seek to direct new building away from local centers and toward the boundaries separating communities. In East London, for example, some planners are working to make the edge of distinct communities into a febrile zone of interaction and exchange between different groups. Yet another strategy is to diversify central spaces, so that different functions overlap and interact in geographic centers. Planners in Los Angeles are seeking ways to put clinics, government offices, and old-age centers into shopping malls, which formerly were devoted solely to consumption activities. Planners in Germany are similarly exploring how to get light manufacturing back into the pedestrian zones in city centers. In honor of Arendt, many of these planners call themselves members of the "New Agora" movement. They don't see planning as the attempt to determine a specific outcome, but they do make assumptions about the form in which interaction and process should occur. In the case of active-edge planners, the animating belief is that the more people interact, the more they will become involved with those unlike themselves. In the case of the central zone planners, the animating belief is that the value of a place will increase when it is not simply commercial. Such planning is "democratic" in my own use of the word. The agora has a defined shape that can open up the possibility of complexity rather than hegemony. Again, part and parcel of this complexity of place is the diversification of a place's purpose. For instance, you can make shopping malls into places where people actually hang out, not just places for consumption. If you make malls more like town centers, you can draw people out of the network of their intimate neighborhood. When I say "intimate," I am not speaking of a psychological intimacy, but of exposure to your neighbors--such as knowing whether and how they are employed. Did they use credit to buy that Ford Windstar? America exposes people economically to each other in ways that enter social discourse as measures of relative personal merit. The reason I have focused my work on impersonality as a political project is that I believe that if we can provide more places in which that exposure is obscured, we can create the preconditions for a more just political discourse and interaction. Granted, you cannot force people to treat each other just as plain citizens, but at least you can provide the sites in which that kind of interaction might occur. And that is why cosmopolitanism (in a non-Kantian sense) can be a political project. My emphasis on the shaping of community is not, as it were, that such veiled communal relations would triumph over capitalism. That would give to place an absurd power. But where democracy occurs does matter in how democracy occurs. Places, especially urban places, have the capacity to help people to grow out of themselves into a more impersonal citizenship, and so to relieve themselves of their own subjective burdens. This may seem abstract, but we experience one of its elements whenever we plunge into a crowded street. A hoary clich? views impersonal crowds as an evil. Throughout the history of the city, people have voted otherwise with their feet. And one great theme in the literature of modern urban culture--from Baudelaire to Aragon to Benjamin to Jane Jacobs--finds in crowds a peculiar antidote to selfhood with all its burdens, a release into a less personalized existence. When she moved to Washington Square in 1906, beginning an affair with another woman, Willa Cather declared, "At last I can breathe," by which she meant that her erotic life no longer defined the terms of her social existence--at least in the dense, impersonal place to which she had moved. Impersonality does more than shelter outsiders or members of sub-cultures; it offers the possibility for what Stuart Hall calls "hybridity," a mixture of social elements beyond any single definition of self. Impersonal release has a particular value in terms of social class and material fortune. Various studies of existing mixed-class areas of big cities like New York and London yield an interesting portrait; intimate "neighborliness" is weak, but identification with the neighborhood is strong. The poor are relieved of social stigma; those who are rich in comparison--contrary to common sense, that most fallible of all guides--find daily life in a diverse neighborhood more stimulating than in places that serve only as private mirrors. These studies exemplify the sociological proposition advanced by Durkheim that impersonality and equality have a strong affinity. The relief of self found in dense streets, mixed pubs, playgrounds, and markets thus is not inconsequential. Such dense forms of civil society affect how people think of themselves as citizens. As the late Henri Lefebvre put it, sensing one's "right to the city" helps people feel entitled to other rights, rights not based on personal injuries or on victimhood. As I say, no one could argue that an impersonal city life will extinguish either the reality or the sentiments aroused by economic failure. But "extinguish," like "rupture," belongs to the sphere of growth envisioned through metamorphosis. I imagine instead a more realistic democratic project, one which develops a kind of concurrent consciousness, in which a middle-aged, supposedly "over the hill" worker can also think of him-or herself in an entirely different way, by virtue of where he or she lives. This doubleness of self seems to be more practicable than the striving for rebirth, as in a metamorphosis. To conclude, whether we seek for democracy in workplaces or in cities, we need to address the culture of the new capitalism. The economy does not "grow" personal skills and durable purposes, nor social trust, loyalty, or commitment. Economic practice has combined, however, with a durable cultural ethic, so that institutional nakedness co-exists with the will to take responsibility for one's life. The forms of polity we need to invent must help people transcend both elements of that combination: we need a model of growth that helps people transcend the self as a burdensome possession. Place-making based on exclusion, sameness, or nostalgia is poisonous medicine socially, and psychologically useless. A self weighted with its insufficiencies cannot lift that burden by retreat into fantasy. Place-making based on diverse, dense, impersonal human contacts must find a way for these contacts to endure. The agora has to prove a durable institution. This is the challenge that urbanists like myself now confront. Baudelaire famously defined modernity as experience of the fleeting and the fragmented. To accept life in its disjointed pieces is an adult experience of freedom, but still these pieces must lodge and embed themselves somewhere, hopefully in a place that allows them to grow and endure. ________________________ [7]^1 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959). ] [8]^2 See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Strahun and Cadell, 1776). ] [9]^3 See Michael Dunlop Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033: The New Elite of Our Social Revolution (New York: Random House, 1959). ] From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 25 14:53:32 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 10:53:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Felicia Wu Song: Towards a Working Perspective of Technology: A Bibliographic Essay Message-ID: Felicia Wu Song: Towards a Working Perspective of Technology: A Bibliographic Essay The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1287676&textreg=1&id=SonBibl4-3 Felicia Wu Song is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia and a Dissertation Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. She is currently working on her dissertation, which focuses on how Internet technology influences the shape of American public life by mediating and reframing our conceptions of community, intimacy, and the self. For many Americans, technology is mysterious. Despite the fact that technologies of all sorts impact almost every aspect of our daily lives, we continue to function with relatively uninformed conceptions of technology. We usually don't know or understand the technical mechanics of the technologies that we enjoy. When we purchase technologies such as computers, we have a vague sense that the computer may affect our family life, our friendships, the ways we work, and the development of our children, but we don't know much beyond that. In the past two to three decades, there has been a proliferation of works concerning technology and its effects on various spheres of society. It is now common to find books and conferences on technology and democracy, technology and gender, technology and the workplace, technology and religion, technology and education, technology and community, technology and literature, just to name a few. While this growing literature is extremely helpful in examining the ways that existing social institutions and cultural practices are challenged and reshaped by new technological developments, these texts are often thinly veiled normative arguments about how democracy, education, or communities ought to be, rather than works that clarify the nature of technology and how it "works" in society. These texts are crucial to the development of a robust public discourse about our technologies, but they often fail to provide a broader framework from which individuals can engage and assess technologies. Many questions that need to be addressed remain unanswered: What is technology? How does it relate to individual action and social order? Is technology an autonomous force that determines history? Or can it be resisted? How does a new technology shift from being the stuff of science fiction to becoming a part of our everyday worlds, even shaping our sense of reality? Is our society prone to develop or use particular kinds of technologies over others? Are there certain types of technologies that are better than others for living the "good life"? Do technologies tend to reinforce or break down power structures? The need for a more sophisticated and constructive understanding of technology is apparent as contemporary developments in biotechnology, nanotechnology, psychopharmacology, and computer technology seem to outpace our legal, social, and cultural institutions' abilities to guide and manage these developments. With each new technological advance, it becomes clearer that the existing public discourse on technology is lacking a language for discussing and engaging our technologies in meaningful ways. Despite the fact that the amount of thoughtful and creative scholarship on technology has been growing in the traditional disciplines of history, sociology, and philosophy (and in newer fields such as communications, media ecology, cultural studies, and science and technology studies), it is an area of literature that continues to be surprisingly unrecognized and underutilized in America. The works cited in this bibliographic essay contribute to the important task of moving beyond either an uncritical acceptance of technologies or vague feelings of helplessness. They are also useful for challenging the common notion that technology is merely a tool, having no social or cultural significance, by revealing the ways that technology is integrally bound up in social institutions, morality, power structures, cultural practices, and the creativity of its users. While the literature on technology is vast, this bibliographic essay aims to provide a basic typology of the technology literature, highlighting the dominant approaches and main areas of study, that will help readers move towards constructing a language or framework that is capable of meaningfully engaging the technologies of our times. Early Perspectives on Technology Fascination and enthusiasm are what usually greet new technologies in American society. Much like the faith that Western civilization has had in modern science, the optimism and excitement that is commonly expressed for technologies can be traced back to the belief in Progress that characterized eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking. Thinkers like Voltaire and Condorcet believed that science and technology were ultimately the keys to achieving the perfection of the human race, empowering people with the fruits of rational knowledge and the development of means to fulfill material needs. Technologies often played a large role in utopian visions, eliminating social inequality and ensuring political freedom for all. While the notion that technology both symbolized and guaranteed progress sprung from the Enlightenment in Europe, it quickly became integrally bound up in the fledgling culture of the newly established United States of America. With prolific inventors such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson among the nation's leaders, technology was truly regarded as a means to humanity's steady moral, social, political, and material betterment. Progress was considered inevitable, and technology would be the means of achieving it. In the nineteenth century, not only did Americans celebrate technologies such as railroads, steamboats, and industrial machinery, for the unprecedented prosperity that they brought to the American economy, but Americans also were awed by and even revered the sheer power and grandeur of technologies, dazzled by what historians have come to call the "technological sublime." This unwavering faith in technologies characterized the popular American sentiment, leading many to believe that American success was as inevitable as the progress that technology would bring. Because this conception of technology as progress has so dominated the American perspective, much of the contemporary scholarship on technology sees this idea as a point of departure. Many of the following books offer the necessary historical context for understanding present-day technological utopianism. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx's Does Technology Drive History?, Howard Segal's Technological Utopianism in American Culture, and Daniel Czitrom's Media and the American Mind provide especially excellent historical and theoretical overviews of America's love for technology. Boorstin, Daniel. The Image or What Happened to the American Dream. New York: Atheneum, 1962. Corn, Joseph J., ed. Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Czitrom, Daniel J. Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Kasson, John F. Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900. New York: Penguin, 1976. Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: Norton, 1991. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985. Smith, Merritt Roe, and Leo Marx. Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Staudenmaier, John M., S.J. Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Theoretical Perspectives on Technology and Society Understanding technological change in contemporary society is one of the dominant areas of research and theoretical work being done in the historical and sociological scholarship on technology. The primary questions beings asked are: What is the relationship between technology and society? Does technology drive history and social change? Or, does society determine the technology that it produces? While earlier accounts of technology focused primarily on recording the nuts-and-bolts development or engineering of technology, what dominates analyses now is the effect that technology and society have on each other. Two perspectives, technological determinism and social constructivism, are the main points of departure for the majority of the literature. Technological Determinism: Technology's Effect on Society The approach of technological determinism views technology as a powerful and autonomous force that changes history and social order. This perspective is present in most histories that argue that technologies were responsible for such enormous historical shifts in human history as the Industrial Revolution, the Protestant Reformation, and the period of Post-Industrialism. According to technological determinists, the realms of technology and society are understood to be distinct spheres--the active sphere of technology and the passive sphere of society. This passivity was perhaps best summed up in the motto for the code 1933 /code Chicago "Century of Progress" World Fair: "Science Finds. Industry Applies. Man Conforms." While technology is understood as a natural by-product of the quest for scientific knowledge, it is understood to be autonomous. Once created, it seems to have a "life of its own" with consequences that its inventor or engineer could never have foreseen. Another characteristic of the technological determinist perspective is that technology itself--its medium, the technical form and features--is the source of social change. An outgrowth of this view is commonly found in media analysis, such as that of Neil Postman, Harold Innis, and Marshall McLuhan. Their accounts argue that different media have different "biases," which determine not only different ways of thinking and perceiving the world, but also different types of civilizations. Strong forms of technological determinism will point to the use of papyrus to explain the fall of the Roman Empire or to the printing press to explain the rise of rational thinking and reason. An example of weaker forms of technological determinism, Joshua Meyrowitz's book, No Sense of Place, shows how the medium of television altered the boundaries of private and public life in American society by bringing political culture and public life into the living rooms of Americans. Present in both optimistic and pessimistic evaluations of technology, tendencies towards technological determinism can be found equally in McLuhan's vision of the global village made possible by electronic technologies and in Jacques Ellul's concern for the technologizing (and, thus, rationalizing) of all domains of life. Despite the implicit characterization of human beings and institutions as passive, technological determinism accurately captures the idea of unintended consequences, and how deeply they can affect the most fundamental aspects of our lived reality. Beniger, James R. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. New York: Knopf, 1964. Innis, Harold A. Empire and Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Viking, 1985. Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. New York: Vintage, 1996. White, Lynn, Jr. Medieval Technology and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. Social Constructivism: Society over Technology In response to the tendencies of scholarship towards technological determinism, the social construction of technology approach was begun in the mid-eighties by sociologists Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch. Drawing from the theoretical work done in the sociology of science, where assumed notions of postivism and scientific inevitability were sufficiently challenged, the social constructivist perspective sought similarly to reveal the levels of contingency and human agency involved in the innovation process of technology. By showing the ways that the design and use of technologies are very much products of particular social and cultural contexts, embedded with pre-existing cultural assumptions and meanings from their inception to their institutionalization, agency is restored to society as the producer of technology. No longer is technology "autonomous"; rather it is shown to be the natural outcome of our socio-cultural realities. While social constructivism adequately addresses an important blindspot of technological determinism, it still persists in analytically separating technology from society, theoretically implying a dichotomy that does not substantively exist. Alternative models have emerged out of the social constructivist project to address this problem, one of which is Thomas Hughes' systems approach, viewing technologies not as individual artifacts, but as entire constellations or systems in which social and technical aspects interact together. Similarly, Bruno Latour's actor-network theory works with the metaphor of technology as interconnecting networks that link human beings and non-human entities together, conveying the mutually constitutive nature of technology and society. Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan's essay in Social Construction of Technological Systems suggests that much can be gained from examining a technology at the point at which it is being considered by a consumer making choices between competing technologies. She argues that by analyzing technological change from the user's perspective, there is theoretical room for a dialectical relationship between the constructivist view of technology and the deterministic one. Bijker, Wiebe, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds. Social Construction of Technological Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Especially Ruth Schwartz Cowan's "The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology." Bijker, Wiebe, and J. Law, eds. Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Especially Bruno Latour's "Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts." Hughes, Thomas. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Law, John, ed. A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. London: Routledge, 1991. MacKenzie, Donald. Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. MacKenzie, Donald, and Judy Wajcman, eds. Social Shaping of Technology: How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum. Milton Keys: Open University Press, 1985. Meikle, Jeffrey. American Plastic: A Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Nye, David. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Winston, Brian. Misunderstanding Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Philosophy of Technology While historical and sociological debates between technological determinism and social constructivism concern the relationship between technology and society, questions about the actual nature of technology and the resulting lifeworld that is shaped by it motivate a distinctly philosophical literature on technology. Drawing from a rich European tradition of exploring technological issues, many philosophers of technology explore the logic and nature of technology itself and consider its significance and meaning in our experience of life. The works of Heidegger, Gehlen, and Berger best reflect the German philosophical tradition that rejects the instrumental notion of technology (as being merely a means to an end) and conceptualizes technology as a way of viewing the world and its objects. As a result, the socio-psychological consequences of the technologized life are primary areas of focus. How are our "technologically textured" lives different from the lives of previous generations? What is the role of technology in our pursuit of the good life, individually and communally? According to Albert Borgmann's theory of technology, while there are particular goals and needs that technology can be expected to fulfill, our lives include particular practices and things that are better off being directly engaged without technological mediation. Similarly, Erik Parens' edited volume, Enhancing Human Traits, problematizes the common notion that technology enhances our lives. What constitutes enhancement? And what are the ethics for using technologies to enhance our lives? While the European line of philosophical inquiry dominates much of the field, Carl Mitcham's Thinking through Technology offers a thorough survey and discussion of the various philosophical perspectives on technology. Lesser known traditions include the philosophy of technology that stems from American philosopher John Dewey's critique of technology. Larry Hickman's and Hans Joas' works are representative of pragmatist inquiries into the role of public life and values in the construction and use of technologies. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2^nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Berger, Peter L., Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Keller. The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Vintage, 1973. Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. London: Routledge, 1999. Gehlen, Arnold. Man in the Age of Technology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Habermas, J?rgen. Toward A Rational Society. Boston: Beacon, 1968. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Hickman, Larry A. Philosophical Tools of Technological Culture: Putting Pragmatism to Work. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, code 2001 /code . Higgs, Eric, Andrew Light, and David Strong. Technology and the Good Life? Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Mitcham, Carl. Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. ----, and Robert Mackey, eds. Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology. New York: Free, 1972. Pacey, Arnold. Meaning in Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Parens, Erik, ed. Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1998. Winner, Langdon. Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977. Technology and Power Coming to grips with how technological change is integrally wrapped up in issues of power and politics was a major area of concern for scholars and thinkers of the twentieth century. In literature, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are perhaps the most well known explorations into the ways that technology can be used coercively by totalitarian governments to enforce social control. Herbert Marcuse's seminal work, One Dimensional Man, has been a point of departure for more recent scholarship by critical theorists Douglas Kellner and Andrew Feenberg, who grapple with the ways that particular understandings of technology mask political powers that are in fact being exercised. Other scholars such as Langdon Winner have sought to show the inadequacy of the idea of scientific or technological inevitability commonly expressed in our culture and to argue for a conception of technology as a political artifact that implicitly leads to distinct types of social orders, benefiting particular institutions and groups of people. Concerns about who will decide how technologies are implemented and distributed are raised in the respective works of Lawrence Lessig and Lori Andrews, as they document the extent to which market forces and tendencies of commodification increasingly shape the development of Internet technologies and biotechnologies. As a whole, these works play an important role in examining how technologies are institutionalized in ways that maintain or exacerbate existing power structures, raising difficult questions about what resources are available in our social institutions to protect the vulnerable and the weak from exploitation. Andrews, Lori, and Dorothy Nelkin. Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age. New York: Crown, code 2001 /code . Feenberg, Andrew, and Alastair Hannay, eds. Technology and the Politics of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern. New York: Routledge, 1995. Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random House, code 2001 /code . Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon, 1964. Noble, David F. America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. New York: Knopf, 1977. Robins, Kevin, and Frank Webster. Time of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life. London: Routledge, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Culture Form. New York: Schocken, 1975. Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Technology and Feminism Feminist scholarship on technology generally falls into two stages. Early gender and technology issues frequently concerned the impact of technology on the everyday lives of women, whether focusing on computer technology in the workplace, technology in the domestic setting, or reproductive technology. In analyzing the trends towards deskilling, cheapened labor, increased domestic work, or the re-conceptualizations of women's reproduction and sexuality, these early approaches to technology and women focused on the ways that technologies were designed and produced by men, thus shaped by patriarchal values and interests in maintaining inequality and in exploiting women's bodies. These essentialist assertions have since received much criticism by those feminists who argue that technologies cannot be inherently gendered and that they are ultimately socially constructed artifacts that can be redirected to serve women's ends. Reflective of these broader shifts in the feminist movement, technologies are now often explored as a means of deconstructing gender, identity, and even human being, as seen in the works of Donna Haraway, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, and others who examine the social and political implications of cyberculture for women. In conjunction with these explorations into technology's impact on gender, an emerging literature is developing on how women are appropriating technologies to fight against institutional discrimination by networking on-line to improve the conditions of women worldwide. Cockburn, Cynthia, and Susan Ormrod. Gender and Technology in the Making. London: Sage, 1993. Cowan, Ruth. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic, 1983. Cutting Edge: The Women's Research Group, ed. Desire by Design: Body, Territories and New Technologies. London: Tauris, 1999. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Harcourt, Wendy, ed. Women at Internet: Creating New Cultures in Cyberspace. London: Zed, 1999. Harding, Sandra, ed. Perspectives on Gender and Science. Brighton: Falmer, 1986. Keller, Evelyn Fox, and Helen E. Longino. Feminism and Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Rothman, Barbara Katz. Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society. New York: Norton, 1989. Rothschild, Joan, ed. Machina Ex Dea. New York: Pergamon, 1983. Star, Susan Leigh, ed. The Cultures of Computing. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Wajcman, Judy. Feminism Confronts Technology. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Technology and Its Discourse The task of understanding and assessing technology is often complicated by the fact that so much hype and debate often surround the technologies that we use. Deciphering whether scholars and pundits are reacting to technology or the surrounding rhetoric is not always an easy task, for the discursive aspects of technology in our culture play a significant role in making technologies what they are. Separating out the myths and rhetoric that shape the ways that technologies are used and understood from the technology itself is a crucial task that has been taken up by various scholars in different areas ranging from the Internet to genetics. Understanding the effects of marketing, the use of metaphors of technology, and the roles that the scientific community plays in shaping our understanding of technology sheds light on the fundamental characteristics and values of contemporary American culture. Each of the following works explore and reveal the ways that technologies are mythologized, their capacities exaggerated and ultimately made sacred by language and discourse. Carey, James W., ed. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hubbard, Ruth, and Elijah Wald. Exploding the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers. Boston: Beacon, 1993. Merchant, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Herman, Andrew, and Thomas Swiss, eds. The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 2000. Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits. London: Verso, 1991. Slack, Jennifer D., and Fred Fejes, eds. The Ideology of the Information Age. Norwood: Ablex, 1987. Stivers, Richard. Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational. New York: Continuum, 1999. Woodward, Kathleen, ed. The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. London: Routledge/Kegan Paul, 1980. Technology and Postmodernism While science and technology may be rightly identified with the project of modernity, it might be just as fair to view contemporary technologies as the very tools that are, ironically, dismantling the assumptions of modernism and ushering in the realities of postmodernism. While the claims of postmodernism may seem abstract and distant to the person on the street, Kenneth Gergen's and Sherry Turkle's works show that the experiences of constructing multiple identities or gender-bending in cyberspace directly challenge the essentialist notions of identity and gender. As the technology of virtual reality poses serious questions about the ontological status of reality, and cutting-edge biotechnologies and artificial intelligence hint at the possibilities of a "posthuman era," it becomes clear that many of the borrowed premises of our social and political order are increasingly fragile and perhaps even meaningless. George Landow's and Richard Lanham's explorations into the implications of computer hypertext (that is, blocks of text linked electronically in an open-ended network) for our conceptualization of knowledge throw into question long-held assumptions about reason and rationality. Whether these technologies actually represent the start of a new reality and new age remains to be seen. However, considering the fact that technology has always been the symbol of progress, it should come as no surprise then that technologies today are regarded as liberatory agents from modernist frameworks of meaning and reality. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Borgmann, Albert. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Carter, Steven. Leopards in the Temple: Studies in American Popular Culture. ^2nd ed. San Francisco: International Scholars, 1997. Gergen, Kenneth J. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic, 1991. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of the Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. L?vy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. New York: Plenum, 1998. Penley, Constance, and Andrew Ross, eds. Technoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Poster, Mark. What's the Matter with the Internet? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, code 2001 /code . Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. From checker at panix.com Mon Oct 25 15:19:35 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 11:19:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Premise Checker: Winfield S. Hancock 1880 Message-ID: I wrote this nearly four years ago, but something like this might come up again, so here's a briefing on the Constitution. This coming election is the least significant one since aforesaid Winfield S. Hancock lost to James A. Garfield by 7000 votes. I append, once again, what Mr. Mencken said about American politics. From: Premise Checker (checker at clark.net) Subject: Two Scenarios for Clinton or Lieberman Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy Date: 2000-12-15 17:28:54 PST Amendment 20, in part, reads, "... the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President...." First Scenario, Bill becomes Acting President: Three electors are blackmailed into switching their votes to Algore when the Electoral College meets on December 18 ("Who was that woman you were with who was not your wife?"). Congress keeps wrangling over counting the electoral votes (it takes one Representative and one Senator to mount a challenge, as a matter of statute law) through the expiration of Bill Clinton and Algore's term at noon on January 20. Congress may then pick anyone to *act* as President, though Bill can't be *elected*. A big foreign policy CRISIS!! breaks out in January, say Red China invades Taiwan. Ordinarily a Republican Congress would appoint a Republican to act as President, but (now remember Bill has been visiting foreign countries for the past couple of months and is positioning himself as a Wise Man) Congress instead asks Bill to stay on as Acting President till one gets elected. This goes on till 2004, at least. Bill slips into being Acting President for Life. Second Scenario, Holy Joe becomes acting President: Neither Bush/Cheney nor Algore/Holy Joe gets a majority of electoral votes. The House fails to pick a President. The Senate is evenly divided, but Algore as President of the Senate, gives the deciding vote for Holy Joe for Veep. (This has to take place between January 6, when the new Congress meets, and January 20.) Holy Joe than becomes Acting President. Politics has become part of the entertainment industry. I invoke the ideas in Howard Bloom's _The Global Brain_ and claim that the coincidences that have allowed the election CRISIS!! so far are too great to have occured by chance alone. No conspiracy is involved, but no explanation of the mechanisms why this election has been so hugely entertaining have been offered yet either. I expect further surprises in the days ahead. Meanwhile, ponder what would have happened if Winfield S. Hancock had won. Who was Winfield S. Hancock? He lost by only 7000 votes in 1880. Who defeated Winfield S. Hancock? James A. Garfield. What did the Garfield Administration accomplish? What would have a Hancock Administration accomplished? Was 1880 a turning point in American history? Will 2000 be regarded as a turning point in American history in 2120, another 120 years from now. I submit these profound questions for you to ponder. Frank Forman ------------- On Being an American by H.L. Mencken (from Prejudices, Third Series (1922)) 4 All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb. It is the reason which grows out of my mediaeval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties. The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth. It is a show which avoids diligently all the kinds of clowning which tire me most quickly -- for example, royal ceremonials, the tedious hocus-pocus of haut politique, the taking of politics seriously -- and lays chief stress upon the kinds which delight me unceasingly -- for example, the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics, the desperate struggles of inferior men to claw their way into Heaven. We have clowns in constant practice among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as a Jack Dempsey is above a paralytic -- and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole droves and herds. Human enterprises which, in all other Christian countries, are resigned despairingly to an incurable dullness -- things that seem devoid of exhilirating amusement, by their very nature -- are here lifted to such vast heights of buffoonery that contemplating them strains the midriff almost to breaking. I cite an example: the worship of God. Everywhere else on earth it is carried on in a solemn and dispiriting manner; in England, of course, the bishops are obscene, but the average man seldom gets a fair chance to laugh at them and enjoy them. Now come home. Here we not only have bishops who are enormously more obscene than even the most gifted of the English bishops; we have also a huge force of lesser specialists in ecclesiastical mountebankery -- tin-horn Loyolas, Savonarolas and Xaviers of a hundred fantastic rites, each performing untiringly and each full of a grotesque and illimitable whimsicality. Every American town, however small, has one of its own: a holy clerk with so fine a talent for introducing the arts of jazz into the salvation of the damned that his performance takes on all the gaudiness of a four-ring circus, and the bald announcement that he will raid Hell on such and such a night is enough to empty all the town blind- pigs and bordellos and pack his sanctuary to the doors. And to aid him and inspire him there are travelling experts to whom he stands in the relation of a wart to the Matterhorn -- stupendous masters of theological imbecility, contrivers of doctrines utterly preposterous, heirs to the Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy and John Alexander Dowie tradition -- Bryan, Sunday, and their like. These are the eminences of the American Sacred College. I delight in them. Their proceedings make me a happier American. Turn, now, to politics. Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency. Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously idiotic -- a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook -- the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable? I defy any one to match it elsewhere on this earth. In other lands, at worst, there are at least intelligible issues, coherent ideas, salient personalities. Somebody says something, and somebody replies. But what did Harding say in 1920, and what did Cox reply? Who was Harding, anyhow, and who was Cox? Here, having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics. Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges charged with talcum power, and so let fly. Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy reminder that it is serious, and that some one may be hurt. I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that no-where else on this disreputable ball has the art of the sham-battle been developed to such fineness... ... Here politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for "King Lear," or a hanging, or a course of medical journals. But feeling better for the laugh. Ridi si sapis, said Martial. Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to comfort, above all to happiness. Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication. Here the buffoonery never stops. What could be more delightful than the endless struggle of the Puritan to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible? The effort is itself a greater joy to one standing on the side-lines than any or all of the carnal joys it combats. Always, when I contemplate an uplifter at his hopeless business, I recall a scene in an old- time burlesque show, witnessed for hire in my days as a dramatic critic. A chorus girl executed a fall upon the stage, and Rudolph Krausemeyer, the Swiss comdeian, rushed to her aid. As he stooped painfully to succor her, Irving Rabinovitz, the Zionist comedian, fetched him a fearful clout across the cofferdam with a slap-stick. So the uplifter, the soul-saver, the Americanizer, striving to make the Republic fit for Y.M.C.A. secretaries. He is the eternal American, ever moved by the best of intentions, ever running a la Krausemeyer to the rescue of virtue, and ever getting his pantaloons fanned by the Devil. I am naturally sinful, and such spectacles caress me. If the slap-stick were a sash-weight, the show would be cruel, and I'd probably complain to the Polizei. As it is, I know that the uplifter is not really hurt, but simply shocked. The blow, in fact, does him good, for it helps get him into Heaven, as exegetes prove from Matthew v, 11: Hereux serez-vous, lorsqu'on vous outragera, qu'on vous persecutera, and so on. As for me, it makes me a more contented man, and hence a better citizen. One man prefers the Republic because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober and his daughter chaste. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher than the cathedral at Chartres. Another because, living here, he can read the New York Evening Journal. Another because there is a warrant out for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me to my taste. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs. That cost, it seems to me is very moderate. Taxes in the United States are not actually high. I figure, for example, that my private share of the expense of maintaining the Hon. Mr. Harding in the White House this year will work out to less than 80 cents. Try to think of better sport for the money: in New York it has been estimated that it costs $8 to get comfortably tight, and $17.50, on an average, to pinch a girl's arm. The United States Senate will cost me perhaps $11 for the year, but against that expense set the subscription price of the Congressional Record, about $15, which, as a journalist, I receive for nothing. For $4 less than nothing I am thus entertained as Solomon never was by his hooch dancers. Col. George Brinton McClellan Harvey costs me but 25 cents a year; I get Nicholas Murray Butler free. Finally, there is young Teddy Roosevelt, the naval expert. Teddy costs me, as I work it out, about 11 cents a year, or less than a cent a month. More, he entertains me doubly for the money, first as a naval expert, and secondly as a walking attentat upon democracy, a devastating proof that there is nothing, after all, in that superstition. We Americans subscribe to the doctrine of human equality - - and the Rooseveltii reduce it to an absurdity as brilliantly as the sons of Veit Bach. Where is your equal opportunity now? Here in this Eden of clowns, with the highest rewards of clowning theoretically open to every poor boy -- here in the very citadel of democracy we found and cherish a clown dynasty! From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 25 15:38:43 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 08:38:43 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Survival of the friendliest Message-ID: <01C4BA6E.0A38A5B0.shovland@mindspring.com> We need a new paradigm. A paradigm of cooperation, not competition. In the onrushing crisis of resources, we may, as we are in Iraq, reach for the sword as a solution. And we may find that it doesn't work that well. Then what? If we are still alive, cooperation will be the only viable choice. And vision. Vision to see that we cannot grow without end in any dimension. Vision to see that perhaps human life is a value, if only as a steppingstone to some higher level of evolution. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Oct 25 18:52:31 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 11:52:31 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] flash poetry In-Reply-To: <200410251800.i9PI0X014123@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041025185231.63082.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> My latest flash poem: http://www.soulaquarium.net/flash/Contagious.html _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. http://messenger.yahoo.com From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Oct 25 19:07:19 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 12:07:19 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] flash poetry Message-ID: <01C4BA8B.2DE17FB0.shovland@mindspring.com> nice Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Monday, October 25, 2004 11:53 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] flash poetry My latest flash poem: http://www.soulaquarium.net/flash/Contagious.html _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. http://messenger.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From guavaberry at earthlink.net Mon Oct 25 20:00:26 2004 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 16:00:26 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] flash poetry In-Reply-To: <20041025185231.63082.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> References: <200410251800.i9PI0X014123@tick.javien.com> <20041025185231.63082.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.0.20041025155942.01f20ec0@mail.earthlink.net> nice work :-) karen At 02:52 PM 10/25/2004, you wrote: >My latest flash poem: > >http://www.soulaquarium.net/flash/Contagious.html /// Karen Ellis /// Educational CyberPlayGround __ /// National Children's Folksong Repository \\\/// Guavaberry Books \X/ Funk Brothers WebQuest \/ "Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect." - Chief Seattle "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." Mark Twain From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 26 03:18:55 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 20:18:55 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Fuel-saving of 50% possible with modern WindShips. Message-ID: <01C4BACF.DAD5D560.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.marinetalk.com/articles_HTML/PEL0321853TU.html Fuel-saving of 50% possible with modern WindShips. A new efficient rig design, combined with an especially developed underwater hull, promises to cut the fuel consumption by half on selected ocean routes. This is the message from a newly held seminar in Copenhagen where Knud E. Hansen, Naval Architects and Marine Engineers presented their study "Modern WindShips, Phase 2". In 1995 the Danish Ministry of Environment and Energy granted funding for Knud E. Hansen A/S to investigate the feasibility of adding sail assisted power to propel commercial ships. In the Phase 1, which was finished in November 1996, a broad background of various projects from the last 30 years, involving sailing and sail assisted ships, were investigated. The study envisaged a new type of sailing vessel named "Modern WindShip" with a length of about 200 m and a dead weight of 50.000 tonnes. The proposed WindShip was compared to conventional ships, and it was concluded that in spite of significant fuel savings an increased overall transportation cost of approx. 10% resulted. The Phase 2 resulted in a new innovative rig design, with complete mechanical layout and a new underwater hull, specifically designed for the dual propulsion using both wind and diesel power. An economical feasibility study confirmed that the 10% higher freight rate was necessary for the WindShip. This stems from the fact that the construction and running costs are slightly higher for the WindShip at the present stage. There are reasons to believe that further technical simplification and optimisation will reduce the price gap between conventional and wind assisted ships. On routes with reasonable weather wind conditions, like in the Atlantic Ocean, fuel savings of about 27% can be obtained. On routes where the superior internal volume capacity of the WindShip can be properly utilised, fuel savings of 50% are possible. This corresponds to an annual fuel saving of approximately4800 tonnes, having large beneficial effects on the environment by reducing harmful emissions of CO2, SOx and NOx. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Oct 26 03:28:08 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 20:28:08 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Full text of Danish study on Modern Windships Message-ID: <01C4BAD1.24A7BB80.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.mst.dk/default.asp?Sub=http://www.mst.dk/udgiv/Publications/2000/87-7944-019-3/html/kap10_eng.htm Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 26 14:46:29 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:46:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Research on Evil: An Annotated Bibliography Message-ID: Research on Evil: An Annotated Bibliography The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1365602&textreg=1&id=ThrBibl2-2 Most annotated bibliographies begin by noting how vast the literature on a certain subject is and how impossible it would be to present to eager readers a complete picture of the literature available. What is unusual is to claim that this vast array of books falls into fairly discrete subcategories. And yet, this is, to some extent, the case with books on evil. Disciplinary approaches divide the study of evil by the ways in which they define or explain it. Legal studies take on evil as crime. Psychological studies of evil focus on the individuals who have committed evil deeds. Theological approaches deal with evil as sin. Philosophical works take up evil as a problem about whether or not, and how, there can be an all-good, all-powerful God given the extent and kinds of evil in the world today. For the sociologist, evil is studied as, in part or wholly, a result of the social forces at work shaping and misshaping individuals and institutions. History books narrate particular events deemed evil. In every case, though, the subject of evil is seen as intricately connected to the most important questions we face as humans, living our lives and living our lives together. Listed below are several categories of books on evil, each with representative selections. The list of categories is not exhaustive but should give the reader a sense of the map of "evil studies" and a way to navigate through it in light of the specific interests she or he might have. Classics in the Study of Evil Certain works are cited again and again in writings on evil. These works span numerous centuries, geographical areas, and writing genres; their authors include Christian theologians, atheist philosophers, Jewish intellectuals, Russian novelists. What they have in common is a deep grappling with the nature of evil. Is evil a person, e.g., Satan, or a force at work in the world and in the wills of humans? Is evil the distortion of good or the lack of a measure of goodness? Is evil a radical choice or a banal thought-less-ness? Is God responsible for evil or are humans? How do humans conceive of evil and how does that relate to their understandings of human nature, the good, and God? Aquinas, Thomas. On Evil. Trans. Jean Oesterle. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Revised and Enlarged Edition. New York: Viking, 1965. Augustine. The City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 1984. ----------. Confessions. Trans. F. J. Sheed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts. Trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961. Hume, David. Principal Writings on Religion. Ed. J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Harper & Row, 1960. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1966. Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon, 1967. The Psychology of the Evil Individual While some books focus on the social conditions that foster violence, propel injustice, or misshape societies, the following books focus either on the inner workings of individuals who have committed horrendous crimes, acts so bad as to merit the appellation "evil," or on individuals' understandings of evil and how they come to see something as "evil." These psychologically oriented books take the forms of interviews, with the executors of evil (e.g., Goldberg), their victims, or those who have had experiences of evil (e.g., Alford); write-ups of findings of psychological studies and/or case studies from clinical practices (e.g., Peck); meditations on the motivations for committing evil deeds (e.g., Diamond); discussions of how individuals conceive of evil, what form it takes in their imaginations or in their lives (e.g., Jung). One assumption and hope of many of these works is that by studying the psychology of individuals who commit evil, we will learn something about how to prevent or reduce its occurrence. The strength of this approach is its ability to show us the complexities of evil: how varied its motivations are, how powerfully destructive one individual can be, how evil often breeds itself in its victims. Two limitations of this approach, which moves from the inside out, are, first, its temptation to reduce evil to biochemistry or unhappy life experiences and in the process to eclipse the agency involved in acts of evil, and, second, its tendency to ignore the larger social forces at work in shaping moral development and understandings of evil. Alford, C. Fred. What Evil Means to Us. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Baumeister, Roy F. Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. New York: Freeman, 1997. Diamond, Stephen A. Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Goldberg, Carl. Speaking with the Devil: Exploring Senseless Acts of Evil. New York: Penguin, 1996. Jung, C. G. Jung on Evil. Ed. Murray Stein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Peck, M. Scott. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Evil as a Social Problem Sociologists are unlikely to use the word "evil" in their discussions of social life. But when they do, their focus is often on the social conditions that are conducive to widespread violence and crime. The health of society is at issue in these social problems. The onus for resisting evil is placed on transforming social institutions and conditions, such that the individuals and communities within them will be morally bound to each other in constructive ways. Like the psychologist, the sociologist may err in eclipsing the agency of evil doers, but not because she reduces evil acts to biochemistry or certain life experiences, but rather because she may find the partial explanation of social causes to be sufficient explanation for why an individual does what he does. Nevertheless, sociological studies make a vital contribution to the study of a subject that has for so long been discussed in abstract terms with no empirical grounding, particularly since the evils that result from corrupt social structures have a much greater capacity for destruction than does a single individual. Hibbert, Christopher. The Roots of Evil: A Social History of Crime and Punishment. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963. Katz, Fred E. Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Katz, Jack. Seductions of Crime: The Moral and Sensual Attraction of Doing Evil. New York: Basic, 1988. Lemert, Edwin M. The Trouble With Evil: Social Control at the Edge of Morality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Oppenheimer, Paul. Evil and the Demonic: A New Theory of Monstrous Behavior. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Pillsbury, Samuel H. Judging Evil: Rethinking the Law of Murder and Manslaughter. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Sanford, Nevitt, Craig Comstock, and Associates, eds. Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1971. God and the Problem of Evil Probably the largest category of writings on evil are those dealing with the problem presented to belief in an all-good, all-powerful God by the occurrence of evil in the world. Being all-good, the argument goes, God would not want there to be any evil and suffering. Being all-powerful, God would be able to prevent any and all evil and suffering from occurring. And yet, there is evil in the world. Is God either not all-good or not all-powerful? Is evil not really evil, but a necessary part of a good plan? Philosophers and theologians have argued and written about this problem for centuries. Some argue that the simple and most logical answer to the problem is that there is no God, i.e., the existence of evil is proof that God does not exist or gives reason to believe that it is more probable than not that God does not exist. Theodicies argue for God's existence and defend God's goodness and omnipotence. These arguments take numerous forms, but most suggest some reason, some greater good, God might have for permitting evil. Finally there are those who argue that the effort put into writing theodicies is misguided: we simply cannot know why God permits evils, and we should be spending our time and effort trying to prevent and resist evil, to alleviate suffering, and to make sure that justice is carried out. Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Adams, Marilyn McCord, and Robert Merihew Adams, eds. The Problem of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Buber, Martin. Good and Evil. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952. Chopp, Rebecca S. The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation and Political Theologies. Mary Knoll: Orbis Books, 1986. Farley, Edward. Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990. Farley, Wendy. Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1990. Griffin, David Rey. Evil Revisited: Responses and Reconsiderations. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. Revised Edition. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978. Leaman, Oliver. Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Peterson, Michael L., ed. The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. Pinn, Anthony B. Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology. New York: Continuum, 1995. Plantinga, Alvin. God, Freedom, and Evil. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Surin, Kenneth. Theology and the Problem of Evil. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Swinburne, Richard. Providence and the Problem of Evil. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. Tilley, Terence. The Evils of Theodicy. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1991. Philosophy and Evil While philosophy of religion books contend with the problem evil raises for belief in God, another vein of philosophy takes up the subject of evil quite apart from any questions about God. Tracing their roots to Kant's idea of radical evil and considering the failures of Western societies to achieve the ideals proposed by the Enlightenment, these books contend with the questions: How are we to understand evil and human nature? What does the occurrence of evil say about our moral life? Is the human will evil at its base? Is it possible to overcome evil? Copjec, Joan, ed. Radical Evil. London: Verso, 1996. Kekes, John. Facing Evil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Midgley, Mary. Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay. London: Routledge, 1984. Taylor, Richard. Good and Evil. Revised Edition. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000. Evil in Anthropology and World Religions Most of the writings in this bibliography focus on Western perspectives on evil, but the following books either examine other cultures' views on evil or compare Western views of evil with those of other cultures, and in doing so, they provide an important perspective on our own understandings of evil. Alford, C. Fred. Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age of Globalization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Bowker, John. Problems of Suffering in the Religions of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Boyd, J. W. Satan and Mara: Christian and Buddhist Symbols of Evil. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975. Doniger O'Flaherty, Wendy. The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Parkin, David, ed. The Anthropology of Evil. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Evil and Literature Literature has been a vital part of discussions of evil from at least the time of the writing of Job. More and more philosophers and theologians are turning to literature in their discussions of our moral life. Certain literary texts have become touchstones in discussions of evil: e.g., Dante's The Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. While many writings make reference to literature in their discussions of evil, a few books focus explicitly on the relation between literature and evil, discussing the ways specific literary works present evil to us (e.g., Bataille); arguing that certain genres explore the sorts of questions that are raised by experiences of evil (e.g., Bouchard); or suggesting that literature can draw us into fascinated admiration for evil through glamorous (mis)representations of it (e.g., Shattuck). Bataille, George. Literature and Evil. Trans. Alastair Hamilton. New York: Marion Boyars, 1985. Bouchard, Larry. Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989. McGinn, Colin. Ethics, Evil, and Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Shattuck, Roger. Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. Tolczyk, Dariusz. See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet-Camp Experience. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Evil and the Gothic Ten years ago, a bibliography on evil would not have included such a section, but in the past decade, interest in the Gothic, both as a literary genre and as a cultural phenomenon, has soared, and it is shaping our cultural understandings of evil, particularly those held by younger generations. Several elements of the Gothic have caught the attention of those interested in evil: its exploration of horror, violence, and terror; its engagement with the supernatural and its setting in an eerie past; and its focus on the mysterious, evil other. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when rationality was being championed in intellectual circles, the Gothic novel was exploring the irrational and the limits of rationality, bringing to the fore in literature what was being repressed in intellectual life. A similar situation is seen by many to be occurring today. The very idea of evil is being eclipsed by, among other things: the hyperbolically positive rhetoric of advertising; the new-age, self-help industry; the expectation that humans will be able to choose not just some specific traits, but everything about themselves (or at least their children-to-be). Eclipsed by these cultural phenomena, interest in evil erupts in other places. What follows are a few of the books that take up the Gothic as either a culture, a genre, or a way of thinking about evil. Edmundson, Mark. Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin. New York: North Point, 1999. Halttunen, Karen.Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Martin, Robert K., and Eric Savoy, eds. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. Punter, David, ed. The Literature of Horror: A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Evil, Suffering, and Pain Suffering has been evil's partner for centuries; it is evil's effect, its flip side. Discussions of evil cannot help but speak of suffering. However the two books listed below stand out in their attempts at understanding the personal and cultural significance of suffering; they focus specifically on the phenomenology of suffering and pain, on what the experience of pain is like, and how it both is shaped by the world and social context in which it occurs and shapes, or more accurately, misshapes the world for those who undergo it: Morris, David B. The Culture of Pain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Women, Feminism, and Evil The connection made throughout history between women and evil is sorely obvious to anyone who takes a moment to think about it. Eve is often portrayed as the source of all evil, as both weak in giving in to the serpent's temptation and wily in leading Adam astray. Feminist thought has pointed out the ways in which women have been relegated to the margins, and, worse, made to be the evil other of men, and a long list of books could be listed as dealing with the equating of women and/or the feminine with what is wrong with the world. However, a few books specifically take up the connection between women and evil: Noddings, Nel. Women and Evil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Sands, Kathleen M. Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994. The Devil and The Antichrist While Satan's death has recently been reported (Delbanco), he has had a long and lively career. Jeffrey Burton Russell's historical series on this figure, under his various aliases (the Devil, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Prince of Darkness, Satan) is hard to surpass, for the sheer amount of information it brings to those interested in evil's most prominent representative. But these and other books on the devil--as well as those on evil's second most prominent representative, the Antichrist--are not mere biography: they chart conceptions of evil through time, externalizations of cultural understandings of evil, and ways in which societies or groups locate an other who is labeled evil. Delbanco, Andrew. The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Forsyth, Neil. The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth. New York: Random House, 1995. Fuller, Robert. Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. McGinn, Bernard. Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York: Random House, 1995. Russell, Jeffrey Burton. The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. ----------. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. ----------. Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. ----------. The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. ----------. Satan: The Early Christian Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Evil in History: The Holocaust Historic evils abound but one, in particular, has focused discussions of evil: the Holocaust. Almost all recent writings on evil refer at some point to the Holocaust, and some of the most profound writings on the subject of evil are those written specifically about the Holocaust. Anyone interested in evil would do well to consider reading any number of the following books. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Three Volumes. Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Lang, Berel. The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Thomas, Laurence Mordekhai. Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Wiesel, Elie. Night. Second Edition. Trans. Stella Rodway. New York: Bantam, 2000. ----------, and Philippe-Micha?l de Saint-Cheron. Evil and Exile. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1990. From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 26 14:58:13 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:58:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYRB: Dreams of Empire Message-ID: Dreams of Empire http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17518 The New York Review of Books Volume 51, Number 17 ? November 4, 2004 By [13]Tony Judt [15]America's Inadvertent Empire by William E. Odom and Robert Dujarric Yale University Press, 285 pp., $30.00 [16]The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire edited by Andrew J. Bacevich Ivan R. Dee, 271 pp., $28.95;$16.95 (paper) [17]Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi Beacon, 192 pp., $23.00 [18]The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge Penguin, 400 pp., $25.95 [19]Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Harvard University Press, 478 pp., $45.00; $19.95 (paper) [20]Multitude by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Penguin, 427 pp., $27.95 [21]The New Imperialism by David Harvey Oxford University Press, 253 pp., $22.00 [22]Fear: The History of a Political Idea by Corey Robin Oxford University Press, 316 pp., $28.00 [23]A New World Order by Anne-Marie Slaughter Princeton University Press, 341 pp., $29.95 1. Talk of "empire" makes Americans distinctly uneasy. This is odd. In its westward course the young republic was not embarrassed to suck virgin land and indigenous peoples into the embrace of Thomas Jefferson's "empire for liberty." Millions of American immigrants made and still make their first acquaintance with the US through New York, "the Empire State." From Monroe to Bush, American presidents have not hesitated to pronounce doctrines whose extraterritorial implications define imperial authority and presume it: there is nothing self-effacing about that decidedly imperious bird on the Presidential Seal. And yet, though the rest of the world is under no illusion, in the United States today there is a sort of wishful denial. We don't want an empire, we aren't an empire--or else if we are an empire, then it is one of a kind. This nervous uncertainty has given rise to an astonishing recent spate of books and essays. Some of these display a charming insouciance. America, write William E. Odom and Robert Dujarric, is an empire of a new type, unipolar, based on ideology rather than territorial control, voluntary in membership, and economically advantageous to all countries within it.^[24][1] Others--like the essays collected by Andrew Bacevich in The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire--are a curious amalgam of military hubris and cultural anxiety: they dutifully document both America's truly awesome military reach and the widespread national uncertainty about what to do with it. The United States is different from other countries. But as an imperial power it is actually quite conventional and even familiar. True, modern America eschews territorial acquisitions. But that is irrelevant. Like the British at the height of their imperial majesty, the US prefers to get its way by example, pressure, and influence. Lord Palmerston's dictum--"trade without rule where possible, trade with rule where necessary"--has been applied by Washington with even greater success. Whereas the British were constrained (after some initial reluctance) to exercise formal--and costly--imperium over whole sub-continents, the US has hitherto perfected the art of controlling foreign countries and their resources without going to the expense of actually owning them or ruling their subjects. Even the story that America tells about its overseas initiatives is hardly original. Like the Victorians, Americans readily suppose that what is demonstrably to our advantage--free trade, democracy--must therefore serve everyone's interest. Like the French, we count ourselves blessed with laws and institutions whose incontrovertible superiority places a duty upon us to make them universally available. Europeans who cringe when George W. Bush describes America as "the greatest force for good in history" --or promises to export democracy to the Middle East because American values "are right and true for every person in every society"^[25][2] --would do well to recall France's "civilizing mission," or the White Man's Burden. They should recall, too, that empires are not all bad. They bring protection, especially to minorities. Joseph Roth correctly foresaw that Jews above all would have cause to rue the fall of the Habsburgs. And it is not by chance that the Abkhazian people trapped in independent Georgia dream today of returning to the anonymous security of the Russian imperial fold: there are many worse things than subjection to a distant imperial capital. Empires often bring modern institutions, too--an ambiguous economic benefit but not without other advantages. And some imperial powers just do have a better track record than others. There is little to say in defense of the Italian overseas empire, much less the Belgian. But if we apply the felicific calculus to the history of American foreign involvement, we shall find a lot to applaud. _________________________________________________________________ Nonetheless, even if it could be demonstrated beyond a doubt that American hegemony really was a net good for everyone, its putative beneficiaries in the rest of the world would still reject it. Whether they would be acting against their own best interests is beside the point--a consideration not always well understood even by proponents of "soft power."^[26][3] As Raymond Aron once observed, it is a denial of the experience of our century (the twentieth) to suppose that men will sacrifice their passions for their interests. And it is above all in its reluctance to grasp the implications of that experience that America today is genuinely different. For the world has changed in ways that make imperial power uniquely difficult to sustain. In the first place, it is hard to be an imperial democracy. Given the choice, voters are reluctant to pay the full cost of sustaining an empire. In a democratic setting the sentiment that money might be better spent at home can be more easily exploited by political opponents, especially when expensive postwar "stabilization and reconstruction" (i.e., nation-building) is at stake. That is why US administrations have sought to underwrite overseas adventures (first in Vietnam and now in Iraq) by borrowing money rather than taxing the American citizenry, and have tried, so far as possible, to outsource--i.e., privatize--the unglamorous nation-building part. Moreover, the US is handicapped when it comes to exporting the image of its own democratic virtues: because it has rather too many undemocratic allies (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan come to mind) and because America does not always regard democracy as an unalloyed virtue if it produces the wrong results. Open elections in Iraq or Palestine right now would produce outcomes wholly unwelcome in Washington, as they have done or threatened to do in other places at other times.^[27][4] The British and the French, not to mention the Russians, did not have this problem: whatever "values" they were exporting, universal suffrage was not one of them. Secondly, it is almost impossible to practice empire in a world of instantaneous mass media transmission. Imperial control is violent. Colonization, as the Marquis de Gervaisis observed apropos of France's seizure of Algeria back in the 1830s, unavoidably entails "the expulsion and extermination of the natives."^[28][5] But most people at home in the imperial metropole never saw that. Not so today. To watch crimes being enacted is very different from reading about them after the fact. That is why Bill Clinton was forced into the Balkans in 1995, once the images from Bosnia had become daily fare on American television. There is a good reason why Washington now "embeds" reporters and looks with disfavor upon the independent Qatar-based al-Jazeera television network (whose equipment we damaged in both Kabul and Baghdad and which the sovereign authorities in Iraq have now temporarily banned)-- the same reason the Bush administration severely restricts visual coverage of American casualties in Iraq. The crimes of Abu Ghraib were as nothing set against what King Leopold of Belgium did to his Congolese slave laborers or the British massacre of 379 civilians at Amritsar in the Punjab in 1919. The difference is that everyone has seen what happened at Abu Ghraib. We don't know how ordinary Belgians would have responded to seeing what their government was doing in central Africa; but in any case our own sensibilities are heightened. When the inevitable dirty work of exercising power over reluctant foreigners--expropriation, violence, corpses --is available in real time for all to see, the case for empire becomes a lot harder to sell. Thirdly, the US cannot be an effective empire precisely because it comes in the wake of all the other empires before it and must pay the price for their missteps as well as its own. The French had been to Vietnam before the US got there. The Russians (and before them the British) have been to Afghanistan. And everyone has been to the Middle East. When Donald Rumsfeld assured his troops in Baghdad that unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this [emphasis added] he was decidedly unoriginal. That's what the British General Stanley Maude said in Baghdad ninety-seven years earlier ("Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators") --not to mention Napoleon Bonaparte's proclamation upon occupying Alexandria in 1798: Oh Egyptians...I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors. _________________________________________________________________ Let us concede, for the sake of argument, that American intentions are more honorable than those of the perfidious Brits and hypocritical French. It really doesn't matter. The history of what they went on to do is what counts--and what is remembered and weighed in the balance when American behavior is assessed from abroad.^[29][6] The name Mohammad Mossadegh doesn't trip readily off many educated American tongues. But as the elected prime minister of Iran who was unceremoniously bundled out of office in 1953 by an Anglo-American coup his memory is invoked all across the Middle East whenever the subject of Western intervention in the region comes up. Americans may be only dimly aware of this history, but others are better informed. Even when the US is free of any responsibility for some malevolent colonial undertaking, it still inherits the consequences. Iraq, it is now being whispered abroad, is America's "Suez": an ill-advised foreign expedition that brought initial military success but long-term discredit and catastrophic loss of influence. The implications of this demeaning comparison ought to be a source of concern in Washing-ton. Unparalleled military superiority counts for far less than its besotted advocates sometimes suppose. Americans may be from Mars, but this is Planet Earth. It isn't significant that our armed forces can outspend and outshoot any hypothetical foe. All they have to be able to do in order to exert effective military hegemony is beat with ease any actual, existing enemy. The rest is superfluity.^[30][7] And that level of domination has been reached by a number of empires and armies (or navies) in the past--Napoleon among them. In the end, of course, all were brought low: more often than not by their own mistakes. Are America's prospects any different? One reason to be pessimistic about America is the mediocrity of its current political class. A brilliant elite is no guarantee of political wisdom, as David Halberstam reminded us many years ago.^[31][8] But its absence is a bad omen. Douglas Feith, the Pentagon undersecretary for policy and a prominent representative of the generation of neoconservatives now installed in Washington, was recently described by General Tommy Franks (who had to deal with him in Iraq) as "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." Even allowing for the fighting soldier's traditional contempt for civilian interlopers, this should give us pause--it is hard to imagine Eisenhower being driven to describe Charles Bohlen or George Kennan in these terms.^[32][9] The generation of intellectuals and politicians responsible for US foreign policy today did not emerge by chance, as John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge convincingly demonstrate in The Right Nation, their detailed account of right-wing political culture in contemporary America. While the great liberal foundations were irresponsibly throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at fashionable scholarship and "politically correct" causes, a small group of American philanthropists and institutions spent the Seventies and Eighties underwriting a revival of conservative political strategy. By the end of the cold war a new generation of right-wing thinkers and activists had recaptured--for the first time in many decades--the initiative in public policy making: so much so that their ideas had become the conventional wisdom. Many of Bill Clinton's successful domestic policies (like those of Tony Blair) were adaptations of initiatives first mooted in conservative think tanks. But overseas policy was another matter. In their prime the British and French empires could draw on a wealth of specialized overseas knowledge--of terrain, of history, of languages. The soldiers, administrators, businessmen, and proconsuls who ran these empires were often scholarly experts in their own right and had in many cases lived and traveled for decades in the countries they now ruled. The same was true of the journalists and writers who commented on them. That didn't make imperial rule any more welcome, but it did keep it well-informed. A comparably talented foreign policy elite emerged in the US in the wake of World War II; it has now been all but eclipsed.^[33][10] Although the new conservatives at the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation never lacked for foreign policy pundits, expertise was another matter. Whereas position papers on domestic policy emanating from these institutions were usually detailed and rigorous--if somewhat ideologically tendentious--recommendations for US policy overseas inclined to the hyperbolic. Strategic ambition was typically present in inverse proportion to professional competence^[34][11] --and almost no one in these circles had any military experience, so there was a natural disposition to exaggerate the scope for military action and minimize its risks. The result was a form of intellectual overreach whose best-known public manifestation comes in the messianic sound-bites written for George W. Bush: America is engaged in a historic mission "to change the world" (from the presidential press conference on April 13 of this year) is a representative example. The point, as William Kristol explained it at the American Enterprise Institute in March 2003, is to get some "respect" for America in places like the Middle East: first Baghdad, and then on to regime change in Tehran and Damascus. The inept execution of the Iraq misadventure has thus been a severe disappointment to the Pentagon cheerleading bench, who spent the Nineties dreaming of a Mesopotamian initiative. They now feel personally affronted. When the editors of The New Republic asked "Were we wrong?" (to advocate war in Iraq), they concluded that no, war was always a good idea. But by misleading the country and the world in order to get his war, the President let them down.^[35][12] _________________________________________________________________ If the right has proved inadequate to the task of imagining and executing a responsible foreign policy for the twenty-first century, its critics have done little better. While neoconservatives culpably overestimated America's capacity to dominate the actual world, the left continued to dream up worlds of its own imagining. In an age when the right to bear (nuclear) arms may soon be available to any criminally disposed person on the planet, and when the problem of maintaining security in an open society is the most difficult challenge facing any democratic government (albeit cynically exploited by the present American one), what is the most popular source of political enlightenment on American campuses today? Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri--now accompanied by the same authors' Multitude. Both books are dreadful. Anyone old enough to remember the revolutionary rhetoric of the Seventies will recognize the style, notwithstanding the postmodern updating. Negri, who spent many years in prison for his part in the homicidal radicalism of Italy's Lead Years, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing (Hardt is presumably too young to have known anything in the first place). There are no subjects in these books: just structures, processes, and "de-centered" forces and "encounters." The proposition--to flatter more than nine hundred pages of flaccid, inept prose--is that the "multitude" will be brought together by the workings of "empire" and (with the familiar help of some cleansing violence) will rise up and break its shackles: Empire...by colonizing and interconnecting more areas of human life ever more deeply, has actually created the possibility for democracy of a sort never before seen. Brought together in a multinoded commons [sic] of resistance, different groups combine and recombine in fluid new matrices of resistance. This is globalization for the politically challenged. In place of the boring old class struggle we have the voracious imperial nexus now facing a challenger of its own creation, the de-centered multitudinous commonality: Alien versus Predator. Through his American dummy, Negri is ventriloquizing a twenty-first-century paraphrase of Marxist theories of imperialism popularized by Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin at the end of the nineteenth. The originals were much better written and distinctly more poli-tically threatening, since they had some purchase upon reality. With the American left reading Multitude, Dick Cheney can sleep easy. David Harvey, by contrast, is a Marxist anthropologist who actually does know something about the way empires work. Building on his claim that there is a permanent tension in American foreign policy between the logic of territorial dominion and the imperatives of a global market, Harvey has some interesting geopolitical reflections to offer upon the illusion of democratic "voluntary" empire. However much the US might genuinely seek to democratize the foreign countries dependent on it and win them over for its way of life, it is sooner or later driven to undermine such exercises of "soft power" by manipulating their domestic policies through a "predatory devaluation of [their] assets." There seems to me some uncertainty in The New Imperialism over what distinguishes "function" (the core workings of capitalism) from "intention" (the stated aims of American foreign policy): in Harvey's hands the latter is accorded little autonomy and even less attention. There is also a little too much genuflection in the direction of Lenin and Kautsky. But that is negligible beside the major drawback to this book, which is that Harvey, too, has a writing problem. Some samples: The consolidation of bourgeois political power within the European states was, therefore, a necessary precondition for a reorientation of territorial politics to-wards the requirements of the capitalistic logic. The molecular processes of capital accumulation operating in space and time generate passive revolutions in the geographical patterning of capital accumulation. If you didn't already agree, you aren't likely to be convinced by something that reads like a parody of a radical sociology lecture from 1972. The point, as Marx observed back in 1845, is either to interpret the world or to change it. This sort of prose advances neither objective. _________________________________________________________________ Fortunately, not everyone writes like this. Corey Robin's account of the place of fear in American life is refreshingly clear--and timely. The first half of his book is a brisk account of the idea of fear in political argument from Hobbes to Arendt; the second a forthright discussion of "Fear, American Style." Some of his observations about the American pairing of optimism and fear--or autonomy and compliance --will be familiar to readers of Tocqueville, though Robin illustrates the American propensity to conformity with a particularly chilling quotation from Dan Rather on media self-censorship in the wake of September 11: It is an obscene comparison--you know I am not sure I like it--but you know there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around people's necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck.... Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions. It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself. It carries through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole--and for all the right reasons--felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying, "I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it." 2. Two of the author's arguments have a special bearing on our present situation. The Madisonian institutions of limited government and separated powers are commonly believed to protect the citizenry against the abuses of state power, and so they do (although only citizens, not aliens, need feel protected). But in Robin's view the American system leaves civil society disproportionately underregulated, with the result that the American workplace in particular is a site of managerial coercion and workers' fear in a way no longer true of any other Western society. This overstates the case-- and anyway, whether the US government in the age of John Ashcroft would be quite so recognizable to Madison may be open to question. But there is no doubt that the American social model now stands at a disconcerting tangent to the rest of the West.^[36][13] Robin's most interesting observation, however, concerns what he calls the "liberalism of terror." For some time now the center of gravity of left-liberal politics in America and elsewhere has been what Judith Shklar once called the liberalism of fear: the belief that the twentieth century taught us that radical projects to accomplish social goals in the service of grand visions were unwise and that the best way to think about liberal politics was to "ramble through a moral minefield." This was one source of the turn to human rights in the last third of the century; it is the reason why many otherwise secular thinkers are sympathetic to George Bush's emphasis on "evil" and "terror" as the ultimate threats to the republic; and it accounts for support by many liberals for overseas intervention to prevent genocide or topple dictators.^[37][14] Robin argues, against the grain of a generation of mainstream liberal thought, that this is a seriously insufficient basis for political action. He also claims that it diverts liberal attention away from domestic injustice, since it is easier to identify absolute evil in Bosnia or Rwanda (or Iraq) than in one's own democratic republic, however imperfect. And of course it is easier to triumph over terror or evil in foreign incarnations than it is to conquer injustice or fear at home, where compromises and disappointments are inevitable. _________________________________________________________________ I'm reluctant to swallow this argument whole. Having favored intervention in Kosovo but opposed it in Iraq, I--like anyone else who wishes to be taken seriously in public policy debates--had better come up with good reasons for these hard choices: there will be more of them in years to come. A left that won't engage the reality of evil overseas because it wants to refocus attention on injustice at home is no better equipped to face our brave new world than a right that invokes the "war against terror" as an excuse for thinking about nothing else. Nevertheless, after reading Robin with a skeptical eye, I found my attention caught by a recent remark by Michael Ignatieff, perhaps the best-known proponent of the "negative" liberalism Robin dislikes. "Iraq...," Ignatieff declared, "has made the case for liberal interventionism impossible."^[38][15] Really? So in retrospect we were wrong to attack the Serbs in Bosnia? And we would be wrong again to send the Marines into Darfur? Isn't Michael Ignatieff folding the tent just a little bit hastily? He is one of a number of prominent liberal intellectuals--Adam Michnik in Poland, for example, and Andr? Glucksmann in Paris--who supported George W. Bush's Iraq policy as part of the ongoing struggle against political tyranny and moral relativism. Having thus deluded themselves into believing that the American president was conducting his foreign policy for their reasons, some of them are understandably disgruntled. But is liberal internationalism so vulnerable, so politically unsecured that one of its core moral tenets can be collapsed by the mendacious misdealings of a single conservative president? Maybe Robin is correct after all. But in that case how should Americans think about foreign policy? One problem with both left and right is that they look upon America's foreign dealings as a zero-sum game. Either the US is sovereign, in which case it should be free of all foreign entanglements, cooperating only with those willing or constrained to accept its leadership. Or else the US, like everyone else, must adapt to a borderless world and relinquish some national sovereignty to international authorities for the benefit of all. Faced with that choice the outcome is foreordained. Their debt-ridden economy may be in thrall to foreign investors and their overstretched military desperate for allied help; but most US congressmen (like their constituents) don't hold a passport and haven't been overseas. They will never "relinquish" sovereignty to some toothless international authority. Liberal internationalists who want to justify intervention in foreign lands--on the grounds that the tradition of "Westphalia"^[39][16] is defunct and the integrity of states has been replaced by international law--will be doomed to accept one law for the US and another for everyone else. But that isn't the choice and it hasn't been for quite a while. As Anne-Marie Slaughter shows in her new book, A New World Order, from the World Trade Organization and the World Court to the international organization of securities commissioners, the United States is already inextricably integrated into a complex web of agencies and networks that inform, oversee, regulate, negotiate, and in practice shape much of what happens in America no less than everywhere else. This much is the truth in "globalization." The fallacy, as she demonstrates, is to suppose that all this either signals or necessitates the end of the sovereign state, much less the coming of a supranational, global system of government. _________________________________________________________________ A New World Order offers copious evidence for what Slaughter, a prominent international lawyer and dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton, calls de facto global "governance." Of course states exist, she says, and they aren't going away. They will be the only imaginable form of legitimate political organization and government for the foreseeable future. But untrammeled, autonomous sovereignty is no more. Instead sovereignty is "relational": bankers, policemen, environmentalists, doctors, Supreme Court justices, ministers, and countless others now exchange and share information and precedents and proposals. Some trans-state links and networks are based on an explicit treaty or agreement; others--such as the US committee on international judicial relations in which American judges collaborate with their colleagues abroad --remain informal. But the mere existence of this horizontally networked world--some of it truly venerable, like the International Postal Union or the Nordic Council, but with new intergovernmental entities "popping up" every year--encourages convergence and cooperation with, and compliance by, the vertically organized states in its embrace. The result is not top-down imposition of rules but an accumulation of common cross-border practices and the domestic incorporation of regulations and procedures first applied or proposed somewhere else. In the longer run Slaughter sees this producing, in her own field for instance, a global legal system "established not by the World Court in The Hague, but by national courts working together around the world." A New World Order is not an easy book to read but it is important. By showing how today's world--of what she calls "disaggregated states"--actually works, Slaughter cuts the ground away from nationalists and internationalists alike. This, she says, is how it is, for America and everyone else. She also, quite clearly, believes that this is how it should be--because a world of collaborative networks that acknowledges state sovereignty while securing and facilitating interstate cooperation is inherently desirable; and because nothing else will work. _________________________________________________________________ It is not clear to me how democratic politics fits in here--this may be how the world actually works but most people don't know that. What if they choose--like the American people-- to be governed in their own country by leaders who are actively unsympathetic to Slaughter's new world order and who would seek to unravel or just ignore it? There would be nothing to stop them: certainly not the United Nations. As Slaughter acknowledges, a certain kind of power will always be retained by the state and no supervening authority exists to stop it abusing that power. The problem of force, and the legitimate application and regulation of force in international affairs, are not addressed in her book. But if Slaughter doesn't pretend to have all the answers, she does have a working model. If you want to see what this new world order of voluntarily linked sovereign states will actually look like, she says, go to Europe. There, the European Union is "pioneering a new form of regional collective governance that is likely to prove far more relevant to global governance than the experience of traditional federal states." The "genius" of the EU, in Slaughter's view, is that it maximizes the benefits of international governance while avoiding the risks of centralization. Legitimacy and power remain at the national level while the regulatory agencies in Brussels are authorized to organize and administer transnational regulations and rules that are supposed to work to everyone's advantage and often do. This seems to me a rather generous reading of the EU, which is not universally appreciated in Europe these days, and is anyway an accident of that continent's unique history. But I have absolutely no doubt that Slaughter is on to something. Seen from the rest of the world, the arrangements that Europeans have worked out for themselves are by far the most attractive and realistic solution to the problems that states and societies alike will face in the coming decades. Given that we have to start from where we are and not some better place, they are the only way to get anywhere. And what of the US, all dressed up in its martial finery but with no place to go? What if America--"the hope of the world," as Churchill told Clark Clifford on the train to Fulton in March 1946--were now irrelevant: still Madeleine Albright's "indispensable nation," but less for the example it offers than because of its capacity to impede the wishes of others? We haven't reached that point yet--in 1995 the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, observed that "absent America's leadership role, things still don't get put together right"; and little has changed.^[40][17] But as Shalikashvili would doubtless agree, it is hard to be a leader if your behavior is not admired, your authority not respected, your example not emulated. All that remains to you is force. Of course, as the neocons are fond of repeating, a good prince would rather be feared than loved; but what they forget is that the same is true of most bad princes. An empire built on fear--fear of terror and the aspiration to make others fear us in turn--is not what Machiavelli (or Jefferson) had in mind. The challenge facing American voters in the coming elections is not to find a president who can convince the world that the US isn't an empire--or else, if it is an empire, that its intentions are honorable. That argument has been lost and is now beside the point. Nor is it even a question of choosing between being loved and being feared. Thanks to America's performance in Iraq--and our evident inability to plan one war at a time, much less two--we are neither loved nor feared. We have shocked the world, yes; but few now hold us in awe. And yet the election of 2004 is the most consequential since 1932, if not since 1860. Is John Kerry the man for the moment? I doubt it. Does he fully grasp the scale of America's crisis? I'm not sure. But what is absolutely certain is that George W. Bush does not. If Bush is reelected much of the world (and many millions of its own citizens) will turn away from America: perhaps for good, certainly for many years. On November 2 the whole world will be looking: not to see what America is going to do in future years, but to find out what sort of a place it will be. With our growing income inequities and child poverty; our underperforming schools and disgracefully inadequate health services; our mendacious politicians and crude, partisan media; our suspect voting machines and our gerrymandered congressional districts; our bellicose religiosity and our cult of guns and executions; our cavalier unconcern for institutions, treaties, and laws--our own and other people's: we should not be surprised that America has ceased to be an example to the world. The real tragedy is that we are no longer an example to ourselves. America's born-again president insists that we are engaged in the war of Good against Evil, that American values "are right and true for every person in every society." Perhaps. But the time has come to set aside the Book of Revelation and recall the admonition of the Gospels: For what shall it profit a country if it gain the whole world but lose its own soul? Notes ^[41][1] America's Inadvertent Empire, p. 36. The book is not all this bad, though much of it is trite and smug. One chapter, on the US military, is excellent--presumably written by Odom, a retired lieutenant general and former director of the National Security Agency. Odom provides a cogent account of the Pentagon's remarkable failure to anticipate the tasks that American forces will face in coming years, including peacekeeping and maintaining the security of beleaguered states. Like many other commentators, Odom and his coauthor make much of the way America's allies in Europe were "free-riders" during the cold war, suggesting that this somehow makes American power distinctive. But there were free riders under the British Empire too--that is just how empires work. ^[42][2] Bush speech at the White House, July 30, 2002; presidential cover letter (September 17, 2002) to The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, quoted in Rashid Khalidi's excellent essay Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East, p. 3. ^[43][3] See, e.g., Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Public Affairs, 2004), a restatement of his earlier essay The Paradox of American Power (Oxford University Press, 2002), which I discussed in The New York Review, August 15, 2002. ^[44][4] On April 13, 1976, fearing that the Italian Communist Party (at the time supported by over one third of Italian voters) might be invited to take office in a coalition ministry, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger publicly declared --just nine weeks before the forthcoming Italian elections--that the US would "not welcome" a Communist role in the government of Italy. ^[45][5] Quoted by Khalidi in Resurrecting Empire, p. 182. ^[46][6] In Iraq Rumsfeld is best remembered for his enthusiastic wooing of Saddam Hussein in the early Eighties, when the Iraqi dictator really was manufacturing and using chemical weapons-- on Iranians. See Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire, p. 187, n. 13. ^[47][7] This seems to be better appreciated by soldiers than by their civilian superiors. See America's Inadvertent Empire, Chapter 3: "The Military Power Gap." ^[48][8] The Best and the Brightest (Random House, 1972). ^[49][9] Franks is quoted by Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 281. Feith, now number three in the Defense Department, was coauthor, along with Richard Perle, of A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, a foreign policy memorandum delivered to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. Among its recommendations is the removal of Saddam Hussein as the opening move in a plan to reshape the Middle East. See www .israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm. ^[50][10] The US State Department remains a repository of specialized knowledge and skills; but one of the achievements of the conservative intellectual revolution has been to ensure that no one listens to the State Department any more. ^[51][11] Thus Charles Krauthammer advised an audience at the American Enterprise Institute in May 2003 that the "Bush Doctrine" (of preemptive, preventive war) rivaled the Truman Doctrine in "audacity, success and revolutionary nature." See The Right Nation, p. 414, n. 10. Audacity, perhaps. ^[52][12] Kristol and others are quoted in the Financial Times of March 22, 2003. For The New Republic see its edition of June 28, 2004, "Were We Wrong?" Note the unconscious echo here of an earlier generation of intellectuals out to change the world on the backs of others, and who particularly resented Stalin for blotting the escutcheon of Marxism. ^[53][13] I shall have more to say about this in a subsequent essay. ^[54][14] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 6; also "The Liberalism of Fear," in Political Thought and Political Thinkers, edited by Stanley Hoffmann (University of Chicago Press, 1998). ^[55][15] Quoted in the Financial Times, June 26/27, 2004, p. W2. ^[56][16] The reference is to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended the European Thirty Years' War and is commonly taken as the starting point for the modern state system. ^[57][17] Shalikashvili is quoted by Richard Holbrooke in To End a War (Random House, 1998), p. 173. ------ What sound does the liberal make? Mo__. What sound does the conservative make? Mo__. What sound does the cow make? Mo__. From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 26 18:38:02 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 14:38:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Langdon Winner: Are Humans Obsolete? Message-ID: Langdon Winner: Are Humans Obsolete? The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1499054&textreg=1&id=WinObso4-3 [This is the last of the articles from the Hedgehog Review.] Langdon Winner is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His work focuses on the social and political implications of modern technological change. His books include: Political Artifacts: Design and the Quality of Public Life (forthcoming); The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986); and Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (1977). In mainstream writings on science and society from the seventeenth century to the end of the millennium, the beneficiary of the growth of knowledge was perfectly clear. Humanity as a whole, often referred to as "man," was bound to reap the benefits from the advance of scientific research and its manifold practical applications. Optimistic depictions of progress assumed that eventually the growth of science, technology, and modern institutions would benefit not only powerful elites, but the world's population more broadly with improvements evident in health, nutrition, housing, industrial production, transportation, education, and numerous other areas. Among the first to grasp the possibilities were Francis Bacon and Ren? Descartes, whose writings on the promise of the new science included bold projections of the godsend that would flow from the laboratories and workshops. Explaining why it was important to overcome his modesty and publish his discoveries in physics, Descartes comments, "I believed that I could not keep them concealed without sinning grievously against the law by which we are bound to promote...the general good of mankind." It is at last conceivable, he argues, that "we might...render ourselves lords and possessors of nature." [3]^1 It did not take long, however, for flaws in these hopeful projections to gain the attention of social critics (Karl Marx most prominent among them), who noted that, in practice, the march onward and upward had benefited some groups more than others and left working people in the dust. In later decades, criticisms that were initially focused on divisions of social class were broadened to emphasize varieties of discrimination associated with race, gender, and ethnicity, ones as potent as social class in withholding the boon to "ourselves" that Descartes and others had promised. But even as the scope of criticism enlarged, most thinkers still assumed that the proper beneficiary of progress was humanity as a whole, including populations more diverse than early modernist visions had recognized. To this day, in venues like the Human Development Reports published each year by the United Nations, the dream is alive and well; it remains possible, the U.N. staff insists, to direct the powers of science and technology for the benefit of human beings everywhere, including those who have enjoyed little of the bounty so far. [4]^2 In recent years the conventional understandings of progress have been challenged yet again, not in this instance by intellectuals concerned about inclusion and social justice, but by entrepreneurs who have discovered a fine new heir to the accumulation of useful knowledge. The writings of several prominent scientists, engineers, and businessmen brashly proclaim that, at the end of the day, the telos of science has nothing to do with serving human needs or alleviating humanity's age-old afflictions. For contemporary developments point to the emergence of a new beneficiary, one vastly modified and improved as compared to its anthropoid ancestors. Yes, human beings may pride themselves in thinking that their presence is required both to generate and enjoy the benefits of scientific advance, but this vain prejudice is false. According to the new prophets of perfectibility, the true inheritor of the legacy of science will be an entirely new creature, one variously named metaman, post-human, superhuman, robot, or cyborg. Prophets of Post-Humanism Predictions that humanity will soon yield to successor species are especially popular among those who spend a good amount of time in corporate and university research laboratories where movement on the cutting edge is the key to success. While most scientists and technologists at work in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics, man/machine symbiosis, and similar fields are content with modest descriptions of their work, each of these fields has recently spawned self-proclaimed futurist visionaries touting far more exotic accounts of what is at stake--vast, world-altering changes that loom just ahead. Colorful enough to be attractive to the mass media, champions of post-humanism have emerged as leading publicists for their scientific fields, appearing on best seller lists, as well as television and radio talk shows, to herald an era of astonishing transformations. While the claims of post-humanist futurism are always pitched as unprecedented, sensational forecasts, the rhetorical form of such messages has assumed a highly predictable pattern. The writer enthusiastically proclaims that the growth of knowledge in a cutting-edge research field is proceeding at a dizzying pace. He/she presents a barrage of colorful illustrations that highlight recent breakthroughs, hinting at even more impressive ones in the works. Although news from the laboratory may seem scattered and difficult to fathom, there are, the writer explains, discernible long-term trends emerging. The trajectory of development points to revolutionary outcomes, foremost of which will be substantial modifications of human beings as we know them, culminating in the fabrication of one or more new creatures superior to humans in important respects. The proponent insists that developments depicted are inevitable, foreshadowed in close connections between technology and human biology that have already made us "hybrid" or "composite" beings; any thought of returning to an original or "natural" condition is, therefore, simply unrealistic, for the crucial boundaries have already been crossed. Those who try to resist these earth-shaking developments are simply out of touch or, worse, benighted Luddites who resist technological change of any sort. Nevertheless, the post-humanist assures us, there is still need for ethical reflection upon the events unfolding. For although these transformations will necessarily occur, we should think carefully about what it all means and how we can gracefully adapt to these changes in the years to come. Typical of this way of arguing is Gregory Stock's Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism. With a PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins and an MBA from Harvard, Stock is prepared to map both the scientific and commercial possibilities at stake in re-engineering the species: Both society and the natural environment have previously undergone tumultuous changes, but the essence of being human has remained the same. Metaman, however, is on the verge of significantly altering human form and capacity As the nature of human beings begins to change, so too will concepts of what it means to be human. One day humans will be composite beings: part biological, part mechanical, part electronic By applying biological techniques to embryos and then to the reproductive process itself, Metaman will take control of human evolution No one can know what humans will one day become, but whether it is a matter of fifty years or five hundred years, humans will eventually undergo radical biological change. [5]^3 As Director of the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life at UCLA, Stock explores the changes he believes the future holds in store, including the conquest of aging. "The human species," he writes, "is moving out of its childhood. It is time for us to acknowledge our growing powers and begin to take responsibility for them. We have little choice in this, for we have begun to play god in so many of life's intimate realms that we probably could not turn back if we tried." [6]^4 Yet Stock believes that ethical reasoning must still play a role. In particular, the present generation must recognize its "responsibility," a positive commitment that accepts the "inevitability" of Metaman and actively exploits every opportunity to use genetic engineering to move the human organism beyond what Stock depicts as its present decrepit condition. While he recognizes that such developments will generate "stresses within society," he argues that moral deliberation and decisions about public policy are irrelevant: "But whether such changes are `wise' or `desirable' misses the essential point that they are largely not a matter of choice; they are the unavoidable product of the technological advance intrinsic to Metaman." [7]^5 Similar enthusiasm for the abolition of old-fashioned human beings informs the writings of Lee Silver, professor of molecular biology at Princeton. His book Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World surveys near and distant prospects for the clever management of human reproduction. In his view, developments already visible in scientific laboratories will produce a revolution in society, an upheaval whose results include a radical division of the species into superior and inferior genetic classes. Contemplating the situation he believes will prevail in the U.S.A. in code 2350 /code c.e., he writes: The GenRich--who account for code 10 /code percent of the American population--all carry synthetic genes.... The GenRich are a modern day hereditary class of genetic aristocrats. All aspects of the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and the knowledge industry are controlled by members of the GenRich class.... In contrast, Naturals work as low-paid service providers or as laborers. [8]^6 Silver speculates that by the end of the third millennium, the two groups will have become "entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee." [9]^7 For those who think his vision of the future resembles a bizarre science fiction screenplay, Silver answers that, in fact, his scenario "is based on straightforward extrapolations from our current knowledge base." [10]^8 It is "inevitable" that the use of reprogenetic technologies will change the species in fundamental ways. In Silver's view, parents who have the financial resources to pass on "enhanced genes" to their offspring will jump at the chance to do so and resist any attempts to restrict the practice. "Evolution--the old-fashioned way, through natural selection--will stop because people will choose which genes to add to their children." [11]^9 The speculations of Stock and Silver, rooted in biotechnology and the biomedical sciences, are matched in exuberance by visionaries in computer science and robotics who predict the eventual replacement of the human being by ingenious feats of engineering. One of the more colorful exponents of this position is Ray Kurzweil, an information scientist known for several major breakthroughs--the development, according to his web page, of "the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments" and other useful devices. [12]^10 In The Age of Spiritual Machines Kurzweil notes that his own gadgets and those of other information technologists have far outpaced earlier predictions about what computers would be able to do. Ongoing developments in computing will soon generate machines far more intelligent than human beings and with far brighter prospects than their biological forbears. His conviction hinges on a view of accelerating evolutionary change, one increasingly common among high tech professionals, that sees evolution moving from its original locus within biological systems to a new realm of possibilities, the self-organizing dynamism of artificial systems. [13]^11 In effect, he argues, time is speeding up because the time between salient events in the development of computing power is rapidly diminishing; accomplishments that recently seemed impossible are upon us in an instant: Evolution has been seen as a billion-year drama that led inexorably to its grandest creation: human intelligence. The emergence in the early twenty-first century of a new form of intelligence on Earth that can compete with, and ultimately significantly exceed, human intelligence will be a development of greater import than any of the events that have shaped human history. [14]^12 Central to Kurzweil's prophecy is an experience increasingly familiar to those who use personal computers and other digital equipment, that is, the continuing replacement of computing systems by newer, faster, more powerful ones in ever shortening cycles. With each successive upgrade, people transfer valuable information from the older system to the newer one. In the not-too-distant future this sequence of replacement, download, and renewal will, acccording to Kurzweil, include not just Pentium chips and personal digital assistants, but human beings themselves. "Initially," Kurzweil opines, "there will be partial porting--replacing memory circuits, extending pattern-recognition and reasoning circuits through neural implants. Ultimately, and well before the twenty-first century is completed, people will port their entire mind file to the new thinking technology." [15]^13 Before long, humans and machines will totally merge, and the new creature's artificial features (in contrast to its biological ones) will be universally recognized as superior. Looking forward to this new era, Kurzweil condescendingly refers to humans as MOSHs, "Mostly Original Substrate Humans," people "still using native carbon-based neurons and unenhanced by neural implants." [16]^14 Within this world even the most conservative MOSH would be forced to realize that the crucial, enduring entity--intelligence itself--no longer depends on any particular, physically and spatially defined, computational home. Barring unforeseen mishaps, intelligent beings of this sort can expect to be immortal. Alas, the poor souls who do not find ways to download their intelligence into the mechanism will be excluded from any meaningful participation in the new order of things. On the scale of outrageous projection, robotics engineer Hans Moravec outdistances even Kurzweil in imagining a future thoroughly sanitized of human beings and their debilities. As he proclaims in Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, "Today, as our machines approach human competence across the board, our stone-age biology and information age lives grow ever more mismatched." [17]^15 The growth of increasingly "intelligent" computerized robotic devices, he believes, points to the creation of both new, superior, artificial beings and new worlds to house them: "Our artificial progeny will grow away from and beyond us, both in physical distance and structure, and similarity of thought and motive. In time their activities may become incompatible with the old Earth's continued existence." [18]^16 Moravec sees the eventual replacement of humans as foreshadowed by ongoing innovations in the business world, changes propelled by the quest for better service at lower prices. Phone calls are handled by intelligent systems of voice mail; automated teller machines handle much of the work of banking; and automated factories increasingly handle the work of production as the contribution of human labor subsides. [19]^17 He expects developments of this variety to spread, absorbing all significant areas of economic activity before long. Even the belief that the owners of the means of production are the ones who will guide these changes and benefit from them is, in Moravec's view, woefully mistaken. Before long, he suggests, "owners will be pushed out of capital markets by much cheaper and better robotic decision makers." [20]^18 Moravec imagines generations of robots in the distant future that look less and less like the clunky machines we see today, and more and more like artificial, self-reproducing organisms. One has the shape of "the basket starfish"; another model, "the Bush Robot" features a stem, tree-like branches, balls attached to its limbs like fruit, and microscopic fingers that "might be able to build a copy of itself in about ten hours." [21]^19 Eventually super-intelligent creatures of this kind, "Ex-humans" or "Exes," would grow weary of the limitations of Earth, seeking their fortunes elsewhere in the universe. The question of what will become of ordinary humans in this brave new world is for Moravec of little concern. It is clear that his sympathies lie with the smarter, more resourceful, more powerful successors to our pathetically weak and incompetent species. At one point he suggests that when robots end up producing all foods and manufactured goods, "humans may work to amuse other humans." [22]^20 In the longer term, however, this pattern is likely to prove unstable. "Biological species," he writes, "almost never survive encounters with superior competitors." He speculates that generations of robots who leave the Earth may eventually return with aggressive intentions. An entity that fails to keep up with its neighbors is likely to be eaten, its space, materials, energy, and useful thoughts reorganized to serve another's goals. Such a fate may be routine for humans who dally too long on slow Earth before going Ex. [23]^21 There is something refreshing in the sheer candor of Moravec's predictions. Pushing the logic of the post-humanist dreams to their ultimate conclusion, he imagines that anthropoid throwbacks will be hunted down and shot. For some fascinated by notions of post-human beings, merely imagining these possibilities is not enough. A small but vocal collection of social activists has taken it upon themselves to demand a rapid transition to a higher form of being, seeking to play a role in its early stages. The Extropians, The Transhumanist Association, the French guru Rael and his followers, as well as publicists J. Hughes and the late F. M. Esfandiary, are among those who have made transcendence of ordinary humanity their central mission, promoting human cloning, genetic engineering, life extension, and human/machine symbiosis as key steps to a better life. [24]^22 One of the more visible campaigners at present is Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University in the U.K., who has gained notoriety in his efforts to blur the line between scientific research and vigorous advocacy. "I was born human," he writes. "But this was an accident of fate--a condition merely of time and place. I believe it's something we have the power to change." [25]^23 To this end, Warwick has launched a series of experiments, implanting his own body with computer chips, hoping to enhance his nervous system with additional computing power and thereby contributing to his ultimate goal, the creation of a race of "superhumans." One of his hopes is to eliminate the cumbersome barriers to communication, the need to use language to express our thoughts and feelings. A far better method is to "send symbols and ideas and concepts without speaking." [26]^24 To demonstrate this possibility Warwick installed matching computer chips implanted in his own body and that of his wife, Irena, hoping to establish direct communication between their nervous systems including their most intimate sexual responses. This research, he believes, could dispatch one of humankind's ancient maladies, the faked orgasm. "The nervous system is full of electronic signals emanating from the brain, which have physical effects, like the way Irena jumps when she sees a spider," Warwick observes, "The implication could be never faking an orgasm again." [27]^25 Indeed, for a society in which Viagra has become a best selling prescription drug, Warwick's chips could prove highly marketable. Perfectibility in Decline Because they are pitched at the level of pure fantasy or tongue-in-cheek provocation, the claims of the post-humanists are often difficult to accept at face value. Some of their conjectures and proposals, however, are well within the realm of plausibility, close enough to ongoing projects in fields of contemporary research and development that they deserve careful scrutiny. We know, of course, that cutting-edge technologies typically require large amounts of public funding during their early stages. For that reason, both citizens and elected officials should critically examine government support of projects within the various orbits of post-human research, especially since their success would have problematic policy implications, for example, placing homo sapiens on the endangered species list. A useful setting in which to gauge post-humanist intentions is the lengthy heritage of thinking about perfectibility, one that includes the world's great religions, several schools of classical and medieval philosophy, as well as much of modern social theory. From Pythagoras to B. F. Skinner, perfectibilists in the West have suggested a variety of paths for improving the species--mystical reflection, religious devotion, moral discipline, well-tuned education, psychological therapy, scientific advance, technological productivity, rational breeding, and the creative shaping of political, economic, and social institutions. [28]^26 Within this sprawling, eternally optimistic tradition, the post-humanists have selected a distinctive route, seeking to improve discrete units, the physical bodies of present and future individuals. This approach, found as early as Plato's commitment to selective breeding and pursued more recently by the nineteenth-and twentieth-century eugenics movements, gains renewed hope in potentially effective means of technological intervention. Today it seems possible to succeed where earlier attempts failed, fixing the ills and weaknesses of particular bodies while realizing the vast potential stored in humanity's decrepit physical shell. So thorough is the commitment of post-humanists to the single unit, single body approach that it seems inconceivable to them that other routes to perfectibility are open to us. [29]^27 In fact, an alternative vision about how to improve humankind has often been favored in modern philosophy, an approach whose concerns and commitments provide a revealing contrast to post-humanist schemes. Although the many expressions of this vision are far from uniform in either theory or practice, its core of beliefs are fairly consistent. The key premise is that humans are fundamentally social beings whose development depends upon favorable conditions for forming social bonds and sentiments. From this perspective, the path to improvement for humanity involves changing institutions--laws, governments, workplaces, dwellings, schools, and the like--in ways that will nurture the potential of individuals and the groups of which they are members. Real creativity in this regard comes not so much in operating on particular atomistic individuals, but in shaping the rule-guided frameworks and material structures of community life. Such were the hopes of Condorcet, Rousseau, Godwin, Paine, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Comte, Marx, Kropotkin, Goldman, Dewey, and a host of others who believed that the essentially social character of men and women offered the most promising prospects for positive change. [30]^28 One of most beautifully crafted statements of this position in modern thought is Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, published in 1795. A nobleman by birth, mathematician and philosopher by vocation, Condorcet was one of the literati who organized the Encyclopaedia and promoted ideas linking scientific enlightenment to political reform. Enmeshed in partisan struggles of the French Revolution, he eventually found himself on the wrong side of a factional dispute and was forced into hiding where, just before his capture and death in prison, he wrote the Sketch, a much-abbreviated version of a larger work he had planned. The book describes nine stages in world history plus a tenth that lies in the future, arguing that there is a necessary, irreversible tendency for human faculties to seek perfection: In spite of the transitory successes of prejudice and the support that it receives from the corruption of governments or peoples, truth alone will obtain a lasting victory; we shall demonstrate how nature has joined together indissolubly the progress of knowledge and that of liberty, virtue and respect for the natural rights of man. [31]^29 Resisting any hint of scientific elitism or technocracy, Condorcet insists that the growth of knowledge is a powerful force for equality and solidarity among the world's people. He recognizes that three main causes of inequality--wealth, status, and education--are found everywhere, but predicts their demise as improvements in the practical arts expand productivity, eliminate scarcity, and make it possible for everyone to earn a comfortable living. By the same token, the spread of well-planned systems of universal education will tend to rectify existing inequalities by informing people of the "common rights to which they are called by nature." [32]^30 Echoing the Socratic teaching that evil is rooted in ignorance, he argues that age-old practices of tyranny and oppression will gradually vanish as a scientific grasp of political affairs inspires new frameworks of law. Because these favorable tendencies are universal among human beings, not just in populations of Europe, he predicts that the achievement of freedom, equality, and human rights will eventually occur in all the nations of the world. "In short," he asks, "will not the general welfare that results from the progress of the useful arts once they are grounded on solid theory...incline mankind to humanity, benevolence and justice?" [33]^31 The warm generosity of Condorcet's essay stands in stark contrast to the hard-edged boosterism characteristic of today's post-humanist manifestos. Nevertheless, the quest for improvement mapped by Condorcet and his successors shares some common ground with today's would-be visionaries: belief in the development of creative intelligence ("reason" as the philosophes preferred) as the underlying source of historical change; faith in limitless scientific advance as a prime expression of this faculty; hope for the apotheosis of humanity within a transcendent, deeply spiritual form of being. Where the two approaches abruptly part company is a fork in the road where the advocate has to decide who will continue on the journey and who will not. Dreams of human equality and solidarity embraced by liberals, utopians, socialists, and pragmatists of earlier generations have no standing in theories of a post-humanist future. As we have seen, the concerted effort to cultivate highly unequal successors to homo sapiens is routinely applauded in post-humanist schemes, celebrated as evidence that genetic and cybernetic breakthroughs are finally proceeding apace. Obligatory expressions of ethical concern about tensions between old-fashioned inferiors and newly engineered superior specimens are typically given short shrift. After all, bold pioneers busily charting our future have little patience with annoying quibbles of that kind. As Silver, Stock, Kurzweil, Moravec, and Warwick make perfectly clear, the unity of humankind is now in the cross hairs, a likely casualty of the grand evolution of creative intelligence. People who agonize about its demise are simply out of touch with the direction of current and future events. [34]^32 For thinkers who claim to revere evolution so thoroughly and who feature themselves as agents of the next evolutionary leap, the post-humanists' choice of an unsocial, single unit atomism as the best path to perfectibility is highly problematic. Recent scientific accounts of evolution have stressed the inherent sociality of humans; the ways in which human existence, survival, and ability adapt to changing circumstances depend upon the inborn tendency of the species to form and maintain groups. In fact, humans do not live as isolated individuals characterized by bundles of atomistic traits. They are always found in social settings and treat each new situation they encounter as an opportunity to develop social bonds and social norms. This fact is evidently given in our make-up, crucial to any realistic understanding of who we are. [35]^33 Yet attention to the social dimensions of human being and human evolution is missing in post-humanist accounts of how we arrived here and where we are headed. Even the list of human features scheduled for re-engineering, bio-technical projects reflects the lack of awareness of humanity's grounding in networks of sociality. Preferred are traits of intelligence, physical strength, beauty, freedom from disease, and longevity; it is these that dynamic research will seek to amplify. But other qualities widely recognized as crucial to our well-being--empathy, cooperativeness, the capacity to love and nurture--are never mentioned on the agendas of post-humanist science. This lop-sided view of human beings is also reflected in the suggestions of post-humanists about how decisions on matters of policy should be made. Here again an atomistic, single unit view of human possibilities is the one praised as the best way to make choices, in particular the setting offered by the so-called "free" market in which rational individuals come together to make deals, buying and selling the valuable goods and services. This view accords with the pungent combination of market ideology and high-tech innovation that became a hallmark of economic and political ideology in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Notions of this kind are associated with the rise of Silicon Valley, the creation of the Internet, telecommunications reform, the vogue of venture capitalism, the stock market boom of the Clinton years, and ecstatic celebrations of cyberspace as the new locus of business and community life. Later, of course, the same alluring blend of market and technology fell on hard times, evident in the Dot-com bust, stock market collapse, and financial scandals of WorldCom, Enron, and other high-flying firms--the sad aftermath of what Federal Reserve Bank chairman Alan Greenspan called the era of "irrational exuberance." Many prospectuses in the post-humanist portfolio were penned during this New Gilded Age (some of them obviously in hope of attracting venture capital) and bear the distinctive stamp of the era's uncritical enthusiasm for innovation propelled by de-regulated markets. An illustration of how an economic philosophy of this kind informs post-humanist programs is found in Gregory Stock's advice on how to "redesign humans." He assures us that what some people find disturbing possibilities for future genetic enhancement are merely extensions of already common practices. Even today, fashion and market preferences determine much more than merely the selection of consumer products we find in the stores. These factors also shape the biological world, determining the crops we plant, the domestic animals we raise, the flowers we grow, the pets we lavish with attention. [36]^34 It is a logical next step, in Stock's opinion, to regard genetic choice technologies (GCTs) as market commodities subject to the desires of individuals. Hence, the market is the best way to select good GCTs (the ones people actually want to buy) as compared to undesirable GCTs (those that fail to attract enough customers): "When people have a range of reproductive options, they generally try to get what they want in the easiest, cheapest, safest, most reversible way." [37]^35 Stock expects that the key decisions about human biology will be made within the framework of an emerging, capitalist, global economy, making good GCT market products available worldwide at bargain prices. His fear is that Americans will listen to those who have misgivings about human enhancement and designer children, missing a great opportunity to take the lead in this exciting growth industry. Thus, he urges Americans to forge boldly ahead with human genetic technologies and "not pull back and relinquish their development to braver souls in more adventurous nations of the world." [38]^36 In view of the market-centered calamities of the early 21^st century and the frantic rush to re-regulate accounting and the rules that govern corporate management, advice of this kind seems reckless. Is it wise to subject fundamental, long-term choices about the structure and character of human beings to the caprices and vicissitudes of the global shopping mall? After all, who decided that market settings and market motives are the best means for deciding humanity's long-term future? In actual practice, a likely consequence of reliance on the unmodified market model is to favor the cultural preferences of small, unrepresentative groups of people--corporations and consumers in well-to-do countries of the North--over the desires and commitments of the world's populace as a whole. Unfortunately, the writings of post-humanists show little awareness of their deep cultural biases and, indeed, of the breathtaking cultural arrogance their proposals involve. Many of their ideas about how the future of humanity will unfold clearly assume that it is "Just we folks," ordinary, everyday people who will decide what will happen. But the advocates have not looked carefully at how their notions reflect unstated, unexamined preconceptions rooted in their own highly rarified, upper-middle-class, white, professional, American and European lifestyles. In post-humanist writings a deeply assumed map of the relevant lifeworld seems to stretch from the university laboratory to the fertility clinic, to the BMW dealer, and on to the nearest Nordstroms. Somewhere within this landscape they evidently expect to find the new Ubermensch, maybe wearing an Abercrombie t-shirt. Nowhere is the obtuse arrogance of post-humanist rhetoric more apparent than in its incessant claim that the changes at issue are foreordained by history or, even better, by evolution itself. "The accelerating pace of change is inexorable," Kurzweil exclaims. "The emergence of machine intelligence that exceeds human intelligence in all of its broad diversity is inevitable." [39]^37 Echoing these sentiments, Stock subtitles his book on the redesign of humans, Our Inevitable Genetic Future. The underlying message in such proclamations is perfectly clear: faced with the powerful momentum of bio-technical developments, only a fool goes searching for alternatives or limits. Counsel of this kind is absurd on its face, for it denies what all serious studies of scientific and technological change have shown, namely, that technological changes of any significance involve intense social interaction, competition, conflict, and negotiation in which the eventual outcomes are highly contingent. Within the making and application of new technologies, there are always competing interests, contesting positions on basic principles, and numerous branching points in which people choose among several options, giving form to the instrumentalities finally realized, discarding others that may have seemed attractive. Modern history is filled with examples of technological developments announced as "inevitable" that never took root--personal helicopters, atomic airplanes, videophones, and extensive colonies in outer space, among others. Nuclear power, for example, touted in the 1950s as an ineluctable product of modern physics and source of all future electricity, eventually encountered problems of construction costs, plant safety, and waste disposal that undermined its social and political support, perhaps for all time. From this standpoint, announcements that particular outcomes are "inevitable" can be little more than attempts to hijack what might otherwise be a lively debate, excluding most people from the negotiations. A group of privileged actors proclaims: "Good news! The future has been foreclosed! Your needs, dreams, ideas, and contributions are no longer relevant. But thanks for listening." At present there are more than six billion humans living on Earth, most of whom have not yet heard of the grand schemes flowing from Westwood, Princeton, Cambridge, Santa Cruz, and other meccas of post-humanist speculation. If this wider populace knew what the intellectuals and entrepreneurs had in store for them, they might want to take a closer look, asking to participate in the decisions at stake, not just as consumers of end products of innovation, but as citizens who would like a voice in deciding basic principles and policies. After all, to alter our species significantly or to seek to eliminate human beings for all time would seem to be a matter that requires the most serious study, reflection, and debate. At the very least, it makes sense to discover whether or not there is consensus among the world's people that the sweeping changes proposed with such alacrity are warranted or desirable. I cannot predict much less prescribe what this wider set of groups and persuasions might decide when faced with these proposals. But if they examined the agendas for the so-called improvements the post-humanists prefer, a more inclusive population might notice some extremely odd judgments about what counts as superior. They might notice, for example, disturbing similarities to ideas of "superiority" that have been imposed through slavery, colonialism, and genocide, and, alas, occasional agendas of scientific research during the modern era, projects that have done little to buttress confidence that professionals in the North have everyone's best interests at heart. Asked what they would like to do, perhaps the world's populace might point to more urgent projects long promised but left undone, for example, securing adequate nutrition, sanitation, housing, health care, and education for the three billion among us who are still in desperate need. Better genes and electronic implants? Hell, how about potable water? In this light, the vision in Condorcet's last testament still demands attention; the real challenge lies in realizing the potential of all humans regardless of their prior condition of poverty and oppression. Until that hope is fulfilled, post-humanist ambitions will seem irrelevant or patently obscene. ________________________ [40]^1 Ren? Descartes, Discourse on Method, Book Six. ] [41]^2 See, for example, Human Development Report 2000, United Nations Development Programme (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). ] [42]^3 Gregory Stock, Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993) 150, 152, 164, 168. ] [43]^4 Gregory Stock, "Introduction," Human Germline Engineering: Implications for Science and Society [44]. ] [45]^5 Stock, Metaman, 168. ] [46]^6 Lee M. Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World (New York: Avon, 1997) 4, 6. ] [47]^7 Silver 7. ] [48]^8 Silver 7. ] [49]^9 "Liberation Biology," an interview with Lee M. Silver, Reason Online (May 1999) [50]. ] [51]^10 See "A Brief Career Summary of Ray Kurzweil," [52]. ] [53]^11 See, for example, Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1994). ] [54]^12 Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999) 5. ] [55]^13 Kurzweil 126. ] [56]^14 Kurzweil 311. ] [57]^15 Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 7. ] [58]^16 Moravec 11. ] [59]^17 Moravec 130. ] [60]^18 Moravec 133. ] [61]^19 Moravec 152. ] [62]^20 Moravec 132. ] [63]^21 Moravec 146. ] [64]^22 J. Hughes' views are especially interesting because he situates them in the context of radical democratic political theory. See Hughes, "Embracing Change with All Four Arms: A Post-Humanist Defense of Genetic Engineering," Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics code 6.4 /code (June 1996): 94- code 101 /code [65]>. ] [66]^23 Kevin Warwick, "Cyborg 1.0," Wired code 8.02 /code [67]. ] [68]^24 Warwick in [69]. ] [70]^25 Kevin Warwick, quoted in "Microchip Hailed as `End of the Faked Orgasm,'" Annova ( code 5 /code October 2000) [71] [72]. ] [73]^26 An excellent overview of this tradition can be found in John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (London: Duckworth, 1970). ] [74]^27 The reasons why visionary technologists sometimes prefer "operating unit designs" are discussed in Robert Boguslaw, The New Utopians: A Study of System Design and Social Change (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1965) chapter code 5 /code . ] [75]^28 A classic interpretation of ideas of this kind is Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). ] [76]^29 Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough (1795; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1955) code 10 /code . ] [77]^30 Condorcet 184. ] [78]^31 Condorcet 193. ] [79]^32 For a modestly worded critique of proposals for human bioengineering, see Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). Fukuyama worries that "the posthuman world could be one that is far more hierarchical and competitive than the one that currently exists, and full of social conflict as a result" (218). ] [80]^33 See L. R. Caporael, "Parts and Wholes: The Evolutionary Importance of Groups," Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self, ed. Constantine Sedikides and Marilynn B. Brewer (Philadelphia: Psychology, 2000) code 241 /code -58; and R. F. Baumeister and M. R. Leary, "The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation," Psychological Bulletin code 117 /code (1995): 497- code 529 /code . ] [81]^34 Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002) code 34 /code . ] [82]^35 Stock, Redesigning Humans, 60- code 1 /code . ] [83]^36 Stock, Redesigning Humans, code 201 /code . ] [84]^37 Kurzweil code 253 /code . ] From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 26 19:11:52 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 15:11:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] IEEE Spectrum: Peter Fairley: The Unruly Power Grid Message-ID: IEEE Spectrum: Peter Fairley: The Unruly Power Grid 2004 August [I have the whole article (six pages) in PDF and will send it to anyone who wants it. The prospect that the power grid could be sabotaged, in addition to just going down on its own, is terrifying and much worse than bombing could be. Ditto for cyberwarfare that could possibly flood the Internet with denial-of-service messages. This threat, a friend who is telecommunications consultant, is not too serious (yet, I tell him), since recovery would be quick and people are already worried about this problem. But, he tells me, no individual electricity provider has much interest in making huge investments that will benefit mainly other providers, a classic free-rider, or market failure problem. [On the other hand, governments aren't doing anything about it either, a classic government failure problem. It was a little silly for Sen. Kerry to blame "Bush" for not inspecting more than 5% of cargo entering the United States, silly since Kerry is a United States Senator and certainly had the opportunity to address the world's greatest deliberative body about the failure. He didn't mention deliberate sabotage of the power grid at all. [I see no reason to think President Kerry would either. We should remember that government failure can exist apart from whoever is its nominal head. The solution is not to replace Tweedledum with Tweedledumber but alter the Constitution so reduce the failures. --Frank Abstract: Most experts agree that the major blackout that affected a large part of the North American upper Midwest and Northeast last August 14, 2003, was no anomaly and will definitely happen again. Records show that between 1984 and 2000, utilities logged 11 outages affecting more than 4000 megawatts, making the probability of any one outage 325 times greater than mathematicians would have expected. Mathematicians, engineers, and physicists have set out to explain the statistical overabundance of big blackouts. Two distinct models emerged based on two general theories of systems failure. One, an optimization model presumes that power engineers make conscious and rational choices to focus resources on preventing smaller and more common disturbances on the lines; large blackouts occur because the grid isn't forcefully engineered to prevent them. The other model views blackouts as a surprisingly constructive force in an unconscious feedback loop that operates over years or decades. Blackouts spur investments to strengthen overloaded power systems, periodically counter-balancing pressures to maximize return on investment and deliver electricity at the lowest possible cost. The mainstream view among power system engineers continues to be the answer to reliability problems is to make the grids more robust physically, improve simulation techniques and computerized real-time controls, and improve regulation. What system theorists suggest is that even if all that is done and done well, the really big outages still will happen more often than they should. ------ What sound does the liberal make? Mo__. What sound does the conservative make? Mo__. What sound does the cow make? Mo__. From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 26 19:22:23 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 15:22:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Frank Forman: Transhumanism's Vital Center Message-ID: Frank Forman: Transhumanism's Vital Center [This is for discussion. I submitted this to the Journal of Evolution and Technology, but it has not yet been reviewed. The editor, Mark Walker, told me I am free to send it out for discussion. I assume permission to pass your comments on, unless you specify otherwise.] Review of James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democracies Must Respond to the Redesigning of Human Nature (Boulder: Westview Press, 2004, 320 pp., $26). Submitted to the Journal of Evolution and Technology. Citizen Cyborg is an excellent survey of the promises and fears of technological developments that will drastically alter humans and human nature itself. The author, James Hughes, is a sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and, as Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association, well qualified to survey "transhumanist" issues, issues that include modifications of the human genome and developments in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Hughes aims to counter fears of both left and right "bioLuddites" who would forestall these developments by assuring them that they will be regulated democratically to secure safety and widespread access. He proposes what he calls "democratic transhumanism," which steers a middle ground of "regulation between resignation and relinquishment," between the resignation that comes from whatever market forces decide and the relinquishment that comes from prohibitions of technology from either left or right. He seeks to capture, in other words, what Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., called "The Vital Center" in his 1949 book by that title (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). Schlesinger meant by that phrase the broad middle ground between the extremes of left and right, though he in fact ruled out a very large portion of the political right as being extreme. The vital center for Mr. Hughes is closer to the median of sociology professors than to the American public, just as it was for Schlesinger, and his scheme of things would involve far more redistribution than exists in American today. Indeed, he states that "no country in the world is as democratic as it should be" (p. 51) and later that "no society is anywhere close to an ideal democracy" (p. 190), which seems to refer not to inadequate constitutional safeguards, imperfect processes in other words, but to imperfect products, namely a too-concentrated distribution of income. By and large, however, Mr. Hughes supports the rights of parents both to adopt and to refuse to adopt technology to improve their children, improvements from the parents' point of view. He balks, however, at the rights of deaf parents to engineer deafness in their children so that they can belong to the deaf subculture. This puts him more at the vital center than to the left of sociology professors. Still, he is closer to the center of American electorate than are libertarians, who make up a large fraction of transhumanists, whose views he considers in detail, in his excellent short history of transhumanism. What is missing from his book is just this constitutional perspective of democracy as process. So, in a case about whether to terminate life support, the constitutional procedure is not to consult bio-ethicists in arriving at some ostensibly objective "truth" on the matter, but rather to consider how a representative individual would assess the costs and benefits. In my own personal case, I feel that, should I be mostly in pain and my children say, "Pop, it's time to go," they are probably right, especially considering that, in my own case, my wealth will consist primarily of my pension, which will terminate after both myself and my spouse have died. But my pension situation and my own attitudes are peculiar to me. Though I can use persuasion, I have only one vote. The constitutional issue is for the legislature to aim at what the median voter would regard as the appropriate trade-off and how to build safeguards into the law of which the median voter would approve. But the existence of pressure groups means that the leglislature will not automatically enact what the median voter would want in this particular situation of terminating life support, or in any other case. All constitutions will be imperfect and subject to manipulation: the task of constitution makers is to find a system of legislative rules, which define the areas in which the legislature is empowered to act, and overarching rules, such as a Bill of Rights, which will command universal consent over the long run. Such constitutional rules and safeguards are far more basic and important than specific laws. I wish Mr. Hughes had addressed constitutional procedures more and had informed us less of his personal values and favored laws. This is all the more important because subgroups within our country are going to be deeply divided. Happily, Americans move an average of every seven years. Over time, Americans will sort themselves by moving to states that give them their prefered mix of taxes, benefits, and regulation, including those regulations that are germane to transhumanist issues. Mr. Hughes, however, does not take a federalist perspective (few people do), but here's hoping that he will realize that transhumanist issues do not need to be settled, one way or another, at the national level, but rather that states will attract movers that offer policies that allow and promote transhumanist developments. All this said, there is a powerful constitutional case for redistribution that has little to do with Mr. Hughes's strong personal preferences on the matter. This case is what economists call the Pareto criterion, which states that major changes should render no one worse off while making at least some better off. A firm outsold by a competitor is worse off, certainly, but only in the short run, for the losers benefit in the long run by having rules of a competitive market order in place. Mr. Hughes is not a foe of capitalism, as such, unlike some left bioLuddites. What is the case, or rather the prospect, is that technological development may render large swaths of the population worse off, the most noted prospect being mass unemployment due to the proliferation of robots and artificial intelligence, but also the prospect of wealthy individuals purchasing cognitive enhancements for themselves and their children. From the perspective of a constitutional agreement that would be accepted unanimously, legislative procedures allowing for minimum incomes and subsidies for cognitive enhancements could be built into the constitution. But note again that such constitutional empowering is a matter or process and only secondarily a matter of product. When Mr. Hughes complains that "no society is anywhere close to an ideal democracy" (p. 190), he is referring to product. These criticisms of a lack of attention to constitutional and federalist issues aside, Citizen Cyborg offers a thorough discussion of the prospects for transhuman developments, mostly near-term prospects having to do with health and bodily betterment--from better medical care and life extension, palliating and removing disabilites and mental disorders, to cognitive enhancements and happiness pills--but rather little to more distant prospects of cyborgs, brain uploading, man-machine interfaces, and the Singularity, all terms well familiar to transhumanists. Mr. Hughes does discuss the rights of subhuman animals, particularly when they get cognitive upgrades, and those of robots, a discussion that I hope will receive more extensive grounding in a future book. BioLuddite objections from the right are detailed in the book and answers given. For the most part, these objections stem from a view of natural rights that holds that people, including embryonic people, have a very specific nature that is not to be tampered with, most often on the grounds that human nature was designed by the God of the Bible, without, Mr. Hughes fails to note, giving chapter and verse, which we would be hearing endlessly if they existed. The usual arguments about embryos and abortion will continue, with little movement toward agreement. Mr. Hughes's own arguments give ammunition to those who already agree with him but are unlikely to change the minds of those who do not. This is very common, and the solution would be federalism, if only that the rightist bioLuddites have long ceased to be federalist. A more serious bioLuddite objection from the right, serious to those who do not share their views on embryos and abortion but need to be addressed, is that valuable aspects of human nature are at risk of being lost if human nature is transformed. Suffering and death give meaning to life. The virtue of courage will be weakened, inasmuch as courage often consists of overcoming fear. If one's brain can be modified to suppress fear, then the hero in battle will not be such a hero. (I doubt this applies to intellectual courage, a far more important kind of courage.) And the issue of genetically engineered athletes will only exacerbate arguments over fairness that already plague arguments over blood doping and the like. (Again, is athletics very important?) The most serious objection, not discussed at length by Mr. Hughes, is that human nature may become emotionally flat like that of the robots of innumerable movies. I say that only those who love Brahms know the full price that might be paid if human nature loses certain traits. If Brahms-loving transhumanists are willing to pay the price that there will never be a proper successor to Brahms, then this counts far more than a similar statement from a stereotypical repressed computer nerd. I support transhumanism because I don't think the social conditions that allowed Brahms to write his music will ever be duplicated and because, carefully guided, upgraded humans could have more emotional depth than current ones. A federalist pluralism is again a possible answer, for subsocieties could arise that engineer deeper emotions. What I don't know is whether there can be enough isolation, lasting long enough, possibly many generations, to make this dream of a plurality of subsocieties feasible. Mr. Hughes certainly hopes that transhumanist technologies will not be used to perfect warfare, in which case the first society that adopts genetic engineering, state directed or not, will take over the world and may turn out to be made up of emotionally flat robots. Mr. Hughes implictly assumes that reproduction will continue to be among discrete organisms. Most humans, indeed all animals above the level of corals, reproduce in this manner. When artificial intelligence comes along, it may not be meaningful to speak of reproduction at all. When is one computer the child of another? This sort of speculation goes far beyond the short-term focus of Citizen Cyborg, but the future may be upon us within the time period Mr. Hughes addresses. Again, a topic for his next book. Left-wing bioLuddism overlaps with that on the right, but its big complaints are hated capitalism and fears that transhumanist benefits will be unequally available. Mr. Hughes says that the fears that intelligence amplification will exacerbate inequality are correct but that more intelligent people will come to agree with his democractic transhumanist vision (p. 41) and furthermore that measures can be taken to assure, not necessarily exactly equal access, but more than the market will provide. This can be handled, as argued above, not by being particularly "left-wing" but by invoking the Pareto criterion that no one be made worse off by broad changes. This is not the same as the stronger demand that any change should benefit everyone by he same amount. Giving in to that demand would stop all change, as Mr. Hughes notices, and not just transhumanist improvements of the human condition. The case against capitalism, on the other hand, can be more serious. Jeremy Rifkin, a leftist who has teamed up even with Christian bioLuddites, is opposed to the commodification of life by nefarious capitalists (pp. 63-66) and with feminists is aghast at "uteruses for hire." It is quite true that societies prohibit certain actions from entering the "cash nexus," contracting for one's own slavery being the most obvious example, and every society regards gift giving as lying outside the nexus of contract. Indeed, employers in every nation are required to place part of their employee compensation out of their reach in retirement programs. No society allows freedom of contract for marriage and greatly restricts the kinds of marriages that will be permitted, in particular provisions for disinherting or divorcing a spouse. Conservatives fully join leftists in this regard of restricting what may be the subject of contract, and both groups protest, not unreasonably, the increase of activity that has come to fall under contract. The French, concerned with the invasion of their culture by Disney and other American purveyors of culture, restrict the number of American movies, even if rather ineffectually. In fact, globalization of capitalism has contradictory effets. On the one hand, nations will increasingly share cultural products, especially imports from the United States, on the other, powerful trends to cultural diversification emerge within countries. The number of subcultures is exploding in every country with a more or less free economy, as profit-seeking businesses seek to invent and exploit niche markets, the largest by far being that for Christian Evangelicals. This is problematic, for evangelicalism has become one more lifestyle choice, to which one can accede or recede from at will, the very opposite of the restoration of a monoculture, in which those refusing the Christian offer of salvation are marginalized. Being born again in a pluralistic society is, and is felt to be but a simulacrum of the salvation of old. This is the post-modern dilemma, a topic I hope Mr. Hughes takes up in his next book. He will have no solution to the dilemma; rather he might observe that conservative fears that society will come unglued are no longer serious, the reason being that a general acceptance of capitalistic exchange replaces much of the social glue that used to be provided by religion and other forms of social control. Not as much social glue is needed as it once was. Mr. Hughes might also explore whether the network of communication provided by the Internet is also providing enormous social glue. Businesses, despite what leftists think, are generally opposed to armed conflict, for they disrupt production and exchange. With increasing communication across countries, people, and not just businessmen, will resist armed attacks on their friends in other countries. The hatred for capitalism among leftists is, therefore, greatly exaggerated. The alternative to capitalism, namely central planning, has failed in the eyes of all but a few stalwart diehards. Mr. Hughes merely wants to use the state to regulate capitalism and to redistribute income, including income that could be used for transhumanist upgrades for self, spouse, and chilren. Again, the problem is one of institutional design, of constitutional process rather than specifying one's personally prefered products. Here is hoping that his next book will reconsider his "vital center" approach from the standpoint of institutional design. Mr. Hughes states, "The political terrain of the twentieth century was shaped by economic issues of taxation and social welfare, and cultural issues of race, gender and civil liberties. The political terrain of the twenty-first century will add a new dimension, biopolitics" (p. 55). This is quite true, but I suggest that a more general shift is occurring, namely that the principal left-right political axis is going to change from central planning vs. free market in the earlier part of the twentieth century and equality vs. inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. universalism in the current century. There are several minor axes, to wit, secular vs. sacred, self-expression vs. self-restraint, change vs. tradition, cooperation vs. competition, tender-minded vs. tough-minded, relativism vs. absolutism, and many more, some perhaps subsumed by others. (The left tends to be less interested in virtue and moral education generally than the right, and Mr. Hughes, being on the left, does not consider how children should be brought up in a world of mass unemployment, how moral education will instill other habits besides those of being a productive member of society. Here's hoping that his next book will address the matter.) There is a general clustering, not at the level of any high theory that reduces political preferences to a single dimension, but a clustering in fact. Left-wingers tend, albeit often quite incompletely, to be on the left side of each axis, not always because they have thought out each opinion, but because their co-left-wingers also have them. Right-wingers do likewise. For myself, I am a left-wing secularist, moderately to the right as far as self-restraint goes, much to the left in favoring change, mixed on cooperation, tough-minded more in rhetoric than in practice, and fairly much an absolutist (evolution limits the feasible pace of change quite a bit). For the major axes, I am a twentieth-century rightist for both the free market and inequality. What's more important is that I am decidedly a twenty-first century leftist in favor of pluralism. Of course, my own preferences count for no more than those of Mr. Hughes: we each have one vote, mine for less, in fact, since he reaches a greater audience. But he is very much a pluralist and is sorely reluctant to interfere with reproductive freedom, except perhaps in the case of deaf parents making sure that their children will have deaf genes and become part of "deaf culture," thus parting from his more extreme leftist friends. On the other hand, he speculates that pressures, perhaps from the state, will be brought to bear on parents who refuse to enhance their children. This collides with his general pluralism, which opposes any universalist conception of what enhancement means absolutely. Still, the tension remains and will remain. Cyborg Citizen deals very little with heated foreign policy debates, but much as he admires many aspects of America, he is probably opposed to using the American military to spread "democratic capitalism" and "American values" to countries in the Islamic world. He deals not at all with foreign trade policy or the spread of American cultural products. For my own part, as a twenty-first century leftist pluralist, I am not pleased with the McDonaldization of the world, but as a twentieth century free marketeer, I can see no solution worth its cost besides urging subscribing to Adbusters and making other acts of what the great French sociologist Jean Baudrillard called "micro-resistance." Mr. Hughes is not in the "vital center" of sociology professors in at least one important respect. He states, "Contrary to the vacuous assertions of Francis Fukuyama and Bill McKibben that we are all biological equals, a lot of social inequality is built on a biological foundation, and enhancement technology makes it possible to redress that source of inequality" (p. 195). Risking a threat of expulsion from leftist circles, he states: "Gene therapy brings us back to Galton and the eugenicists, who were half right about the inheritance of intelligence, although not about its relationship to race and class.... These findings and other accumulating evidence give strong support to the idea that there are a finite number of genes that determine general intelligence, 'g', and not just separate genes determining individual intellectual capacities like memory, spatial visualization or verbal skills" (p. 39). Intelligence is quite bound up in the equality issue, but let us depart from that twentieth century preoccupation and hope that there has been so much cullture-gene coevolution, even along racial lines, that there will be major internal resistance to a universal culture, thus keeping the world safe for pluralism. I keep looking for and finding signs that leftists are indeed shifting to pluralism as the principle left-right political axis, that the failures of egalitarian programs to make people more equal though environmental manipulation are now so apparent to leftists that they are no longer pushing them, just as they are no longer pushing centrally planned economies. Their hatred of capitalism is no longer grounded on the lost opportunity to centrally plan the economic system, and not even that much any more over its generation of inequality, but rather because of its supposed cultural hegenomy. Mr. Hughes's egalitarianism is not greatly concerned with the generation of inequality but with what he sees as unacceptable products of that generation. Yet this outcome can be handled by the Pareto criterion in a renegotiated social contract, which will include provision of income transfers--remember he gets only one vote on how much--part of which may be devoted to using new transhumanist technologies. His next book should consider more carefully whether only a generalized transfer should be made or whether certain technologies should be provided for all, whether they want to pay for them or not, as is already the case for much of health care. I keep urging the author of Citizen Cyborg to write another book. The current one give atrociously few citations. Another major omission is that he does little to argue that democratic transhumanism must be offered in order to be accepted, as opposed to Hughes's telling us "this is how I want the world to be." He is confident that, as intelligence is boosted, more and more people will come to agree with him. Replace him with me, please. But no, more intelligent people will tear up any blueprints we make for the future and replace them with far better ones. I want enough pluralism for this to happen, if only because my own culture, based as it is in Europe, just as it is for our author, has changed so much over the course of its history that only a universalist could pretend that all answers have been found. Most of all, I urge Mr. Hughes to move out of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first: "At the turn of the century most working people in the industrialized countries worked 3000 hours a year from their early teens to the day they died" (p. 215). Gotcha! Here's hoping that his next book will take up constitutional design, process against products, and the shift to pluralism vs. universalism as the major political divide between transhumanists and bioLuddites. The vital center is shifting, and he should shift along with it. -------------- Frank Forman is an economist at the U.S. Department of Education--his views are distinct from theirs--and the author of The Metaphysics of Liberty (Dordrect, Holland: Kluwer Academic, 1989). He regularly participates in Internet discussions under the handle of Premise Checker. His e-mail address is checker at panix.com and his website http://www.panix.com/~checker (don't forget the tilde). From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Oct 26 19:26:52 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 12:26:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] sacrificial systems In-Reply-To: <200410261800.i9QI0R017518@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041026192652.77009.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> >>Is evil a person, e.g., Satan, or a force at work in the world and in the wills of humans?<< --I think evil is more like a habit. A person with a really annoying habit seems identical to the habit, since it eclipses all other traits in the mind of the observer. Unless the observer is a neurologist, a behavioral or gognitive psychologist, a depth psychologist or a believer in demons. Or a historian, in the case of modern evils that recapitulate earlier ones. An annoying habit and a scary addictive cycle are both legitimate objects of curiosity, and when society refuses to look at evil through a scientific lens (insisting on the attribution of evil to individuals as if individuals invented evil) there is a lot of room for curious individuals to look at evil in new ways, discarding superstition for a sincere interest in both the mechanical aspects of evil and the mythology surrounding it. An evolutionary psychologist would say evil is part of the social calculus that gave some people a mating advantage over others until the hierarchical mating privelege pyramid became entrenched in institutions. The man who gets the women and the votes is the alpha male who shows strong "daddy" traits. The women who get the men are the ones who can navigate the madonna/whore complex, the compliant/arrogant polarity and other psychological conundrums. In either case, it is the ones who can manipulate the social system, push the buttons of others that trigger compliance, favoritism or emulation. We still vote for people who resonate with our lizard brains, not people who write eloquently and lucidly about issues. >>Is evil the distortion of good or the lack of a measure of goodness?<< --Evil is a boundary violation, especially one which leads to a ripple effect or an infinite series of boundary violations. War is evil, because it triggers tit-for-tat responses that are dominated by fear and identity myths rather than knowledge. Rejection is evil, because it produces an itch in the rejected to repeat the scenario with roles reversed. Apathy is evil because it enables psychotic alpha males and females to rule over others in subtle or overt ways. There has to be a certain amount of harmonic tension in a culture, connections that are both competitive and cooperative. Without those connections, society experiences a range of problems from paralysis to "driving off the cliff" behavior in the powerful and powerless alike. Everyone denies responsibility by claiming other responsibilities, and everyone pushes off his portion of the necessary sacrifice by sacrificing others. Sacrificial logic is built into the natural system, and humans fear it enough to wear scary masks to frighten others into accepting more than their share of the sacrifice. In doing so, people become more and more attached to the faulty logic that says a sacrifice is needed at all. In avoiding the worst moves in the game from a personal perspective, we collectively create a game which gives some individuals only bad moves, and that injustice tends to corrode trust and accountability on a fractal scale. >>Is evil a radical choice or a banal thought-less-ness?<< --The latter makes the former possible. Evil is usually an attempt to evade responsibility, pushing it onto someone else. When everyone believes a sacrifice is necessary, potential scapegoats begin trying to push each other toward the hot seat while getting themselves into a position of safe compliance with an evil game. >>Is God responsible for evil or are humans?<< --Humans are responsible only for their choice, and choice is subject to natural laws like everything else. Marketing psychologists know the brain is a machine and they exploit its most machinelike tendencies (laugh tracks appeal to the social brain even when the thinking brain is aware they're only laugh tracks). The public in general tends not to learn marketing psychology, and the result is that someone figures out how to push buttons to gain power, and exploits the consistency principle (if you loved me you must continue loving me, even if it means ignoring reality) to turn society into a sacrificial machine. We squeeze out some despised group, in order to avoid being squeezed out ourselves, and in playing that game we set the rules of the game for future generations. Cascades of manipulation produce a culture that must unite over some sacrificial narrative, one which destroys the identity and security of one group in order to feed the psychological needs of the majority and avoid a confrontation with internal hypocrisy. Whatever tensions can't be handled internally are manifested externally through bullying, intimidation and pre-emptive reprisals for imagined crimes. >>How do humans conceive of evil and how does that relate to their understandings of human nature, the good, and God?<< --Everything that one fears someone else might do is part of one's own imagination. Evil relates to the first cut in one's consciousness, the split between self and matter. A feeling of self is gained by treating others as matter, and it is always done in order to avoid seeing oneself as matter, subject to the same laws as everything else in nature. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From checker at panix.com Tue Oct 26 19:54:53 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 15:54:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Creationism and Science Clash at Grand Canyon Bookstores Message-ID: Creationism and Science Clash at Grand Canyon Bookstores NYT October 26, 2004 By CORNELIA DEAN [Google <"behe's empty box"> for more.] Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, is hardly a practitioner of secular humanism. Meals at his house begin with grace, and in a recent talk on environmental politics he chided his audience for not paying enough attention to the way the wonders of nature inspire wonder at their creator. But when it comes to selling, in stores at a national park, a book propounding the idea that God created Grand Canyon in Noah's flood, he pauses. "If there were a person, which I doubt, qualified in geological science, who said it is perfectly plausible, that would be one thing," said Mr. Kennedy, who led the park service from 1993 to 1996. But, he said, such a book would have to have "a respectable scholarly basis." Mr. Kennedy has not seen "Grand Canyon: A Different View," but others who have, including geologists on the Park Service staff, say it does not meet that test. A compilation of photographs, biblical quotations and essays published last year by Master Books, the book says God created the heavens and the earth in six days, 6,000 years ago, and that the canyon formed in a flood God caused in order to wipe out "the wickedness of man." The geology of the canyon proves it, the books' contributors say. Actually, the universe formed billions of years ago, Earth formed billions of years later and the Grand Canyon was shaped by millions and millions of years of hydrology, chiefly the action of the Colorado River. Other ideas, however dearly held, are myths. Or, as the Geologic Resources Division of the Park Service put it in a memo, "The book purports to be science when it is not. The book repudiates science." Nevertheless, it is for sale at the six bookstores at Grand Canyon National Park. Brad Wallis, executive director of the Grand Canyon Association, the nonprofit group that runs the stores, said the association did not market the book as science. The association decided to stock it, he said, because it is a professionally produced presentation of "a divergent viewpoint." In the main store, the only one large enough to have separate sections for different kinds of books, "the book was placed in the inspiration section, and we never moved," Mr. Wallis said. "It was never in the science section." Last December, a few months after the book appeared in Grand Canyon shops, the presidents of seven geological and paleontological organizations wrote to Joseph Alston, superintendent of the canyon, to urge that the book be removed from stores there, lest visitors get the impression that the park endorsed its contents. Now the issue rests with the solicitor's office of the Interior Department, which has been reviewing the issue for almost a year, said Elaine Sevy, a spokeswoman for the Park Service. Asked what the review consists of and why it is taking so long, she said, "It's resting with the solicitor's office." Until its ruling, the book remains on sale. "Grand Canyon: A Different View" was put together by Tom Vail, who in his own contribution says he was working as a rafting guide in the canyon in 1994, "telling folks that the exquisite and varied rock layers came about through completely natural processes," when a woman on one of his trips introduced him to the Bible. Within a few months, he relates, "I had made a conscious decision to believe in the Gospel." Soon, he and his passenger were married and now he and his wife, Paula Vail, operate Canyon Ministries, leading river tours with a creationist bent. Some have argued that because the store offers books about the culture and legends of the Navajo and Hopi tribes it is appropriate for it to sell books on the legends of creationists as well. Rob Arnberger, who was superintendent of the park from 1996 to 2000, will have none of that. "At Grand Canyon it is appropriate to present the culture of the Navajo and the Hopi, tribes that live in and around the canyon," he said. "But there are no books that present the culture of the Plains Indians, for example, because their culture was not associated with the Grand Canyon. To present one view does not obligate us to present another, especially when the science is so wrong." And the fact that the book is selling well also cuts no ice with him. The store could probably make money selling Superman cartoons, he said, but that is not a reason to stock them. Mr. Wallis said the book was not a particularly big seller, though it had been doing better lately. "People are curious about it now," he said. Mr. Kennedy says collisions between ideology and scholarship are nothing new at the Park Service. "There are still recurring editorials in Civil War buff journals decrying any discussion of causes of the war, particularly slavery." And he differentiates between what people learn from materials sold in Park Service bookstores and what they learn from the service's professional staff, "around the campfire," he said. Still, he worries that the Park Service may be relying too much on outsiders to research and explain its wonders - "outsourcing professional services," as he put it. And of course, he says, many people will assume any book sold in a Grand Canyon bookstore has the imprimatur of the Park Service. "That's the problem," Mr. Kennedy said. It is an important issue, he said, "and we need to pay attention to it." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/science/26cany.html ------ What sound does the liberal make? Mo__. What sound does the conservative make? Mo__. What sound does the cow make? Mo__. From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Oct 27 01:15:51 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 19:15:51 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] sacrificial systems In-Reply-To: <20041026192652.77009.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20041026192652.77009.qmail@web13426.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <417EF6C7.8030709@solution-consulting.com> Speaking of evil . . . If you don't believe in demons, how do you explain this: http://www.dailyrecycler.com/blog/2004/10/breakdown.html Great case of demonic possession. Grinning, Lynn J. Michael Christopher wrote: >>>Is evil a person, e.g., Satan, or a force at work in >>> >>> >the world and in the wills of humans?<< > >--I think evil is more like a habit. > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Oct 27 04:28:36 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 21:28:36 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] sacrificial systems Message-ID: <01C4BBA2.C1CA1940.shovland@mindspring.com> I think words like "demon" are examples of the "wisdom of language." We don't invent words without reason. Demon's may not exist as disembodied entities, but there's something in the world that deserves the word. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 6:16 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] sacrificial systems Speaking of evil . . . If you don't believe in demons, how do you explain this: http://www.dailyrecycler.com/blog/2004/10/breakdown.html Great case of demonic possession. Grinning, Lynn J. Michael Christopher wrote: >>>Is evil a person, e.g., Satan, or a force at work in >>> >>> >the world and in the wills of humans?<< > >--I think evil is more like a habit. > > > << File: ATT00034.html >> << File: ATT00035.txt >> From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 27 14:40:42 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 10:40:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Time: Is God in Our Genes? Message-ID: Is God in Our Genes? Time, 4.10.25 Jeffrey Kluger, Jeff Chu/ London; Broward Liston/ Orlando; Maggie Sieger/ Chicago; Daniel Williams/ Sydney ???It's not hard to see the divinity behind the water temples that dot the rice terraces of Bali. It's there in the white-clad high priest presiding in the temple at the summit of a dormant volcano. It's there in the 23 priests serving along with him, selected for their jobs when they were still children by a bevy of virgin priestesses. It's there in the rituals the priests perform to protect the island's water, which in turn is needed to nurture the island's rice. ???If the divine is easy to spot, what's harder to make out is the banal. But it's there too--in the meetings the priests convene to schedule their planting dates and combat the problem of crop pests; in the plans they draw up to maintain aqueducts and police conduits; in the irrigation proposals they consider and approve, the dam proposals they reject or amend. "The religion has a temple at every node in the irrigation system," says David Sloan Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, N.Y. "The priests make decisions and enforce the code of both religion and irrigation." ???Ask true believers of any faith to describe the most important thing that drives their devotion, and they'll tell you it's not a thing at all but a sense--a feeling of a higher power far beyond us. Western religions can get a bit more doctrinaire: God has handed us laws and lore, and it's for us to learn and practice what they teach. For a hell-raising species like ours, however--with too much intelligence for our own good and too little discipline to know what to do with it--there have always been other, more utilitarian reasons to get religion. Chief among them is survival. Across the eons, the structure that religion provides our lives helps preserve both mind and body. But that, in turn, has raised a provocative question, one that's increasingly debated in the worlds of science and religion: Which came first, God or the need for God? In other words, did humans create religion from cues sent from above, or did evolution instill in us a sense of the divine so that we would gather into the communities essential to keeping the species going? ???Just as a hurricane spins off tornadoes, this debate creates its own whirlwind of questions: If some people are more spiritual than others, is it nature or nurture that has made them so? If science has nothing to do with spirituality and it all flows from God, why do some people hear the divine word easily while others remain spiritually tone-deaf? Do such ivied-hall debates about environment, heredity and anthropology have any place at all in more exalted conversations about the nature of God? ???Even among people who regard spiritual life as wishful hocus-pocus, there is a growing sense that humans may not be able to survive without it. It's hard enough getting by in a fang-and-claw world in which killing, thieving and cheating pay such rich dividends. It's harder still when there's no moral cop walking the beat to blow the whistle when things get out of control. Best to have a deity on hand to rein in our worst impulses, bring out our best and, not incidentally, give us a sense that there's someone awake in the cosmic house when the lights go out at night and we find ourselves wondering just why we're here in the first place. If a God or even several gods can do all that, fine. And if we sometimes misuse the idea of our gods--and millenniums of holy wars prove that we do--the benefits of being a spiritual species will surely outweigh the bloodshed. ???Far from being an evolutionary luxury then, the need for God may be a crucial trait stamped deeper and deeper into our genome with every passing generation. Humans who developed a spiritual sense thrived and bequeathed that trait to their offspring. Those who didn't risked dying out in chaos and killing. The evolutionary equation is a simple but powerful one. ???Nowhere has that idea received a more intriguing going-over than in the recently published book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes (Doubleday; 256 pages), by molecular biologist Dean Hamer. Chief of gene structure at the National Cancer Institute, Hamer not only claims that human spirituality is an adaptive trait, but he also says he has located one of the genes responsible, a gene that just happens to also code for production of the neurotransmitters that regulate our moods. Our most profound feelings of spirituality, according to a literal reading of Hamer's work, may be due to little more than an occasional shot of intoxicating brain chemicals governed by our DNA. "I'm a believer that every thought we think and every feeling we feel is the result of activity in the brain," Hamer says. "I think we follow the basic law of nature, which is that we're a bunch of chemical reactions running around in a bag." ???Even for the casually religious, such seeming reductionism can rankle. The very meaning of faith, after all, is to hold fast to something without all the tidy cause and effect that science finds so necessary. Try parsing things the way geneticists do, and you risk parsing them into dust. "God is not something that can be demonstrated logically or rigorously," says Neil Gillman, a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. "[The idea of a God gene] goes against all my personal theological convictions." John Polkinghorne, a physicist who is also Canon Theologian at England's Liverpool Cathedral, agrees: "You can't cut [faith] down to the lowest common denominator of genetic survival. It shows the poverty of reductionist thinking." ???Is Hamer really guilty of such simplification? Could claims for a so-called God gene be merely the thin end of a secular wedge, one that risks prying spirituality away from God altogether? Or, assuming the gene exists at all, could it somehow be embraced by both science and religion, in the same way some evolutionists and creationists--at least the less radicalized ones--accept the idea of a divinely created universe in which evolving life is simply part of the larger plan? Hamer, for one, hopes so. "My findings are agnostic on the existence of God," he says. "If there's a God, there's a God. Just knowing what brain chemicals are involved in acknowledging that is not going to change the fact." ???Whatever the merits of Hamer's work, he is clearly the heir of a millenniums-long search for the wellsprings of spirituality. People have been wrestling with the roots of faith since faith itself was first codified into Scripture. "[God has] set eternity in the hearts of men," says the Book of Ecclesiastes, "yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." ???To theologians in the 3rd century B.C., when Ecclesiastes is thought to have been written, that passage spoke to the idea that while all of us are divinely inspired to look for God, none of us are remotely capable of fully comprehending what we are seeking. Scientists in the 21st century may not disagree, provided that "hearts of men" is replaced with "genes of men." The key for those researchers is finding those genes. ???Hamer began looking in 1998, when he was conducting a survey on smoking and addiction for the National Cancer Institute. As part of his study, he recruited more than 1,000 men and women, who agreed to take a standardized, 240-question personality test called the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI). Among the traits the TCI measures is one known as self-transcendence, which consists of three other traits: self-forgetfulness, or the ability to get entirely lost in an experience; transpersonal identification, or a feeling of connectedness to a larger universe; and mysticism, or an openness to things not literally provable. Put them all together, and you come as close as science can to measuring what it feels like to be spiritual. "This allows us to have the kind of experience described as religious ecstasy," says Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., and the designer of the self-transcendence portion of the TCI. ???Hamer decided to use the data he gathered in the smoking survey to conduct a little spirituality study on the side. First he ranked the participants along Cloninger's self-transcendence scale, placing them on a continuum from least to most spiritually inclined. Then he went poking around in their genes to see if he could find the DNA responsible for the differences. Spelunking in the human genome is not easy, what with 35,000 genes consisting of 3.2 billion chemical bases. To narrow the field, Hamer confined his work to nine specific genes known to play major roles in the production of monoamines--brain chemicals, including serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine, that regulate such fundamental functions as mood and motor control. It's monoamines that are carefully manipulated by Prozac and other antidepressants. It's also monoamines that are not so carefully scrambled by ecstasy, LSD, peyote and other mind-altering drugs--some of which have long been used in religious rituals. ???Studying the nine candidate genes in DNA samples provided by his subjects, Hamer quickly hit the genetic jackpot. A variation in a gene known as VMAT2--for vesicular monoamine transporter--seemed to be directly related to how the volunteers scored on the self-transcendence test. Those with the nucleic acid cytosine in one particular spot on the gene ranked high. Those with the nucleic acid adenine in the same spot ranked lower. "A single change in a single base in the middle of the gene seemed directly related to the ability to feel self-transcendence," Hamer says. Merely having that feeling did not mean those people would take the next step and translate their transcendence into a belief in--or even a quest for--God. But they seemed likelier to do so than those who never got the feeling at all. ???Hamer is careful to point out that the gene he found is by no means the only one that affects spirituality. Even minor human traits can be governed by the interplay of many genes; something as complex as belief in God could involve hundreds or even thousands. "If someone comes to you and says, 'We've found the gene for X,'" says John Burn, medical director of the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Newcastle in England, "you can stop them before they get to the end of the sentence." ???Hamer also stresses that while he may have located a genetic root for spirituality, that is not the same as a genetic root for religion. Spirituality is a feeling or a state of mind; religion is the way that state gets codified into law. Our genes don't get directly involved in writing legislation. As Hamer puts it, perhaps understating a bit the emotional connection many have to their religions, "Spirituality is intensely personal; religion is institutional." ???At least one faith, according to one of its best-known scholars, formalizes the idea of gene-based spirituality and even puts a pretty spin on it. Buddhists, says Robert Thurman, professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia University, have long entertained the idea that we inherit a spirituality gene from the person we were in a previous life. Smaller than an ordinary gene, it combines with two larger physical genes we inherit from our parents, and together they shape our physical and spiritual profile. Says Thurman: "The spiritual gene helps establish a general trust in the universe, a sense of openness and generosity." Buddhists, he adds, would find Hamer's possible discovery "amusing and fun." ???The Buddhist theory has never been put to the scientific test, but other investigations into the biological roots of belief in God were being conducted long before Hamer's efforts--often with intriguing results. In 1979, investigators at the University of Minnesota began their now famous twins study, tracking down 53 pairs of identical twins and 31 pairs of fraternal twins that had been separated at birth and raised apart. The scientists were looking for traits the members of each pair had in common, guessing that the characteristics shared more frequently by identical twins than by fraternal twins would be genetically based, since identical twins carry matching DNA, and those traits for which there was no disparity between the identicals and fraternals would be more environmentally influenced. ???As it turned out, the identical twins had plenty of remarkable things in common. In some cases, both suffered from migraine headaches, both had a fear of heights, both were nail biters. Some shared little eccentricities, like flushing the toilet both before and after using it. When quizzed on their religious values and spiritual feelings, the identical twins showed a similar overlap. In general, they were about twice as likely as fraternal twins to believe as much--or as little--about spirituality as their sibling did. Significantly, these numbers did not hold up when the twins were questioned about how faithfully they practiced any organized religion. Clearly, it seemed, the degree to which we observe rituals such as attending services is mostly the stuff of environment and culture. Whether we're drawn to God in the first place is hardwired into our genes. "It completely contradicted my expectations," says University of Minnesota psychologist Thomas Bouchard, one of the researchers involved in the work. Similar results were later found in larger twin studies in Virginia and Australia. ???Other researchers have taken the science in a different direction, looking not for the genes that code for spirituality but for how that spirituality plays out in the brain. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has used several types of imaging systems to watch the brains of subjects as they meditate or pray. By measuring blood flow, he determines which regions are responsible for the feelings the volunteers experience. The deeper that people descend into meditation or prayer, Newberg found, the more active the frontal lobe and the limbic system become. The frontal lobe is the seat of concentration and attention; the limbic system is where powerful feelings, including rapture, are processed. More revealing is the fact that at the same time these regions flash to life, another important region--the parietal lobe at the back of the brain--goes dim. It's this lobe that orients the individual in time and space. Take it off-line, and the boundaries of the self fall away, creating the feeling of being at one with the universe. Combine that with what's going on in the other two lobes, and you can put together a profound religious experience. ???Even to some within the religious community, this does not come as news. "In India in Buddha's time, there were philosophers who said there was no soul; the mind was just chemistry," says Thurman. "The Buddha disagreed with their extreme materialism but also rejected the 'absolute soul' theologians." Michael Persinger, professor of behavioral neuroscience at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., puts the chemistry argument more bluntly. "God," he says, "is an artifact of the brain." ???Even if such spiritual deconstructionism is true, some scientists--to say nothing of most theologians--think it takes you only so far, particularly when it comes to trying to determine the very existence of God. Simply understanding the optics and wiring of the eyes, after all, doesn't mean there's no inherent magnificence in the Rembrandts they allow us to see. If human beings were indeed divinely assembled, why wouldn't our list of parts include a genetic chip that would enable us to contemplate our maker? ???"Of course, concepts of God reside in the brain. They certainly don't reside in the toe," says Lindon Eaves, director of the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. "The question is, To what is this wiring responsive? Why is it there?" ???Says Paul Davies, professor of natural philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia: "I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that if you explain something, you explain it away. I don't see that at all with religious experience." ???Those religious believers who are comfortable with the idea that God genes are the work of God should have little trouble making the next leap: that not only are the genes there but they are central to our survival, one of the hinges upon which the very evolution of the human species turned. It's an argument that 's not terribly hard to make. ???For one thing, God is a concept that appears in human cultures all over the globe, regardless of how geographically isolated they are. When tribes living in remote areas come up with a concept of God as readily as nations living shoulder to shoulder, it's a fairly strong indication that the idea is preloaded in the genome rather than picked up on the fly. If that's the case, it's an equally strong indication that there are very good reasons it's there. ???One of those reasons might be that, as the sole species--as far as we know--capable of contemplating its own death, we needed something larger than ourselves to make that knowledge tolerable. "Anticipation of our own demise is the price we pay for a highly developed frontal lobe," says Persinger. "In many ways, [a God experience is] a brilliant adaptation. It's a built-in pacifier." ???But the most important survival role religion may serve is as the mortar that holds a group together. Worshipping God doesn't have to be a collective thing; it can be done in isolation, disconnected from any organized religion. The overwhelming majority of people, however, congregate to pray, observing the same rituals and heeding the same creeds. Once that congregation is in place, it's only a small step to using the common system of beliefs and practices as the basis for all the secular laws that keep the group functioning. ???One of the best examples of religion as social organizer, according to Binghamton University's Wilson, is early Calvinism. John Calvin rose to prominence in 1536 when, as a theologian and religious reformer, he was recruited to help bring order to the fractious city of Geneva. Calvin, perhaps one of the greatest theological minds ever produced by European Christianity, was a lawyer by trade. Wilson speculates that it was Calvin's pragmatic genius to understand that while civil laws alone might not be enough to bring the city 's deadbeats and other malefactors into line, divine law might be. ???Calvin's catechism included the familiar Ten Commandments--which, with their injunctions against theft, murder, adultery and lying, are themselves effective social organizers. Added to that were admonitions to pay taxes, perform civic duties, behave in a civil manner and submit to the authority of magistrates. "You must understand religions very thoroughly in relation to their environments," says Wilson. "And one problem for Calvin was to make his city function." ???The heirs to Calvinism today--Presbyterians, many Baptists and believers in the Reformed tradition in general--see the roots of their faith as something far more divine than merely good civic management. But even some theologians seem to think that a deep belief in the laws of God can coexist with the survival demands of an evolving society. "Calvin had a reverence for the Scriptures, which then became institutionalized," says James Kay, professor of practical theology at the Princeton Theological Seminary. "The Bible is concerned about justice for the poor, equity and fairness, and all of those things were seen to in Calvin's Geneva." ???Other struggling cultures have similarly translated godly law into earthly order and in doing so helped ensure their survival. The earliest Christians established a rough institutional structure that allowed them to transmit their ideas within a generation of Christ's death, and as a result succeeded in living through the Roman persecution; the Jews of the Diaspora moved as a cultural whole through the nations of Europe, finding niches wherever they could but maintaining their identity and kinship by observing the same rites. "All religions become a bit secular," says Wilson. "In order to survive, you have to organize yourselves into a culture." ???The downside to all this is that often religious groups gather not into congregations but into camps--and sometimes they're armed camps. In a culture of Crusades, Holocausts and jihads, where in the world is the survival advantage of religious wars or terrorism? One facile explanation has always been herd culling--an adaptive way of keeping populations down so that resources aren't depleted. But there's little evolutionary upside to wiping out an entire population of breeding-age males, as countries trying to recover from wars repeatedly learn. Why then do we so often let the sweetness of religion curdle into combat? ???The simple answer might be that just because we're given a gift, we don't necessarily always use it wisely. Fire can either light your village or burn down the one next door, depending on your inclination. "Religions represent an attempt to harness innate spirituality for organizational purposes--not always good," says Macquarie University's Davies. And while spiritual contemplation is intuitive, says Washington University's Cloninger, religion is dogmatic; dogma in the wrong hands has always been a risky thing. ???Still, for every place in the world that's suffering from religious strife, there are many more where spirituality is doing its uplifting and civilizing work. A God who would equip us with the genes and the smarts to cooperate in such a clever way is a God who ought to be appealing even to religious purists. Nonetheless, sticking points do remain that prevent genetic theory from going down smoothly. One that's particularly troublesome is the question of why Hamer 's God gene--or any of the others that may eventually be discovered--is distributed so unevenly among us. Why are some of us spiritual virtuosos, while others can't play a note? Isn't it one of the central tenets of religion that grace is available to everybody? At least a few scientists shrug at the question. "Some get religion, and some don't," says Virginia Commonwealth University's Eaves. ???But this seeming inequity may be an important part of the spiritual journey. It would be easy for God simply to program us for reverence; it's more meaningful when the door is opened but you've got to walk through on your own--however hard those steps may be for some. "I have never had a Big Bang conversion experience," says the Jewish Theological Seminary's Gillman. "My sense is that slowly and gradually, out of a rich experience of the world, one builds a faith." ???Such experiences may ultimately be at least as important a part of our spiritual tool kit as the genes we're born with. A poor genetic legacy but lucky spiritual circumstances might mean more than good genes and bad experiences. "Fortune includes the possibility of divine grace as well as environmental influences," says Cloninger. ???No matter how the two factors balance out, scientists may eventually find that trying to identify the definitive cluster of genes that serves as our spiritual circuit board is simply impossible--like trying to draw a genetic schematic of love. Still, they're likely to keep trying. "I am personally convinced that there is a scheme of things," says Davies of Macquarie University, "that the universe is not just any ragbag of laws." In the end, genes may prove to be a part of that scheme--but clearly one of very many. --With reporting by Jeff Chu/ London, Broward Liston/ Orlando, Maggie Sieger/ Chicago and Daniel Williams/ Sydney ???"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." --ALBERT EINSTEIN ???"With all your science, can you tell me how it is that light comes into the soul?" --HENRY DAVID THOREAU ???"Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses." --SIGMUND FREUD ???"All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods." --WILLIAM JAMES From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 27 14:41:44 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 10:41:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Time: How Spiritual Are You? Message-ID: How Spiritual Are You? To find out, take this test, which is adapted from a personality inventory devised by Washington University psychiatrist Robert Cloninger, author of Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being Time, 4.10.25 ???1. I often feel so connected to the people around me that it is like there is no separation between us. TRUE FALSE ???2. I often do things to help protect animals and plants from extinction. TRUE FALSE ???3. I am fascinated by the many things in life that cannot be scientifically explained. TRUE FALSE ???4. Often I have unexpected flashes of insight or understanding while relaxing. TRUE FALSE ???5. I sometimes feel so connected to nature that everything seems to be part of one living organism. TRUE FALSE ???6. I seem to have a "sixth sense" that sometimes allows me to know what is going to happen. TRUE FALSE ???7. Sometimes I have felt like I was part of something with no limits or boundaries in time and space. TRUE FALSE ???8. I am often called "absent-minded" because I get so wrapped up in what I am doing that I lose track of everything else. TRUE FALSE ???9. I often feel a strong sense of unity with all the things around me. TRUE FALSE ???10. Even after thinking about something a long time, I have learned to trust my feelings more than my logical reasons. TRUE FALSE ???11. I often feel a strong spiritual or emotional connection with all the people around me. TRUE FALSE ???12. Often when I am concentrating on something, I lose awareness of the passage of time. TRUE FALSE ???13. I have made real personal sacrifices in order to make the world a better place, like trying to prevent war, poverty and injustice. TRUE FALSE ???14. I have had experiences that made my role in life so clear to me that I felt very happy and excited. TRUE FALSE ???15. I believe that I have experienced extrasensory perception. TRUE FALSE ???16. I have had moments of great joy in which I suddenly had a clear, deep feeling of oneness with all that exists. TRUE FALSE ???17. Often when I look at an ordinary thing, something wonderful happens. I get the feeling that I am seeing it fresh for the first time. TRUE FALSE ???18. I love the blooming of flowers in the spring as much as seeing an old friend again. TRUE FALSE ???19. It often seems to other people like I am in another world because I am so completely unaware of things going on around me. TRUE FALSE ???20. I believe that miracles happen. TRUE FALSE ???SCORING: Give yourself one point for each TRUE answer and 0 points for each FALSE answer. ???14 and above = highly spiritual, a real mystic; 12-13 = spiritually aware, easily lost in the moment; 8-11 = spiritually average; could develop more spiritual life if desired; 6-7 = a practical empiricist lacking self-transcendence; 1-5 = highly skeptical, resistant to developing spiritual awareness From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 27 14:49:10 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 10:49:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: From a Physicist and New Nobel Winner, Some Food for Thought Message-ID: >From a Physicist and New Nobel Winner, Some Food for Thought NYT October 19, 2004 By DENNIS OVERBYE GOLETA, Calif. - Fresh from a new Nobel Prize, with a smile as wide as the Pacific Ocean only a Frisbee throw away, Dr. David Gross stood with a microphone on a stage at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics here. "The most important product of knowledge is ignorance," he declared. And without much more ado than that, Dr. Gross proceeded to enumerate what he considered to be the most enticing items that physics had learned enough to be ignorant about in 25 different areas. If there are any limits of the ambitions of physicists to probe and quantify every last aspect of the world, they are not to be found here. The questions, culled from hundreds of e-mail messages from physicists around the world in the wee hours of the morning, show how physicists' ambitions have expanded. No longer content to examine the origin of the universe, they are injecting themselves into the search for the origin of consciousness and other life science issues; not content to muse about building quantum computers, they are thinking of training computers themselves to be physicists. The occasion was a three-day conference this month modestly titled "The Future of Physics" that had been planned as a double celebration, but turned into a triple one. It was both the 25th anniversary of the institute, which was founded by the National Science Foundation on the University of California at Santa Barbara campus here in 1979, and the dedication of a new wing, designed by the architect Michael Graves, complete with a portholed lounge on the second floor looking out to sea. The center, named three years ago for Fred Kavli, an inventor and businessman who has become a financial angel of physics. On Oct. 5, the day before some 150 physicists were to arrive, Dr. Gross, the director of the institute, was named one of three winners of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Dr. Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dr. H. David Politzer of the California Institute of Technology, for helping explain the force that holds atomic nuclei together and pens quarks together inside protons and neutrons, where they cannot be seen. As a result, the strawberries and whipped cream heaped in bowls on the seaside lawn seemed especially sweet. "Let's take this house of science on a ride through the stars to solve some of humanity's most fundamental questions," Mr. Kavli said at the dedication. Dr. Gross had enlisted an all-star cast of physicists, including Dr. Wilczek and six other Nobelists, to discourse on what the last 25 years in physics had wrought and the next 25 might bring. As reflected in the talks here, the history of physics as well as the history of the institute in the last quarter century, is, like the universe, a story of expansion outward from fundamental forces and particles, like gravity and electrons, to the behavior of larger and larger agglomerations of matter, complex systems, the weird quantum properties of materials chilled to near absolute zero, subject to huge pressures or magnetic fields, to planets, stars and even life itself. Physicists who went into biology once were content to apply their methods and training to answering the questions raised by biologists, noted Dr. William Bialek of Princeton, but now physicists were asking their own questions about living systems, searching for universal principles underlying the activities at different levels of life. In assembling his list, Dr. Gross was joining distinguished company. In 1900 the mathematician David Hilbert published a list of 23 important problems that has formed a research agenda ever since. At the millennium four years ago, Dr. Gross, and two other physicists, Dr. Michael Duff of the University of Michigan and Dr. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study inPrinceton, N.J., assembled a list of 10 questions in particle physics and cosmology. Some of Dr. Gross's questions are ripped from the headlines. What is the dark matter that enfolds the visible galaxies? What is the dark energy that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe? Was there a time before the Big Bang that started the universe, or is time itself an "emergent concept" deriving from something more fundamental that we don't know yet? Can physicists make room-temperature superconductors? Others reach into less publicized fields in an effort to tap into uncharted controversies of the future. Here is a sampler. Dr. Gross's talk is online at online.itp.ucsb.edu/online /kitp25/gross/. Can we measure the onset of consciousness in an infant? "I love this one," said Dr. Gross, who speculated that such an event was what physicists call a "phase transition," like the sudden melting of ice into water, when some microscopic change causes a large-scale change in behavior. "At some point it turns on," he said. Putting the emphasis on measuring this, Dr. Gross explained, meant that physicists would first have to define precisely what consciousness was. Can the theory of evolution be made quantitative and predictable? Given what we know about the genetic code and about organisms, is it possible to do experiments on real organisms and make quantitative predictions? In particular, Dr. Gross asked, "Can one tell the shape of an organism by its genome?" This, he mused, to much laughter, could be homework in biology classes: give out a chart of the genome and have the student "draw the picture." Is quantum mechanics the ultimate description of nature? It is amazing Dr. Gross noted, that 80 years after the theory was formulated physicists and philosophers are still debating the meaning of the paradoxical rules that govern atomic behavior and underlie all modern technology. They include such infuriating features as the uncertainty principle, which ascribes a certain randomness to atomic events. "I see no evidence that anything is wrong with quantum mechanics," Dr. Gross said to a ripple of laughter, but, he added, physics should explore the possibility that it would break down at short distances where gravity becomes important, or in large complex systems, or as a description of the universe itself. Can we use astronomical observations to determine the geometry of space-time around a black hole? Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the warped geometry of space-time, is the mathematical language of cosmology, but is it really correct? The theory has never been experimentally tested in the really strong gravitational fields that prevail in a black hole, the gravitational abysses that according to Einstein can stop time and swallow everything, even light. "Right now we have no data," Dr. Gross said. But many physicists hope that they will eventually be able to diagnose the space-time structures of black holes by studying the roiling and rippling of space-time, so-called gravitational waves, from the collisions of black holes, or by following the motions of individual stars caught in that fatal black grip, and thus find out if Einstein's theory is right. Modern particle physics, despite its success as exemplified by his own Nobel, is awash in mystery, Dr. Gross said. For example, physicists have yet to come up with satisfactory equations to describe quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong force. Nor can physicists explain in any quantitative detail why the universe consists of matter and not antimatter, its bad-twin opposite. Neither question can be answered by the present reigning theory, a suite of equations, known as the Standard Model, he said. Rather it has whetted physicists' desires for a grander more encompassing theory. Is there low-energy supersymmetry? Nearly every scheme that seeks to unify the forces of nature into a single equation relies in part on this concept. It posits a relationship between the particles known as fermions that comprise matter and the particles known as bosons that comprise forces like electromagnetism or the strong force. If it is true, all of the known elementary particles have partners, as yet undiscovered, but which might constitute the dark matter in the universe. But there is as yet no scintilla of evidence in favor of supersymmetry. Does it exist at the low energies available to human experimentation? "The whole field hangs on the answer," said Dr. Gross, who added that it was the "undying hope" of physicists that supersymmetric particles would be discovered when the Large Hadron Collider, to be the world's largest, most energetic particle accelerator, starts operating in 2007 at CERN, the European research consortium in Geneva. Is physics an environmental science? This is one of the more philosophical and contentious questions facing modern physics. Is it possible, Dr. Gross explained, to calculate all the parameters characterizing nature, like the ratios of masses of elementary particles or the strengths of the fundamental forces, from whatever the final theory turns out to be? Or are some things simply accidents of history or random quantum mechanical events? Einstein proclaimed a theory that left God "no choice" in such matters as the goal of physics, but, as Dr. Gross acknowledged, recent results from string theory, the putative theory of everything, and cosmological speculations about the Big Bang, produce a "landscape" of gazillions of possible universes, each with different properties determined basically by chance. Our own universe has the features it has, some theorists go on to suggest, because those are the conditions under which life could evolve. We live where we can live goes the argument, but Dr. Gross admits that he hates it. "I hate to give up this ambitious goal," he said, referring to the Einsteinian dream of being able to predict everything. He added that it was "kind of fun" being a conservative. Can we understand big things by understanding little things? After all, big things, no matter how complicated, are made of little things. Physics has been guided since the time of the Greeks by the assumption, known as reductionism, that the world can be understood by breaking it down into tinier parts, a few elementary particles interacting through four basic forces. But, Dr. Gross, a card-carrying reductionist, asked of the reductionist principle, "Is this anymore obviously true than was the idea that nature can't tell the difference between the left hand and the right hand?" He was alluding to surprising experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1950's showing in fact that nature did know the difference between left and right when it came to the "weak" force that causes some kinds of radioactivity. Could physicists be so wrong again? "Who knows?" Dr. Gross said. When will computers become creative theoretical physicists? And how will we train them? Dr. Gross attributed this question to his fellow Nobelist and former student, Dr. Wilczek. While others have suggested that computers will eventually take over, the issue of how to teach them was novel. In keeping with his job nurturing theorists Dr. Gross added, "And that's really fun to think about." Will physics still continue to be important? This, Dr. Gross admitted, was the 26th question, but he allowed himself to go over his own limit, he said, because this one had an answer. "Yes," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/science/19phys.html ------ What sound does the liberal make? Mo__. What sound does the conservative make? Mo__. What sound does the cow make? Mo__. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 27 14:58:25 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 10:58:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Critic's Notebook: Buzzing the Web on a Meme Machine Message-ID: Critic's Notebook: Buzzing the Web on a Meme Machine NYT October 26, 2004 By SARAH BOXER The Web is obsessed with anything that spreads, whether it's a virus, a blog or a rumor. And so the Internet loves memes. Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene." Memes (the word rhymes with dreams and is short for mimemes, from the word mimetic) are infectious ideas or any other things that spread by imitation from person to person - a jingle, a joke, a fashion, the smiley face or the concept of hell. Memes propagate from brain to brain much as genes spread from body to body. Thus, Mr. Dawkins wrote, they really "should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically." The World Wide Web is the perfect Petri dish for memes. Wikipedia, the free collaborative online encyclopedia, calls the Internet "the ultimate meme vector." Meme and memetics (the study of memes, not to be confused with mimetics) were once terms batted around only by thinkers like Mr. Dawkins, the philosopher Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore, the author of "The Meme Machine." Now the word "meme" is part of many would-be-trendy Web addresses. A site called memes.org says it tests "new, old and emergent memes that are either being flown as a trial balloon or are sweeping the memesphere, the mediasphere or the buzzsphere.'' In fact much of the site is a grab bag of blogs, quotes and theories about politics and culture. Another Web site, iampariah.com, advertises a meme list that turns out to be just a dispensary of lame topics for bloggers. Other Web sites, without blaring it in their addresses, track certain types of memes. Vmyths.com follows popular hoaxes and myths about computer viruses that propagate on the Web. Snopes.com is a clearinghouse of urban legends. Here you can see whether various rumors are true or not. Was Harlan Ellison fired from Disney for joking about an animated porn film? Yes. Can Michael Jackson's phone number be found in the bar code on his "Thriller" album? No. Streetmemes.com, sponsored by Eyebeam, an art and technology center in Manhattan, tracks any "sticker, stencil or poster that can spread a single image around the world." At this Web site you can browse a selection of easy-to-spread street graphics or add your own. The problem is that many of the street memes posted are not really memes at all. For example, the site posts only one instance of "Business Yo," the figure of a beaten-down businessman stenciled in black on a yellow ground with a rain cloud over his head. Maybe the image could spread on the street, but it hasn't yet. It's a meme wanna-be. Can a wanna-be meme become a real meme? People on the Web are doggedly pursuing this very question right now. One Web site, Quotesexchange.com, offers to help make your blogs more visible - that is, to turn them into memes. "Let's help the smaller blogs get more visibility!" the site says, and it even ventures a hypothesis as to why some blogs are ignored. It's not because they're boring. No. "The reason is that the smaller blogs don't have enough links pointing to them." To remedy this, the site recommends something that sounds suspiciously like chain-letter tactics. You, the neglected blogger, simply post your blog along with a string of addresses of popular sites, adding your own to the end. "As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL," the site promises. Soon it will appear near the top of Google searches. In other words, you add some meme gas to your blog to help it spread through the culture. The non-meme that has been given meme fuel is called a GoMeme. This is the invention of Nova Spivack, who runs a Web site called mindingtheplanet .net. The unintended model here seems to be Sylvester McMonkey McBean, the Dr. Seuss character who invented a machine to put stars on the bellies of non-star-bellied Sneeches. Mr. Spivack has made four versions of the GoMeme - partly, to test how real memes, natural memes, spread. At least one site has analyzed the results of the various GoMemes that Mr. Spivack has tested. On nodalpoint.org you can read "Analysis of an Artificial Meme." The conclusion? "The GoMeme experiment did not help elucidate any useful properties of a meme." Can the spread of memes be stopped? At memecentral.com, run by Richard Brodie, the author of "Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme," visitors learn how to recognize and resist mind viruses - not to be confused with Internet viruses. "These messages all have one thing in common: they contain compelling messages or memes that grab our attention and persuade us to pass them on." The idea of the meme has, itself, become a meme. Spread the word. Some of the Web sites offering information on memes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/meme memes.org iampariah.com/projects/memeslist.php Vmyths.com snopes.com streetmemes.com quotesexchange.com/2004/08/help-make-blogs-more-visible-05.html mindingtheplanet.net nodalpoint.org/node.php?id=1539 memecentral.com/ antidote.htm http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/arts/26meme.html ------ What sound does the liberal make? Mo__. What sound does the conservative make? Mo__. What sound does the cow make? Mo__. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 27 15:08:20 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 11:08:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Information Week: What The Future Holds Message-ID: What The Future Holds http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=49901144 Six computer scientists take a look into the future. What's in store? Think speed. By Aaron Ricadela Oct. 18, 2004 25 years In the world of nuclear physics, where moving at Internet speed still isn't fast enough, scientists are sending data from the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland, to the California Institute of Technology at the rate of a CD's worth of information every second. By 2007, they hope to double that to a gigabyte of data every second, fast enough to send a DVD movie in three seconds. Even at those speeds, it would still take 40 minutes to transfer a trillion bytes of information--the yardstick particle physicists use to measure the information their instruments spew. Scientists now collect a few terabytes of data a year, but that could increase a thousandfold by early in the next decade. Contrast that with the technology many of us have at home today. With a dial-up Internet connection, it would take about two years to move a terabyte of data to your house, says Jim Gray, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft Research who's working with CERN and Caltech on the high-speed project. "I'm trying to get things that run in hours or days or weeks to run in seconds," says Gray, a specialist in making huge databases hum, whose resum? stretches back nearly 40 years, including work at Bell Labs, Digital Equipment, and IBM. People want answers in real time, Gray says. Slowness, "makes you much more reluctant to ask questions." Carbon nanotubes, plastics semiconductors, and more esoteric areas of research such as using the spin of electrons are being examined as successors to silicon, IBM's senior VP and head of research Paul Horn Carbon nanotubes, plastics semiconductors, and more esoteric areas of research such as using the spin of electrons are being examined as successors to silicon, IBM's senior VP and head of research Paul Horn says. For its 25th anniversary issue, InformationWeek asked six leading computer scientists--Gray; IBM senior VP and head of research Paul Horn; Hewlett-Packard senior VP of research and HP Labs director Dick Lampman; Sun Microsystems executive VP and chief technology officer Greg Papadopoulos; Intel senior VP and CTO Pat Gelsinger; and Palo Alto Research Center president and director Mark Bernstein--to look ahead, to identify the ways the computer industry is likely to change, or needs to change, during the next decade. If any single theme emerged, it's speed--and the desire for it. For these gentlemen and the computer industry in general, slowness stands in the way of greater future achievements. Microprocessor speeds are flattening after years of phenomenal gains. PCs can't find us the information we need fast enough. Supercomputer users thirst for faster "time to insight" from their complex machines. Meanwhile, the explosion of technology patents confounds companies, making it more challenging for them to assemble all the pieces they need to bring innovative products to market quickly. And America's universities attract fewer students interested in science and technology, as Asia and India shine in this area, a development that could slow U.S. competitiveness. For an in-depth look at the big changes afoot in computer design, the office of the future, the wired home, intellectual property, and education and globalization, read on. Just make it fast. What's Next For Silicon Chips? If there's a metaquestion dogging computer designers, it's how much longer the industry will keep churning out silicon-based machines that are twice as fast as last year's. The most common guess: About a dozen years. Chips' clock speeds already are increasing more slowly: 10% to 15% a year, versus 35% to 40% per year historically. Yet computer performance keeps nearly doubling each year, as Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, Intel, and Sun Microsystems make their products more specialized and combine more computing functions on a single piece of silicon. Even so, designers are running into engineering problems that rob performance as electronics shrink into the nano scale. "Frequencies will continue to go up, but nowhere near at the rate they have in the past," IBM's Horn says. "We're going to see a sea change in the way processors are designed." But what's the limit? The question has many practical implications. "We've been on a curve where you lead with your fastest microprocessor with the biggest cache," and you charge premium prices for those products, Sun's Papadopoulos says. "Now the world's starting to unravel." The semiconductor industry is building products with electronics just 65 billionths of a meter wide. The next two generations--45 nanometers and 32 nanometers, each about three years apart--look OK, Horn says. "It's pretty clear nothing's going to replace silicon in that time," he says. "You go one more cycle out and, I'll tell you, it's getting pretty dicey. The problem is, there's no good alternative." Carbon nanotubes, plastic semiconductors, and more esoteric areas of research, such as using the electronic spin of electrons or the quantum mechanical properties of atoms to perform computations, have all been posited as solutions. "All have some potential," Horn says, "but there's no clear-cut road map as a replacement for silicon." Others are more bullish. Nanotechnology won't knock out today's CMOS technology right away, says HP's Lampman, "but in the long term, it will be the dominant form of electronics." One big advantage would be lower-cost production compared with CMOS: A chip fabrication plant with all its equipment costs about $3 billion. PARC is researching "organic electronics"--using carbon-based materials instead of silicon to compute--in hopes that one day they can be cheaply stamped onto flexible rolls using common printing techniques. "The use of organics is going to have a radical impact," PARC director Bernstein says. As for today's technology, gains in the sophistication of software let programmers wring more performance from the specialized silicon chips that companies are turning out. "Programmability always rules," Papadopoulos says. "There's far more innovation happening in software than in hardware." The PC Versus The Personal Network On the other end of the computing spectrum is the old, not-always-so-reliable, PC. While the rarified end of the supercomputing sector heads toward the milestone of a petaflop machine capable of a quadrillion calculations a second, other engineers and scientists are trying to extract power from huge networks of cheap PCs. "My agenda isn't to be the first to a petaflop," Intel CTO Gelsinger says. "The agenda is supercomputing for the masses." At Microsoft, Gray talks about closing the "guru gap" between what the most advanced users can get out of Wintel systems and what everyone else can. Even Microsoft's and Intel's critics concede the PC isn't likely to budge from desktops soon. "The PC's going to be around for a long time," Papadopoulos says. Horn calls it a "platform that will be with us for the foreseeable future." However, there's a lot that needs to be addressed. In an era of rapidly multiplying E-documents, the hierarchical file system is falling down on the job. Apple Computer and Microsoft are putting research and development into new ways of pinpointing digital files that don't require wading through directories of folders. Microsoft and Intel are rethinking the PC's guts so its electronics and software are more aware of who's changing what. Ideas percolating in research labs could change the nature of office work, making the PC just one part of a floating "personal network" of information. "The PC represents an architectural point that's distinctly unnetworked." Papadopoulos says. "The question isn't whether I should have Google-like search on my PC." Rather, he says, it's how soon users can unhook themselves from their hard drives and take advantage of the the Internet's ubiquitous reach. Bill Gates first called that notion "information at your fingertips" in a 1990 speech at the Comdex trade show, and it's an increasingly popular one. "The nature of the work we're doing hasn't changed that much," PARC's Bernstein says. "We're still pounding our fingers on keyboards." PARC is researching computer displays that are large surfaces that groups of workers can share to call up new information by touching the screen. IP phones also will change social protocols at work--instead of picking up a receiver and dialing, we might say, "Phone Bill in Redmond." The notion of a corporate network could change, too, as information on people's PCs and PDAs melds into a work-life blur, Bernstein says. But different technical standards for computers, cars, and consumer electronics make it too hard to ferry those devices between work and home, he adds. PARC software, called Obje, can bridge standards among cell phones, laptops, PDAs, printers, set-top boxes, and video displays from different companies. At HP, engineers are working to bring to market another great hope for the office of the future: videoconferencing that works, Lampman says. Within a few years, HP plans to release a videoconferencing system that it has been developing with DreamWorks SKG, which features life-size images of people broadcast in high-definition video and multidimensional sound that doesn't ring like speakerphone gibberish when two people are talking, he says. DreamWorks' system "is the first one I've seen that makes you feel emotionally like you're in one room," Lampman says. "We've thrown HP tech teams on it to see how to commercialize the system and take some of the cost out." The Wired Home MAY Be More Entertaining Than You Think Tech companies throwing R&D dollars at your office agree where the money should go. That's not the case at home. "Where's the interface for information? Is it the TV set, the set-top box, the tablet computer, or the phone?" Bernstein asks. "The one that will win out is the one that's easiest for people to use." A good candidate: TV sets with touch screens and speech recognition, areas PARC is researching. Everybody agrees that games and other entertainment apps will lead the next wave of technology in our homes. They differ in how to get there. Intel's goal isn't to be first with a petaflop, Intel senior VP and CTO Pat Gelsinger says. Instead, the company's agenda is to deliver 'supercomputing for the masses.' Intel is building concept technology that aims to fuse the functions of the PC, digital video recorder, and game machine on a single versatile silicon chip, Gelsinger says. "It's very hard to tell where consumer electronics stop in the home and PCs start," he says. "We're trying to make it very hard to tell the difference." Gelsinger wants Intel to compete with PlayStation, Xbox, and TiVo, powering products that let consumers play games, record shows, and check their E-mail. "I'm going to take x86 [chip] and sell it into [consumer electronic] boxes," he says. HP is going the specialty route, licensing technology to Swiss chipmaker STMicroelectronics N.V. for a processor aimed at DVD players and digital TVs. "When you specialize, you can get a huge performance boost you can't [get] otherwise," Lampman says. "As the consumer-electronics world goes all-digital, getting the performance people want takes huge amounts of processing." But forget the notion of Internet-ready washing machines, refrigerators, and toasters that can chat among themselves in a network, IBM's Horn adds. "It's more the high-tech wacko in my laboratory who would want to do that than John Q. Public." Intellectual Property: Build Or Buy? Where's the next great idea in computing going to come from? Increasingly, companies are betting it will be outside their walls. As the number of technology patents explodes, and information technologies find new applications outside the industries for which they were invented, it's becoming much harder for any one company to control all the pieces it needs to bring great products to market. "As a consequence of the breadth of technology, it's very unlikely you'll have all the pieces you need to succeed," PARC's Bernstein says. "Barriers have dropped tremendously." That's the reason Microsoft restructured its licensing business this year--to gain greater freedom to license the intellectual property it needs to build its products in portfolios, instead of piece by piece. And HP has increased the number of patents it has applied for in the last five years and become more aggressive in protecting its intellectual property, Lampman says. Four years ago, the company made decisions similar to the ones Microsoft is making now, he says, and this year's revenue from intellectual-property licensing should triple compared to last year. Fragmentation and faster tech transfer mean hardware, software, and services will come to market faster, IBM's Horn says. "Innovation in our world is undergoing a fundamental shift." Earlier this month, IBM tapped two of its most senior executives, John Kelly and Irving Wladawsky-Berger, to head an intellectual-property group. IBM earned about $1 billion in profit last year from licensing its intellectual property. The Education Of The Post-Modern Programmer So who's going to build the next wave of great products? Many researchers are afraid that a shortage of technical talent will hurt U.S. competitiveness. "American education is doing an extremely bad job," says Microsoft's Gray, who served on the President's IT Advisory Committee during the Clinton administration. Enrollment in college science and engineering programs has been dropping since the '80s, and participation by women is falling off even more rapidly, to about 15% of students. "This is an education catastrophe," he says. The United States spends about as much per capita on education as other countries, Gray says, but low pay and lack of respect for teachers isn't preparing kids to choose technical fields--a decision that's often made by the time they're in fourth grade. "Many students aren't excited about science and technology. Play it forward, and the high-paying jobs are in areas where people have some special expertise." Companies are outsourcing tech work to Asia, India, and Russia because the workforce isn't just cheaper--it's often more talented, Gray says. Case in point: HP's lab in Bangalore, India, isn't just a money saver, Lampman says. "It's helping HP grow. That's the mission of that lab," he says. That's not to say training more computer scientists at home isn't important. "The U.S. has benefited enormously from IT investment, in terms of balance of trade and jobs," he says. "I'm concerned we've lost that." IBM is going one step further, trying to influence university curriculum. This fall, the Haas Business School at the University of California, Berkeley, is offering the first class in a discipline Horn calls "services science." It's being taught by business professor and noted R&D expert Hank Chesbrough and IBM researcher Jim Spohrer. Boundaries between B-schools and computer-science programs need to fall to give students 21st century skills, Horn says. "There wasn't even a computer science course until the 1940s," when IBM and Columbia University teamed up to teach one, he says. "I'm hopeful this could be something like that." If the tech industry wants to keep its engines of innovation churning, it's going to need more of this sort of fuel. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 27 15:13:01 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 11:13:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Paul Kurtz: Can the Sciences Help Us to Make Wise Ethical Judgments? Message-ID: Paul Kurtz: Can the Sciences Help Us to Make Wise Ethical Judgments? http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-09/scientific-ethics.html Scientific knowledge has a vital, if limited, role to play in shaping our moral values and helping us to frame wiser judgments. Ethical values are natural and open to examination in the light of evidence and reason. I. Can science and reason be used to develop ethical judgments? Many theists claim that without religious foundations, "anything goes," and social chaos will ensue. Scientific naturalists believe that secular societies already have developed responsible ethical norms and that science and reason have helped us to solve moral dilemmas. How and in what sense this occurs are vital issues that need to be discussed in contemporary society, for this may very well be the hottest issue of the twenty-first century. Dramatic breakthroughs on the frontiers of science provide new powers to humans, but they also pose perplexing moral quandaries. Should we use or limit these scientific discoveries, such as the cloning of humans? Much of this research is banned in the United States and restricted in Canada. Should scientists be permitted to reproduce humans by cloning (as we now do with animals), or is this too dangerous? Should we be allowed to make "designer babies?" Many theologians and politicians are horrified by this; many scientists and philosophers believe that it is not only inevitable but justifiable under certain conditions. There were loud cries against in vitro fertilization, or artificial insemination, only two generations ago, but the procedure proved to be a great boon to childless couples. Many religious conservatives are opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on fetal tissues, because they think that "ensoulment" occurs with the first division of cells. Scientists are appalled by this censorship of scientific research, since the research has the potential to cure many illnesses; they believe those who oppose it have ignored the welfare of countless numbers of human beings. There are other equally controversial issues on the frontiers of science: Organ transplants-who should get them and why? Is the use of animal organs to supply parts for human bodies wrong? Is transhumanism reforming what it means to be human? How shall we control AIDS-is it wicked to use condoms, as some religious conservatives think, or should this be a high priority in Africa and elsewhere? Does global warming mean we need a radical transformation of industry in affluent countries? Is homosexuality genetic, and if so, is the denial of same-sex marriage morally wrong? How can we decide such questions? What criteria may we draw upon? II. Many adhere today to the view that ethical choices are merely relativistic and subjective, expressing tastes; and you cannot disputes tastes (de gustibus non disputandum est). If they are emotive at root, no set of values is better than any other. If there is a conflict, then the best option is to persuade others to accept our moral attitudes, to convert them to our moral feelings, or, if this fails, to resort to force. Classical skeptics denied the validity of all knowledge, including ethical knowledge. The logical positivists earlier in the twentieth century made a distinction between fact, the appropriate realm of science, and value, the realm of expressive discourse and imperatives, claiming that though we can resolve descriptive and theoretical questions by using the methods of science, we cannot use science to adjudicate moral disputes. Most recently, postmodernists, following the German philosopher Heidegger and his French followers, have gone further in their skepticism, denying that there is any special validity to humanistic ethics or indeed to science itself. They say that science is merely one mythological construct among others. They insist that there are no objective epistemological standards; that gender, race, class, or cultural biases likewise infect our ethical programs and any narratives of social emancipation that we may propose. Who is to say that one normative viewpoint is any better than any other, they demand. Thus have many disciples of multicultural relativism and subjectivism often given up in despair, becoming nihilists or cynics. Interestingly, most of these well-intentioned folk hold passionate moral and political convictions, but when pushed to the wall, will they concede that their own epistemological and moral recommendations likewise express only their own personal preferences? The problem with this position is apparent, for it is impaled on one horn of a dilemma, and the consequence of this option is difficult to accept. If it is the case that there are no ethical standards, then who can say that the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan, Cambodian, or Armenian genocides are evil? Is it only a question of taste that divides sadists and masochists on one side from all the rest on the other? Are slavery, the repression of women, the degradation of the environment by profit-hungry corporations, or the killing of handicapped people morally impermissible, if there are no reliable normative standards? If we accept cultural relativity as our guide, then we have no grounds to object to Muslim law (sharia), which condones the stoning to death of adulteresses. III. What is the position of those who wish to draw upon science and reason to formulate ethical judgment? Is it possible to bridge the gap and recognize that values are relative to human interests yet allow that they are open to some objective criticisms? I submit that it is, and that upon reflection, most educated people would accept them. I choose to call this third position "objective relativism" or "objective contextualism"; namely, values are related to human interests, needs, desires, and passions-whether individual or socio-cultural-but they are nonetheless open to scientific evaluation. By this, I mean a form of reflective intelligence that applies to questions of principles and values and that is open to modification of them in the light of criticism. In other words, there is a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which bears fruit, and which, if eaten and digested, can impart to us moral knowledge and wisdom. In what sense can scientific inquiry help us to make moral choices? My answer to that is it does so all the time. This is especially the case with the applied sciences: medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacology, psychiatry, and social psychology; and also in the policy sciences: economics, education, political science; and such interdisciplinary fields as criminology, gerontology, etc. Modern society could not function without the advice drawn from these fields of knowledge, which make evaluative judgments and recommend prescriptions. They advise what we ought to do on a contextual basis. Nonetheless, there are the skeptical critics of this position, who deny that science per se can help us or that naturalistic ethics is possible. I think that those critics are likewise mistaken and that naturalism is directly relevant to ethics. My thesis is that an increase in knowledge can help us to make wiser decisions. By knowledge, I do not refer simply to philosophical analysis but scientific evidence. It would answer both the religionist, who insists that you cannot be moral unless you are religious, and the subjectivist, who denies there is any such thing as ethical knowledge or wisdom. Before I outline this position, let me concede that the skeptical philosophical objections to deriving ethics from science have some merit. Basically, what are they? The critics assert that we cannot deduce ethics from science, i.e., what ought to be the case from what is the case. A whole series of philosophers from David Hume to the emotivists have pointed out this fallacy. G.E. Moore, at the beginning of the twentieth century, characterized this as "the naturalistic fallacy" [[40]1] (mistakenly, I think). But they are essentially correct. The fact that science discovers that something is the case factually does not make it ipso facto good or right. To illustrate: (a) Charles Darwin noted the role of natural selection and the struggle for survival as key ingredients in the evolution of species. Should we conclude, therefore, as Herbert Spencer did, that laissez-faire doctrines ought to apply, that we ought to allow nature to take its course and not help the handicapped or the poorer classes? (b) Eugenicists concluded earlier in the century that some people are brighter and more talented than others. Does this justify an elitist hierarchical society in which only the best rule or eugenic methods of reproduction be followed? This was widely held by many liberals until the fascists began applying it in Germany with dire consequences. There have been abundant illustrations of pseudoscientific theories-monocausal theories of human behavior that were hailed as "scientific"-that have been applied with disastrous results. Examples: (a) The racial theories of Chamberlain and Gobineau alleging Aryan superiority led to genocide by the Nazis. (b) Many racists today point to IQ to justify a menial role for blacks in society and their opposition to affirmative action. (c) The dialectical interpretation of history was taken as "scientific" by Marxists and used to justify class warfare. (d) Environmentalists decried genetics as "racist" and thought that changes in species should only be induced by modifications of the environment. Thus, one has to be cautious about applying the latest scientific fad to social policy. We ought not to consider scientific specialists to be especially gifted or possessed with ethical knowledge nor empower them to apply this knowledge to society-as B.F. Skinner in Walden II and other utopianists have attempted to do. Neither scientist-kings nor philosopher-kings should be entrusted to design a better world. We have learned the risks and dangers of abandoning democracy to those wishing to create a Brave New World. Alas, all humans-including scientists-are fallible, and excessive power may corrupt human judgment. Given these caveats, I nevertheless hold that scientific knowledge has a vital, if limited, role to play in shaping our moral values and helping us to frame wiser judgments of practice--surely more, I would add, than our current reliance on theologians, politicians, military pundits, corporate CEOs, and celebrities! IV. How and in what sense can scientific inquiry help us? I wish to present a modified form of naturalistic ethics. By this, I mean that ethical values are natural; they grow out of and fulfill human purposes, interests, desires, and needs. They are forms of preferential behavior evinced in human life. "Good," "bad," "right," and "wrong" relate to sentient beings, whether human or otherwise. These values do not reside in a far-off heaven, nor are they deeply embedded in the hidden recesses of reality; they are empirical phenomena. The principle of naturalism is based on a key methodological criterion: We ought to consider our moral principles and values, like other beliefs, open to examination in the light of evidence and reason and hence amenable to modification. We are all born into a sociocultural context; and we imbibe the values passed on to us, inculcated by our peers, parents, teachers, leaders, and colleagues in the community. I submit that ethical values should be amenable to inquiry. We need to ask, are they reliable? How do they stack up comparatively? Have they been tested in practice? Are they consistent? Many people seek to protect them as inviolable truths, immune to inquiry. This is particularly true of transcendental values based on religious faith and supported by custom and tradition. In this sense, ethical inquiry is similar to other forms of scientific inquiry. We should not presuppose that what we have inherited is true and beyond question. But where do we begin our inquiry? My response is, in the midst of life itself, focused on the practical problems, the concrete dilemmas, and contextual quandaries that we confront. Let me illustrate by refer to three dilemmas. I do so not in order to solve them but to point out a method of inquiry in ethics. First, should we exact the death penalty for people convicted of murder? The United States is the only major democracy that still demands capital punishment. What is the argument for the death penalty? It rests on two basic premises: (a) A factual question is at issue: capital punishment is effective in deterring crime, especially murder; and (b) the principle of justice that applies is retributive. As the Old Testament adage reads, "Whatever hurt is done, you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. . . ." [[41]2] The first factual premise can be resolved by sociological studies, by comparing the incidence of murder in those states and nations that have the death penalty in force and those that do not and by states and nations before and after the enactment or abrogation of the death penalty. We ask, has there been an increase or a decrease in murder? If, as a matter of fact, the death penalty does not restrain or inhibit murder, would a person still hold his view that the death penalty ought to be retained? The evidence suggests that the death penalty does not to any significant extent reduce the murder rate, especially since most acts of murder are not deliberate but due to passion or are an unexpected result of another crime, such as robbery. Thus, if one bases his or her belief in capital punishment primarily on the deterrence factor, and it does not deter, would one change one's belief? The same consideration should apply to those who are opposed to the death penalty: Would they change their belief if they thought it would deter excessive murder rates? These are empirical questions at issue. And the test of a policy are its consequences in the real world. Does it achieve what it sets out to do? There are, of course, other factual considerations, such as: Are many innocent people convicted of crimes they did not commit (as was recently concluded in the State of Illinois)? Is capital punishment unfairly applied primarily to minorities? This points to the fact that belief in capital punishment is, to some extent, a function of scientific knowledge concerning the facts of the case. This often means that such measures should not be left to politicians or jurors alone to decide; the scientific facts of the case are directly relevant. The second moral principle of retributive justice is far more difficult to deal with, for this may be rooted in religious conviction or in a deep-seated tribal sense of retaliation. If you injure my kin, it is said, I can injure yours; and this is not purely a factual issue. There are other principles of justice that are immediately thrown into consideration. Those opposed to the death penalty say that society "should set a humane tone and not itself resort to killing." Or again, the purpose of justice should be to protect the community from future crimes, and alternative forms of punishment, perhaps lifetime imprisonment without the right of parole, might suffice to deter crime. Still another principle of justice is relevant: Should we attempt, where possible, to rehabilitate the offender? All of the above principles are open to debate. The point is, we should not block inquiry; we should not say that some moral principles are beyond any kind of re-evaluation or modification. Here, a process of deliberation enters in, and a kind of moral knowledge emerges about what is comparatively the best policy to adopt. Another example of the methods of resolving moral disputes is the argument for assisted suicide in terminal cases, in which people are suffering intolerable pain. This has become a central issue in the field of medical ethics, where medical science is able to keep people alive who might normally die. I first saw the emergence of this field thirty years ago, when I sponsored a conference in biomedical ethics at my university and could find very few, if any, scholars or scientists who had thought about the questions or were qualified experts. Today, it is an essential area in medicine. The doctor is no longer taken as a patriarchal figure. His or her judgments need to be critically examined, and others within the community, especially patients, need to be consulted. There are here, of course, many factual questions at issue: Is the illness genuinely terminal? Is there great suffering? Is the patient competent in expressing his or her long-standing convictions regarding his or her right to die with dignity? Are there medical and legal safeguards to protect this system against abuse? Our decision depends on several further ethical principles: (a) the informed consent of patients in deciding whether they wish treatment to continue; (b) the right of privacy, including the right of individuals to have control of their own bodies and health; and (c) the criterion of the quality of life. One problem we encounter in this area is the role, again, of transcendental principles. Some people insist, "God alone should decide life-and-death questions, not humans." This principle, when invoked, is beyond examination, and for many people it is final. Passive euthanasia means that we will not use extraordinary methods to keep a person alive, where there is a longstanding intent expressed in a living will not to do so. Active euthanasia will, under certain conditions, allow the patient, in consultation with his physician, to hasten the dying process (as practiced in Oregon and the Netherlands). The point is, there is an interweaving of factual considerations with ethical principles, and these may be modified in the light of inquiry, by comparing alternatives and examining consequences in each concrete case. I wish to illustrate this process again by referring to another issue that is hotly debated today: Should all cloning research be banned? The Canadian legislature, in March 2004, passed legislation that will put severe restrictions on such scientific research. The bill is called "An Act Respecting Assisted Human Reproduction" (known as C-56), and it makes it a criminal offense to engage in therapeutic cloning, to maintain an embryo outside a woman's body for more than fourteen days, to genetically manipulate embryos, to choose the gender of offspring, to sell human eggs and sperm, or to engage in commercial surrogacy. It also requires that in vitro embryos be created only for the purpose of creating human beings or for improving assisted human-reproductive procedures. Similar legislation was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and is before the Senate. It is still being heatedly debated. It includes the prohibition of reproductive cloning as well as therapeutic stem-cell research. Two arguments against reproductive cloning are as follows: (a) It may be unsafe (at the present stage of medical technology) and infants born may be defective. This factual objection has some merit. (b) There is also a moral objection saying that we should not seek to design children. Yet we do so all the time, with artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and surrogate motherhood. We already are involved in "designer-baby" technology, with amniocentesis, pre-implantation, genetic testing, and chorionic villus sampling (the avoiding of unwanted genes by aborting fetuses and implanting desirable embryos). If it were to become safe, would reproductive cloning become permissible? I can think of situations where we might find it acceptable-for example, if couples are unable to conceive by normal methods. It is the second area I mentioned above that is especially telling-the opposition to any forms of embryonic stem-cell research. Proponents maintain that this line of research may lead to enormous benefits by curing a wide range of diseases such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, or juvenile diabetes. Adult stem cells are now being used, but embryonic stem cells may provide important new materials. The criterion here is consequential: that positive outcomes may result. Opponents maintain that this type of research is "immoral" because it is tampering with human persons possessed of souls. Under this interpretation, "ensoulment" occurs at the moment of conception. This is said to apply to embryos, many of which, however, are products of miscarriages or abortions. Does it also apply once the division of stem cells occurs? Surely a small collection of cells, which is called a blastocyst, is not a person, a sentient being, or a moral agent prior to implantation. Leon Kass, chair of President Bush's Council on Bioethics, believes that human life cannot be treated as a commodity and it is evil to manufacture life. He maintains that all human life, including a cloned embryo, has the same moral status and dignity as a person from the moment of conception. This controversy pits two opposing moral claims: (a) the view that stem-cell research may be beneficent because of its possible contributions to human health (i.e., it might eliminate debilitating diseases) versus (b) an ethic of revulsion against tampering with natural reproductive processes. At issue here are the questions of whether ensoulment makes any sense in biology and whether personhood can be said to have begun at such an early stage, basically a transcendental claim that naturalists object to on empirical grounds. These arguments are familiar in the abortion debate; it would be unfortunate if they could be used to censor scientific stem-cell research. This issue is especially relevant today, for transhumanists say that we are discovering new powers every day that modify human nature, enhance human capacities, and extend life spans. We may be able to extend memory and increase human perception and intelligence dramatically by silicon implants. Traditionalists recoil in horror, saying that post-humanists would have us transgress human nature. We would become cyborgs. But we already are, to some extent: we wear false teeth, eyeglasses, and hearing aids; we have hair grafts, pacemakers, organ transplants, artificial limbs, and sex-change/sexual reassignment operations and injections; we use Viagra to enhance sexual potency or mega-vitamins and hormone therapy. Why not go further? Each advance raises ethical issues: Do we have the reproductive freedom and responsibility to design our children by knowing possible genetic disorders and correcting them before reproduction or birth? V. This leads to an important distinction between two kinds of values within human experience. Let me suggest two possible sources: (a) values rooted in unexamined feelings, faith, custom, or authority, held as deep-seated convictions beyond question, and (b) values that are influenced by cognition and informed by rational inquiry. Naturalists say that scientific inquiry enables us to revise our values, if need be, and to develop, where appropriate, new ones. We already possess a body of prescriptive judgments that have been tested in practice in the applied sciences of medicine, psychiatry, engineering, educational counseling, and other fields. Similarly, I submit that there is a body of prescriptive ethical judgments that has been tested in practice and that constitutes normative knowledge; and new normative prescriptions are introduced all the time as the sciences progress. The question is thus raised, what criteria should we use to make ethical choices? This issue is especially pertinent today for those living in pluralistic societies such as ours, where there is diversity of values and principles. In formulating ethical judgments, we need to refer to what I have called a "valuational base." [[42]3] Packed into this referent are the pre-existing de facto values and principles that we are committed to; but we also need to consider empirical data, means-ends relationships, causal knowledge, and the consequences of various courses of action. It is inquiry that is the instrument by which we decide what we ought to do and that we should develop in the young. We need to focus on moral education for children; we wish to structure positive traits of character and also the capacity for making reflective decisions. There are no easy recipes or simple formulae that we can appeal to, telling us what we ought to do in every case. There are, however, what W.D. Ross called prima facie general principles of right conduct, the common moral decencies, a list of virtues, precepts, and prescriptions, ethical excellences, obligations, and responsibilities, which are intrinsic to our social roles. But how they work out in practice depends on the context at hand, and the most reliable guide for mature persons is cognitive inquiry and deliberation. Conservative theists have often objected to this approach to morality as dangerous, given to "debauchery" and "immorality." Here, there is a contrast between two different senses of morality: (a) the obedience/authoritarian model, in which humans are expected to follow moral absolutes derived from ancient creeds, and (b) the encouragement of moral growth, implying that there are within the human species potential moral tendencies and cognitive capacities that can help us to frame judgments. For a naturalistic approach, in the last analysis, ethics is a product of a long evolutionary process. Evolutionary psychology has pointed out that moral rules have enabled human communities to adapt to threats to their survival. This Darwinian interpretation implies a biological basis for reciprocal behavior- epigenetic rules-according to E.O. Wilson (1998). [[43]4] The social groups that possessed these rules transmitted them to their offspring. Such moral behavior provides a selective advantage. There is accordingly an inward propensity for moral behavior, moral sentiments, empathy, and altruism within the species. This does not deny that there are at the same time impulses for selfish and aggressive tendencies. It is a mistake, however, to read in a doctrine of "original sin" and to say that human beings are by nature sinful and corrupt. I grant that there are individuals who lack moral empathy; they are morally handicapped. Some may even be sociopaths. The salient point is that there are genetic potentialities for good and evil; but how they work out and whether beneficent behavior prevails is dependent on cultural conditions. Both our genes (genetics) and memes (social patterns of enculturation) are factors that determine how and why we behave the way we do. We cannot simply deduce from the evolutionary process what we ought to do. What we do depends in part upon the choices we make. Thus, we still have some capacity for free choice. Though we are conditioned by environmental and biogenetic determinants, we are still capable of cognitive processes of selection, and rationality and intentionality play a causative role. (Note: There is a considerable scientific literature that supports this evolutionary view. See Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves [New York: Viking, 2003] and Darwin's Dangerous Idea [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995]; Brian Skyrm, Evolution of the Social Contract [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], Robert Wright, The Moral Animal [New York: Pantheon Books, 1994] and Nonzero [New York: Vintage Books, 2001], Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue [New York: Viking, 1996], and Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others [Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998].) Ethical precepts need not be based upon transcendental grounds or dependent upon religious faith. Undoubtedly, the belief that they are sacred may strengthen moral duties for many persons, but it is not necessary for everyone. I submit that it is time for scientists to recognize that they have an opportunity to contribute to naturalistic ethics. We stand at an interesting time in human history. We have great power to ameliorate the human condition. Biogenetic engineering, nanotechnology, and space research open new opportunities for humankind to create a better world. Yet there are those today who wish to abandon human reason and freedom and return to mythological legends of our premodern existence, including their impulses of aggres- sion and self-righteous vengeance. I submit that the Enlightenment is a beacon whose promise has not been fulfilled and that humankind needs to accept the responsibility for its own future. Conclusion A caveat is in order. In the last analysis, some degree of skepticism is a necessary antidote to all forms of moral dogmatism. We are continually surrounded by self-righteous moralists who claim that they have the Absolute Truth, Moral Virtue, or Piety or know the secret path to salvation and wish to impose their convictions on all others. They are puffed up with an inflated sense of their own rectitude as they rail against unbenighted immoral sinners who lack their moral faith. These moral zealots are willing to repress or even sacrifice anyone who stands in their way. They have in the past unleashed conquering armies in the name of God, the Dialectic, Racial Superiority, Posterity, or Imperial Design. Skepticism needs to be applied not only to religious and paranormal fantasies but to other forms of moral and political illusions. These dogmas become especially dangerous when they are appealed to in order to legislate morality and are used by powerful social institutions, such as a state or church or corporation, to enforce a particular brand of moral virtue. Hell hath no fury like the self-righteous moral fanatic scorned. The best antidote for this is some skepticism and a willingness to engage in ethical inquiry, not only about others' moral zeal, but about our own, especially if we are tempted to translate the results of our own ethical inquiries into commandments. The epistemological theory that I propose is based upon methodological principles of skeptical scientific inquiry, and it has important moral implications. For in recognizing our own fallibility, we thereby can learn to tolerate other human beings and to appreciate their diversity and the plurality of lifestyles. If we are prepared to engage in cooperative ethical inquiry, then perhaps we are better prepared to allow other individuals and groups some measure of liberty to pursue their own preferred lifestyles. If we are able to live and let live, then this can best be achieved in a free and open democratic society. Where we differ, we should try to negotiate our divergent views and perhaps reach common ground; and if this is impractical, we should at least attempt to compromise for the sake of our common interests. The method of ethical inquiry requires some intelligent and informed examination of our own values as well as the values of others. Here we can attempt to modify attitudes by an appeal to cognitive beliefs and to reconstruct them by an examination of the relevant scientific evidence. Such a give-and-take of constructive criticism is essential for a harmonious society. In learning to appreciate different conceptions of the good life, we are able to expand our own dimensions of moral awareness; and this is more apt to lead to a peaceful world. By this, I surely do not mean to imply that anything and everything can or should be tolerated or that one thing is as good as the next. We should be prepared to criticize moral nonsense parading as virtue. We should not tolerate the intolerable. We have a right to strongly object, if need be, to those values or practices that we think are based on miscalculation, misconception, or that are patently false or harmful. Nonetheless, we might live in a better world if inquiry were to replace faith; deliberation, passionate commitment; and education and persuasion, force and war. We should be aware of the powers of intelligent behavior, but also of the limitations of the human animal and of the need to mitigate the cold, indifferent intellect with the compassionate and empathic heart. Thus, I conclude that within the ethical life, we are capable of developing a body of melioristic principles and values and a method of coping with problems intelligently. When our ethical judgments are based on rational and scientific inquiry, they are more apt to express the highest reaches of excellence and nobility and of civilized human conduct. We are in sore need of that today. Notes 1. G.E. Moore. Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). 2. See Exodus 21. 3. Kurtz, Paul (ed.). The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge (Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 1992), chapter 9. 4. Wilson, E.O. Consilience (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998). About the Author Paul Kurtz is a professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and chairman of the Center for Inquiry - Transnational. This article is a portion of the keynote address delivered at the conference on "Science and Ethics" sponsored by the Center for Inquiry in Toronto, Ontario, on May 13, 2004. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Oct 27 19:24:09 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 12:24:09 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] death penalty In-Reply-To: <200410271800.i9RI0b022303@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041027192409.10120.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> >>If, as a matter of fact, the death penalty does not restrain or inhibit murder, would a person still hold his view that the death penalty ought to be retained?<< --I think that fact would be suppressed quite vigorously, since it would complicate moral certainty. The death penalty FEELS right, to people who were raised with a certain king of "tough love". It FEELS wrong to others. Whether it works or not isn't the issue in people's minds, and those in favor of capital punishment will deny facts if facts say it doesn't work. Especially those whose faith has gotten wrapped up with politics. It's hard to admit you made a moral mistake in God's name, and it FEELS wrong to back down from an absolute position once you've sacrificed anything substantial for it. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Oct 27 20:02:23 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 13:02:23 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] death penalty Message-ID: <01C4BC25.33EBCDC0.shovland@mindspring.com> Not too many years ago in America executions (and lynchings) were conducted as festivals, which means that our dark side like to see people die violently. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 12:24 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] death penalty >>If, as a matter of fact, the death penalty does not restrain or inhibit murder, would a person still hold his view that the death penalty ought to be retained?<< --I think that fact would be suppressed quite vigorously, since it would complicate moral certainty. The death penalty FEELS right, to people who were raised with a certain king of "tough love". It FEELS wrong to others. Whether it works or not isn't the issue in people's minds, and those in favor of capital punishment will deny facts if facts say it doesn't work. Especially those whose faith has gotten wrapped up with politics. It's hard to admit you made a moral mistake in God's name, and it FEELS wrong to back down from an absolute position once you've sacrificed anything substantial for it. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 27 21:13:25 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:13:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Nature: Biologists come close to cloning primates Message-ID: Biologists come close to cloning primates http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041018/full/041018-12.html [53]Helen Pearson Cloned monkey embryos transferred into mothers. US biologists have created cloned monkey embryos, and successfully transferred them into monkey mothers. Although none of the resulting pregnancies lasted more than a month, this is by far the closest scientists have come to cloning a primate. The study was unveiled yesterday by reproductive biologist Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Philadelphia. Schatten's group copied a technique used earlier this year to clone a human embryo and extract embryonic stem cells. If researchers are able to repeat this process in monkeys, it might help them to refine the tricky technique without experimenting on human eggs and embryos, which are very difficult to obtain and raise a host of ethical objections. This in turn might help to resolve whether human embryonic stem cells, which can grow into a variety of tissues, will prove useful in medicine. Cross-pollination Previously, Schatten and his colleagues had struggled to create healthy monkey embryos by cloning, which involves removing the DNA-containing nucleus from an adult cell and inserting it into an egg stripped of its own nucleus. In a 2003 study published in Science, Schatten suggested that extracting the nucleus from a monkey egg also robs it of two proteins essential for survival^[54]1. He found that all the resulting embryos had fatal chromosomal defects, and speculated that cloning any primate, including humans, might be impossible. That view proved false in February this year, when scientists from South Korea announced in Science that they had successfully cloned human embryos, and used them to grow embryonic stem cells capable of morphing into numerous different tissue types^[55]2. One aim of such research is to grow replacement tissues to fight human disease. In the Korean work, the cloned human embryos were allowed to divide in culture for just five or six days before being terminated. But, by adopting the Koreans' technique, Schatten's team made 135 cloned monkey embryos and transferred them into 25 mothers. The team experimented with transferring the nuclei from skin cells and from cumulus cells, which are found in the ovary. Why does it work? Schatten says he is not yet sure why the Korean method is so successful. Rather than sucking the nucleus out of the recipient eggs, the technique involves gently squeezing it out. This may remove less of the cell's cytoplasm and leave more of the essential molecules needed by the egg to direct embryo development; or it may simply cause less damage to the eggs. None of the cloned monkey embryos resulted in a pregnancy that lasted more than a month. But Schatten says it is too early to say whether cloned monkeys will ever be born; it may just take more attempts. It is also impossible, he says, to use these results to predict whether a cloned human baby could survive long in development. Schatten adds that his preliminary attempts to make embryonic stem cells from cloned monkey embryos failed. But at least his study confirms that the Korean cloning method works, something that has been difficult to prove because very few research groups work in such areas. "It shows that at least part of the technique is reproducible," he says. References 1. Simerly C., et al. Science, 300. 297 (2003). | [57]Article | [58]PubMed | [59]ISI | 2. Hwang W. S., et al. Science, 303. 1669 - 1674 (2004). | [60]Article | [61]PubMed | [62]ISI | [63]ChemPort | relateds [70]UN to debate human cloning 14 October 2004 [71]Cloned human embryos yield stem cells 12 February 2004 [72]Korea's stem-cell stars dogged by suspicion of ethical breach 06 May 2004 [73]Stem-cell research: Crunch time for Korea's cloners 06 May 2004 [74]Human clones doomed? 11 April 2003 [75]Silence of the clones 11 March 2003 References 53. http://www.nature.com/news/about/aboutus.html#Pearson 54. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041018/full/041018-12.html#B1 55. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041018/full/041018-12.html#B2 56. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041018/full/041018-12.html#top 57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.1082091 58. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=npg&cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12690191&dopt=Abstract 70. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041011/full/041011-10.html 71. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040209/full/040209-12.html 72. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040503/full/429003a.html 73. http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040503/full/429012a.html 74. http://www.nature.com/news/2003/030407/full/030407-12.html 75. http://www.nature.com/news/2003/030310/full/030310-2.html From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 27 21:14:45 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:14:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Experts fear escape of 1918 flu from lab Message-ID: Experts fear escape of 1918 flu from lab | New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99996554 10:33 21 October 04 The 1918 flu virus spread across the world in three months and killed at least 40 million people. If it escaped from a lab today, the death toll could be far higher. "The potential implications of an infected lab worker - and spread beyond the lab - are terrifying," says D. A. Henderson of the University of Pittsburgh, a leading biosecurity expert. Yet despite the danger, researchers in the US are working with reconstructed versions of the virus at less than the maximum level of containment. Many other experts are worried about the risks. "All the virologists I have spoken to have concerns," says Ingegerd Kallings of the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control in Stockholm, who helped set laboratory safety standards for the World Health Organization. Work on the 1918 flu virus is not the only worry. Some experiments with bird flu have also been criticised as dangerous (New Scientist print edition, 28 February 2004). Kallings and others are calling for international discussions to resolve the issues related to such work. "It is time for influenza scientists to find a consensus on containment," she says. John MacKenzie of the University of Queensland in Australia, who investigated how the SARS virus escaped from high-level containment labs in east Asia on three occasions after lab workers became infected, agrees. "A meeting would be beneficial." Gene sequencing The researchers working on the 1918 virus say their work is vital to understand what changes make flu viruses dangerous. So far five of the 1918 flu virus's eight genes have been sequenced, using fragments retrieved from victims of the pandemic. Several teams have added one or more of these genes to modern flu viruses, or plan to - in effect partially recreating the long-vanished pandemic virus. The latest work was done by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His team showed that adding the 1918 gene for the surface protein haemagglutinin to modern viruses made them far deadlier to mice. The researchers also found that people born after 1918 have little or no immunity. The team started the work at the highest level of containment, BSL-4, at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. Then they decided the viruses were safe enough to handle at the next level down, and did the rest of the work across the border in a BSL-3Ag lab in Madison. The main difference between BSL-4 and BSL-3Ag is that precautions to ensure staff do not get infected are less stringent: while BSL-4 involves wearing fully enclosed body suits, those working at BSL-3Ag labs typically have half-suits. Kawaoka told New Scientist that the decision to move down to BSL-3Ag was taken only after experiments at BSL-4 showed that giving mice the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) in advance prevented them getting sick. This means, he says, that if all lab workers take oseltamivir "they cannot become infected". Contradictory results Yet this assumes that the mouse results apply to humans. And the findings have not been published. In similar experiments, Terrence Tumpey's team at the US Department of Agriculture's poultry research lab in Athens, Georgia, got quite different results: they found that mice given oseltamivir still got sick and 1 in 10 died. It is not clear why Kawaoka's mice fared better. What is more, all the safety precautions are aimed at preventing escape, not dealing with it should it occur. If any of Kawaoka's lab workers are exposed to the virus despite all the precautions, and become infected despite taking oseltamivir, the consequences could be disastrous. "I experienced disbelief...regarding the decision to relocate the reconstructed 1918 influenza strain from a BSL-4 facility to a BSL-3 facility, based on its susceptibility to antiviral medication," Ronald Voorhees, chief medical officer at the New Mexico Department of Health, wrote on ProMED-mail, an infectious diseases mailing list. Yet Kawaoka's decision does comply with the US National Institutes of Health guidelines for BSL-3 agents: those causing "serious or lethal human disease for which preventive or therapeutic interventions may be [its italics] available". In fact, he is considered unusually cautious. "Kawaoka should be applauded for using BSL-4 at all," says Richard Webby, a flu researcher at St Jude's Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Exposing monkeys By contrast, the team in Georgia, the first to experiment with genetically engineered 1918 viruses, did all its work at BSL-3Ag. Meanwhile, Michael Katze at the University of Washington at Seattle is planning to expose monkeys to aerosols of 1918-type viruses at BSL-3, a step down from BSL-3Ag. The recent SARS escapes were from BSL-3 labs. "We would have to do any such work at BSL-4," says John Wood of the UK's National Institute for Biological Standards and Control. In the US, the differing standards applied by different groups are due to the fact that experiments on engineered viruses such as the 1918 flu are approved on a case-by-case basis by Institutional Biosafety Committees (IBCs), composed of local scientists and officials. Critics say these are free to interpret the official guidelines in a way that suits them. "There is no effective national system to ensure consistency, responsibility and good judgement in such research," says Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project, a biosecurity pressure group in Austin, Texas. In a review of IBCs published this month, he found that many would not provide minutes of recent meetings as required by law. He says the IBC that approved the planned 1918 flu study at the University of Washington considered only one scenario that could result in workers being exposed to airborne virus - the dropping of samples. Its solution: lab workers "will be trained to stop Debora MacKenzie ------ What sound does the liberal make? Mo__. What sound does the conservative make? Mo__. What sound does the cow make? Mo__. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 27 21:50:11 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:50:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] American Conservative: Endorsement Issue Message-ID: American Conservative: Endorsement Issue http://amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover.html et seq. 4.11.8 [I keep coming out as a paleo-conservative, even though I criticize their shortcomings regularly and am in fact a transhumanist and a secularist, have little feeling for tradition, and am a 21st century left-wing pluralist. The reason I come out as a paleo-con, I think, is because of my pluralism: I find no higher truth in politics and therefore favor a radically decentralized federalism, which is the scheme that allows voter to move to the states that give them *their own* optimal mix of taxes, benefits, and regulations. The average American moves every seven years, but since the national government collects most of the taxes, federalism is not allowed to work very well. I find very little national activity that cannot be handled at the state and local level, esp. since 85% of government activity is simply transfer. [I don't vote, on the principled grounds that taxeaters have a conflict of interest to vote for more tax dollars for themselves. Taxeaters include those who work for the government, like I do, as well as those who receive more in targeted government benefits than they pay back in taxes. But were I to vote, I'd vote for the Constitution Party, even though they are strongly Christian and want to ban abortion. Their platform, http://constitutionparty.org, refrains from demanding a Federal law against it. I am both anti-life and anti-choice: in my state, Maryland, pregnant female taxeaters--I exclude government workers here--should be required to get an abortion as a condition of remaining a taxeater.] [I'd support the Libertarian Party, on the grounds that I'd vote with Ron Paul more than any other member of the U.S. House of Representatives, except for their open-borders policy. [I do not fear Christians! I understand them. Nearly all of them want to be left alone by the government. I do not fear their unwillingness to leave the rest of us alone. That is a way out-of-date fear.] Unfortunately, this election does not offer traditional conservatives an easy or natural choice and has left our editors as split as our readership. In an effort to deepen our readers' and our own understanding of the options before us, we've asked several of our editors and contributors to make "the conservative case" for their favored candidate. Their pieces, plus Taki's column closing out this issue, constitute TAC's endorsement. --The Editors Coming Home by Patrick J. Buchanan In the fall of 2002, the editors of this magazine moved up its launch date to make the conservative case against invading Iraq. Such a war, we warned, on a country that did not attack us, did not threaten us, did not want war with us, and had no role in 9/11, would be "a tragedy and a disaster." Invade and we inherit our own West Bank of 23 million Iraqis, unite Islam against us, and incite imams from Morocco to Malaysia to preach jihad against America. So we wrote, again and again. In a 6,000-word article entitled "Whose War?" we warned President Bush that he was "being lured into a trap baited for him by neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations..." Everything we predicted has come to pass. Iraq is the worst strategic blunder in our lifetime. And for it, George W. Bush, his War Cabinet, and the neoconservatives who plotted and planned this war for a decade bear full responsibility. Should Bush lose on Nov. 2, it will be because he heeded their siren song--that the world was pining for American Empire; that "Big Government Conservatism" is a political philosophy, not an opportunistic sellout of principle; that free-trade globalism is the path to prosperity, not the serial killer of U.S. manufacturing; that amnesty for illegal aliens is compassionate conservatism, not an abdication of constitutional duty. Mr. Bush was led up the garden path. And the returns from his mid-life conversion to neoconservatism are now in: o A guerrilla war in Iraq is dividing and bleeding America with no end in sight. It carries the potential for chaos, civil war, and the dissolution of that country. o Balkanization of America and the looming bankruptcy of California as poverty and crime rates soar from an annual invasion of indigent illegals is forcing native-born Californians to flee the state for the first time since gold was found at Sutter's Mill. o A fiscal deficit of 4 percent of GDP and merchandise trade deficit of 6 percent of GDP have produced a falling dollar, the highest level of foreign indebtedness in U.S. history, and the loss of one of every six manufacturing jobs since Bush took office. If Bush loses, his conversion to neoconservatism, the Arian heresy of the American Right, will have killed his presidency. Yet, in the contest between Bush and Kerry, I am compelled to endorse the president of the United States. Why? Because, while Bush and Kerry are both wrong on Iraq, Sharon, NAFTA, the WTO, open borders, affirmative action, amnesty, free trade, foreign aid, and Big Government, Bush is right on taxes, judges, sovereignty, and values. Kerry is right on nothing. The only compelling argument for endorsing Kerry is to punish Bush for Iraq. But why should Kerry be rewarded? He voted to hand Bush a blank check for war. Though he calls Iraq a "colossal" error, "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," he has said he would--even had he known Saddam had no role in 9/11 and no WMD--vote the same way today. This is the Richard Perle position. Assuredly, a president who plunged us into an unnecessary and ruinous war must be held accountable. And if Bush loses, Iraq will have been his undoing. But a vote for Kerry is more than just a vote to punish Bush. It is a vote to punish America. For Kerry is a man who came home from Vietnam to slime the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and POWs he left behind as war criminals who engaged in serial atrocities with the full knowledge of their superior officers. His conduct was as treasonous as that of Jane Fonda and disqualifies him from ever being commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the United States. As senator, he voted to undermine the policy of Ronald Reagan that brought us victory in the Cold War. He has voted against almost every weapon in the U.S. arsenal. Though a Catholic who professes to believe life begins at conception, he backs abortion on demand. He has opposed the conservative judges Bush has named to the U.S. appellate courts. His plans for national health insurance and new spending would bankrupt America. He would raise taxes. He is a globalist and a multilateralist who would sign us on to the Kyoto Protocol and International Criminal Court. His stands on Iraq are about as coherent as a self-portrait by Jackson Pollock. With Kerry as president, William Rehnquist could be succeeded as chief justice by Hillary Clinton. Every associate justice Kerry named would be cut from the same bolt of cloth as Warren, Brennan, Douglas, Blackmun, and Ginsburg. Should Kerry win, the courts will remain a battering ram of social revolution and the conservative drive in Congress to restrict the jurisdiction of all federal courts, including the Supreme Court, will die an early death. I cannot endorse the candidate of Michael Moore, George Soros, and Barbra Streisand, nor endorse a course of action that would put this political windsurfer into the presidency, no matter how deep our disagreement with the fiscal, foreign, immigration, and trade policies of George W. Bush. As Barry Goldwater said in 1960, in urging conservatives to set aside their grievances and unite behind the establishment party of Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and Lodge, the Republican Party is our home. It is our only hope. If an authentic conservatism rooted in the values of faith, family, community, and country is ever again to become the guiding light of national policy, it will have to come through a Republican administration. The Democratic Party of Kerry, Edwards, Clinton & Clinton is a lost cause: secularist, socialist, and statist to the core. What of the third-party candidates? While Ralph Nader is a man of principle and political courage, he is of the populist Left. We are of the Right. The Constitution Party is the party closest to this magazine in philosophy and policy prescriptions, and while one must respect votes for Michael Peroutka by those who live in Red or Blue states, we cannot counsel such votes in battleground states. For this election has come down to Bush or Kerry, and on life, guns, judges, taxes, sovereignty, and defense, Bush is far better. Moreover, inside the Republican Party, a rebellion is stirring. Tom Tancredo is leading the battle for defense of our borders. While only a handful of Republicans stood with us against the war in Iraq, many now concede that we were right. As Franklin Foer writes in the New York Times, our America First foreign policy is now being given a second look by a conservative movement disillusioned with neoconservative warmongering and Wilsonian interventionism. There is a rumbling of dissent inside the GOP to the free-trade fanaticism of the Wall Street Journal that is denuding the nation of manufacturing and alienating Reagan Democrats. The celebrants of outsourcing in the White House have gone into cloister. The Bush amnesty for illegal aliens has been rejected. Prodigal Republicans now understand that their cohabitation with Big Government has brought their country to the brink of ruin and bought them nothing. But if we wish to be involved in the struggle for the soul of the GOP--and we intend to be there--we cannot be AWOL from the battle where the fate of that party is decided. There is another reason Bush must win. The liberal establishment that marched us into Vietnam evaded punishment for its loss of nerve and failure of will to win--by dumping LBJ, defecting to the children's crusade to "give peace a chance," then sabotaging Nixon every step of the way out of Vietnam until they broke his presidency in Watergate. Ensuring America's defeat, they covered their tracks by denouncing their own war as "Nixon's War." If Kerry wins, leading a party that detests this war, he will be forced to execute an early withdrawal. Should that bring about a debacle, neocons will indict Democrats for losing Iraq. The cakewalk crowd cannot be permitted to get out from under this disaster that easily. They steered Bush into this war and should be made to see it through to the end and to preside over the withdrawal or retreat. Only thus can they be held accountable. Only thus can this neo-Jacobin ideology be discredited in America's eyes. It is essential for the country and our cause that it be repudiated by the Republican Party formally and finally. The neocons must clean up the mess they have made, themselves, in full public view. There is a final reason I support George W. Bush. A presidential election is a Hatfield-McCoy thing, a tribal affair. No matter the quarrels inside the family, when the shooting starts, you come home to your own. When the Redcoats approached New Orleans to sunder the Union and Jackson was stacking cotton bales and calling for help from any quarter, the pirate Lafitte wrote to the governor of Louisiana to ask permission to fight alongside his old countrymen. "The Black Sheep wants to come home," Lafitte pleaded. It's time to come home. Kerry's the One by Scott McConnell http://amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover1.html There is little in John Kerry's persona or platform that appeals to conservatives. The flip-flopper charge--the centerpiece of the Republican campaign against Kerry--seems overdone, as Kerry's contrasting votes are the sort of baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up. (Bob Dole could tell you all about it.) But Kerry is plainly a conventional liberal and no candidate for a future edition of Profiles in Courage. In my view, he will always deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002. But this election is not about John Kerry. If he were to win, his dearth of charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would face challenges from within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive initiatives by a Republican Congress. Much of his presidency would be absorbed by trying to clean up the mess left to him in Iraq. He would be constrained by the swollen deficits and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee. It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush. To the surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into an important president, and in many ways the most radical America has had since the 19th century. Because he is the leader of America's conservative party, he has become the Left's perfect foil--its dream candidate. The libertarian writer Lew Rockwell has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II: both gained office as a result of family connections, both initiated an unnecessary war that shattered their countries' budgets. Lenin needed the calamitous reign of Nicholas II to create an opening for the Bolsheviks. Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation's children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing clich? about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal--Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can't be found to do it--and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail. During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world. Of course there has always been "anti-Americanism." After the Second World War many European intellectuals argued for a "Third Way" between American-style capitalism and Soviet communism, and a generation later Europe's radicals embraced every ragged "anti-imperialist" cause that came along. In South America, defiance of "the Yanqui" always draws a crowd. But Bush has somehow managed to take all these sentiments and turbo-charge them. In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office. The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. It's the same throughout the Middle East. Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy doctrine under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country it wants if it feels threatened. It is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, but the latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe. If the analogy seems extreme, what is an appropriate comparison when a country manufactures falsehoods about a foreign government, disseminates them widely, and invades the country on the basis of those falsehoods? It is not an action that any American president has ever taken before. It is not something that "good" countries do. It is the main reason that people all over the world who used to consider the United States a reliable and necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a menace to their own peace and security. These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire. More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists--indeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge. Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to America's survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to provide full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world's most hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help. I've heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served prominently in his father's administration say that he could not possibly have conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he was essentially taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to overturn Saddam Hussein. Bush's public performances plainly show him to be a man who has never read or thought much about foreign policy. So the inevitable questions are: who makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the information flow to the president, how are various options are presented? The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory. Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidency--and it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security Council in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to the Israeli embassy and another who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader have become key players in the making of American foreign policy. But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed intellectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified support of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the future kingdom of Christ. These two strands of Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in the Bush presidency--and President Bush has given not the slightest indication he would restrain either in a second term. With Colin Powell's departure from the State Department looming, Bush is more than ever the "neoconian candidate." The only way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian Armageddon set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected. If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward. But the most important battles will take place within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a huge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American past--and to make that case without a powerful White House pulling in the opposite direction. George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on the hopelessly na?ve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by American armies--a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky's concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His immigration policies--temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election--are just as extreme. A re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans "won't do." This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support. Old Right Nader by Justin Raimondo http://amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover2.html The Nader for President rally was a raucous affair and Mission High School was filled to capacity, with a substantial crowd packing the lobby and overflowing into the street. It was the logical place for such an event, the middle of San Francisco's Mission District, a hub of far-left activism where you're as likely to see an advertisement for a forum by the International Socialist Organization as a billboard for Absolut vodka. As I entered the auditorium, Nader's runing mate, Peter Camejo, was already warming up the crowd. Camejo, a former Trotskyist turned Green, gives a good speech: the stentorian voice, the slashing polemics punctuated by applause. There I was, surrounded on every side by rambunctious Reds, wondering: what the heck am I doing here? As if in answer to my question, Nader finally strode onto the stage. He looked impossibly serene in the midst of that storm of applause, and his voice--steady and sure--reinforced an aura of integrity that seemed to emanate from his very person. We're getting poorer, he said. In spite of government propaganda about how things are getting better, our standard of living, compared to the way our parents lived, is declining. The Left, content to settle for less, has given up fighting for real progress, while the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans on such issues as "the concentration of power." Nader explained that his campaign is important "pictorially" because the two major parties, left to themselves, will merely consolidate the status quo: there will be no one to pull the political dialogue in a new direction. He spoke of "the domination of multi-national corporations" intent on "erecting a corporate globalization scheme of international autocratic government called WTO and NAFTA." The avarice and cowardice of the two parties allows this to happen. Invoking the legacy of the populist and progressive movements of the last century, Nader urged the crowd to remember the fighting tradition of ordinary people who stood up to the railroad monopolies and bankers. They didn't "settle for less," he declared, and neither should you. He kept coming back to the theme of a liberal intelligentsia that has betrayed the cause of progressive reform. They are, he charged, at once arrogant and too accommodating. They "presume to tell you that [your efforts on behalf of Nader] will help to re-elect George W. Bush--but when push actually came to shove in Florida, what did they do?" "Who elected George W. Bush?" he asked. "It was the Democratic Party! Even after they won the election they blew it!" I cheered when he cited Gen. Smedley Butler's book War is a Racket as an example of how corporate interests manipulate patriotic sentiment, socializing the risks of overseas investments and pocketing the profits. The Democrats are a big part of the problem: "In Washington they say that George W. Bush must be defeated because of the War in Iraq. Who voted for the War in Iraq? John Kerry. They say our civil liberties are being sacrificed by the Patriot Act. Who voted for the Patriot Act? Every Democratic Senator except Sen. Russ Feingold voted for the Patriot Act." What we have in this country, he declared, is "corporate socialism." You should've seen the dirty looks I got as I applauded vigorously. Socialism, to this audience, doesn't have anything to do with corporations, it can't. But Nader is no Red; he knows better. Although all 11 varieties of Trotskyists were there in full force, earnestly hawking their pamphlets, the rhetoric that was coming from the stage was hardly music to their ears. Nader's distrust of bigness, either corporate or governmental, his fear of centralized power, his sharp critique of the managerial-bureaucratic mentality, all recall the distinctively American tradition of individualist populism. Just as Nader rebelled against the corporate socialism of the Democratic Party establishment, so the mostly Midwestern progressives turned against the New Deal when it became a stalking horse for corporatism and war. Nader's views are attractive to the Left but are rooted, at least in part, on the libertarian and populist Right. He wasn't always a leftist icon. One of his first published articles appeared in the Oct. 1962 issue of The Freeman, a libertarian magazine. The piece, "How the Winstedites Kept Their Integrity," told the story of how a proposal to build a public-housing project met with opposition in Winsted, Conn., Nader's hometown. He attacked the aesthetic aspect of government housing projects as symbolic of "the drab, uniform, barrack-type existence" that awaits its tenants. He writes: Living under the government as landlord neither teaches children the value of property (which is one reason why public housing deteriorates so quickly) nor produces the environment for the exercise of independence, self-reliance, and, above all, citizenship. Any government intrusion into the economy deters the alleged beneficiaries from voicing their views or participating in civic life. The reason for this goes beyond the stigma of living in subsidized housing. When public housing becomes, as it has over the nation, a source of additional patronage for local distribution to contractors, repairmen, and tenants, the free expression of human beings is thus discouraged. What riled Ralph about the Winsted housing project was that locals were denied access to information by bureaucrats and had to resort to three referenda before they could scotch the plans of political insiders to milk private profit from the public teat. It's the same old Ralph, albeit a bit more libertarian than we're used to. As he stood on the stage, denouncing corporate socialism and foreign wars, that calm, clear voice ringing with modest sincerity, I thought: no wonder they're so afraid of him that they've hired an army of corporate lawyers to deny him ballot status and shut down his campaign. I know Ralph Nader is supposed to be a man of the Left, the Eugene Debs or the Norman Thomas of our times, but as I listen to him on the stump, I keep hearing the voice of the Old Right. ___________________________________________ Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com. Constitutionally Correct Peroutka by Howard Phillips http://amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover3.html The Constitution Party, then called the U.S. Taxpayers Party, was established in 1992, with its goal to limit the federal government to its delegated, enumerated, constitutional functions and to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical common-law foundations. Neither John Kerry nor George W. Bush shares that goal. Both President Bush and Senator Kerry have voted for or signed into law more money for Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups, more money for homosexual activist groups, more money for the United Nations, more money for foreign aid, more money for federal intervention in education, not to mention the biggest budgets and budget deficits in the history of our Republic. Neither Bush nor Kerry has supported "Ten Commandments Judge" Roy Moore and his Constitution Restoration Act to prohibit reliance on foreign law and deny federal judges the authority to restrict our acknowledgment of God. Both men favor amnesty for illegal aliens and policies that benefit Communist China to the detriment of U.S. national security. You and I know these things, but most "conservatives" plan to vote for George W. Bush. Some say the reason they plan to vote for Bush is judicial appointments. But that argument lost its validity when President Bush intervened to prevent the nomination of Congressman Pat Toomey over pro-abortion Sen. Arlen Specter in the recent Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary. If Senator Specter is re-elected on Nov. 2 and the GOP holds its majority in the U.S. Senate, Specter will become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, situated to act in collaboration with his liberal Democrat soul mates to prevent the confirmation of pro-life judicial nominees--and positioned to argue to Bush, if he is re-elected, against the appointment of judges who are comprehensively opposed to abortion. For these reasons and others, it is specious to vote for George W. Bush on the basis of supposed advantages for our side with respect to judicial confirmations. Moreover, just as Senate Democrats have blocked Republican judicial nominees, the GOP majority in the Senate can--if they summon the will to do so--block nominees by a President Kerry. Of course, only three GOP Senators voted to oppose the confirmation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Only nine voted against Stephen Breyer, and no Republican Senator voted against confirming either pro-abortion David Souter or pro-abortion Sandra Day O'Connor. The positions of both of these nominees were a matter of public record when the Senate placed them on the Supreme Court of the United States. But there is a greater reason that many conservatives are reluctant to vote for the Constitution Party's Michael Peroutka. It is fear of the "Bogey Man," and John Kerry is the Bogey Man of 2004. George W. Bush is presented as "the lesser of two evils," and Bogey Man John Kerry is characterized, perhaps accurately, as evil incarnate. Kerry personifies the antithesis of what most conservatives believe, but he is only the latest in a long line of Bogey Men who have diverted us from putting our Republic back on a constitutional track. In 1992, most conservatives were understandably frightened by Bogey Man Bill Clinton and voted against me when I offered then, as Michael Peroutka does now, a constitutionally correct alternative to both major parties. Despite your votes for Bush the Elder, the Bogey Man won in 1992. Bogey Man Bill Clinton reappeared in 1996 and, once again, most conservatives rejected the only candidate who offered a Christian, constitutional plan of action and invested their votes in Kansas Sen. Bob Dole. There were some exceptions. Jim Dobson declared after the fact that he had cast his vote for Howard Phillips. Of course, despite conservative support for Dole, Clinton won again in 1996. Last time, Al Gore was the Bogey Man and, once again, conservatives rejected the Constitution Party nominee in favor of George Bush the Younger. In 2000, the Bogey Man lost, but what did it profit America to have elected the "lesser of two evils"? Would we have had the unwise, unnecessary, unconstitutional war on Iraq if Gore had been elected? I doubt it. We have traveled farther down the wrong path with a Republican president and Congress than we would have if we had experienced gridlock with a Democratic president and a Republican majority in the House and the Senate. As president, Michael Peroutka would end federal intervention in education, cut off federal funding of Planned Parenthood and homosexual activist groups, withdraw from NATO, the UN, NAFTA, WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF. He would seal our borders, cancel the George W. Bush-Vicente Fox treaty to pay Social Security benefits to illegal aliens who have returned to Mexico, expel illegal aliens, end all foreign aid, withdraw from Iraq, oppose the Patriot Act, fight all forms of socialized medicine, and appoint only judges who are 100 percent against abortion. Peroutka would abolish the IRS and replace the income tax with a revenue tariff. He would recognize the threat posed by Communist China and rebuild the U.S. Navy, which has dropped from 600 ships under Ronald Reagan to fewer than 250 today. If conservatives don't vote for what they believe, they will never get what they want. Losing as slowly as possible means we still lose. Going over the cliff at a supposedly slower speed still means we are going to crash. A vote withheld from both the Democrats and Republicans weakens that which is wrong and strengthens the cause of that which is right. Any vote cast for constitutionally sound, Biblically based policies hastens the day when, should God will it, we can witness the restoration of the Republic. It is not for us to decide elections, but rather to determine where we shall invest our precious franchise. God alone determines the outcome, and He blesses those who trust in Him. Michael Peroutka is the only constitutionally correct choice in 2004. Let's not let the Right go wrong again. ___________________________________________ Howard Phillips is the founder of the Constitution Party Libertarian Resistance by Alan W. Bock http://amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover4.html For those inclined to participate in the electoral circus--and given the choices presented by the two major parties, especially on the key issue of war and an increasingly imperial American foreign policy, one can understand an inclination simply to abstain--the question is what kind of vote will best send a message to the system about the importance of your core political values. I would respectfully suggest that a vote for Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik, and for Libertarians running for other offices, is the most efficacious way to do so. It's not a perfect way to telegraph a message, and Michael Badnarik is not a perfect candidate. But by its nature the electoral system does not offer ideal choices, simply those that have managed to claw their way to party nominations and ballot status. For conservatives who treasure the Old Republic and recoil from the interventionist foreign policies that have led to so much American blood being needlessly spilled and treasure unnecessarily wasted, while posing an ongoing danger to constitutional principles, the Libertarian Party is the best option in 2004. John Kerry, however tempting it might be to contemplate a divided government (assuming Republicans maintain control of Congress) mired in glorious gridlock, simply will not do. His short-term solution to Iraq is more troops, and while he questions in retrospect the Bush administration's decision-making and lack of planning, he is an unalloyed international interventionist unwilling to question the Wilsonian underpinnings of current American foreign policy. His explanation of his vote to authorize the use of force if needed is more ominous than if he had supported the Iraq War enthusiastically. The president should have that power, he explained, whining only that Bush had misused it. On domestic policy, of course, his voting record is to the left of Teddy Kennedy, suggesting a slew of spending initiatives, not all of which a Republican Congress--especially one conditioned to higher spending by four years of Bush 43--will resist or block. George W. Bush richly deserves to be punished at the polls. He got the United States into a war of aggression in Iraq that is likely to be followed, in a best-case scenario, by a long and difficult occupation that will inspire increasing hatred of the United States among people likely to express their hatred in unpleasant ways toward innocent Americans. On the home front, Bush has presided over the most dramatic increase in domestic discretionary spending since the Great Society. While he talks of freedom and a government that leaves the people alone, the initial debates show that both his and Cheney's learned response to problems in American society is to throw taxpayers' money at them. This record does not deserve support or encouragement from even a modestly principled American conservative. As for Ralph Nader, while some of his statements on the unwise war in Iraq have been welcome, he is what he has been for many years: an advocate of a comprehensive regulatory state designed to eliminate even the whiff of risk--and plenty of freedom--from American life. A vote for him in some battleground states might hurt Bush or help Kerry. Those who want to use their vote for such tactical purposes--understanding that no matter how sophisticated polling gets you can't be sure it will have that effect--might want to vote for Nader, but it will not be a vote that sends a message of support for constitutionally limited government. Why should a conservative vote for the Libertarian candidate rather than one of the American Independent, Patriot, or Constitution Party hopefuls? The main reason is the ability to send a coherent message of resistance to unconstitutional growth of government. To be sure, many conservatives are put off by some libertarian positions on drug-law reform, free trade, gay marriage, and pornography. But an election is--or should be for a government properly limited in scope--more about political values than moral values. If I correctly understand American Conservative readers, of which I have been one since early on, they still hold a constitutionally limited state, a noninterventionist foreign policy, and a proper balance among branches and levels of government, to be core political values. The Libertarian Party, whatever its many shortcomings, has been around since 1972, running candidates at every level. It is on the ballot in every state and in 2000 ran enough congressional candidates to win (theoretically) a majority in the House. It is much better organized at a national level than any of the minor conservative parties (which may not be saying much) and it has presented a coherent philosophical alternative to the major parties for decades. I know the party better in the Golden State than on a national level. In California, which has seen its share of flakes running as Libertarians, Orange County Superior Court Judge Jim Gray, a serious, principled proponent of limited government who would wipe the floor with Democrat Barbara Boxer and Republican Bill Jones if they were foolish enough to let him into televised debates, is running for Senate and should do respectably. He's the harbinger of a trend toward people who understand that if you're going to do politics, even as a third party, you put on a suit and tie, handle questions seriously, and convince people you could actually serve responsibly if elected. That trend in the Libertarian Party should be rewarded. And a vote for a Libertarian is the best way for a small-government, constitutionalist conservative to let various establishments know there is still a constituency for the Constitution. ___________________________________________ Alan W. Bock is a senior editorial writer for the Orange County Register. The Right to Remain Silent by Kara Hopkins http://amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover5.html What if you threw a party--and 100 million people refused to come? You could blame them for lacking festive spirit, but odds are it wasn't much of a party if they preferred to stay home. On Nov. 2, millions of Americans will troop to the polls to re-enact the quadrennial pageant. But nearly as many will opt out. They will be accused of sloth, though indifference is more apt--and remains the appropriate response to irrelevance. If George W. Bush and John Kerry agree on anything --in fact, they agree on far too many things--it's that we must vote. Elections maintain the illusion of opposing parties exchanging ideas rather than political animals competing for power. Selling voting as the ultimate expression of citizenship serves two purposes: it legitimizes the process that keeps them in control and makes the public docile by enforcing the notion that we rule ourselves. But what value is participation if those who cast ballots go unrepresented? Is there virtue in the act if it allows no choice? Smash offending countries alone or invite friends along for the invasion? Tax-and-spend or tax-cut-and-spend? Open borders or open borders? Before herding to the polls because it's What We Do--like fireworks on the Fourth or eggnog at Christmas--consider the possibility that voting has little to do with democracy and democracy is not the first cause of liberty. Fault him for a thousand things, but Saddam Hussein knew how to get out the vote: his elections had far better turnout than ours. Yet we reckoned his government so undemocratic that it had to be razed, and next round, according to Donald Rumsfeld, elections in "three-quarters or four-fifths of the country" should be good enough. It's not the chad-punching that makes a country free. It's the democracy, stupid. Or is it? After Sept. 11, the White House identified our enemy as forces that "hate democracy and freedom." The coupling may have been as careless as the notion that men die for such abstractions, but in the public mind the concepts are twined as they are devalued. We export democracy to spread freedom to make our country more secure--or so the slogan goes. Real life is more complicated. Venture into that crosswalk reserved for sacred cows. Democracy may be the West's political grail, but it is not inherently just or moral. As Edmund Burke famously asked, "[Is there some difference] between the despotism of the monarch and the despotism of the multitude?" The rule of law--fixed by forces less capricious than the whim of the mob--is a far better guardian of individual freedom than electoral popularity. The majority may elect a tyrant. Neither is democracy the most stable social order--something we might have considered before we went planting political systems in security's name. Come January, our new colony is likely to school us in democracy's shortcomings. A May survey by the Coalition Provisional Authority found that just 6 percent of Iraqis want the U.S. to stay as long as is "necessary for stability." Thus any victorious candidate will have radicalized his constituents by running on an anti-American platform. Because we have enshrined democracy, we must accept the Iraqis' choice and may quietly be grateful to be shown the door by these infant democrats. But so much for visions of Madison reincarnated in Mesopotamia and promises that Iraqi democracy will enhance U.S. security. But they will be free, we comfort ourselves. After all, we wrote that book. Its latest version ensures that we don't answer cell phones while driving in D.C. or smoke after dinner in New York. No complaints because we apparently brought this freedom from ourselves upon ourselves by democratic means. The old monarchs confiscated a far smaller portion of their subjects' gain and would never have countenanced a trillion-dollar deficit. They weren't leaving town in four years. But we feel more free because we elect our captors, having long since forgotten that the purpose of government is not to confer freedom but to restrict it. With regrets to Tocqueville, here the people do not rule--though marching to the polls creates a tidy front. So if the act of voting is not sacrosanct and democracy, despite its "better than all the rest" pedestal, is not the sole--or perhaps even the best--guarantor of liberty, Nov. 2 may be just another day. This election the major candidates agree on the prerogative of politicians to bribe voters with their own money and that the fine print of the presidential job description obligates him to "make the world safe." These issues are not open to debate. There is no conservative candidate. Some will argue that voting third party is more responsible than staying home. But there is a more effective way to register a protest than lining up behind an asterisk. Four million evangelical voters refused to be corralled in 2000. This round, Karl Rove went looking for them. "What about judges?" Republicans ask conservatives turned conscientious objectors. That argument no longer persuades. Six Republican-appointed justices sat on the Court that decided Roe v. Wade; Nixon appointee Harry Blackmun wrote the decision. And after 12 years of Reagan and Bush, the Court affirmed Roe in 1992. The GOP has no reason to register some votes as pertaining solely to judicial nominees. They collect them all and call it a mandate--affirmation of a foreign policy that plunged us into endless war and a domestic agenda that is driving us into massive debt. Full speed ahead. By declining to be coerced we may yet salvage a scrap of liberty. We won't be letting democracy down, for it has already disappointed us. Pace President Bush and his "forward strategy of freedom," liberty was never government's to give; the essential right to be left alone belongs to each citizen. This November, we can borrow a bit back by refusing to be counted by parties that don't represent us. Silence is a profound expression, and enough unraised voices eventually turn even the most partisan heads. The Real Deal by Taki http://amconmag.com/2004_11_08/taki.html Having to choose between George W. Bush and John Kerry is like navigating between Scylla and Charybdis. On one side lurks the hoary beast of a decent man brought down by the neocons and their agenda of world domination. On the other churns the vortex of a man who is right on nothing and is willing to betray anyone--as he did his fellow soldiers, sailors, and Marines when he painted them as war criminals--in order to achieve recognition and high office. It is obviously a very difficult choice, so I will take the third way. But first, as my colleague Pat Buchanan states in his endorsement of the president, "Bush is right on taxes, judges, sovereignty, and values. Kerry is right on nothing." So why not Bush? Why not do, as Pat says, what the pirate Jean Lafitte did when he asked to fight alongside his countrymen against the Redcoats in the Battle of New Orleans? I am, after all, a lifelong conservative Republican. The answer is that the party of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and William F. Buckley Jr., a party motivated by libertarian impulses and deep convictions about personal freedoms, ain't no more. Since when is a Leviathan federal government with a record deficit a conservative Republican one? How does a Bush administration supposedly committed to ideas like limited government, personal freedom, and a balanced budget explain a $450 billion budget deficit, the loss of American manufacturing jobs, and the promise of an amnesty for illegal aliens? How can the party of Robert A. Taft excuse the catastrophic war against Iraq and the idea that those who opposed it are traitors, an accusation Pat, Scott, and I were tarred with by Ariel Sharon's agent David Frum? The words of Gen. George C. Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army during World War II, come to mind: "I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes." Yet Bush continues to heed men whose policies have radicalized the Mideast and converted much of the Islamic world into a giant recruiting station for Osama bin Laden. As Buchanan wrote recently, the Republican Party is now the party of big business, big government, and big war. Tom DeLay is a disgrace, a brutal fund-raiser who resembles Robert Torricelli and Alfonse D'Amato, not what a conservative Republican House majority leader should be in my book. Once upon a time, conservatives believed in ideas and individualism, now it seems money and power are what counts. So despite his personal decency, I cannot in all honesty endorse Bush for a second term. Kerry, of course, is far worse, a disaster in the making. Not only has he dismissed the president's promises to enact amnesty for illegal aliens as insufficient, he has vowed to sign an amnesty within his first 100 days in office. Again, as Pat writes in his endorsement of the president, the people on Kerry's side are all those I despise, the George Soroses, Barbra Streisands, and Michael Moores of this world. What unites the Kerry army is hate for George W. Bush. Marching under the Michael Moore banner, they have no message except to get rid of the 43rd president. If this is a policy, I'm Monica Lewinsky. Their self-righteous anger is negative and as dishonest as John Kerry's false populism. Signing the Kyoto Protocol and adhering to the rules of the International Criminal Court will only weaken America and yield national sovereignty. Which brings me to my choice, Michael Anthony Peroutka. Yes, I know, it sounds like a wasted vote, but is it? He is the nominee of a small third party called the Constitution Party. The point of voting for Peroutka is to help create an alternative. After all, there has to be a start somewhere and adhering to the Constitution as Peroutka advocates is a pretty good way to begin. Peroutka defines his party as a Christian one dedicated to preserving the foundations on which the American Republic was based. He is predictably against abortion and gay marriage. Peroutka is also opposed to mass immigration, and he strongly supports national sovereignty. As Samuel Francis has written, Peroutka "is a charming and decent man of deep convictions and principle, has a ready grasp of the principles he supports and knows how to explain them." As it happens, National Review was founded 50 years ago next year. If anything, it looked like a quixotic effort at its birth. Yet 25 years later, Bill Buckley and his crew had managed to sweep Ronald Reagan into office. Peroutka's presidential bid looks just as idealistic, perhaps even more so. What is a conservative Republican to do except send a message and, in the words of Buckley, yell "Stop" to runaway government? Without big ideas, elections become about personalities--popularity contests, nothing more. Both major candidates are filching each others' rhetoric and pandering. All that matters is the sell, not the content. Kerry is an opportunist sans pareil, Bush a man under the wrong influence. Vote for the real deal, Michael Anthony Peroutka. ------ What sound does the liberal make? Mo__. What sound does the conservative make? Mo__. What sound does the cow make? Mo__. From checker at panix.com Wed Oct 27 21:50:56 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:50:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Clearing the Deck Message-ID: I'm clearing the deck. JAP, a program that lets you surf the net anonymously and doesn't even put the pages you visit on your hard disk, so that spyware can't retrieve them. (Thanks to Oleg for finding this.) http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html Neal Stephenson responds with wit and wisdom http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1518217 Sign up for the Wired Campus from the Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/infotech/newsletter/ Why don't the rest of us like the buildings the architects like? http://www.amacad.org/publications/bulletin/summer2004/campbell.pdf From checker at panix.com Thu Oct 28 09:59:09 2004 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 05:59:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 036: Frank Is Abandoning Reality Message-ID: Meme 036: Frank Is Abandoning Reality sent 4.10.28, 4:59 am Central War Time, the minute of his 60th birthday in Kansas City, Mo. "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road...." ---------- I am abandoning reality for fiction and will stop reading non-fiction books. I think I know pretty much, at least in outline form, what is actually known about human nature from the biological and social sciences. Novelists have a way of getting at the complexities of the human condition that scientists have not. So not having read much fiction since I read all twelve volumes of Dostoyevsky in the 1970s, I am returning to deepen my understanding. What aspects of our humanity may we be giving up as we take control of human nature through manipulating the genome, through nanotechnology, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, man-machine hookups? Will we become the emotionally flat robots depicted in science fiction novels and movies? Could our selves and our lives, instead, become deeper, even deeper than Beethoven in his last decade? I also want to know how human nature varies. Is the world converging to one system of thinking? Or has there been enough gene-culture coevolution of human populations--it's still taboo to say races, owing to lingering 20th century egalitarianism--that there will be significant *internal* barriers to Western hegemony? As I said in my last meme, there has been a major reorientation of the dominant left-right polarity, from central planning vs. free market in the earlier twentieth century and equality vs. inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. universalism in this century. I'm asking for lists of your favorite novels, stressing non-Western literature, those that have depth of characterization and are worth rereading. (But are novels all alike, the medium being the message?) I've read all of the (University of Chicago) Great Books (except that I could only get through a quarter of War and Peace) but have read only one non-Western novel, Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima. I need to broaden my learning. So please send your lists. (I do NOT read poetry.) Books that appear on many lists are most likely to get read. I shall assume your permission to forward your lists, unless you tell me otherwise. (Having last had an English class in 1964--yes, I am that old--my memory of what happened in those classes is completely vague. How is a 40 or 50 minute class, that is in neither a lecture nor a seminar format, get filled up? Can anyone point me toward webpages of transcripts of typical literature classes?) I have four categories in my project: I. Western novels II. Non-Western novels III. Science fiction novels IV . Religion, books of or about. Here's the list of what I've accumulated so far: I. WESTERN NOVELS 1. Kerouac, Jack, On the Road. America. This will be the first book. I read. 2. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. England. Never read anything by her. 3. Balzac, Honor?. The Bureaucrats. France. Since I've lived among the bureaucrats far longer than Margaret Mead lived among the Samoans, this novel is probably the one for me to get introduced to Balzac. 4. Colman, Hila. Diary of a Frantic Kid Sister. America. Teen-age: I should know something about this genre. 5. Goethe, Johann von. Elective Affinities. Germany. Sarah's very favorite. 6. Gover, Robert. One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding. America. One of Charles Sletten's favorites. 7. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature and La-Bas. Germany. Two of Sarah's other favorites. 8. Jelinek, Elfriede. Wonderful, Wonderful Times. Austria. Just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. 9. J?nger, Ernst. On the Marble Cliffs. Germany. Another of Sarah's favorites. 10. Kleist, Heinrich von. The Marquise of O- and Other Stories. Germany. Given to me by George. Kleist never wrote a novel and committed suicide at age 34. 11. O'Connor, Flannery. America. Three by Flannery O'Connor. 12. Schaefer, Jack. Shane. America. A casebook. I love casebooks, for the give me background! Love Cliff Notes, too, since I have great difficulty following lots of characters. 13. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. England. A Casebook. I have read the play but need to really study it. 14. Trevor, William. The Story of Lucy Gault. Ireland. One of Marcia's favorites. 15. Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. America. A classic work from the 1950s protesting the conformity of the era. Others include Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd; Robert Lindner, Prescription for Rebellion; C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite; William Whyte, The Organization Man. All non-fiction here, except Atlas Shrugged, but I don't know fiction very well. 16. Wolfe, Thomas. You Can't Go Home Again. America. 17. Zola, Emile. Earth. France. Given to me by Denise, but I'll probably read the much more famous Nana instead. 18. The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Moral Ruins). A sampler. France. We have a division of labor in our house: I read the books on cynicism and nihilism, while Sarah reads the books on decadence and degeneration. But this is fiction, so I shall read it. 19. Goethe, Tieck, Fouqu?, Brentano. Romantic Fairy Tales. German. II. NON-WESTERN NOVELS 1. Garc?a M?rques, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Colombia. This will be my first non-Western novel. Almost everyone recommends it. I'll be getting a case book and the Cliff Notes. I've downloaded everything on it from http://www.oprah.com. 2. Allende, Isabel. Chile. Several lying around the apartment, I don't know which to read first. 3. Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Argentina. He never wrote a novel. Another non-Western author nearly everyone recommends. 4. Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fiction. This is literature, really. 5. Jin, Ha. Waiting. China. 6. Pramoedya Ananta Toer. The Buru Quartet. Java. Given to me by Denise. Will read one volume initially. 7. Mahfouz, Naguib. The Thief and the Dogs. Egypt. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. 8. Murasaki Shikibu [Lady Muraski]. The Tale of Genji. Japan. My copy is just Part One. If I like it, I can get the whole thing. 9. Tanizaki, Junichiro. Some Prefer Nettles. Japan. Given to my by Denise. 10. Truong, Monique. The Book of Salt. Vietnam. She noted that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had a Vietnamese cook, so she wrote a novel about Paris in the 1930s from the standpoint of the cook! 11. Watase, Yu. Alice 19th. A Japanese Manga (comic book format). You can get a mangastrap, a jacket designed for holding your arms to read mangas on long Japanese subway rides. A good idea, but as Japanese goods are very expensive, they cost $160 to import! III. SCIENCE FICTION 1. Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age. Given to me by Carolyn and autographed by the Author at the National Book Festival earlier this month. This will be my first science fiction novel. 2. Anderson, Poul. A Midsummer Tempest. Patterned after two Shakespeare plays. 3. Asimov, Isaac, et al., editors. The 7 Deadly Sins of Science Fiction. I've already read The 7 Cardinal Virtues. 4. Benford, Gregory (et al.), editors. Hitler Victorious. 5. Brown, Fredric. Compliments of a Fiend. The only Fred Brown book, published in his lifetime, that I have not read. 6. Herbert, Frank. Dune. I can get the Spark Notes on this one. 7. Le Guin, Ursula. The Dispossessed. Actually, I don't physically own a copy, but this seems to be the first one to read. How will it compare to Dostoyevsky's novel of the same title? 8. Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. Casebook version. 9. Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds. Casebook version. IV. RELIGION 1. Gregg, Steve. Revelation: Four Views, a Parallel Commentary. This book gives the four principle interpretations of the last book in the Bible in parallel columns for each verse. This will be my first book in this category. 2. Cleary, Thomas, translator and presentor. The Essential Koran. I do not want to read the entire Koran. I have stacks of other books of or on religion, too many to list. I also have lots of unread books on the art that probes the human condition more than any other, namely Western music. I have multiple recordings of nearly all the great masterpieces of classical instrumental music. In order to speed myself in this task of abandoning reality, I'm stopping my finding and forwarding articles on many subjects until I've read at least one book in each category. I read slowly and have no idea how many months this will take. (This may grow into a full sabbatical. I need, too, to catch up on stacks of back issues of the Times Literary Supplement, long my favorite serial. I shall continue to bounce articles to my various lists at the request of others. And I'll continue to participate in threads started by others. In parallel with the books above, I'll be reading Mary Ann Caws and Christopher Prendergast, The HarperCollins World Reader (2 v., 2796 pp.), along with its Instructor's Manual (846 pp. The only copy in the OCLC World Cat database is at the Mohawk Valley Community College!) and the accompanying Issues in World Literature (a mere 108 pp.). I will also be reading the President's Council on Bioethics (Leon Kass, chairman) anthology, Being Human, which consists of selections from literature, almost entirely Western. The purpose of the book is to display the fullness of human nature, or at least Western human nature, to caution us about getting rid of it. Whether Kass believes West is Best, I don't know. I'm launching a website immediately after sending this. It is http://www.panix.com/~checker (you must include the tilde). I shall upload more on Beethoven's birthday. If you have sent me e-mail and really wanted a reply but didn't get one, bug me. I've just gotten too far behind. I'm not blanking out, for I hold my hypotheses lightly and do not want to continue chasing after bad ones. Get to work on lists of novels, particularly non-Western novels, for me to read! [I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and spread them.] From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Oct 28 13:53:38 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 07:53:38 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 036: Frank Is Abandoning Reality In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4180F9E2.1020007@solution-consulting.com> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 28 17:40:38 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:40:38 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] A reptilian appeal for a progressive cause Message-ID: <01C4BCDA.912F38E0.shovland@mindspring.com> "Your children are going to starve in the future if we don't make a major effort to switch to alternative energy sources." Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Oct 28 18:46:06 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 11:46:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] death penalty and ritual media sacrifice In-Reply-To: <200410281800.i9SI0U030149@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041028184606.78930.qmail@web13424.mail.yahoo.com> >>Not too many years ago in America executions (and lynchings) were conducted as festivals, which means that our dark side like to see people die violently.<< --Not so different now. We sacrifice evildoers in the media with a ritual process of assimilation and purification. There's a gallery of people applauding, jeering, spitting accusations and so on. And, as ever, there is no accountability for the audience. Everyone was there, everyone was watching, so nobody feels guilty. After all, I wasn't the one who cheered. Or maybe I did, but I wasn't the one who pulled the switch. Or maybe I did, but that's my job. And so on. Moral accountability falls away, which is one of the reasons I'm suspect about the death penalty's effectiveness or ethics. If nobody alone wants to be responsible for an act, if the burden is carried by dozens, or millions, none with much reason to fear consequences of a wrong decision, can it really be assumed that it's a positive moral act, and not a pagan ritual dressed in monotheistic rationalizations? Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Oct 28 19:00:08 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 12:00:08 -0700 Subject: FW: [Paleopsych] A reptilian appeal for a progressive cause Message-ID: <01C4BCE5.AC596950.shovland@mindspring.com> From: Lynn Johnson [SMTP:ldj at mail.sisna.com] Steve, Here is a topic you and I agree on (rare???) I like it, want in on the discussion. Please forward this to the list; I am away from my home computer. As you know from my own website, I am big on positive connotation and solution-focused thinking. My variation: A visionary view Discover, Dream, Design, Deliver. Discover: Where are the inspiring stories about alternative energy? Let's have a government / media cooperative effort to publicize them. Dream: Based on this, sponsor symposiums / articles / festschrifts / publicity about the nation's dream of energy independence. Talk about how it will enrich our nation, how more resources can shift to education and how our nation can again be the leader of the world, this time in energy independency. In other words, foster exchanges of dreams. Design: Based on the two above steps, what does our next step look like? Where are the choice points, the inflection points? What will cause the critical mass to tip (tipping points)? How can Spiral Dynamics contribute? Delivery: Demonstration and feasibility projects, private enterprise, social psychology efforts to energize people using those choices. What can we start to do today? I ride my bicycle to work (yes, in spire of owning an SUV) in decent weather. News stories on "what I did today to defeat islamofacisism." Encourage each person to 'do something today' We have two senior republican senators from my state, and what I am willing to do (since I can't ride the bike until spring comes) is write repeatedly to them. Bennett will clearly be re-elected. He is a man motivated by vision. He put tremendous energy into the Y2K problem. I can try to influence him. What can others do? Republicans will almost certainly control both houses post election, so we need to talk to them. Perhaps others could encourage the Dems to tone down the attack speech and worth together, post 04? Lynn ---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: Steve Hovland Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 10:40:38 -0700 >"Your children are going to starve in the future >if we don't make a major effort to switch to >alternative energy sources." > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _________________________________ SISNA...more service, less money. http://www.sisna.com/exclusive/ From wtroytucker at yahoo.com Thu Oct 28 22:58:55 2004 From: wtroytucker at yahoo.com (W. Troy Tucker) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 15:58:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 036: Frank Is Abandoning Reality In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20041028225855.57513.qmail@web40602.mail.yahoo.com> Hi Frank, We've seldom interacted as I'm a lurker on most lists. I've read most of your posts over the last five or six years and appreciate the service you provide. You caught my attention with the On the Road quote because I just read it for the first time a few weeks ago. Like you, I read non-fiction voluminously, however I never gave up the fiction habit. Because I have an incomplete (or more accurately, perhaps, "false") sense of who you are from reading your posts for so long, I have two immediate suggestions for your reading list. On the Road would be well followed by Samuel R. Delany's "Dahlgren", which is, perhaps, the next generation's version of the Kerouac odyssey. I read it when I was 19 and have returned to it every ten years or so. More importantly, I intuit that you should read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. It is erudite, insightful, ambitious, and daring in tackling pretty much the entire range of issues I've seen you struggling with. I don't know if I agree with him (or even entirely understand) but it's well worth the slog. On occasion I've wondered if, in fact, you might be Kim Stanley Robinson. Best wishes, Troy. --- Premise Checker wrote: > Meme 036: Frank Is Abandoning Reality > sent 4.10.28, 4:59 am Central War Time, the minute > of his 60th birthday in > Kansas City, Mo. > > "I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split > up. I had just gotten > over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk > about, except that it > had something to do with the miserably weary > split-up and my feeling that > everything was dead. With the coming of Dean > Moriarty began the part of my > life you could call my life on the road...." > ---------- > > I am abandoning reality for fiction and will stop > reading non-fiction > books. I think I know pretty much, at least in > outline form, what is > actually known about human nature from the > biological and social sciences. > Novelists have a way of getting at the complexities > of the human condition > that scientists have not. So not having read much > fiction since I read all > twelve volumes of Dostoyevsky in the 1970s, I am > returning to deepen my > understanding. What aspects of our humanity may we > be giving up as we take > control of human nature through manipulating the > genome, through > nanotechnology, biotechnology, artificial > intelligence, man-machine > hookups? Will we become the emotionally flat robots > depicted in science > fiction novels and movies? Could our selves and our > lives, instead, become > deeper, even deeper than Beethoven in his last > decade? > > I also want to know how human nature varies. Is the > world converging to > one system of thinking? Or has there been enough > gene-culture coevolution > of human populations--it's still taboo to say races, > owing to lingering > 20th century egalitarianism--that there will be > significant *internal* > barriers to Western hegemony? As I said in my last > meme, there has been a > major reorientation of the dominant left-right > polarity, from central > planning vs. free market in the earlier twentieth > century and equality vs. > inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. > universalism in this > century. > > I'm asking for lists of your favorite novels, > stressing non-Western > literature, those that have depth of > characterization and are worth > rereading. (But are novels all alike, the medium > being the message?) I've > read all of the (University of Chicago) Great Books > (except that I could > only get through a quarter of War and Peace) but > have read only one > non-Western novel, Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima. I > need to broaden my > learning. So please send your lists. (I do NOT read > poetry.) Books that > appear on many lists are most likely to get read. I > shall assume your > permission to forward your lists, unless you tell me > otherwise. > > (Having last had an English class in 1964--yes, I am > that old--my memory > of what happened in those classes is completely > vague. How is a 40 or 50 > minute class, that is in neither a lecture nor a > seminar format, get > filled up? Can anyone point me toward webpages of > transcripts of typical > literature classes?) > > I have four categories in my project: > I. Western novels > II. Non-Western novels > III. Science fiction novels > IV . Religion, books of or about. > > Here's the list of what I've accumulated so far: > > I. WESTERN NOVELS > > 1. Kerouac, Jack, On the Road. America. This will > be the first book. I > read. > 2. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. England. > Never read anything by > her. > 3. Balzac, Honor?. The Bureaucrats. France. Since > I've lived among the > bureaucrats far longer than Margaret Mead lived > among the > Samoans, this novel is probably the one for me > to get > introduced to Balzac. > 4. Colman, Hila. Diary of a Frantic Kid Sister. > America. Teen-age: I > should know something about this genre. > 5. Goethe, Johann von. Elective Affinities. > Germany. Sarah's very > favorite. > 6. Gover, Robert. One Hundred Dollar > Misunderstanding. America. One of > Charles Sletten's favorites. > 7. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature and La-Bas. > Germany. Two of > Sarah's other favorites. > 8. Jelinek, Elfriede. Wonderful, Wonderful Times. > Austria. Just won the > Nobel Prize for Literature. > 9. J?nger, Ernst. On the Marble Cliffs. Germany. > Another of Sarah's > favorites. > 10. Kleist, Heinrich von. The Marquise of O- and > Other Stories. > Germany. Given to me by George. Kleist never > wrote a novel and > committed suicide at age 34. > 11. O'Connor, Flannery. America. Three by Flannery > O'Connor. > 12. Schaefer, Jack. Shane. America. A casebook. I > love casebooks, for the > give me background! Love Cliff Notes, too, > since I have great difficulty > following lots of characters. > 13. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. England. A > Casebook. I have read > the play but need to really study it. > 14. Trevor, William. The Story of Lucy Gault. > Ireland. One of Marcia's > favorites. > 15. Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. > America. A classic > work from the 1950s protesting the conformity > of the era. Others include > Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; David Reisman, The > Lonely Crowd; Robert > Lindner, Prescription for Rebellion; C. Wright > Mills, The Power > Elite; William Whyte, The Organization Man. All > non-fiction here, > except Atlas Shrugged, but I don't know fiction > very well. > 16. Wolfe, Thomas. You Can't Go Home Again. America. > 17. Zola, Emile. Earth. France. Given to me by > Denise, but I'll probably > read the much more famous Nana instead. > 18. The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Moral Ruins). A > sampler. France. We > have a division of labor in our house: I read > the books on cynicism > and nihilism, while Sarah reads the books on > decadence and > degeneration. But this is fiction, so I shall > read it. > 19. Goethe, Tieck, Fouqu?, Brentano. Romantic Fairy > Tales. German. > > II. NON-WESTERN NOVELS > > 1. Garc?a M?rques, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of > Solitude. Colombia. This > will be my first non-Western novel. Almost > everyone recommends it. I'll be > getting a case book and the Cliff Notes. I've > downloaded everything > on it from http://www.oprah.com. > 2. Allende, Isabel. Chile. Several lying around the > apartment, I don't > know which to read first. > 3. Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. > Argentina. He never wrote a > novel. Another non-Western author nearly > everyone recommends. > 4. Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fiction. This > is literature, really. > 5. Jin, Ha. Waiting. China. > 6. Pramoedya Ananta Toer. The Buru Quartet. Java. > Given to me by > Denise. Will read one volume initially. > 7. Mahfouz, Naguib. The Thief and the Dogs. Egypt. > Winner of the Nobel > Prize for Literature in 1988. > 8. Murasaki Shikibu [Lady Muraski]. The Tale of > Genji. Japan. My copy is > === message truncated ===> _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From paul.werbos at verizon.net Fri Oct 29 00:47:48 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 20:47:48 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Nature: Biologists come close to cloning primates In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20041028203858.02aec370@incoming.verizon.net> For some reason or other -- I am reminded that it's not just politicians who forget to tie their shoelaces or totally lose touch with reality, regularly. It is shocking to me that even world-class biologists talk about cloning to themselves and to others without discussing telomeres. Though I am curious what happened in the past few years to the black projects on teleomeres -- the reality has some resonance with a wild novel Greg Bear wrote years ago. At least ONE of the TV shows on cloning a few years back did try to explain the facts of life. "Could it be that this cloned sheep, young on the outside, is old on the inside?" Scenario: rich couple sneaks off to idealistic doctor in the Virgin Islands, a cult hero to many, who offers to clone the big rich sugar daddy outside the repressive borders of the US. The clone comes home to the US with great fanfare... but in his teens his knees start to go, his hair grays, and he becomes a regular Dorian Gray horror show. About what one would expect, really, when people do cloning with special telomere technology and associated p52 and whatnot stuff. It's all basically solvable... but the same is true of our energy policies. And indeed, the current energy discussions in elite policy circles all over the world do offer some argument for paying more attention to the hereafter... because, after all, what chances will the here have if they don't show radically different behaviors? But as for those guys... there is no reason to believe they know one whit more about the hereafter than about the here. The former merely offers more opportunity to disregard empirical reality and get away with it, politically... From paul.werbos at verizon.net Fri Oct 29 01:07:48 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:07:48 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 036: Frank Is Abandoning Reality In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20041028204839.00bf9400@incoming.verizon.net> At 05:59 AM 10/28/2004 -0400, Premise Checker wrote: >Meme 036: Frank Is Abandoning Reality >sent 4.10.28, 4:59 am Central War Time, the minute of his 60th birthday in >Kansas City, Mo. > >"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten >over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it >had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that >everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my >life you could call my life on the road...." >---------- > >I am abandoning reality for fiction and will stop reading non-fiction >books. I think I know pretty much, at least in outline form, what is >actually known about human nature from the biological and social sciences. >Novelists have a way of getting at the complexities of the human condition >that scientists have not. Something in this. Novelists are less constrained by the reinvented colleges of cardinals. But Pribram's book on Freud should not be underestimated here... and there are other glimmers. It is as much a matter of how one uses those sources as the sources themselves. >So not having read much fiction since I read all twelve volumes of >Dostoyevsky in the 1970s, I am returning to deepen my understanding. What >aspects of our humanity may we be giving up as we take control of human >nature through manipulating the genome, through nanotechnology, >biotechnology, artificial intelligence, man-machine hookups? Will we >become the emotionally flat robots depicted in science fiction novels and >movies? Could our selves and our lives, instead, become deeper, even >deeper than Beethoven in his last decade? Good question. In fact, one of the all-pervasive fault lines out there today. I suspect fears on those lines have a lot to do with Kerry not being in a landslide situation today, and with the Islam versus Europe divide (which in many ways is mirrored in the Bush-Kerry divide). Not robots, but faulty memes, inability to go from thesis and antithesis to synthesis, are the immediate causes... >I also want to know how human nature varies. Is the world converging to >one system of thinking? Or has there been enough gene-culture coevolution >of human populations--it's still taboo to say races, owing to lingering >20th century egalitarianism--that there will be significant *internal* >barriers to Western hegemony? As I said in my last meme, there has been a >major reorientation of the dominant left-right polarity, from central >planning vs. free market in the earlier twentieth century and equality vs. >inequality in the later part to pluralism vs. universalism in this century. See above. In Freudian terms... are we moving to an Ericsonian leap in maturity, or a collective nervous breakdown? I sure don't know. >I'm asking for lists of your favorite novels, stressing non-Western >literature, those that have depth of characterization and are worth >rereading. (But are novels all alike, the medium being the message?) I've >read all of the (University of Chicago) Great Books (except that I could >only get through a quarter of War and Peace) but have read only one >non-Western novel, Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima. I need to broaden my >learning. So please send your lists. (I do NOT read poetry.) Books that >appear on many lists are most likely to get read. I shall assume your >permission to forward your lists, unless you tell me otherwise. There are many too many. Was a bit amused by Waley's Tao Te Ching, the other day. In some ways, I like the new fancy color Tao Te Ching with three translators better, but Waley has important history. Curt Benjamin's "silly" fantasy series captures some of the spirit of Chinese and Golden Horde cultures. The Creation of the Gods book (published in Beijing) made great bed-time reading for my kids a few years back. Have you ever read Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus? I am appalled by how badly the new Gnostic introducer/interpreter screws it up... but it has some curious resonances. But... Western style Novels written by nonWesterners? None of the above qualify. And what is Western, anyway? It is Asia other than Russia, plus Islam and Africa, or Native American? That's hard. I don't know a lot IN that intersection of categories! Satanic Verses by Rushdie? I haven't even gotten around to reading it; there are other sources on that culture. There ARE a few famous Novels from China and Japan, but I am not sure how deep they go. Popular romance stuff is the best known. I remember a Chinese friend who once said "Science Fiction? We have those Gung Fu movies..." ... Maybe a hole in my education... or maybe not. Best, Paul >(Having last had an English class in 1964--yes, I am that old--my memory >of what happened in those classes is completely vague. How is a 40 or 50 >minute class, that is in neither a lecture nor a seminar format, get >filled up? Can anyone point me toward webpages of transcripts of typical >literature classes?) > >I have four categories in my project: >I. Western novels >II. Non-Western novels >III. Science fiction novels >IV . Religion, books of or about. > >Here's the list of what I've accumulated so far: > >I. WESTERN NOVELS > >1. Kerouac, Jack, On the Road. America. This will be the first book. I > read. >2. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. England. Never read anything by > her. >3. Balzac, Honor?. The Bureaucrats. France. Since I've lived among the > bureaucrats far longer than Margaret Mead lived among the > Samoans, this novel is probably the one for me to get > introduced to Balzac. >4. Colman, Hila. Diary of a Frantic Kid Sister. America. Teen-age: I > should know something about this genre. >5. Goethe, Johann von. Elective Affinities. Germany. Sarah's very > favorite. >6. Gover, Robert. One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding. America. One of > Charles Sletten's favorites. >7. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature and La-Bas. Germany. Two of > Sarah's other favorites. >8. Jelinek, Elfriede. Wonderful, Wonderful Times. Austria. Just won the > Nobel Prize for Literature. >9. J?nger, Ernst. On the Marble Cliffs. Germany. Another of Sarah's > favorites. >10. Kleist, Heinrich von. The Marquise of O- and Other Stories. > Germany. Given to me by George. Kleist never wrote a novel and > committed suicide at age 34. >11. O'Connor, Flannery. America. Three by Flannery O'Connor. >12. Schaefer, Jack. Shane. America. A casebook. I love casebooks, for the > give me background! Love Cliff Notes, too, since I have great difficulty > following lots of characters. >13. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. England. A Casebook. I have read > the play but need to really study it. >14. Trevor, William. The Story of Lucy Gault. Ireland. One of Marcia's > favorites. >15. Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. America. A classic > work from the 1950s protesting the conformity of the era. Others include > Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd; Robert > Lindner, Prescription for Rebellion; C. Wright Mills, The Power > Elite; William Whyte, The Organization Man. All non-fiction here, > except Atlas Shrugged, but I don't know fiction very well. >16. Wolfe, Thomas. You Can't Go Home Again. America. >17. Zola, Emile. Earth. France. Given to me by Denise, but I'll probably > read the much more famous Nana instead. >18. The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Moral Ruins). A sampler. France. We > have a division of labor in our house: I read the books on cynicism > and nihilism, while Sarah reads the books on decadence and > degeneration. But this is fiction, so I shall read it. >19. Goethe, Tieck, Fouqu?, Brentano. Romantic Fairy Tales. German. > >II. NON-WESTERN NOVELS > >1. Garc?a M?rques, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Colombia. This > will be my first non-Western novel. Almost everyone recommends it. > I'll be > getting a case book and the Cliff Notes. I've downloaded everything > on it from http://www.oprah.com. >2. Allende, Isabel. Chile. Several lying around the apartment, I don't > know which to read first. >3. Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Argentina. He never wrote a > novel. Another non-Western author nearly everyone recommends. >4. Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fiction. This is literature, really. >5. Jin, Ha. Waiting. China. >6. Pramoedya Ananta Toer. The Buru Quartet. Java. Given to me by > Denise. Will read one volume initially. >7. Mahfouz, Naguib. The Thief and the Dogs. Egypt. Winner of the Nobel > Prize for Literature in 1988. >8. Murasaki Shikibu [Lady Muraski]. The Tale of Genji. Japan. My copy is > just Part One. If I like it, I can get the whole thing. >9. Tanizaki, Junichiro. Some Prefer Nettles. Japan. Given to my by > Denise. >10. Truong, Monique. The Book of Salt. Vietnam. She noted that Gertrude > Stein and Alice B. Toklas had a Vietnamese cook, so she wrote a > novel about Paris in the 1930s from the standpoint of the cook! >11. Watase, Yu. Alice 19th. A Japanese Manga (comic book format). You can > get a mangastrap, a jacket designed for holding your arms to read > mangas on long Japanese subway rides. A good idea, but as Japanese > goods are very expensive, they cost $160 to import! > >III. SCIENCE FICTION > >1. Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age. Given to me by Carolyn and > autographed by the Author at the National Book Festival earlier > this month. This will be my first science fiction novel. >2. Anderson, Poul. A Midsummer Tempest. Patterned after two Shakespeare > plays. >3. Asimov, Isaac, et al., editors. The 7 Deadly Sins of Science Fiction. > I've already read The 7 Cardinal Virtues. 4. Benford, Gregory (et > al.), editors. Hitler Victorious. >5. Brown, Fredric. Compliments of a Fiend. The only Fred Brown book, > published in his lifetime, that I have not read. >6. Herbert, Frank. Dune. I can get the Spark Notes on this one. >7. Le Guin, Ursula. The Dispossessed. Actually, I don't physically own > a copy, but this seems to be the first one to read. How will it compare > to Dostoyevsky's novel of the same title? >8. Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. Casebook version. >9. Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds. Casebook version. > >IV. RELIGION > >1. Gregg, Steve. Revelation: Four Views, a Parallel Commentary. This book > gives the four principle interpretations of the last book in the > Bible in parallel columns for each verse. This will be my first book > in this category. >2. Cleary, Thomas, translator and presentor. The Essential Koran. I do > not want to read the entire Koran. > >I have stacks of other books of or on religion, too many to list. I also >have lots of unread books on the art that probes the human condition more >than any other, namely Western music. I have multiple recordings of nearly >all the great masterpieces of classical instrumental music. > >In order to speed myself in this task of abandoning reality, I'm stopping >my finding and forwarding articles on many subjects until I've read at >least one book in each category. I read slowly and have no idea how many >months this will take. (This may grow into a full sabbatical. I need, too, >to catch up on stacks of back issues of the Times Literary Supplement, >long my favorite serial. I shall continue to bounce articles to my various >lists at the request of others. And I'll continue to participate in >threads started by others. > >In parallel with the books above, I'll be reading Mary Ann Caws and >Christopher Prendergast, The HarperCollins World Reader (2 v., 2796 pp.), >along with its Instructor's Manual (846 pp. The only copy in the OCLC >World Cat database is at the Mohawk Valley Community College!) and the >accompanying Issues in World Literature (a mere 108 pp.). I will also be >reading the President's Council on Bioethics (Leon Kass, chairman) >anthology, Being Human, which consists of selections from literature, >almost entirely Western. The purpose of the book is to display the >fullness of human nature, or at least Western human nature, to caution us >about getting rid of it. Whether Kass believes West is Best, I don't know. > >I'm launching a website immediately after sending this. It is >http://www.panix.com/~checker (you must include the tilde). I shall upload >more on Beethoven's birthday. If you have sent me e-mail and really wanted >a reply but didn't get one, bug me. I've just gotten too far behind. I'm >not blanking out, for I hold my hypotheses lightly and do not want to >continue chasing after bad ones. > >Get to work on lists of novels, particularly non-Western novels, for me to >read! > >[I am sending forth these memes, not because I agree wholeheartedly with >all of them, but to impregnate females of both sexes. Ponder them and >spread them.] > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Fri Oct 29 02:05:32 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:05:32 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP References: <5.2.1.1.0.20041028203858.02aec370@incoming.verizon.net> Message-ID: <02d901c4bd5b$c5fa10f0$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Hi Paleo people, I have an EPish question which I can't seem to wrap my Floresian-sized brain around...And hoping someone out there has some thoughts... In terms of evolved psychological mechanisms/innate releasing mechanisms (IRMs) and manifest behavior or traits...etc...I would like to be able to argue for a universal human nature, even in the face of huge individual differences... However, say I wanted to argue that, along with our hierarchical nature, we also have the capacity to be nonhierarchical. Now, right there it almost sounds nonsensical to say it is our human nature to be hierarchical but that we have the capacity not to be that way. But I do understand Cosmides, I think, and I'm willing to view it as an epigenetic structure that can be turned up/on, or not, that there's great human variabilty, IRMs, etc... However, it seems to me, that we'd be better off talking about multi-phylogenetic modes [along lines of (tri) MacLean or (quad) Jim Henry] or even a bi-human nature...rather than uni. Homo sap's hierarchical mode (Appolinian) is probably a lot newer than homo sap's spiritual/connected-to-everything-feeling/nonhierarchical mode (Dionysian)--which must represent, phylogentically, something older, not more primitive-- even though we think of the hierarchical mode as being more primitive and the connected/spiritual as being more 'evolved'... (Or binary human nature: in terms of left brain/right brain; agonic/hedonic; reason/emotion, ad infinitum.) But getting to question: I realize EP and behavior genetics are at odds sometimes...but...I've long known about the possibility of a belief-in-god module. From my novel, Trine Erotic (2002): She suspected these romantic, fate thoughts they both had were "designed" for a reason. That there had to be some kind of belief-in-fate module, a mental organ in the brain, just as there is a belief-in-God module. Some people's are "set" very high. Others don't even have them. Perhaps this fate module was even close to the God module, some kind of Belief area, maybe near the amygdala or hypothalamus. And now it looks like that they've found the genes controlling spiritual 'feeling'...And my suspicion that some people have and some don't, appears to be true. Now, that doesn't mean that someone who doesn't have all the genes that might make someone feel spiritual naturally, can't get to that place. But it would probably take concerted effort...lots and lots of meditation and will, and indoctrination, and mushrooms, etc. And then still, it may not be the same thing as the natural 'Dionysian' man...not even close. So... how would the universal human nature argument proceed? We all have psych evolved mechs/structure to feel connected/ spiritual, (Dionysian) etc...?????? But...again...What about people who don't feel this way and don't have these genes? Do they have this potential/structure? What does that look like? If nonspirituals (Appolinian types) don't have genes that seem to carry such a disposition and their brains don't appear to reflect it either...How can we say it is there for everyone? Especially when, despite powerful forces like models (parents), school, peers, society, some people have no spiritual feeling or religiosity, etc etc. And the reverse is also true. Is it that the 'spiritual' program isn't universal, because even the environment doesn't seem to be able to kick it in...? Or that it is a part of universal human nature, because if it's not there innately, it IS possible for people to feel such feelings given the right set of circumstances? Is it semantic and political? If we say there's no universal human nature, but then make nativist claims here and there, do we get closer to right-wing ideology and behavior genetics? Uni-human Nature versus Bi-human nature I'm thinking we have two choices--but we can choose both if we want: 1.We can say here is human nature warts and all and it's taken millions of years of mother nature's 'fine-tuning' to get it where it is and it's not likely to change in any dramatic way anytime soon, so let's, with our knowledge and understanding of who we are and where we came from, try to change (as some EPists suggest), our environment, to make it more compatible with our hunter-gatherer minds. (eg, focus on creating more cohesive communities and less fractured alienated ones, much like EEA tribes. ) This is the practical, pragmatic, active approach. The idea would be to try to create a world that by and large helps to activate certain modules/programs. However, this could sound, to some, like on the path to right-wing ideology or whacky Luddite utopia..But it doesn't have to be either. We needn't not be realistic nor give up freedoms and individual rights and choice. Freedom and individual rights trump the notion that there may be an inherent, archetypal, mother-father system, say. If we maintain as the ultimate goal, though, the pursuit and experience of happiness, then other ways will not only be tolerated, but embraced and supported. What the project in this case would do would be to try to support people's innate archetypal goals and programs. 2. And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, transcendental, dualistic route and say, one of human nature's features is that it is binary. Reason and passion, Id and Superego, reptilian brain and neocortex, feeling and thought, left-brain and right brain, head and heart, Dionysian and Appolinian, agonic and hedonic, hierarchical versus affiliative, instinct and rationality, animalness and godliness, nature and culture, individualistic/separate-feeling vs communitarian/connected- feeling.I could go on. We are every bit of one as we are the other. And we can choose to act on instinct or not. When we are hit, we can choose, through thinking first, whether we wish to do what feels good (limbically and reptiliany) and "right"--which is, generally, to hit back. Our prefrontal lobes give us the gift of not hitting back, running away, or freezing. We can reason, we can ask why, we can negotiate, we can forgive. The proliferation is the West of the Eastern traditions, philosophies, spiritualities (by way of prayer, meditation, yoga, belief, etc.) in the past 3 decades attests to our yearning for this way of being... Sorry if this isn't more clear...I welcome your thoughts... Cheers, Alice From dsmith06 at maine.rr.com Fri Oct 29 02:43:26 2004 From: dsmith06 at maine.rr.com (David Smith) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:43:26 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP References: <5.2.1.1.0.20041028203858.02aec370@incoming.verizon.net> <02d901c4bd5b$c5fa10f0$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Message-ID: <008001c4bd61$1102cc90$0200a8c0@dad> Alice As I understand it (drawing on the work of Christopher Boehm) our common ancestor with the chimpanzee was, in all likelihood, heavily into dominance hierarchies. Our stone age ancesestors, like nomadic hunter-gatherers today, opposed dominance by deploying a counter-dominance strategy (the whole group opposes any individual who tries to throw his weight around). With the advent of a more settled life-style, and especially agriculture, we reverted to ancient, despotic, chimpanzee-like ways. So, I guess that this would imply what we have the potential for dominance-hierarchies and counterdominant anti-hierarchies. David ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alice Andrews" To: "The new improved paleopsych list" Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 10:05 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP > Hi Paleo people, > > I have an EPish question which I can't seem to wrap my Floresian-sized brain > around...And hoping someone out there has some thoughts... > In terms of evolved psychological mechanisms/innate releasing mechanisms > (IRMs) and manifest behavior or traits...etc...I would like to be able to > argue for a universal human nature, even in the face of huge individual > differences... > > However, say I wanted to argue that, along with our hierarchical nature, we > also have the capacity to be nonhierarchical. Now, right there it almost > sounds nonsensical to say it is our human nature to be hierarchical but that > we have the capacity not to be that way. > But I do understand Cosmides, I think, and I'm willing to view it as an > epigenetic structure that can be turned up/on, or not, that there's great > human variabilty, IRMs, etc... > > However, it seems to me, that we'd be better off talking about > multi-phylogenetic modes [along lines of (tri) MacLean or (quad) Jim Henry] > or even a bi-human nature...rather than uni. Homo sap's hierarchical mode > (Appolinian) is probably a lot newer than homo sap's > spiritual/connected-to-everything-feeling/nonhierarchical mode > (Dionysian)--which must represent, phylogentically, something older, not > more primitive-- even though we think of the hierarchical mode as being more > primitive and the connected/spiritual as being more 'evolved'... > > (Or binary human nature: in terms of left brain/right brain; agonic/hedonic; > reason/emotion, ad infinitum.) > > But getting to question: > I realize EP and behavior genetics are at odds sometimes...but...I've long > known about the possibility of a belief-in-god module. From my novel, Trine > Erotic (2002): > > > She suspected these romantic, fate thoughts they both had were "designed" > for a reason. That there had to be some kind of belief-in-fate module, a > mental organ in the brain, just as there is a belief-in-God module. Some > people's are "set" very high. Others don't even have them. Perhaps this fate > module was even close to the God module, some kind of Belief area, maybe > near the amygdala or hypothalamus. > > > > > > And now it looks like that they've found the genes controlling spiritual > 'feeling'...And my suspicion that some people have and some don't, appears > to be true. Now, that doesn't mean that someone who doesn't have all the > genes that might make someone feel spiritual naturally, can't get to that > place. But it would probably take concerted effort...lots and lots of > meditation and will, and indoctrination, and mushrooms, etc. And then still, > it may not be the same thing as the natural 'Dionysian' man...not even > close. > > > > So... how would the universal human nature argument proceed? We all have > psych evolved mechs/structure to feel connected/ spiritual, (Dionysian) > etc...?????? > > > > But...again...What about people who don't feel this way and don't have these > genes? Do they have this potential/structure? What does that look like? > > > > If nonspirituals (Appolinian types) don't have genes that seem to carry such > a disposition and their brains don't appear to reflect it either...How can > we say it is there for everyone? Especially when, despite powerful forces > like models (parents), school, peers, society, some people have no spiritual > feeling or religiosity, etc etc. And the reverse is also true. > > > > Is it that the 'spiritual' program isn't universal, because even the > environment doesn't seem to be able to kick it in...? Or that it is a part > of universal human nature, because if it's not there innately, it IS > possible for people to feel such feelings given the right set of > circumstances? > > > > Is it semantic and political? If we say there's no universal human nature, > but then make nativist claims here and there, do we get closer to right-wing > ideology and behavior genetics? > > > > > > Uni-human Nature versus Bi-human nature > > > > I'm thinking we have two choices--but we can choose both if we want: > > 1.We can say here is human nature warts and all and it's taken millions of > years of mother nature's 'fine-tuning' to get it where it is and it's not > likely to change in any dramatic way anytime soon, so let's, with our > knowledge and understanding of who we are and where we came from, try to > change (as some EPists suggest), our environment, to make it more compatible > with our hunter-gatherer minds. (eg, focus on creating more cohesive > communities and less fractured alienated ones, much like EEA tribes. ) This > is the practical, pragmatic, active approach. The idea would be to try to > create a world that by and large helps to activate certain modules/programs. > However, this could sound, to some, like on the path to right-wing ideology > or whacky Luddite utopia..But it doesn't have to be either. > > We needn't not be realistic nor give up freedoms and individual rights and > choice. Freedom and individual rights trump the notion that there may be an > inherent, archetypal, mother-father system, say. If we maintain as the > ultimate goal, though, the pursuit and experience of happiness, then other > ways will not only be tolerated, but embraced and supported. What the > project in this case would do would be to try to support people's innate > archetypal goals and programs. > > > > 2. And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, transcendental, > dualistic route and say, one of human nature's features is that it is > binary. Reason and passion, Id and Superego, reptilian brain and neocortex, > feeling and thought, left-brain and right brain, head and heart, Dionysian > and Appolinian, agonic and hedonic, hierarchical versus affiliative, > instinct and rationality, animalness and godliness, nature and culture, > individualistic/separate-feeling vs communitarian/connected- feeling.I could > go on. We are every bit of one as we are the other. And we can choose to act > on instinct or not. When we are hit, we can choose, through thinking first, > whether we wish to do what feels good (limbically and reptiliany) and > "right"--which is, generally, to hit back. Our prefrontal lobes give us the > gift of not hitting back, running away, or freezing. We can reason, we can > ask why, we can negotiate, we can forgive. The proliferation is the West of > the Eastern traditions, philosophies, spiritualities (by way of prayer, > meditation, yoga, belief, etc.) in the past 3 decades attests to our > yearning for this way of being... > > > > Sorry if this isn't more clear...I welcome your thoughts... > > > > Cheers, > > Alice > > > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From n.j.c.bannan at reading.ac.uk Fri Oct 29 10:28:23 2004 From: n.j.c.bannan at reading.ac.uk (Nicholas Bannan) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 11:28:23 +0100 Subject: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP References: <5.2.1.1.0.20041028203858.02aec370@incoming.verizon.net><02d901c4bd5b$c5fa10f0$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> <008001c4bd61$1102cc90$0200a8c0@dad> Message-ID: <004e01c4bda2$05148900$6882e186@.rdg.ac.uk> I also like the idea that behaviour is modified in each individual as well as the group by context and periodicity. There are times of year and days of the week on which people are, as it were, more or less in touch with spiritual concerns. There might also be releasing mechnisms for leanings in this direction: I hesitate to say, for instance, moonlight, but I offer it as a basic example; fasting might be another. One could also imagine 'curves' whereby a given event might have a spiritual dimension that is then set to one side, only to be recovered later. Think of what happens before sporting events (anthems, anticipation), in an atmosphrere rudely interrupted by the confrontation itself. When conflict is completed, anthems and ceremonies, speeches and slo-mo replays to nostalgic music take over. Imagine racking this sequence up for real confrontations, such as wars. We have a different response to the trumpet calls that recruit our arousal for battle, and those that accompany the burial of the dead. Nicholas ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Smith" To: "The new improved paleopsych list" Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 3:43 AM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP > Alice > > As I understand it (drawing on the work of Christopher Boehm) our common > ancestor with the chimpanzee was, in all likelihood, heavily into dominance > hierarchies. Our stone age ancesestors, like nomadic hunter-gatherers > today, opposed dominance by deploying a counter-dominance strategy (the > whole group opposes any individual who tries to throw his weight around). > With the advent of a more settled life-style, and especially agriculture, we > reverted to ancient, despotic, chimpanzee-like ways. So, I guess that this > would imply what we have the potential for dominance-hierarchies and > counterdominant anti-hierarchies. > > David > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Alice Andrews" > To: "The new improved paleopsych list" > Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 10:05 PM > Subject: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP > > > > Hi Paleo people, > > > > I have an EPish question which I can't seem to wrap my Floresian-sized > brain > > around...And hoping someone out there has some thoughts... > > In terms of evolved psychological mechanisms/innate releasing mechanisms > > (IRMs) and manifest behavior or traits...etc...I would like to be able to > > argue for a universal human nature, even in the face of huge individual > > differences... > > > > However, say I wanted to argue that, along with our hierarchical nature, > we > > also have the capacity to be nonhierarchical. Now, right there it almost > > sounds nonsensical to say it is our human nature to be hierarchical but > that > > we have the capacity not to be that way. > > But I do understand Cosmides, I think, and I'm willing to view it as an > > epigenetic structure that can be turned up/on, or not, that there's great > > human variabilty, IRMs, etc... > > > > However, it seems to me, that we'd be better off talking about > > multi-phylogenetic modes [along lines of (tri) MacLean or (quad) Jim > Henry] > > or even a bi-human nature...rather than uni. Homo sap's hierarchical mode > > (Appolinian) is probably a lot newer than homo sap's > > spiritual/connected-to-everything-feeling/nonhierarchical mode > > (Dionysian)--which must represent, phylogentically, something older, not > > more primitive-- even though we think of the hierarchical mode as being > more > > primitive and the connected/spiritual as being more 'evolved'... > > > > (Or binary human nature: in terms of left brain/right brain; > agonic/hedonic; > > reason/emotion, ad infinitum.) > > > > But getting to question: > > I realize EP and behavior genetics are at odds sometimes...but...I've long > > known about the possibility of a belief-in-god module. From my novel, > Trine > > Erotic (2002): > > > > > > She suspected these romantic, fate thoughts they both had were "designed" > > for a reason. That there had to be some kind of belief-in-fate module, a > > mental organ in the brain, just as there is a belief-in-God module. Some > > people's are "set" very high. Others don't even have them. Perhaps this > fate > > module was even close to the God module, some kind of Belief area, maybe > > near the amygdala or hypothalamus. > > > > > > > > > > > > And now it looks like that they've found the genes controlling spiritual > > 'feeling'...And my suspicion that some people have and some don't, appears > > to be true. Now, that doesn't mean that someone who doesn't have all the > > genes that might make someone feel spiritual naturally, can't get to that > > place. But it would probably take concerted effort...lots and lots of > > meditation and will, and indoctrination, and mushrooms, etc. And then > still, > > it may not be the same thing as the natural 'Dionysian' man...not even > > close. > > > > > > > > So... how would the universal human nature argument proceed? We all have > > psych evolved mechs/structure to feel connected/ spiritual, (Dionysian) > > etc...?????? > > > > > > > > But...again...What about people who don't feel this way and don't have > these > > genes? Do they have this potential/structure? What does that look like? > > > > > > > > If nonspirituals (Appolinian types) don't have genes that seem to carry > such > > a disposition and their brains don't appear to reflect it either...How can > > we say it is there for everyone? Especially when, despite powerful forces > > like models (parents), school, peers, society, some people have no > spiritual > > feeling or religiosity, etc etc. And the reverse is also true. > > > > > > > > Is it that the 'spiritual' program isn't universal, because even the > > environment doesn't seem to be able to kick it in...? Or that it is a part > > of universal human nature, because if it's not there innately, it IS > > possible for people to feel such feelings given the right set of > > circumstances? > > > > > > > > Is it semantic and political? If we say there's no universal human nature, > > but then make nativist claims here and there, do we get closer to > right-wing > > ideology and behavior genetics? > > > > > > > > > > > > Uni-human Nature versus Bi-human nature > > > > > > > > I'm thinking we have two choices--but we can choose both if we want: > > > > 1.We can say here is human nature warts and all and it's taken millions of > > years of mother nature's 'fine-tuning' to get it where it is and it's not > > likely to change in any dramatic way anytime soon, so let's, with our > > knowledge and understanding of who we are and where we came from, try to > > change (as some EPists suggest), our environment, to make it more > compatible > > with our hunter-gatherer minds. (eg, focus on creating more cohesive > > communities and less fractured alienated ones, much like EEA tribes. ) > This > > is the practical, pragmatic, active approach. The idea would be to try to > > create a world that by and large helps to activate certain > modules/programs. > > However, this could sound, to some, like on the path to right-wing > ideology > > or whacky Luddite utopia..But it doesn't have to be either. > > > > We needn't not be realistic nor give up freedoms and individual rights and > > choice. Freedom and individual rights trump the notion that there may be > an > > inherent, archetypal, mother-father system, say. If we maintain as the > > ultimate goal, though, the pursuit and experience of happiness, then other > > ways will not only be tolerated, but embraced and supported. What the > > project in this case would do would be to try to support people's innate > > archetypal goals and programs. > > > > > > > > 2. And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, transcendental, > > dualistic route and say, one of human nature's features is that it is > > binary. Reason and passion, Id and Superego, reptilian brain and > neocortex, > > feeling and thought, left-brain and right brain, head and heart, Dionysian > > and Appolinian, agonic and hedonic, hierarchical versus affiliative, > > instinct and rationality, animalness and godliness, nature and culture, > > individualistic/separate-feeling vs communitarian/connected- feeling.I > could > > go on. We are every bit of one as we are the other. And we can choose to > act > > on instinct or not. When we are hit, we can choose, through thinking > first, > > whether we wish to do what feels good (limbically and reptiliany) and > > "right"--which is, generally, to hit back. Our prefrontal lobes give us > the > > gift of not hitting back, running away, or freezing. We can reason, we can > > ask why, we can negotiate, we can forgive. The proliferation is the West > of > > the Eastern traditions, philosophies, spiritualities (by way of prayer, > > meditation, yoga, belief, etc.) in the past 3 decades attests to our > > yearning for this way of being... > > > > > > > > Sorry if this isn't more clear...I welcome your thoughts... > > > > > > > > Cheers, > > > > Alice > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > paleopsych mailing list > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From he at psychology.su.se Fri Oct 29 14:03:10 2004 From: he at psychology.su.se (Hannes Eisler) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 16:03:10 +0200 Subject: [Paleopsych] mem 036 Message-ID: Hi Frank, a few items for your list. Often I do not know whether translations into English exist and the English titles. German writing Western authors: Kafka, Musil, Grass. Not Western: Golden Lotus, a Chinese novel from, if my recollection is correct, the 17th century. On the internet I saw two English translations. Science fiction: Harry Martinson, Aniara. There seem to be translations from the Swedish original. (It has also been turned into an opera.) It is in verse, but still a story with characterisations of the space ship vogagers. Enjoy! Hannes Eisler -- ------------------------------------- Prof. Hannes Eisler Department of Psychology Stockholm University S-106 91 Stockholm Sweden e-mail: he at psychology.su.se fax : +46-8-15 93 42 phone : +46-8-163967 (university) +46-8-6409982 (home) internet: http://www.psychology.su.se/staff/he -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From seamensa at yahoo.com Fri Oct 29 15:29:59 2004 From: seamensa at yahoo.com (s e a m u s) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 08:29:59 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] EPers in Mind here... In-Reply-To: <02d901c4bd5b$c5fa10f0$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Message-ID: <20041029152959.19781.qmail@web54406.mail.yahoo.com> Hello Alice, and your EPishness conquers all on this one for me really. I personally thought the concept and observation of your 'hierarchical nature' came into play, as a crucial kind of understanding of human beings, as sentient beings who, being self aware, derive choice or selection, from a multi-fascited realm of what is possible, averaging out to what is functional in time. I usually just breeze by the PaleoWindow if the weather draws me within, but thought your approach, was refreshing! Yours Seamus Dunlap --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From guavaberry at earthlink.net Fri Oct 29 16:31:39 2004 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 12:31:39 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Gleason Sackmann Retires Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.0.20041029123119.043af180@mail.earthlink.net> Hello, Many folks on this list may not have had the opportunity to know my friend Gleason Sackmann so I thought to send this along. Please feel free to post this to other interested lists. best, Karen Ellis -- GLEASON SACKMANN RETIRES Carolyn Kotlas CIT INFOBITS October 2004 No. 76 ISSN 1521-9275 10/29/04 After a long career in education, Gleason Sackmann retired this year. In 1998, he was awarded the SIG/Tel Educational Telecomputing Outstanding Service Award, and in 1996, he was rated #10 on NEWSWEEK's prestigious List of "50 People Who Matter." Over the years, Sackmann moderated several important newsletters for educators: K12 NEWSLETTERS, NETWORK NEWSLETTERS, and NEW-LIST. From 1993 to 2004, he published NET-HAPPENINGS. Net-Happenings covers conference announcements, calls for papers, network resource announcements, newsletters, and network tool updates. Over 9,000 individuals currently subscribe, with many more readers through the website and mail redistribution. Net-Happenings will continue publication under the direction of Karen Ellis, founder of the Educational CyberPlayGround website. As one who has benefited from Gleason Sackmann's work over the years (including his distribution of Infobits in his publications), I would like to express my appreciation for his tremendous contribution to the educational and Internet communities. For more information about Gleason Sackmann, see http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/gmanbio.html For more about Net-Happenings or to subscribe, see http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/NetHappenings.html For more about CyberPlayGround and its other publications and services, see http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/index.html <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> The Educational CyberPlayGround http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ National Children's Folksong Repository http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Culdesac/Repository/NCFR.html Hot List of Schools Online and Net Happenings, K12 Newsletters, Network Newsletters http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Community/index.html 7 Hot Site Awards New York Times, USA Today , MSNBC, Earthlink, USA Today Best Bets For Educators, Macworld Top Fifty <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Fri Oct 29 17:06:50 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 13:06:50 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP References: <5.2.1.1.0.20041028203858.02aec370@incoming.verizon.net> <02d901c4bd5b$c5fa10f0$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> <008001c4bd61$1102cc90$0200a8c0@dad> Message-ID: <01fa01c4bdd9$b329f200$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Yes...thank you, David...That's kind of how I've been understanding it, too. Agonic and hedonic archetypal modes (Chance, 1970)...etc. But 2 questions about that still remain for me. 1. From an essay of mine in Entelechy: Here are several 'truths' about human nature that many people feel and see, but have been told (by some) are not true, from Pinker's TBS. It comes from a long list of 'discoveries' about human nature that he believes makes unlikely "the Utopian Vision that human nature might radically change in some imagined society of the remote future." (I'm a tad more optimistic than Pinker.) "The universality of dominance and violence across human societies...and the existence of genetic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it....The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent trade-off between equality and freedom....The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty.") (p.294) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------- In some sense, what would it matter to say our human nature was both hierarchical and nonhierarchical? That's why I want to be more specific...When we speak of human nature it is usually about something that is polarized...And often it is something on the dark side. "Man's nature is to be dominant and violent." But that's why I'm kind of feeling like I want to be rescued from the language of 'human nature' because it's too simplistic and it's starting to confuse issues for me. That's why I'd like to start thinking again in terms of our multilayers...The agonic system is 300 m years old, the hedonic a lot newer, just as you mention. 2. In regards to that, though...My very romantic side wants to argue that before the reptilian agonic dominant aggressive mode, there was the 'spiritual' all-oneness mode... So it would have gone something like... Pre-reptiles (beginning of reptiles) --nonhierarchical (in genome) Reptiles and hominids--hierarchical EEA cousins-- nonheirarchical, AND hierarchical mod homo sap sap--hierarchical and nonhierarchical Anyway, I'm still grappling...but thanks for entertaining my thoughts... Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Smith" To: "The new improved paleopsych list" Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 10:43 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP > Alice > > As I understand it (drawing on the work of Christopher Boehm) our common > ancestor with the chimpanzee was, in all likelihood, heavily into dominance > hierarchies. Our stone age ancesestors, like nomadic hunter-gatherers > today, opposed dominance by deploying a counter-dominance strategy (the > whole group opposes any individual who tries to throw his weight around). > With the advent of a more settled life-style, and especially agriculture, we > reverted to ancient, despotic, chimpanzee-like ways. So, I guess that this > would imply what we have the potential for dominance-hierarchies and > counterdominant anti-hierarchies. > > David > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Alice Andrews" > To: "The new improved paleopsych list" > Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 10:05 PM > Subject: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP > > > > Hi Paleo people, > > > > I have an EPish question which I can't seem to wrap my Floresian-sized > brain > > around...And hoping someone out there has some thoughts... > > In terms of evolved psychological mechanisms/innate releasing mechanisms > > (IRMs) and manifest behavior or traits...etc...I would like to be able to > > argue for a universal human nature, even in the face of huge individual > > differences... > > > > However, say I wanted to argue that, along with our hierarchical nature, > we > > also have the capacity to be nonhierarchical. Now, right there it almost > > sounds nonsensical to say it is our human nature to be hierarchical but > that > > we have the capacity not to be that way. > > But I do understand Cosmides, I think, and I'm willing to view it as an > > epigenetic structure that can be turned up/on, or not, that there's great > > human variabilty, IRMs, etc... > > > > However, it seems to me, that we'd be better off talking about > > multi-phylogenetic modes [along lines of (tri) MacLean or (quad) Jim > Henry] > > or even a bi-human nature...rather than uni. Homo sap's hierarchical mode > > (Appolinian) is probably a lot newer than homo sap's > > spiritual/connected-to-everything-feeling/nonhierarchical mode > > (Dionysian)--which must represent, phylogentically, something older, not > > more primitive-- even though we think of the hierarchical mode as being > more > > primitive and the connected/spiritual as being more 'evolved'... > > > > (Or binary human nature: in terms of left brain/right brain; > agonic/hedonic; > > reason/emotion, ad infinitum.) > > > > But getting to question: > > I realize EP and behavior genetics are at odds sometimes...but...I've long > > known about the possibility of a belief-in-god module. From my novel, > Trine > > Erotic (2002): > > > > > > She suspected these romantic, fate thoughts they both had were "designed" > > for a reason. That there had to be some kind of belief-in-fate module, a > > mental organ in the brain, just as there is a belief-in-God module. Some > > people's are "set" very high. Others don't even have them. Perhaps this > fate > > module was even close to the God module, some kind of Belief area, maybe > > near the amygdala or hypothalamus. > > > > > > > > > > > > And now it looks like that they've found the genes controlling spiritual > > 'feeling'...And my suspicion that some people have and some don't, appears > > to be true. Now, that doesn't mean that someone who doesn't have all the > > genes that might make someone feel spiritual naturally, can't get to that > > place. But it would probably take concerted effort...lots and lots of > > meditation and will, and indoctrination, and mushrooms, etc. And then > still, > > it may not be the same thing as the natural 'Dionysian' man...not even > > close. > > > > > > > > So... how would the universal human nature argument proceed? We all have > > psych evolved mechs/structure to feel connected/ spiritual, (Dionysian) > > etc...?????? > > > > > > > > But...again...What about people who don't feel this way and don't have > these > > genes? Do they have this potential/structure? What does that look like? > > > > > > > > If nonspirituals (Appolinian types) don't have genes that seem to carry > such > > a disposition and their brains don't appear to reflect it either...How can > > we say it is there for everyone? Especially when, despite powerful forces > > like models (parents), school, peers, society, some people have no > spiritual > > feeling or religiosity, etc etc. And the reverse is also true. > > > > > > > > Is it that the 'spiritual' program isn't universal, because even the > > environment doesn't seem to be able to kick it in...? Or that it is a part > > of universal human nature, because if it's not there innately, it IS > > possible for people to feel such feelings given the right set of > > circumstances? > > > > > > > > Is it semantic and political? If we say there's no universal human nature, > > but then make nativist claims here and there, do we get closer to > right-wing > > ideology and behavior genetics? > > > > > > > > > > > > Uni-human Nature versus Bi-human nature > > > > > > > > I'm thinking we have two choices--but we can choose both if we want: > > > > 1.We can say here is human nature warts and all and it's taken millions of > > years of mother nature's 'fine-tuning' to get it where it is and it's not > > likely to change in any dramatic way anytime soon, so let's, with our > > knowledge and understanding of who we are and where we came from, try to > > change (as some EPists suggest), our environment, to make it more > compatible > > with our hunter-gatherer minds. (eg, focus on creating more cohesive > > communities and less fractured alienated ones, much like EEA tribes. ) > This > > is the practical, pragmatic, active approach. The idea would be to try to > > create a world that by and large helps to activate certain > modules/programs. > > However, this could sound, to some, like on the path to right-wing > ideology > > or whacky Luddite utopia..But it doesn't have to be either. > > > > We needn't not be realistic nor give up freedoms and individual rights and > > choice. Freedom and individual rights trump the notion that there may be > an > > inherent, archetypal, mother-father system, say. If we maintain as the > > ultimate goal, though, the pursuit and experience of happiness, then other > > ways will not only be tolerated, but embraced and supported. What the > > project in this case would do would be to try to support people's innate > > archetypal goals and programs. > > > > > > > > 2. And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, transcendental, > > dualistic route and say, one of human nature's features is that it is > > binary. Reason and passion, Id and Superego, reptilian brain and > neocortex, > > feeling and thought, left-brain and right brain, head and heart, Dionysian > > and Appolinian, agonic and hedonic, hierarchical versus affiliative, > > instinct and rationality, animalness and godliness, nature and culture, > > individualistic/separate-feeling vs communitarian/connected- feeling.I > could > > go on. We are every bit of one as we are the other. And we can choose to > act > > on instinct or not. When we are hit, we can choose, through thinking > first, > > whether we wish to do what feels good (limbically and reptiliany) and > > "right"--which is, generally, to hit back. Our prefrontal lobes give us > the > > gift of not hitting back, running away, or freezing. We can reason, we can > > ask why, we can negotiate, we can forgive. The proliferation is the West > of > > the Eastern traditions, philosophies, spiritualities (by way of prayer, > > meditation, yoga, belief, etc.) in the past 3 decades attests to our > > yearning for this way of being... > > > > > > > > Sorry if this isn't more clear...I welcome your thoughts... > > > > > > > > Cheers, > > > > Alice > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > paleopsych mailing list > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Fri Oct 29 17:07:49 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 13:07:49 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP Message-ID: <020d01c4bdd9$e3d449f0$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Hi Nicholas, I think I'd agree with this...though not sure it's what I was talking about...But then again, honestly, I'm grappling, so maybe this is what I was talking about! Anyway, I came across this lovely quote while reading some evolutionary epistemology the other day, and I think it's lovely: "Evolution is a process in which information regarding the environment is literally incorporated, incarnated, in surviving organisms through the process of adaptation. Adaptation is for Darwininans, an increment of knowledge." -Gerard Radnitzky Thanks for writing, Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nicholas Bannan" To: "The new improved paleopsych list" Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 6:28 AM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP > I also like the idea that behaviour is modified in each individual as well > as the group by context and periodicity. There are times of year and days > of the week on which people are, as it were, more or less in touch with > spiritual concerns. There might also be releasing mechnisms for leanings in > this direction: I hesitate to say, for instance, moonlight, but I offer it > as a basic example; fasting might be another. One could also imagine > 'curves' whereby a given event might have a spiritual dimension that is then > set to one side, only to be recovered later. Think of what happens before > sporting events (anthems, anticipation), in an atmosphrere rudely > interrupted by the confrontation itself. When conflict is completed, > anthems and ceremonies, speeches and slo-mo replays to nostalgic music take > over. Imagine racking this sequence up for real confrontations, such as > wars. We have a different response to the trumpet calls that recruit our > arousal for battle, and those that accompany the burial of the dead. > > Nicholas > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "David Smith" > To: "The new improved paleopsych list" > Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 3:43 AM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP > > > > Alice > > > > As I understand it (drawing on the work of Christopher Boehm) our common > > ancestor with the chimpanzee was, in all likelihood, heavily into > dominance > > hierarchies. Our stone age ancesestors, like nomadic hunter-gatherers > > today, opposed dominance by deploying a counter-dominance strategy (the > > whole group opposes any individual who tries to throw his weight around). > > With the advent of a more settled life-style, and especially agriculture, > we > > reverted to ancient, despotic, chimpanzee-like ways. So, I guess that > this > > would imply what we have the potential for dominance-hierarchies and > > counterdominant anti-hierarchies. > > > > David > > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "Alice Andrews" > > To: "The new improved paleopsych list" > > Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 10:05 PM > > Subject: [Paleopsych] grappling w/EP > > > > > > > Hi Paleo people, > > > > > > I have an EPish question which I can't seem to wrap my Floresian-sized > > brain > > > around...And hoping someone out there has some thoughts... > > > In terms of evolved psychological mechanisms/innate releasing mechanisms > > > (IRMs) and manifest behavior or traits...etc...I would like to be able > to > > > argue for a universal human nature, even in the face of huge individual > > > differences... > > > > > > However, say I wanted to argue that, along with our hierarchical nature, > > we > > > also have the capacity to be nonhierarchical. Now, right there it almost > > > sounds nonsensical to say it is our human nature to be hierarchical but > > that > > > we have the capacity not to be that way. > > > But I do understand Cosmides, I think, and I'm willing to view it as an > > > epigenetic structure that can be turned up/on, or not, that there's > great > > > human variabilty, IRMs, etc... > > > > > > However, it seems to me, that we'd be better off talking about > > > multi-phylogenetic modes [along lines of (tri) MacLean or (quad) Jim > > Henry] > > > or even a bi-human nature...rather than uni. Homo sap's hierarchical > mode > > > (Appolinian) is probably a lot newer than homo sap's > > > spiritual/connected-to-everything-feeling/nonhierarchical mode > > > (Dionysian)--which must represent, phylogentically, something older, not > > > more primitive-- even though we think of the hierarchical mode as being > > more > > > primitive and the connected/spiritual as being more 'evolved'... > > > > > > (Or binary human nature: in terms of left brain/right brain; > > agonic/hedonic; > > > reason/emotion, ad infinitum.) > > > > > > But getting to question: > > > I realize EP and behavior genetics are at odds sometimes...but...I've > long > > > known about the possibility of a belief-in-god module. From my novel, > > Trine > > > Erotic (2002): > > > > > > > > > She suspected these romantic, fate thoughts they both had were > "designed" > > > for a reason. That there had to be some kind of belief-in-fate module, a > > > mental organ in the brain, just as there is a belief-in-God module. Some > > > people's are "set" very high. Others don't even have them. Perhaps this > > fate > > > module was even close to the God module, some kind of Belief area, maybe > > > near the amygdala or hypothalamus. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > And now it looks like that they've found the genes controlling spiritual > > > 'feeling'...And my suspicion that some people have and some don't, > appears > > > to be true. Now, that doesn't mean that someone who doesn't have all the > > > genes that might make someone feel spiritual naturally, can't get to > that > > > place. But it would probably take concerted effort...lots and lots of > > > meditation and will, and indoctrination, and mushrooms, etc. And then > > still, > > > it may not be the same thing as the natural 'Dionysian' man...not even > > > close. > > > > > > > > > > > > So... how would the universal human nature argument proceed? We all have > > > psych evolved mechs/structure to feel connected/ spiritual, (Dionysian) > > > etc...?????? > > > > > > > > > > > > But...again...What about people who don't feel this way and don't have > > these > > > genes? Do they have this potential/structure? What does that look like? > > > > > > > > > > > > If nonspirituals (Appolinian types) don't have genes that seem to carry > > such > > > a disposition and their brains don't appear to reflect it either...How > can > > > we say it is there for everyone? Especially when, despite powerful > forces > > > like models (parents), school, peers, society, some people have no > > spiritual > > > feeling or religiosity, etc etc. And the reverse is also true. > > > > > > > > > > > > Is it that the 'spiritual' program isn't universal, because even the > > > environment doesn't seem to be able to kick it in...? Or that it is a > part > > > of universal human nature, because if it's not there innately, it IS > > > possible for people to feel such feelings given the right set of > > > circumstances? > > > > > > > > > > > > Is it semantic and political? If we say there's no universal human > nature, > > > but then make nativist claims here and there, do we get closer to > > right-wing > > > ideology and behavior genetics? > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Uni-human Nature versus Bi-human nature > > > > > > > > > > > > I'm thinking we have two choices--but we can choose both if we want: > > > > > > 1.We can say here is human nature warts and all and it's taken millions > of > > > years of mother nature's 'fine-tuning' to get it where it is and it's > not > > > likely to change in any dramatic way anytime soon, so let's, with our > > > knowledge and understanding of who we are and where we came from, try to > > > change (as some EPists suggest), our environment, to make it more > > compatible > > > with our hunter-gatherer minds. (eg, focus on creating more cohesive > > > communities and less fractured alienated ones, much like EEA tribes. ) > > This > > > is the practical, pragmatic, active approach. The idea would be to try > to > > > create a world that by and large helps to activate certain > > modules/programs. > > > However, this could sound, to some, like on the path to right-wing > > ideology > > > or whacky Luddite utopia..But it doesn't have to be either. > > > > > > We needn't not be realistic nor give up freedoms and individual rights > and > > > choice. Freedom and individual rights trump the notion that there may be > > an > > > inherent, archetypal, mother-father system, say. If we maintain as the > > > ultimate goal, though, the pursuit and experience of happiness, then > other > > > ways will not only be tolerated, but embraced and supported. What the > > > project in this case would do would be to try to support people's innate > > > archetypal goals and programs. > > > > > > > > > > > > 2. And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, transcendental, > > > dualistic route and say, one of human nature's features is that it is > > > binary. Reason and passion, Id and Superego, reptilian brain and > > neocortex, > > > feeling and thought, left-brain and right brain, head and heart, > Dionysian > > > and Appolinian, agonic and hedonic, hierarchical versus affiliative, > > > instinct and rationality, animalness and godliness, nature and culture, > > > individualistic/separate-feeling vs communitarian/connected- feeling.I > > could > > > go on. We are every bit of one as we are the other. And we can choose to > > act > > > on instinct or not. When we are hit, we can choose, through thinking > > first, > > > whether we wish to do what feels good (limbically and reptiliany) and > > > "right"--which is, generally, to hit back. Our prefrontal lobes give us > > the > > > gift of not hitting back, running away, or freezing. We can reason, we > can > > > ask why, we can negotiate, we can forgive. The proliferation is the West > > of > > > the Eastern traditions, philosophies, spiritualities (by way of prayer, > > > meditation, yoga, belief, etc.) in the past 3 decades attests to our > > > yearning for this way of being... > > > > > > > > > > > > Sorry if this isn't more clear...I welcome your thoughts... > > > > > > > > > > > > Cheers, > > > > > > Alice > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > paleopsych mailing list > > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > _______________________________________________ > > paleopsych mailing list > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Fri Oct 29 17:08:54 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 13:08:54 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] EPers in Mind here... References: <20041029152959.19781.qmail@web54406.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <021601c4bdda$0a6cd000$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Hi Seamus, Yes, I think this is close to what I'm getting at...Though, I'm not sure the time variable was my concern as much as a semantics/conceptual one. But...to echoe my intellectual 'softness' right now...Maybe that is what I meant. But I don't think so! ; ) many cheers to you! Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: s e a m u s To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org ; Alice Andrews Entelechy Journal Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 11:29 AM Subject: [Paleopsych] EPers in Mind here... Hello Alice, and your EPishness conquers all on this one for me really. I personally thought the concept and observation of your 'hierarchical nature' came into play, as a crucial kind of understanding of human beings, as sentient beings who, being self aware, derive choice or selection, from a multi-fascited realm of what is possible, averaging out to what is functional in time. I usually just breeze by the PaleoWindow if the weather draws me within, but thought your approach, was refreshing! Yours Seamus Dunlap ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Oct 29 17:43:35 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 10:43:35 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Energy Shift: reworking personal transport Message-ID: <01C4BDA4.25704F20.shovland@mindspring.com> One thing we could do would be to analyze urban traffic patterns using satellite imagery. We could then begin to insert microbuses into these corridors to take up the load as people begin to look for alternatives to the one-person one-car mode we live in now. Cell phone and computer technology could be harnessed to provide a responsive system, as opposed to the rigid system we have now. There would still be peak hours, which could be handled by employing people part time, which will be increasing popular as Baby Boomers choose to slow down. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Fri Oct 29 18:12:06 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 11:12:06 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature In-Reply-To: <200410291800.i9TI0V022505@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041029181206.24423.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> Alice says: >>And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, transcendental, dualistic route and say, one of human nature's features is that it is binary.<< --I think "binary" is the wrong word. Humans, like everything else in nature, oscillate. We're like the tides. We go in, we go out. We're expressive, we're introspective. It's all part of one cycle, not two separate things but two limits approached alternately by one function. In our culture we tend to believe in willpower, and we keep trying to say "this is my final position." It fails, because even if one side of a polarity is held without wavering, it only increases the intensity of the opposite swing. Conservatives will be shocked when they discover their lock on power will only lead to a more intense anti-conservative (or perhaps anti-extreme?) backlash later on. Michael PS: The Wimp Factor The author of a new and timely book reveals how American politics is shaped by a cultural definition of masculinity that is based on disavowing all things feminine. http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20343/ _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. http://messenger.yahoo.com From unstasis at gmail.com Fri Oct 29 19:34:23 2004 From: unstasis at gmail.com (Stephen Lee) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 15:34:23 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Announcement for Howard being on coast to coast on Election night Message-ID: <951ad07041029123475db811c@mail.gmail.com> An announcement for the November 2nd Coast to Coast AM show. Howard will be on from 4-4:30am eastern time with the possibility of showing up at midnight for a short time. The show will be on election coverage and im sure connective topics. Nov.2 page- http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2004/11/02.html National station coverage -- http://www.coasttocoastam.com/info/wheretolisten.html Also, was told from Howard that if there was an "event" (ie terrorist disaster or something highly controversial/strange)happens that night they would add him on at around midnight as well. Stephen Lee one of Howard's assistants From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Oct 29 20:48:46 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 13:48:46 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The tape Message-ID: <01C4BDBE.038ACB00.shovland@mindspring.com> What is that whooshing sound? The air going out of someone's balloon? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Oct 29 20:49:54 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 13:49:54 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Announcement for Howard being on coast to coast on Election night Message-ID: <01C4BDBE.2BFB6C70.shovland@mindspring.com> totally cool Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Stephen Lee [SMTP:unstasis at gmail.com] Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 12:34 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] Announcement for Howard being on coast to coast on Election night An announcement for the November 2nd Coast to Coast AM show. Howard will be on from 4-4:30am eastern time with the possibility of showing up at midnight for a short time. The show will be on election coverage and im sure connective topics. Nov.2 page- http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2004/11/02.html National station coverage -- http://www.coasttocoastam.com/info/wheretolisten.html Also, was told from Howard that if there was an "event" (ie terrorist disaster or something highly controversial/strange)happens that night they would add him on at around midnight as well. Stephen Lee one of Howard's assistants _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From howlbloom at aol.com Fri Oct 29 22:50:02 2004 From: howlbloom at aol.com (Howlbloom) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 14:50:02 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Thank you! Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: price.cpl Type: application/octet-stream Size: 0 bytes Desc: not available URL: From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Sat Oct 30 11:40:51 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 07:40:51 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature References: <20041029181206.24423.qmail@web13421.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <009301c4be75$4f5e7ce0$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Hi Michael, I think you're right...Binary is the wrong word. It came to me as I was thinking of the word '(uni)versal' and wanting to displace that 'uni' concept with a morpheme that reflected a dual or multilayered 'being'/nature. "However, it seems to me, that we'd be better off talking about multi-phylogenetic modes [along lines of (tri) MacLean or (quad) Jim Henry] or even a bi-human nature...rather than uni." But, you're right re: >It's all part of one cycle, not two > separate things but two limits approached alternately > by one function. I guess the part that gets me stuck is that when we left-brainishly DO start to categorize, we invariably want to say: the one function is a particular way--rather than saying the one function is a dual way. Does that make sense? It's early... And also I think you're so 'right on' re the polarity question. Re the wimp factor: I think that these recent posts of mine are pretty wimpy...You're not likely to hear a man say "my Floresian-sized brain" or "I'm grappling" or "I don't think that was what I was talking about but maybe it was." These were all genuine feelings I had, which I expressed reluctantly, knowing that to male ear it would either be seen as phony (from projection--since when do they ever feel such things?!!!!), or manipulative in some way--since I'm a woman and why else express a weakness if not for some gain????? I'll go look at the Wimp link, thanks.... I just yesterday heard on news Arnold preaching to a Republican crowd re something like: "You don't want a girly-man country, do you?? Yikes! All best, Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Christopher" To: Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 2:12 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature > > Alice says: > >>And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, > transcendental, dualistic route and say, one of human > nature's features is that it is binary.<< > > --I think "binary" is the wrong word. Humans, like > everything else in nature, oscillate. We're like the > tides. We go in, we go out. We're expressive, we're > introspective. It's all part of one cycle, not two > separate things but two limits approached alternately > by one function. > > In our culture we tend to believe in willpower, and we > keep trying to say "this is my final position." It > fails, because even if one side of a polarity is held > without wavering, it only increases the intensity of > the opposite swing. Conservatives will be shocked when > they discover their lock on power will only lead to a > more intense anti-conservative (or perhaps > anti-extreme?) backlash later on. > > Michael > > PS: The Wimp Factor > > The author of a new and timely book reveals how > American politics is shaped by a cultural definition > of masculinity that is based on disavowing all things > feminine. > > http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20343/ > > > > > _______________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. > http://messenger.yahoo.com > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Oct 30 13:37:28 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 06:37:28 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature Message-ID: <01C4BE4A.EDC14460.shovland@mindspring.com> If you're looking for computer metaphors, consider "fuzzy logic." Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Alice Andrews [SMTP:aandrews at hvc.rr.com] Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 4:41 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] binary nature Hi Michael, I think you're right...Binary is the wrong word. It came to me as I was thinking of the word '(uni)versal' and wanting to displace that 'uni' concept with a morpheme that reflected a dual or multilayered 'being'/nature. "However, it seems to me, that we'd be better off talking about multi-phylogenetic modes [along lines of (tri) MacLean or (quad) Jim Henry] or even a bi-human nature...rather than uni." But, you're right re: >It's all part of one cycle, not two > separate things but two limits approached alternately > by one function. I guess the part that gets me stuck is that when we left-brainishly DO start to categorize, we invariably want to say: the one function is a particular way--rather than saying the one function is a dual way. Does that make sense? It's early... And also I think you're so 'right on' re the polarity question. Re the wimp factor: I think that these recent posts of mine are pretty wimpy...You're not likely to hear a man say "my Floresian-sized brain" or "I'm grappling" or "I don't think that was what I was talking about but maybe it was." These were all genuine feelings I had, which I expressed reluctantly, knowing that to male ear it would either be seen as phony (from projection--since when do they ever feel such things?!!!!), or manipulative in some way--since I'm a woman and why else express a weakness if not for some gain????? I'll go look at the Wimp link, thanks.... I just yesterday heard on news Arnold preaching to a Republican crowd re something like: "You don't want a girly-man country, do you?? Yikes! All best, Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Christopher" To: Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 2:12 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature > > Alice says: > >>And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, > transcendental, dualistic route and say, one of human > nature's features is that it is binary.<< > > --I think "binary" is the wrong word. Humans, like > everything else in nature, oscillate. We're like the > tides. We go in, we go out. We're expressive, we're > introspective. It's all part of one cycle, not two > separate things but two limits approached alternately > by one function. > > In our culture we tend to believe in willpower, and we > keep trying to say "this is my final position." It > fails, because even if one side of a polarity is held > without wavering, it only increases the intensity of > the opposite swing. Conservatives will be shocked when > they discover their lock on power will only lead to a > more intense anti-conservative (or perhaps > anti-extreme?) backlash later on. > > Michael > > PS: The Wimp Factor > > The author of a new and timely book reveals how > American politics is shaped by a cultural definition > of masculinity that is based on disavowing all things > feminine. > > http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20343/ > > > > > _______________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. > http://messenger.yahoo.com > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Sat Oct 30 16:55:21 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 12:55:21 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature References: <01C4BE4A.EDC14460.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <015701c4bea1$52e3a800$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> maybe...or maybe something along lines of ervin laszlo's 'bifurcation' in dynamical systems theory...hmmm... Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 9:37 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] binary nature > If you're looking for computer metaphors, > consider "fuzzy logic." > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Alice Andrews [SMTP:aandrews at hvc.rr.com] > Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 4:41 AM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] binary nature > > Hi Michael, > I think you're right...Binary is the wrong word. It came to me as I was > thinking of the word '(uni)versal' and wanting to displace that 'uni' > concept with a morpheme that reflected a dual or multilayered > 'being'/nature. > > "However, it seems to me, that we'd be better off talking about > multi-phylogenetic modes [along lines of (tri) MacLean or (quad) Jim Henry] > or even a bi-human nature...rather than uni." > > But, you're right re: > > >It's all part of one cycle, not two > > separate things but two limits approached alternately > > by one function. > > I guess the part that gets me stuck is that when we left-brainishly DO start > to categorize, we invariably want to say: the one function is a particular > way--rather than saying the one function is a dual way. Does that make > sense? It's early... > And also I think you're so 'right on' re the polarity question. > Re the wimp factor: I think that these recent posts of mine are pretty > wimpy...You're not likely to hear a man say "my Floresian-sized brain" or > "I'm grappling" or "I don't think that was what I was talking about but > maybe it was." These were all genuine feelings I had, which I expressed > reluctantly, knowing that to male ear it would either be seen as phony (from > projection--since when do they ever feel such things?!!!!), or manipulative > in some way--since I'm a woman and why else express a weakness if not for > some gain????? > I'll go look at the Wimp link, thanks.... > I just yesterday heard on news Arnold preaching to a Republican crowd re > something like: "You don't want a girly-man country, do you?? Yikes! > > All best, > Alice > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Christopher" > To: > Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 2:12 PM > Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature > > > > > > Alice says: > > >>And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, > > transcendental, dualistic route and say, one of human > > nature's features is that it is binary.<< > > > > --I think "binary" is the wrong word. Humans, like > > everything else in nature, oscillate. We're like the > > tides. We go in, we go out. We're expressive, we're > > introspective. It's all part of one cycle, not two > > separate things but two limits approached alternately > > by one function. > > > > In our culture we tend to believe in willpower, and we > > keep trying to say "this is my final position." It > > fails, because even if one side of a polarity is held > > without wavering, it only increases the intensity of > > the opposite swing. Conservatives will be shocked when > > they discover their lock on power will only lead to a > > more intense anti-conservative (or perhaps > > anti-extreme?) backlash later on. > > > > Michael > > > > PS: The Wimp Factor > > > > The author of a new and timely book reveals how > > American politics is shaped by a cultural definition > > of masculinity that is based on disavowing all things > > feminine. > > > > http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20343/ > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________ > > Do you Yahoo!? > > Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. > > http://messenger.yahoo.com > > _______________________________________________ > > paleopsych mailing list > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sat Oct 30 19:17:34 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 15:17:34 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature In-Reply-To: <015701c4bea1$52e3a800$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> References: <01C4BE4A.EDC14460.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20041030145929.00c3cc50@incoming.verizon.net> At 12:55 PM 10/30/2004 -0400, Alice Andrews wrote: >maybe...or maybe something along lines of ervin laszlo's 'bifurcation' in >dynamical systems theory...hmmm... Hmm. Fuzzy logic. Have discussed that often enough with Lotfi Zadeh, the official God of that movement. But the concern you began with... is more reminiscent of yin-yang things... or of some more precise technical things. Some folks on this list have talked about "introvert versus extrovert." There is something there, but the validity of that distinction has been exaggerated. The best cognitive psychologist I know at NSF really gets his dander up when he hears some of the silly overenthusiasm about Meyers-Briggs as a key to all of life... But one of the other top people told me in 1999 that "tolerance of cognitive dissonance" and "novelty seeking" are far more fundamental dimensions of human diversity. Those variables tend to remain stable in people's lives, he says... and get passed on to children.. far more than most traits we measure. Your initial complaint about Bush's folks involve low tolerance of cognitive dissonance. And in fact... this relatively stable part of psychology has some ties to even more reliable stuff in genuine cybernetics. Reliable, but technical. But my intuition says this is not the time or the place to explain more about how this works. Such explanation needs to be part of a connected whole. Such stuff out of context can distract people to wrong places. Suffice it to say I know how to build such systems, and have published the main outlines of how, for those who can understand. A few words. The Nazis and the Communist Party were also famous for extreme intolerance of cognitive dissonance -- and it went far beyond what they needed to stay in power, unless you count supporting certain types of personality as part of how they stayed in power. Yet intolerance of cognitive dissonance is not an evil trait, nor even a mental deficiency. It is.. just a parameter. The opposite extreme, the extreme "sponge" or "fuzzball" personality, has equally severe weaknesses. I would argue that we need some diversity here, and some efforts by both personality types to appreciate and live with the other, and to overcome their own characteristic weaknesses. And maybe we need some new hard systems of thought that allow those who demand coherence to remain in touch with reality, the largest possible reality. The possibility is there... we need it very badly... but who is really willing to work on that project? Fuzzballs can't see it, and most of those who demand coherence are strongly wedded to prior commitments right now. And it demands an openness to a complexity that those with intolerance of cognitive dissonance rarely would have the courage to face up to (as indeed few of Bush's loyal people face up to the mess his tax cuts have created). They tell me that novelty seeking and tolerance of cognitive dissonance are not 100 percent correlated, and are equally fundamental; so perhaps we rely a lot on those for whom the correlation is broken... Best, Paul >Alice > >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Steve Hovland" >To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" >Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 9:37 AM >Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] binary nature > > > > If you're looking for computer metaphors, > > consider "fuzzy logic." > > > > Steve Hovland > > www.stevehovland.net > > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Alice Andrews [SMTP:aandrews at hvc.rr.com] > > Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 4:41 AM > > To: The new improved paleopsych list > > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] binary nature > > > > Hi Michael, > > I think you're right...Binary is the wrong word. It came to me as I was > > thinking of the word '(uni)versal' and wanting to displace that 'uni' > > concept with a morpheme that reflected a dual or multilayered > > 'being'/nature. > > > > "However, it seems to me, that we'd be better off talking about > > multi-phylogenetic modes [along lines of (tri) MacLean or (quad) Jim >Henry] > > or even a bi-human nature...rather than uni." > > > > But, you're right re: > > > > >It's all part of one cycle, not two > > > separate things but two limits approached alternately > > > by one function. > > > > I guess the part that gets me stuck is that when we left-brainishly DO >start > > to categorize, we invariably want to say: the one function is a particular > > way--rather than saying the one function is a dual way. Does that make > > sense? It's early... > > And also I think you're so 'right on' re the polarity question. > > Re the wimp factor: I think that these recent posts of mine are pretty > > wimpy...You're not likely to hear a man say "my Floresian-sized brain" or > > "I'm grappling" or "I don't think that was what I was talking about but > > maybe it was." These were all genuine feelings I had, which I expressed > > reluctantly, knowing that to male ear it would either be seen as phony >(from > > projection--since when do they ever feel such things?!!!!), or >manipulative > > in some way--since I'm a woman and why else express a weakness if not for > > some gain????? > > I'll go look at the Wimp link, thanks.... > > I just yesterday heard on news Arnold preaching to a Republican crowd re > > something like: "You don't want a girly-man country, do you?? Yikes! > > > > All best, > > Alice > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "Michael Christopher" > > To: > > Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 2:12 PM > > Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature > > > > > > > > > > Alice says: > > > >>And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, > > > transcendental, dualistic route and say, one of human > > > nature's features is that it is binary.<< > > > > > > --I think "binary" is the wrong word. Humans, like > > > everything else in nature, oscillate. We're like the > > > tides. We go in, we go out. We're expressive, we're > > > introspective. It's all part of one cycle, not two > > > separate things but two limits approached alternately > > > by one function. > > > > > > In our culture we tend to believe in willpower, and we > > > keep trying to say "this is my final position." It > > > fails, because even if one side of a polarity is held > > > without wavering, it only increases the intensity of > > > the opposite swing. Conservatives will be shocked when > > > they discover their lock on power will only lead to a > > > more intense anti-conservative (or perhaps > > > anti-extreme?) backlash later on. > > > > > > Michael > > > > > > PS: The Wimp Factor > > > > > > The author of a new and timely book reveals how > > > American politics is shaped by a cultural definition > > > of masculinity that is based on disavowing all things > > > feminine. > > > > > > http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20343/ > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________ > > > Do you Yahoo!? > > > Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. > > > http://messenger.yahoo.com > > > _______________________________________________ > > > paleopsych mailing list > > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > _______________________________________________ > > paleopsych mailing list > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ > > paleopsych mailing list > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sat Oct 30 19:28:11 2004 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Werbos, Dr. Paul J.) Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 15:28:11 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature:an amusing correlation Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.0.20041030152339.01f34d98@incoming.verizon.net> By the way -- I think there is an amusing statistical correlation between tolerance of cognitive dissonance (and of fuzziness) and tolerance of hair. Was the victory of Lenin over the Trotskyites a victory of the bald over the long hairs? And we all know about skinheads and those who move in that direction... Admittedly, bearded mullahs often break this correlation.... it's not perfect... history always adds other factors... Another defier of this correlation was Einstein, whom in my view was actually intolerant of cognitive dissonance.. and had an internal struggle between his own nature and his culture... a very productive struggle. Heisenberg had the same kind of struggle, with opposite signs. Schrodinger and DeBroglie I find it easier to empathize with... Best, Paul From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Oct 30 19:56:33 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 12:56:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] "girly-men" and "manly-girls" In-Reply-To: <200410301800.i9UI0X008038@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041030195633.28887.qmail@web13422.mail.yahoo.com> >>Re the wimp factor: I think that these recent posts of mine are pretty wimpy...You're not likely to hear a man say "my Floresian-sized brain" or "I'm grappling" or "I don't think that was what I was talking about but maybe it was." These were all genuine feelings I had, which I expressed reluctantly, knowing that to male ear it would either be seen as phony (from projection--since when do they ever feel such things?!!!!), or manipulative in some way--since I'm a woman and why else express a weakness if not for some gain?????<< --Great insights. If it's any consolation, I am a male and I'll tell you that men do a great deal of editing out their indecision and "wimpish" aspects, and that what you see is a persona based on feedback from the world (as in Arnold's trite use of the "girly-man" cliche to appeal to insecure, "butch" males). Wise men use that filtering and feedback in a creative way, cultivating a masculine aesthetic that covertly promotes "feminine" perspectives. A lot of male rock stars do that. Eminem is a nurturer, despite his image as a rebel. A lot of the men who seem so extremely masculine are really scabbing over an injured playful, intuitive and/or feminine side. A lot of women, for their part, go out of their way to appear feminine or react against it by filtering out "girly" mannerisms. Either way, it's a compromise between what's inside and what the outside world rewards or punishes. There are a thousand subtle punishments for coloring outside the gender lines, and a thousand little rewards for each gender to act out a decisively one-sided role. In today's political climate, it's not so subtle at all. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Sat Oct 30 20:10:05 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 16:10:05 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] between fuzzball and hard ball lies... References: <01C4BE4A.EDC14460.shovland@mindspring.com> <5.2.1.1.0.20041030145929.00c3cc50@incoming.verizon.net> Message-ID: <019401c4bebc$745c1f60$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Hi Paul, Thanks for the giggle...(the part re fuzzballs, I think it was...) I think you're probably right about this ability to tolerate cognitive dissonance having something to do with this all...and perhaps it is related to Heider's 'balance theory', as well. You say: intolerance of > cognitive dissonance is not... > a mental deficiency. I might like to argue that perhaps it is more atavistic, though...I suspect black-and-white polarized thinking is nm ancient trait, a good and simple heuristic which was very adaptive and still works today. But when people employ it habitually, and are unable to reconcile two opposing ideas together etc etc etc etc, I think it IS some kind of devolution. On the other hand, I very much think we desperately need such polarized extreme views and we need all voices...so that we can suss out what needs sussing out. At the individual level, however, I think we want to strive for having people be able to be good at reconciling--to be healthy epistemic engines who are neither fuzzy nor hard. I know I keep referring to my own writing, but here's something else from an essay I wrote called: 'Being Brave: In Defense of Naturalism and Essentialism ' along same lines: "...Is it possible to hold the view that certain patterns of behavior, and/or certain characteristics of people etc., are hard-wired, while recognizing culture plays an important role in behavior? While recognizing people can change? While understanding that what is 'true' isn't necessarily good or right or completely immutable? Of course! But perhaps it is not easy for everyone. Borderline personality disorder is a disorder characterized by an overuse of a defense mechanism called 'splitting.' In splitting, a person is unable to hold or reconcile two opposing ideas in their mind at the same time, so they use black-and-white thinking to protect themselves from contradictory feelings, gray areas and ambiguities. Dennett and others like him, who are fearful and distrusting and want to tell scientists when to shut up, have good reason. We live in a borderline personality disordered world; and a world where many have committed and will commit the naturalistic fallacy-a way of thinking, by the way, which is also probably ancient and hard-wired. But to fight illogical and psychologically unhealthy people by covering up the truth or shutting up, seems infantilizing and the wrong way to go. (We should be working toward helping people to become more logical and healthy!) Plus, when people see and feel certain truths as self-evident, and are told these 'truths' are not true, it makes people angry and crazy. And rightfully so." Blah blah blah! you get the idea... You made a lot of thought-provoking and evocative points which I would like to get back to when I have some more time...and I hope to...Thank you! ps re novelty-seeking and tolerance for cognitive dissonance: allow me to be very dualistic again, and a little bit fuzzy: relative to left-brain dominant folks, right-brain dominant folks are low in novelty-seeking. it is also my opinion that r-brain dominant people are not big into categorization, labeling, etc...Which gets closer to the idea re reconciling, or keeping opposing ideas together in one's mind...And while I'm at it, I might as well add that I also think right-brainers are more honest with themselves and with others than are l-brainers....I view left-brain as seat of defense mechanisms and I also have a number of ideas re this, which, one day, I may do study on.... All best, Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: "Werbos, Dr. Paul J." To: "The new improved paleopsych list" ; "The new improved paleopsych list" Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 3:17 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] binary nature > At 12:55 PM 10/30/2004 -0400, Alice Andrews wrote: > >maybe...or maybe something along lines of ervin laszlo's 'bifurcation' in > >dynamical systems theory...hmmm... > > Hmm. Fuzzy logic. Have discussed that often enough with Lotfi Zadeh, > the official God of that movement. > > But the concern you began with... is more reminiscent of yin-yang things... or > of some more precise technical things. > > Some folks on this list have talked about "introvert versus extrovert." > There is > something there, but the validity of that distinction has been exaggerated. > The best cognitive psychologist I know at NSF really gets his dander up > when he hears some > of the silly overenthusiasm about Meyers-Briggs as a key to all of life... > > But one of the other top people told me in 1999 that "tolerance of > cognitive dissonance" > and "novelty seeking" are far more fundamental dimensions of human diversity. > Those variables tend to remain stable in people's lives, he says... and get > passed on to children.. > far more than most traits we measure. > > Your initial complaint about Bush's folks involve low tolerance of > cognitive dissonance. > > And in fact... this relatively stable part of psychology has some ties to > even more reliable stuff > in genuine cybernetics. Reliable, but technical. > > But my intuition says this is not the time or the place to explain more > about how this works. > Such explanation needs to be part of a connected whole. Such stuff out of > context can distract people > to wrong places. Suffice it to say I know how to build such systems, and > have published the main > outlines of how, for those who can understand. > > A few words. The Nazis and the Communist Party were also famous for extreme > intolerance of cognitive > dissonance -- and it went far beyond what they needed to stay in power, > unless you count supporting certain types > of personality as part of how they stayed in power. Yet intolerance of > cognitive dissonance is not > an evil trait, nor even a mental deficiency. It is.. just a parameter. The > opposite extreme, > the extreme "sponge" or "fuzzball" personality, has equally severe weaknesses. > I would argue that we need some diversity here, and some efforts by both > personality types to appreciate > and live with the other, and to overcome their own characteristic weaknesses. > > And maybe we need some new hard systems of thought that allow those who > demand coherence to remain in touch > with reality, the largest possible reality. The possibility is there... we > need it very badly... but who is > really willing to work on that project? Fuzzballs can't see it, and most of > those who demand coherence are strongly > wedded to prior commitments right now. And it demands an openness to a > complexity that those > with intolerance of cognitive dissonance rarely would have the courage to > face up to (as indeed few of Bush's > loyal people face up to the mess his tax cuts have created). They tell me > that novelty seeking > and tolerance of cognitive dissonance are not 100 percent correlated, and > are equally fundamental; so perhaps > we rely a lot on those for whom the correlation is broken... > > Best, > > Paul > > >Alice > > > >----- Original Message ----- > >From: "Steve Hovland" > >To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > >Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 9:37 AM > >Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] binary nature > > > > > > > If you're looking for computer metaphors, > > > consider "fuzzy logic." > > > > > > Steve Hovland > > > www.stevehovland.net > > > > > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > > From: Alice Andrews [SMTP:aandrews at hvc.rr.com] > > > Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 4:41 AM > > > To: The new improved paleopsych list > > > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] binary nature > > > > > > Hi Michael, > > > I think you're right...Binary is the wrong word. It came to me as I was > > > thinking of the word '(uni)versal' and wanting to displace that 'uni' > > > concept with a morpheme that reflected a dual or multilayered > > > 'being'/nature. > > > > > > "However, it seems to me, that we'd be better off talking about > > > multi-phylogenetic modes [along lines of (tri) MacLean or (quad) Jim > >Henry] > > > or even a bi-human nature...rather than uni." > > > > > > But, you're right re: > > > > > > >It's all part of one cycle, not two > > > > separate things but two limits approached alternately > > > > by one function. > > > > > > I guess the part that gets me stuck is that when we left-brainishly DO > >start > > > to categorize, we invariably want to say: the one function is a particular > > > way--rather than saying the one function is a dual way. Does that make > > > sense? It's early... > > > And also I think you're so 'right on' re the polarity question. > > > Re the wimp factor: I think that these recent posts of mine are pretty > > > wimpy...You're not likely to hear a man say "my Floresian-sized brain" or > > > "I'm grappling" or "I don't think that was what I was talking about but > > > maybe it was." These were all genuine feelings I had, which I expressed > > > reluctantly, knowing that to male ear it would either be seen as phony > >(from > > > projection--since when do they ever feel such things?!!!!), or > >manipulative > > > in some way--since I'm a woman and why else express a weakness if not for > > > some gain????? > > > I'll go look at the Wimp link, thanks.... > > > I just yesterday heard on news Arnold preaching to a Republican crowd re > > > something like: "You don't want a girly-man country, do you?? Yikes! > > > > > > All best, > > > Alice > > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > > From: "Michael Christopher" > > > To: > > > Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 2:12 PM > > > Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Alice says: > > > > >>And/or we can take the more existential, romantic, > > > > transcendental, dualistic route and say, one of human > > > > nature's features is that it is binary.<< > > > > > > > > --I think "binary" is the wrong word. Humans, like > > > > everything else in nature, oscillate. We're like the > > > > tides. We go in, we go out. We're expressive, we're > > > > introspective. It's all part of one cycle, not two > > > > separate things but two limits approached alternately > > > > by one function. > > > > > > > > In our culture we tend to believe in willpower, and we > > > > keep trying to say "this is my final position." It > > > > fails, because even if one side of a polarity is held > > > > without wavering, it only increases the intensity of > > > > the opposite swing. Conservatives will be shocked when > > > > they discover their lock on power will only lead to a > > > > more intense anti-conservative (or perhaps > > > > anti-extreme?) backlash later on. > > > > > > > > Michael > > > > > > > > PS: The Wimp Factor > > > > > > > > The author of a new and timely book reveals how > > > > American politics is shaped by a cultural definition > > > > of masculinity that is based on disavowing all things > > > > feminine. > > > > > > > > http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20343/ > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________ > > > > Do you Yahoo!? > > > > Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. > > > > http://messenger.yahoo.com > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > paleopsych mailing list > > > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > paleopsych mailing list > > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > _______________________________________________ > > > paleopsych mailing list > > > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > >_______________________________________________ > >paleopsych mailing list > >paleopsych at paleopsych.org > >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Sat Oct 30 20:31:33 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 16:31:33 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] "girly-men" and "manly-girls" References: <20041030195633.28887.qmail@web13422.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <01a801c4bebf$72c79550$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Hi Paul and Michael, Just got your recent posts but have busy Halloween weekend... but I plan to get back to them soon, as I had plenty of reactions to them... Cheers, Alice ps Michael, I'm in complete agreement with your view on the persona stuff etc etc. And, oddly, though it may not be AS difficult as it would be for you, since you're a man, it still is difficult to put ideas out there so vulnerably etc etc, in part because I'm an academic. The only model I've had and the only one which seems to exist for putting out ideas is male-based and all about certitude and strength.....in a word: fuzzless. And so....It is an uncomfortable position regardless of my gender...But it is also somewhat comfortable because of my sex.... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Christopher" To: Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 3:56 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] "girly-men" and "manly-girls" > > >>Re the wimp factor: I think that these recent posts > of mine are pretty wimpy...You're not likely to hear a > man say "my Floresian-sized brain" or "I'm grappling" > or "I don't think that was what I was talking about > but maybe it was." These were all genuine feelings I > had, which I expressed reluctantly, knowing that to > male ear it would either be seen as phony (from > projection--since when do they ever feel such > things?!!!!), or manipulative in some way--since I'm a > woman and why else express a weakness if not for some > gain?????<< > > --Great insights. If it's any consolation, I am a male > and I'll tell you that men do a great deal of editing > out their indecision and "wimpish" aspects, and that > what you see is a persona based on feedback from the > world (as in Arnold's trite use of the "girly-man" > cliche to appeal to insecure, "butch" males). Wise men > use that filtering and feedback in a creative way, > cultivating a masculine aesthetic that covertly > promotes "feminine" perspectives. A lot of male rock > stars do that. Eminem is a nurturer, despite his image > as a rebel. A lot of the men who seem so extremely > masculine are really scabbing over an injured playful, > intuitive and/or feminine side. A lot of women, for > their part, go out of their way to appear feminine or > react against it by filtering out "girly" mannerisms. > Either way, it's a compromise between what's inside > and what the outside world rewards or punishes. There > are a thousand subtle punishments for coloring outside > the gender lines, and a thousand little rewards for > each gender to act out a decisively one-sided role. In > today's political climate, it's not so subtle at all. > > Michael > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. > http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From pkurakin at yahoo.com Sun Oct 31 08:00:12 2004 From: pkurakin at yahoo.com (Pavel Kurakin) Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 01:00:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] John Baez' crackpot index Message-ID: <20041031080012.36712.qmail@web53401.mail.yahoo.com> John Baez is a distinguished theorist in quantum loop gravity, which is assumed as a main competitor of superstrins theory to become a TOE ("theory of everything"). Here's his 'crackpot index", i.e., his arguments and criteria what kind of "new theories" should not be taken "seriously" by "true scientists": http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html Here's my view of this, as sent to Prof. Baez: Dear Prof. Baez! I have just examined Your crackpot index. I got a great plesure, thank You. When I was in charge for answering some crackpots, declining classical mechanical conservation laws, I derived 2 simple rules for myself: a) If I am not able to meet crackpot's arguments in their essense, I fail. b) If I am not able to formulate short, I fail to beat this crackpot. So. a) Your list seems to be too long. Any good classification uses from 3 to 7 points. b) Mentioning Feynman is not forbidden for crackpots as well for well-mannered physicists, taught not to say bad words. If one uses double standards, 5 points to suspect him as pseudo-scientist. c) Current quantum theory does not indeed provide "underlying mechanism". It is not a tradegy, but it is exactly so. d) Providing "uderlying mechanism" without new predictions but also without contradictions to current knowledge has no difference to current knowledge. No differnece, let me point, means it is not better, but it is not worse as well. d) Russian proverb says that "7 miles is not a loop for crazy dog". So, if "alternative" theory provides a shorter way, even without new predictions, it's better than current theory. It is moreover better, if point (d) is valid. e) 2 or even more theories, equivalent in predictions, are equivalent. Equivalent, in my terms, is simply equivalent :) The difference is in authority of "main" theory shareholders. No more difference. Sincerely, Pavel V. Kurakin, Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, Russian Academy of Sciences. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Sun Oct 31 12:53:38 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 07:53:38 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature:an amusing correlation References: <5.2.1.1.0.20041030152339.01f34d98@incoming.verizon.net> Message-ID: <003201c4bf48$a5142d50$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> Hair, to me, represents and signifies a certain kind of sexual power and potency. It transgreses boundaries...Also, sensitivity... Lenin over Trotsky...I suppose Lenin was more a militaristic manly type...or harder type..known for his unobtrusive personality...whereas Trotsky, at least to me, seemed to be more feminine type, more high-drama. (Lips, too, of course, in this way, are good indication of these types--Trotsky had very full, sensual lips.)Anyway, hair is unquestionably a reliable indicator, it would seem, of hormonal balance, and thus a very strong fitness indicator... Some women's hair (I have friends for whom this is true) doesn't grow very long (it starts breaking off, they say)...while others grow and grow. Perhaps a signal of a balance of estrogen and other hormones--even testostorone/progesterone? While for men, as we all know, the less of it there is the more testosterone there is, though there is probably a very complicated pathway at play in terms of the sexes and balance of hormones that i don't think we quite understand...Also, darker hair probably indicates more testosterone...lionnesses prefer dark manes to light ones... Also hair is source of pheromonal communication and thus the less one has, the less communication is going on at 'nature' level...Less primal/closer to nature, less chthonic and female and animal; more male and culture--a domination over nature. I suspect the less hair, the more novelty -seeking, and risk-taking...(testosterone again?!). Lenin was quicker to put stuff into action than Trostky, I think... I could go on and on with my silly speculations...but I think poor paleo is not the place for my sillyness... All best, Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: "Werbos, Dr. Paul J." To: "The new improved paleopsych list" ; "The new improved paleopsych list" Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 2:28 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] binary nature:an amusing correlation > By the way -- > > I think there is an amusing statistical correlation between tolerance of > cognitive > dissonance (and of fuzziness) and tolerance of hair. > > Was the victory of Lenin over the Trotskyites a victory of the bald over > the long hairs? > And we all know about skinheads and those who move in that direction... > > Admittedly, bearded mullahs often break this correlation.... it's not > perfect... history > always adds other factors... > > Another defier of this correlation was Einstein, whom in my view was > actually intolerant of cognitive dissonance.. > and had an internal struggle between his own nature and his culture... a > very productive struggle. > Heisenberg had the same kind of struggle, with opposite signs. Schrodinger > and DeBroglie I find it easier to empathize with... > > Best, > > Paul > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From aandrews at hvc.rr.com Sun Oct 31 15:06:48 2004 From: aandrews at hvc.rr.com (Alice Andrews) Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 10:06:48 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] binary nature:an amusing correlation References: <5.2.1.1.0.20041030152339.01f34d98@incoming.verizon.net> Message-ID: <005c01c4bf5b$3f4f5770$47f4ae44@CallaStudios> I wrote that I suspected that the less hair, the more novelty -seeking, and risk-taking...(testosterone again?!). but it gets tricky...(hair on head vs. hair on face and body)..facial/body hair unequivocally signals high testosterone...and both Lenin and T sported facial hair... Bye bye, AA ----- Original Message ----- From: "Werbos, Dr. Paul J." To: "The new improved paleopsych list" ; "The new improved paleopsych list" Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 2:28 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] binary nature:an amusing correlation > By the way -- > > I think there is an amusing statistical correlation between tolerance of > cognitive > dissonance (and of fuzziness) and tolerance of hair. > > Was the victory of Lenin over the Trotskyites a victory of the bald over > the long hairs? > And we all know about skinheads and those who move in that direction... > > Admittedly, bearded mullahs often break this correlation.... it's not > perfect... history > always adds other factors... > > Another defier of this correlation was Einstein, whom in my view was > actually intolerant of cognitive dissonance.. > and had an internal struggle between his own nature and his culture... a > very productive struggle. > Heisenberg had the same kind of struggle, with opposite signs. Schrodinger > and DeBroglie I find it easier to empathize with... > > Best, > > Paul > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Oct 31 19:11:07 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 11:11:07 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] demons In-Reply-To: <200410311900.i9VJ0L005793@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041031191107.76240.qmail@web13423.mail.yahoo.com> >>Borderline personality disorder is a disorder characterized by an overuse of a defense mechanism called 'splitting.' In splitting, a person is unable to hold or reconcile two opposing ideas in their mind at the same time, so they use black-and-white thinking to protect themselves from contradictory feelings, gray areas and ambiguities.<< --Sounds like fundamentalism. Are demons split-off aspects of the self that the self cannot integrate and cannot ignore? Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Oct 31 19:15:46 2004 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 11:15:46 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] fuzzy vs. linear In-Reply-To: <200410311900.i9VJ0L005793@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20041031191546.18070.qmail@web13422.mail.yahoo.com> >>The only model I've had and the only one which seems to exist for putting out ideas is male-based and all about certitude and strength.....in a word: fuzzless.<< --And yet, in order to be anywhere near the cutting edge in many fields, you have to have some recognition, if not comprehension, of "fuzzy" processes. And if you want to do anything NEW, intuition is essential. Linear brains can always position themselves as teachers, as carriers of a tradition or as apologists for the ideas of others. But without an imagination that can leapfrog linearity, you're stuck repeating what has already been said and thought. The linear brain is for nailing down what has already been covered. It's not so good at figuring out what's coming next, in a world dominated by nonlinearity and feedback. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Oct 31 19:25:05 2004 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 11:25:05 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] demons Message-ID: <01C4BF3C.45BEED60.shovland@mindspring.com> Sounds like conservatives :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2004 11:11 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] demons >>Borderline personality disorder is a disorder characterized by an overuse of a defense mechanism called 'splitting.' In splitting, a person is unable to hold or reconcile two opposing ideas in their mind at the same time, so they use black-and-white thinking to protect themselves from contradictory feelings, gray areas and ambiguities.<< --Sounds like fundamentalism. Are demons split-off aspects of the self that the self cannot integrate and cannot ignore? Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Oct 31 22:37:54 2004 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 15:37:54 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] demons In-Reply-To: <01C4BF3C.45BEED60.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C4BF3C.45BEED60.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41856942.5040401@solution-consulting.com> These comments betray a misunderstanding of the subjects. Fundamentalists - what ever that means - appear to be the demonic side of liberals. Onto them - and onto 'conservatives' - are projected unacceptable aspects of the self. So liberals accuse conservatives of all their own sins, and the conservatives become the scapegoats, onto which the community sins are placed. (E. g., Kerry, a profligate liar, accuses Bush of lying.) In his book, _Radical Son_, David Horowitz recounts being amazed at the acceptance that conservatives had for his own failings (the failed marriages, for example), whereas his former radical colleagues showed all the hate and rejection that Horowitz had always projected onto the Right. He says he realized that the rules that conservatives propose are not there so that no one will break them. They are there because they _will_ be broken, but having the rules reduces the likelihood that people will break them, and, says Horowitz, because life works better when you obey them. I found that Radical Son explained the paradox I had often puzzled at. My conservative friends are the most accepting/tolerant of contrasting opinions, whereas my liberal friends are the most rigid and rejecting of opinions that contrast their own. What is it about the Left that makes them so hateful? Lynn Johnson Steve Hovland wrote: >Sounds like conservatives :-) > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] >Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2004 11:11 AM >To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >Subject: [Paleopsych] demons > > > > >>>Borderline personality disorder is a disorder >>> >>> >characterized by an overuse of a defense mechanism >called 'splitting.' In splitting, a person is unable >to hold or reconcile two opposing ideas in their mind >at the same time, so they use black-and-white thinking >to protect themselves from contradictory >feelings, gray areas and ambiguities.<< > >--Sounds like fundamentalism. Are demons split-off >aspects of the self that the self cannot integrate and >cannot ignore? > >Michael > > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. >http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: