From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Feb 1 02:31:31 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 19:31:31 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] perceiving deception? In-Reply-To: <01C5077B.CE9F37C0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C5077B.CE9F37C0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <41FEEA03.1020202@solution-consulting.com> These are interesting, thanks for your help, Steve Steve Hovland wrote: >I remember hearing that but can't recall the words. > >Try this- some interesting stuff came up: > >http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=people+detect+lying&btnG=Google+Search > > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Monday, January 31, 2005 7:58 AM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: [Paleopsych] perceiving deception? > >Some time ago there was a report of a portion of the brain being >specialized for perceiving deception. I cannot find that reference; can >anyone help me? >Lynn > >_______________________________________________ >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 Tue Feb 1 09:16:20 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 01:16:20 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] A superpower on life support Message-ID: <01C507FB.A4058CA0.shovland@mindspring.com> In recent years the US has been styling itself as the last remaining superpower, able to dictate the establishment of a Pax Americana without significant opposition. If you look at our finances, you see a different picture. The USSR crumbled because they could no longer afford the Cold War game. We are about to crumble because we can no longer pay cash to finance our activities. Most of our prosperity is financed by a mountain of debt that now threatens the economy of the entire planet. In their foolish greed our largest corporations have exported vast amounts of capital to India or China, who now have trade surpluses while we have trade deficits that compound our budget deficits. This is a zero sum game. The day will come when the world recognizes that we have spent all of the gold that we found at the end of our continental rainbow a mere 200 years ago. When that day comes they will no longer buy Dollar bonds, but Euro bonds. Indeed, the last straw with Saddam Hussein was that he started to price his oil in Euro's. When that day comes we will find that India, China, Japan, and Europe will be our equal partners because we won't be in any position to refuse their demands. When that day comes we will no longer be a psychotic Gulliver stomping on all who dare to oppose us. We will be one among equals living in a more benign equilibrium with the planet. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Feb 1 13:59:41 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 06:59:41 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Kerrey on Social Security Message-ID: <41FF8B4D.1060802@solution-consulting.com> No, not John Kerry, the smart Kerrey. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006234 Pride and Prejudice "Hell no, we won't go" is the wrong liberal approach on Social Security reform. BY BOB KERREY Tuesday, February 1, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST The late Pat Moynihan used to joke when I asked him why liberals were so reluctant to consider changing Social Security so that it guaranteed wealth as well as income: "It's because they worry that wealth will turn Democrats into Republicans." Leaving aside that possible correlation, it will be a shame if liberal voices, values and ideas are not brought into the debate initiated by President Bush's Social Security reform proposal. To make certain the reforms are done correctly liberal thinking is urgently needed. There is no doubt that Social Security and Medicare are two of liberalism's most enduring and popular triumphs. And there is no doubt that a vocal and influential minority remains true to its strong conservative belief that the Social Security Act of 1935 and the 1965 amendments to this act, which created Medicare and Medicaid, represent socialistic and dangerous interferences with the marketplace. However, liberals are wrong to fear that President Bush's proposal represents a threat to Social Security. I sincerely hope they do not merely defend their proudest achievement. I hope they see that President Bush is giving them an opportunity to finally do something about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. First of all, fears that Social Security will be destroyed are exaggerated. Across all generations and within both major parties, Social Security and Medicare are seen as a vital part of American life. They represent a powerful intergenerational contract between younger Americans in the work force who agree to be taxed on behalf of older, eligible Americans. What makes the contract work is that the expectation of those in the work force is that when they pass the age of eligibility, successive generations of workers will not object to the taxes that must be imposed on them to cover the costs of their income and health benefits. Secondly, President Bush's fears of a bankrupt Social Security and his rhetoric of the program being in financial crisis are also exaggerated. Relatively small changes in taxes and/or benefits would restore the promise to all living beneficiaries--those eligible today and those eligible in the future. Unlike the situation that existed in 1983, when Congress and the president acted to avoid a financial crisis, today's financial problems are relatively small. On the other hand, there are two problems with Social Security that are serious enough to be called a crisis. The first is that in eight years the income from a 12.4% payroll tax will be insufficient to pay the old age, survivor and disability benefits owed at that time. From that point on, Social Security will begin to redeem some of the hundreds of billions of dollars of Treasury bonds it has "accumulated in the trust fund" in order to issue monthly checks to beneficiaries. Though these bonds are far from "worthless," as some critics allege, the picture of them "accumulating in a trust fund" is not accurate either. That is because, in order to convert these bonds into cash, the U.S. Treasury will use the cash from individual and corporate income taxes. While some income taxes are currently used to pay Social Security benefits, the dollar amounts do not pose a serious budgetary challenge. In eight years that will change. Coupled with the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, the annual benefit demands of Social Security will put real pressure on Congress to cut spending on defense and nondefense appropriations. It is at this point in time that the demographic and monetary demands of the baby boom generation will become painfully apparent. The disinvestment in public infrastructure caused by the growth in Medicare and Medicaid will become even worse than it is today. And the nature of this crisis will be considerably more daunting than that faced squarely by Congress and the president in 1983. Liberals, who have silently watched the share of state and federal spending apportioned to the elderly grow at the expense of education, training, child care and research, will be appalled to discover how much their silence has cost them. The second crisis is the one for which liberals are even more urgently needed. This crisis is the shockingly low rates of savings and pitifully inadequate amount of preparation being made by American households for their old age. If liberals were to join this debate and insist upon provisions that would lead to dramatic reductions of the numbers of poor elderly, the outcome could be a dramatically enhanced quality of life for all, reduced dependency upon welfare in old age, and downward pressure on the social costs of growing old. If liberals joined this debate they would insist that the guaranteed transfer payment of Social Security remain intact. With the evidence that trade, technology and immigration are putting downward pressure on unskilled wages, they might even be able to succeed in changing the current benefit formula so that more than 50% of the first $900 of income was replaced. Perhaps they could even convince their Republican colleagues to eliminate penalties that affect stay-at-home women. Liberals would fight to make certain that contributions to private accounts were progressive in order to benefit lower-wage workers. They might even argue that accounts be opened at birth, thus giving Americans the longest possible time to accumulate wealth. No doubt they would insist that investment options be carefully regulated to keep administrative costs and risks as low as possible. And since liberals oftentimes understand the good that markets can do even more than some of their conservative colleagues, they could see the wisdom of changing the tax code so that no income taxes were levied on income that went into these savings accounts. All of these would practically guarantee a muscular market response that would give future Americans larger amounts of insured non-employment income to add to the $800 per month on average they receive from Social Security. None of this will happen if liberals merely shout "hell no, we won't go." The best they can hope for with that strategy is to prevent reform from happening. They should feel no pride of accomplishment if that is the result. Mr. Kerrey, a Democratic former senator from Nebraska, is the president of New School University, in New York City. From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Feb 1 14:01:57 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 07:01:57 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The future of oil Message-ID: <41FF8BD5.9020805@solution-consulting.com> I tried to send this yesterday; I don't think it went through. This is a very counter-intuitive piece, good for challenging the popular notions. http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006228 Oil, Oil Everywhere . . . Why is it expensive? Because it's so cheap. BY PETER HUBER AND MARK MILLS Sunday, January 30, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST The price of oil remains high only because the cost of oil remains so low. We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta. The market price of oil is indeed hovering up around $50 a barrel on the spot market. But getting oil to the surface currently costs under $5 a barrel in Saudi Arabia, with the global average cost certainly under $15. And with technology already well in hand, the cost of sucking oil out of the planet we occupy simply will not rise above roughly $30 a barrel for the next 100 years at least. The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all. To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion--over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption. Then you have to get the oil out of the sand--or the sand out of the oil. In the Mideast, current lifting costs run $1 to $2.50 per barrel at the very most; lifting costs in Iraq probably run closer to 50 cents, though OPEC strains not to publicize any such embarrassingly low numbers. For the most expensive offshore platforms in the North Sea, lifting costs (capital investment plus operating costs) currently run comfortably south of $15 per barrel. Tar sands, by contrast, are simply strip mined, like Western coal, and that's very cheap--but then you spend another $10, or maybe $15, separating the oil from the dirt. To do that, oil or gas extracted from the site itself is burned to heat water, which is then used to "crack" the bitumen from the clay; the bitumen is then chemically split to produce lighter petroleum. In sum, it costs under $5 a barrel to pump oil out from under the sand in Iraq, and about $15 to melt it out of the sand in Alberta. So why don't we just learn to love hockey and shop Canadian? Conventional Canadian wells already supply us with more oil than Saudi Arabia, and the Canadian tar is now delivering, too. The $5 billion (U.S.) Athabasca Oil Sands Project that Shell and ChevronTexaco opened in Alberta last year is now pumping 155,000 barrels per day. And to our south, Venezuela's Orinoco Belt yields 500,000 barrels daily. But here's the catch: By simply opening up its spigots for a few years, Saudi Arabia could, in short order, force a complete write-off of the huge capital investments in Athabasca and Orinoco. Investing billions in tar-sand refineries is risky not because getting oil out of Alberta is especially difficult or expensive, but because getting oil out of Arabia is so easy and cheap. Oil prices gyrate and occasionally spike--both up and down--not because oil is scarce, but because it's so abundant in places where good government is scarce. Investing $5 billion over five years to build a new tar-sand refinery in Alberta is indeed risky when a second cousin of Osama bin Laden can knock $20 off the price of oil with an idle wave of his hand on any given day in Riyadh. The one consolation is that Arabia faces a quandary of its own. Once the offshore platform has been deployed in the North Sea, once the humongous crock pot is up and cooking in Alberta, its cost is sunk. The original investors may never recover their capital, but after it has been written off, somebody can go ahead and produce oil very profitably going forward. And capital costs are going to keep falling, because the cost of a tar-sand refinery depends on technology, and technology costs always fall. Bacteria, for example, have already been successfully bioengineered to crack heavy oil molecules to help clean up oil spills, and to mine low-grade copper; bugs could likewise end up trampling out the vintage where the Albertan oil is stored. In the short term anything remains possible. Demand for oil grows daily in China and India, where good government is finally taking root, while much of the earth's most accessible oil lies under land controlled by feudal theocracies, kleptocrats, and fanatics. Day by day, just as it should, the market attempts to incorporate these two antithetical realities into the spot price of crude. But to suppose that those prices foreshadow the exhaustion of the planet itself is silly. The cost of extracting oil from the earth has not gone up over the past century, it has held remarkably steady. Going forward, over the longer term, it may rise very gradually, but certainly not fast. The earth is far bigger than people think, the untapped deposits are huge, and the technologies for separating oil from planet keep getting better. U.S. oil policy should be to promote new capital investment in the United States, Canada, and other oil-producing countries that are politically stable, and promote stable government in those that aren't. Messrs. Huber and Mills are co-authors of "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy," just out from Basic Books From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 15:34:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 10:34:35 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Miami Herald: Lizzie Grubman spins a comeback Message-ID: Lizzie Grubman spins a comeback http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/10658534.htm Jail time softened PR goddess' intensity. Soon, you'll see it on TV. BY LYDIA MARTIN It's 3 in the morning, New Year's Eve. Ingrid Casares, she of the celebrity liaisons, guards the door to a VIP room at the Raleigh Hotel like a riled Doberman. Bouncers just stand there while Ingrid dismisses partyers who claim they know -- whomever. Here comes New York celebrity publicist Lizzie Grubman, who once would have swiftly beaten Casares in a contest for most high-strung. But she's now soft and Zen, even as things heat up and beefy guys in black suits and earpieces start shepherding in stars. Lizzie, who on March 10 will make a debut in her own MTV reality show, wants to help a friend get a couple of not-so-fabulous associates past Ingrid, and though they're throwing the party together, Lizzie has to engage in a little back and forth with Ingrid before Ingrid relents and lets the guys in. ''It's OK, Ingrid,'' Lizzie says in a hushed tone, avoiding what once upon a time might have turned into an amusing little power clash. ''I've changed a lot as a person,'' Lizzie says a couple of days later over bubbly water and cigarettes at the Shore Club. As publicist for Britney Spears, Jay-Z, the Backstreet Boys and P. Diddy, she was used to seeing her name in bold. But she got more press than she could stand when she backed her father's Mercedes SUV into a crowd outside a Hamptons nightclub in the summer of 2001, injuring 16. Witnesses claimed she used choice words as she bolted. She pleaded guilty to assault charges and leaving the scene of an accident, and in the fall of 2002 served 37 days of a 60-day sentence, getting off early for good behavior. The ordeal seems to have left an impression. Lizzie speaks calmly now, and she listens. ``I'm more centered, more focused. Words can't even explain everything I've learned. I feel so fortunate to get a second chance. I realize how lucky I was to have such great family and friends around me when it all happened. I hid for so long. But I was lucky that I had people working for me, and clients, too, who were so loyal. I was virtually a zombie. I would go to the office, but I was not functioning.'' Lizzie says her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer on the day of the accident. She died 21 days later. ``A client of mine made me drive to the Hamptons anyway, to open a place that didn't even open. I should have stayed with my mother. When I got there he didn't have the permits. I wish that night had never happened. And I wish I could have properly mourned my mother.'' The nightmare may be close to over (there are still pending civil suits) but Lizzie continues lying low. ''I work out like a freak, I go to work, I come home and I'm asleep by 9:30 or 10,'' says Lizzie, who now avoids drinking and clubbing. ``I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I'm spiritual now. I just realized I needed to slow down. I think I'm approachable now, and much more humble.'' READY FOR PRIME TIME? The homebody thing seems exactly the wrong image for Lizzie as her reality show prepares to hit MTV. PoweR Girls will feature Lizzie and her lovely assistants as they run star-studded events in Manhattan, the Hamptons, Miami and Los Angeles. ''It's not that I don't go out. It's just that now I only do it if I have to,'' she says. ``I tell a lot of clients, listen, I'll represent you, but you won't see me at the event. I have young kids who do that for me. That's their job now. I paid my dues. And I'm 33. There's no reason why any 33-year-old girl should be in the nightclubs every night.'' How about for the sake of meeting a guy? Lizzie broke up with her boyfriend of a year and a half just a month ago. ``All my old boyfriends were nightclub owners. Never again.'' The MTV show has been billed as Apprentice meets Sex and the City. But it's not a contest. It's more about celebrity gawking. ''The show is about these girls in their early 20s who work for Lizzie, who is their mentor,'' says Tony DiSanto, senior vice president of production for MTV. ``She gives them a lot of rope. She's nurturing, but she's also tough on the girls.'' ''I'm in it as much as Donald Trump is in his show,'' says Lizzie. ``It's about the ins and outs of the PR business. You'll get the behind-the-scenes of a celebrity getting ready to launch a CD or whatever.'' Some of the show was shot on South Beach this past summer during MTV's Video Music Awards, at Mansion, Mynt and the Shore Club. FAMOUS, NOT INFAMOUS Lizzie says she now imparts her keep-a-low-profile philosophy on clients. She has learned that less is more. ``My job is to make people famous. But getting famous is not about going out at night. Going out at night can be your fatal flaw. Overexposure is the worst. People don't want to see you every day. They don't want to read about you every day. It's boring. You have to go to the right events, or you won't have any credibility.'' So, like, Paris Hilton is totally overexposed? ''I love Paris. She's a very good friend of mine,'' says Lizzie, who isn't a publicist for nothing. When Casares and her partners decided to throw a blowout New Year's Eve party at the Raleigh, they enlisted Lizzie's help. Lizzie was glad to, since she was putting another event together right next door at the Shelbourne. Among the names in bold who showed at the Raleigh: Paris and Nicky Hilton, Boris Becker, Lindsay Lohan, the Olsen twins, a couple of Wayans, John Stamos. ''Basically, I brought my celebrities over,'' says Lizzie. Then she remembers to be nice. ``But I mean, Ingrid and Paris are very good friends. So it wasn't just me.'' As open as she comes off these days, Lizzie draws the line at talking about her time in jail. She also won't shed light on what her close friend Martha Stewart might be going through. ``I can't talk about her or prison or give you any other details because I have civil cases still pending. But, yes, I can relate to what she's going through.'' Lizzie's cell phone, Blackberry and Sidekick, all three lined up on the table, keep going off. She needs to take her leave. But not before she offers the one line she keeps repeating to the media. Only a cynic would call it just spin. There's something about the barely audible tone that says the whole thing still smarts. ``There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about the people who got hurt in that car accident. I feel awful, I really do.'' From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 15:37:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 10:37:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Gawker: Monica's Comeback Message-ID: Soho House Showdown: Monica Lewinsky Vs. Chelsea Clinton http://www.gawker.com/news/culture/nightlife/soho-house-showdown-monica-lewinsky-vs-chelsea-clinton-028999.php chelsea.JPG A reader sends us a very special Page Six sighting: Chelsea Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in Soho House last night at different ends of the lounge. Whoa. We didn't know Soho House was still open! And we can only imagine how things went down in the ladies' room: Monica: Um, this is awkward. Chelsea: Yeah. Monica: Come on, Chelsea--can't we get past this? Aren't we ever going to be friends? Chelsea: No, Monica. You humped my dad's Cristo. Monica: But I brought [3]analingus to the forefront of national consciousness. Surely that's helped things with you and Ian! Chelsea: Stay the hell away from my boyfriend. [4]Sightings... [Page Six] ? [6]Monica Lewinsky ? [7]Monica Lewinsky, reality TV show host ? [8]Monica Lewinsky Continues To Make The Universe Collapse ? [9]Chelsea Clinton at "McKinney" ? [10]"I love Chelsea Clinton" ? [11]Soho House NY ? [12]more... ? [13]Back to Gawker front page [14]Front Page email [15]"tips at gawker.com" , or AIM [16]gawkbox [17]Published by Gawker Media References 3. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/icreport/7groundsfoot.htm 4. http://www.nypost.com/seven/01062005/gossip/37735.htm 5. http://www.gawker.com/topic/advertising-010293.php 6. http://www.gawker.com/news/unused/urges/monica-lewinsky-011930.php 7. http://www.gawker.com/news/unused/diary/monica-lewinsky-reality-tv-show-host-011661.php 8. http://www.gawker.com/news/unused/entertainment/monica-lewinsky-continues-to-make-the-universe-collapse-023039.php 9. http://www.gawker.com/news/unused/diary/chelsea-clinton-at-mckinney-011083.php 10. http://www.gawker.com/news/unused/diary/i-love-chelsea-clinton-011685.php 11. http://www.gawker.com/news/unused/diary/soho-house-ny-010435.php 12. http://www.gawker.com/news/culture/nightlife/index.php 13. http://www.gawker.com/ 14. http://www.gawker.com/ 15. mailto:tips at gawker.com From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 15:38:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 10:38:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Newt's Comeback Message-ID: The New York Times > Books > Books of The Times | 'Winning the Future': Does Tomorrow Belong to Gingrich's 'Popular Majority'? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/books/01kaku.html 5.2.1 BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'WINNING THE FUTURE' Does Tomorrow Belong to Gingrich's 'Popular Majority'? By MICHIKO KAKUTANI WINNING THE FUTURE: A 21st Century Contract With America By Newt Gingrich 243 pages. Regnery. $27.95 In his sloppy, poorly reasoned new book "Winning the Future," the former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich sets up an either/or dynamic between "the liberal elite minority" and "the popular majority," and makes this aggrieved assertion: "Since the 1960's, the conservative majority has been intimidated, manipulated and bullied by the liberal minority. The liberal elites who dominate academia, the courts, the press and much of the government bureaucracy share an essentially European secular-socialist value system. Yet they have set the terms of the debate, which is why 'politics as usual' is a losing proposition for Americans." Never mind that the Republicans currently control the White House and both houses of Congress. Never mind that a majority of the nation's governors are Republicans and that a majority of Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican presidents. Never mind that Fox News further established itself as the dominant cable news network last year, outdrawing all of its competitors combined in prime time and extending its lead over CNN. Never mind that the Bush administration argues the last election gave it a mandate for the war in Iraq, or that it is now pushing Social Security reform (of a sort supported by Mr. Gingrich) and a conservative agenda on a host of social issues. Indeed Mr. Gingrich's complaint that "the liberal elite minority is winning and the popular majority is losing" suggests that the author still has a mindset from the 1980's and early 90's (when his party was in the minority and he made a name for himself as a backbench revolutionary). It also points to larger problems with this book as a whole: the author's fondness for reductive Manichean dichotomies; his tendency to ignore facts that might contradict or undermine his thesis; and his substitution of attention-grabbing assertions for thoughtful analysis. Similar problems contributed to Mr. Gingrich's fall from grace in 1998, when he announced that he was stepping aside as speaker and leaving Congress in the wake of unexpected Republican losses in the midterm elections. It was a fall brought about, in part, by Mr. Gingrich's reputation as a polarizing bomb-thrower, his proclivity for overreaching, his failure to unite House Republicans around a persuasive agenda and his misreading of the public mood about the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Combined with voter anger at the Republicans for the budget-related federal shutdowns in 1995 and Mr. Clinton's co-option of issues like welfare reform and a balanced budget, these missteps helped sink Mr. Gingrich, the man who four years earlier had been hailed as a visionary for winning Republican control of Congress with a 52-seat pickup and a controversial Contract With America that proposed to radically cut back the size of the federal government. In "Winning the Future," Mr. Gingrich hops and skips over his earlier travails to deliver a kind of updated version of the Contract With America, a move that also seems designed as the opening sally in a political comeback attempt. Book-tour stops in Iowa and New Hampshire are on the author's schedule, and much of the volume reads like a platform for a possible 2008 presidential run. As with the 1994 Contract With America, Mr. Gingrich here stresses less regulation, more free enterprise, lower taxes and fewer entitlements. But some chapters suggest that the author is trying to reposition himself within the Republican Party: whereas Mr. Gingrich, as House speaker, was more identified with tax cutters than with social conservatives and the religious right, he includes an entire chapter in this volume about "the centrality of our Creator in defining America" (in which he rails against what he calls "the secular left's unending war against God in America's public life"). He vigorously endorses President Bush's plan to export democracy to the Middle East (he calls it "the only strategy that can make America secure"), but acknowledges the alarming inadequacies of the administration's postwar planning: "Iraq is a mess," he writes. "It is going to remain a mess for a long time." Like his 1995 book "To Renew America," this volume is replete with windy talk about big, ambitious plans (in this case, remaking health care and the Social Security system) but short on details, slip-sliding over counter arguments and practical impediments to his vision. Mr. Gingrich calls for an intelligence community "about three times the size of the current system," but fails to explain how this would be paid for, how it would be organized or how current problems (from the F.B.I.'s failed computer systems to interagency turf wars) would be corrected. He writes at length about the difficulties faced by the current Social Security system, but fails to apply equal scrutiny to the risks and costs involved in setting up personal investment accounts. On other subjects, Mr. Gingrich settles for chirpy, Pollyanna-ish assertions and fuzzy musings about the sort of technological change he has long championed. On health care and balancing the budget, he writes: "We must transform the health system so people can live longer and healthier lives while taking 20 percent out of the cost of the system. We can achieve this through the efficiencies of information technology, and by the kind of waste reduction and productivity increases that have been common in manufacturing for the last 30 years and in service industries for the last 15 years." Many of Mr. Gingrich's arguments are riddled with gaps in logic. While he repeatedly ratifies the presidency of George W. Bush in this book, he complains that the Supreme Court - which effectively decided the presidential election of 2000 - has become a mechanism by which "appointed lawyers can redefine the meaning of the U.S. Constitution and the policies implemented under that Constitution either by inventing rationales out of thin air or by citing whatever foreign precedent they think helpful." He adds that "this is not a judiciary in the classic sense, but a proto-dictatorship of the elite pretending to still function as a Supreme Court," and yet he cites overrulings and reversals by the Supreme Court to try to impugn decisions made by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which he scorns even more. This same chapter, "Bringing the Courts Back Under the Constitution," is filled with vintage Gingrichian bomblets sure to provoke talk. He asserts that "there is significant precedent in American history for believing that the legislative and executive branches can force the judicial branch into changing its views when they are out of touch with the values of the vast majority of Americans." And he argues that "Ninth Circuit judges who found the motto 'one nation under God' unconstitutional could be considered unfit to serve and be impeached." These are the sorts of pronouncements that won Mr. Gingrich attention as a minority firebrand before the 1994 elections, but they are also the sorts of pronouncements that got him into trouble as speaker of the House. He seems to be hoping that this time they will help him assume the moniker of the Democratic president he was so obsessed with: the Comeback Kid. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 15:49:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 10:49:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Law Barring Junk E-Mail Allows a Flood Instead Message-ID: The New York Times > Technology > Law Barring Junk E-Mail Allows a Flood Instead http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/technology/01spam.html 5.2.1 By TOM ZELLER Jr. A year after a sweeping federal antispam law went into effect, there is more junk e-mail on the Internet than ever, and Levon Gillespie, according to [1]Microsoft, is one reason. Lawyers for the company seemed well on the way to shutting down Mr. Gillespie last September after he agreed to meet them at a [2]Starbucks in Los Angeles near the University of Southern California. There they served him a court summons and a lawsuit accusing him, his Web site and 50 unnamed customers of violating state and federal law - including the year-old federal Can Spam Act - by flooding Microsoft's internal and customer e-mail networks with illegal spam, among other charges. But that was the last the company saw of the young entrepreneur. Mr. Gillespie, who operated a service that gives bulk advertisers off-shore shelter from the antispam crusade, did not show up last month for a court hearing in King County, Wash. The judge issued a default judgment against him in the amount of $1.4 million. In a telephone interview yesterday from his home in Los Angeles, Mr. Gillespie, 21, said he was unaware of the judgment and that no one from Microsoft or the court had yet followed up. But he insisted that he had done nothing wrong and vowed that lawsuits would not stop him - nor any of the other players in the lucrative spam chain. "There's way too much money involved," Mr. Gillespie said, noting that his service, which is currently down, provided him with a six-figure income at its peak. "And if there's money to be made, people are going to go out and get it." Since the Can Spam Act went into effect in January 2004, unsolicited junk e-mail on the Internet has come to total perhaps 80 percent or more of all e-mail sent, according to most measures. That is up from 50 percent to 60 percent of all e-mail before the law went into effect. To some antispam crusaders, the surge comes as no surprise. They had long argued that the law would make the spam problem worse by effectively giving bulk advertisers permission to send junk e-mail as long as they followed certain rules. "Can Spam legalized spamming itself," said Steve Linford, the founder of the Spamhaus Project, a London organization that is one of the leading groups intent on eliminating junk e-mail. And in making spam legal, he said, the new rules also invited flouting by those intent on being outlaws. Not everyone agrees that the Can Spam law is to blame, and lawsuits invoking the new legislation - along with other suits using state laws - have been mounted in the name of combating the problem. Besides Microsoft, other large Internet companies like AOL and [3]Yahoo have used the federal law as the basis for suits. Two prolific spam distributors, Jeremy D. Jaynes and Jessica DeGroot, were convicted under a Virginia antispam law in November, and a $1 billion judgment was issued in an Iowa federal court against three spam marketers in December. The law's chief sponsor, Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, said that it was too soon to judge the law's effectiveness, although he indicated in an e-mail message that the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees its enforcement, might simply need some nudging. "As we progress into the next legislative session," Mr. Burns said, "I'll be working to make sure the F.T.C. utilizes the tools now in place to enforce the act and effectively stem the tide of this burden." The F.T.C. has made some recent moves that include winning a court order in January to shut down illegal advertising from six companies accused of profiting from thousands of X-rated spam e-mail messages. But so far, the spam trade has foiled most efforts to bring it under control. A growing number of so-called bulletproof Web host services like Mr. Gillespie's offer spam-friendly merchants access to stable offshore computer servers - most of them in China - where they can park their Web sites, with the promise that they will not be shut down because of spam complaints. Some bulk e-mailers have also teamed with writers of viruses to steal lists of working e-mail addresses and quietly hijack the personal computers of millions of unwitting Internet users, creating the "zombie networks" that now serve, according to some specialists, as the de facto circulatory system for spam. "We've thrown everything but the kitchen sink at this problem," said Chris Smith, the senior director of product marketing for Postini, a company that filters e-mail for corporations. "And yet, all of these efforts have yet to make a significant dent." Mr. Smith was speaking in a conference call with reporters last week to discuss Postini's 2005 e-mail security report, which echoed the bleak findings of recent academic surveys and statistics from other vendors that filter and monitor e-mail traffic. A survey from Stanford University in December showed that a typical Internet user now spends about 10 working days a year dealing with incoming spam. Industry analysts estimate that the global cost of spam to businesses in 2005, in terms of lost productivity and network maintenance, will be about $50 billion ($17 billion in the United States alone). And the Postini report concluded that most legislative measures - in the United States, Europe and Australia - have had little impact on the problem. The American law requires solicitations to be identified as such in the subject line and prohibits the use of fake return addresses, among other restrictions. But the real soft spot in the American law, critics have argued, is that it puts a burden on recipients to choose to be removed from an e-mailers list - an "opt out" feature that bulk mailers are obligated by the law to provide. (The European and Australian systems requires bulk mailers, in most cases, to receive "opt in" authorization from recipients.) While a law-abiding bulk mailer under the American law might remove a person from its list, critics say, the scofflaw spammer simply takes an opt-out message as verification that the e-mail address is current and has a live person behind it. "Any spammer worth his salt is not going to follow Can Spam," said Scott Petry, Postini's founder and senior vice president for products and engineering, "because it would be filtered out immediately." Defenders of the Can Spam Act say blaming any one law is far too simple. "Most people say it's a miserable failure," said Anne Mitchell, who helped draft the legislation and is the chief executive of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, a research group in California. "But I see it as a lawyer would see it. To think that law enforcement agencies can make spam stop right away is silly. There's no such thing as an instant fix in the law." She and others note that filtering software has become particularly adept at catching the vast majority of spam before it ever gets to a user's in-box. Legitimate e-mail messages do sometimes get caught in such nets - a drawback that generates its own chorus of complaints. But some specialists have also suggested that the overall success of identifying and weeding out junk e-mail from in-boxes may actually help explain the current surge in spam. "The more effective the filtering technology," Ms. Mitchell said, "the more spam they have to send to get the same dollar rate of return." Those rates of return can be staggeringly high (and the costs of entry into the market relatively low). A spammer can often expect to receive anywhere from a 25 percent to a 50 percent commission on any sales of a product that result from a spam campaign, according to a calculus developed by Richi Jennings, an Internet security analyst with Ferris Research, a technology industry consulting firm. Even if only 2,000 of 200 million recipients of a spam campaign - a single day's response rate for some spammers - actually go to a merchant's Web site to purchase a $50 bottle of an herbal supplement, a spammer working at a 25 percent commission will take in $25,000. If a spammer makes use of anonymous virus-enslaved computers to spread the campaign, expenses like bandwidth payments to Internet service providers are low - as is the likelihood of anyone's tracking down who pushed the "send" button. The overlapping and truly global networks of spam-friendly merchants, e-mail list resellers, virus-writers and bulk e-mailing services have made identifying targets for prosecution a daunting process. Merchants whose links actually appear in junk e-mail are often dozens of steps and numerous deals removed from the spammers, Mr. Jennings said, and proving culpability "is just insanely difficult." The new federal law does give prosecutors some leverage to go after the merchants - but it must be proved that they knew, or should have known, that their wares were being fed into the illegal spam chain. "We wait to see a real test case of that," Mr. Jennings said. In the meantime, analysts predict, more viruses will commandeer more personal computers as zombie spam transmitters - which besides free relays give spammers a thicker cloak of anonymity. Mr. Jennings estimates that hijacked machines handle 50 percent of the spam stream, and other analysts have put the percentage higher. Analysts also expect more use of virus bombs - called directory harvest attacks - to wrest working e-mail addresses from Internet service providers. "It's the silent killer of e-mail servers," Mr. Smith of Postini said. And bulletproof services like Mr. Gillespie's and another, [4]Buprhost.com, are intent on continuing to offer spam-friendly merchants a haven from antispam complaints, starting at $89 a month. "If your Web site host receives complaints or discovers that your Web site has been advertised in e-mail broadcasts, they may disconnect your account and shut down your Web site," explains Buprhost.com, which promises no such disruptions. "The reason we can do this is that we put your Web site in our overseas server where the local law will protect your Web sites." "It's very simple," Mr. Petry of Postini said of the junk e-mail scourge. "Spam is technically very easy to send." Which is why, according to Aaron Kornblum, Microsoft's Internet safety enforcement lawyer, suits against spam enablers like Mr. Gillespie are an important, if incremental, new front to pursue. "Microsoft's efforts in filing these lawsuits is to stop spammers - and in this case hosting services that cater to spammers - from plying their trade," said Mr. Kornblum, who noted that Microsoft was working to enforce the $1.4 million judgment against Mr. Gillespie. "Our objective with sustained enforcement activity is to change the economics of spamming, making it a cost-prohibitive business model rather than a profitable one." References 1. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=MSFT 2. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=SBUX 3. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=YHOO 4. http://Buprhost.com/ From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 15:50:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 10:50:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] J. Studies in Int. Ed.: Wine Is for Drinking, Water Is for Washing: Student Opinions About International Exchange Programs Message-ID: Wine Is for Drinking, Water Is for Washing: Student Opinions About International Exchange Programs First, the summary from The Chronicle of Higher Education: A glance at the current issue of the "Journal of Studies in International Education": What students value about studying abroad Students value their study-abroad experiences, but more for the experience than the study, say two scholars at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. Hubert B. Van Hoof, a professor of hospitality management, and Marja J. Verbeeten, an assistant professor of hospitality management, surveyed college students who had participated in international-study programs, including foreign students who had studied in the United States. The authors found that the students felt "almost unanimous enthusiasm" for their experience in terms of their personal development. Students said they felt that the experience "had brought them a greater understanding of other cultures" and "had helped them appreciate their own culture more," the scholars write. When asked what advice they would give other students considering studying abroad, the survey respondents' most common answers "were along the lines of 'Do it!'; 'You'll regret it if you don't!'; 'Experience as much as possible'; and 'Keep an open mind.'" Mr. Van Hoof and Ms. Verbeeten urge more such research to see what students are getting out of their studies abroad. "It is no longer sufficient," they write, "for educators to say that the international-study experience is invaluable and necessary in the education of our students because they think it is so." The article, "Wine Is for Drinking, Water Is for Washing: Student Opinions About International Exchange Programs," will be online for a limited time at http://jsi.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/9/1/42 ----------------------- Wine Is for Drinking, Water Is for Washing: Student Opinions About International Exchange Programs Hubert B. Van Hoof Marja J. Verbeeten Journal of Studies in International Education, Vol. 9 No. 1, Spring 2005 42-61 This article reports on a study done among students who participated in student exchange programs, both in the United States and other parts of the world, between January 2001 and May 2003. Issues such as why students decide to study abroad, why they select a certain institution, how their home institution compares to a partner institution abroad, and what they consider to be the relevance of their international experience were investigated. Students agreed with the literature on the topic to a large extent and were very positive about the experience. Some interesting differ?ences of opinion between incoming (to United States) and outgoing (from United States) students were observed. Keywords: study abroad; exchange programs; international education When Penny Barend, a 3rd-year hospitality management student at North?ern Arizona University, arrived in Italy for a year of studies at the American International University in Florence, she did so with an open mind. Peers, par?ents, and professors had told her that this was going to be the best experience of her life and that living and studying in Italy were going to be very different from living and studying in Arizona. Different, she had been told, is not better or worse-it is just different. When she sat down for dinner with her host family on her very first night, she asked for some water with her meal, a common request in the United States. Yet, the response she got from a 75-year-old Italian was not what she had expected: "Wine is for drinking, water is for washing," he said. With this, she was wel?comed to the world of living and studying abroad, and this incident stuck with her and became the theme of her valedictorian speech at her graduation cere- mony 3 years later. She will always look upon a glass of water in a different light, as will many who heard her speech. Over the years, we have published several articles on the benefits of students living, working, and studying abroad (Van Hoof, 1999a, 2000, 2001) and have related these experiences to the benefits of international education as identified in the literature on the topic. The most common benefit identified is the student's exposure to different social and cultural environments (Arndt, 1984; Calleja, 1995; Lamey, 1990; Saliba, 1995; Swanson, 1969). Also mentioned is the fact that living in another culture changes one's stereotypes of other nationalities (Stangor, Jonas, Stroebe, & Hewstone, 1994) and that it presents one with an alternative view of the world (Remy, Nathan, Becker, & Torney, 1975). Students acquire a "new-found recognition of the extent to which their own cultural val?ues and norms differ from those of their counterparts in their host country"(Rob-erts, 1998, p. 65). That this does not necessarily lead to a truly global perspective is lamented by some (Anderson, 1990; Van Spaandonck, 1995) but is to be expected, given the age and maturity levels of the students. Yet, it has also been found that students who participate in exchange programs tend to be a little more mature than their peers who did not study abroad (Frisch, 1990). The literature has highlighted the role of these international programs in shaping a rounded, culturally sensitive individual, which happens to be one of the guiding principles of higher education around the world. As Vestal (1994) states, "These programs are commonly based on the conviction that quality edu?cation must reflect and encompass knowledge of diverse societies and cultures as well as the realities of global interdependence" (p. 15). As such, they fit in well with the drive to internationalize, which dominates university campuses across the globe nowadays (Barnett & Wu, 1995; Lawson, White, & Dimitriadis, 1998; Van Hoof, 1996). A concrete example of this drive to internationalizeis Harvard University, where students are now expected to have a passport (which is still not common in the United States), and where internationalization has been made one of the cornerstones of curricular developments at the university. It is safe to assume that the most important benefits of international education have been identified and that, as De Wit (1997) stated some 6 years ago, the time is ripe to move from the descriptive phase to a more analytical phase in the study of international education. In 1999, we analyzed the opinions of U.S. industry recruiters concerning a student's international experience and found that they did not value the international experience very highly (Van Hoof, 1999b). This article reports on a study done among students who participated in exchange programs. The intent of the study was to compare student opinions about inter?national exchange programs to those expressed in the literature and to investi?gate what students saw as the biggest benefits and challenges of the experience, why they decided to go abroad, how the education they received abroad com?pared to that at their home institutions, and what, in their minds, the relevance of the experience was to their personal and professional development. METHOD AND DATA COLLECTION The survey that provided the data for the study was conducted during the months of March, April, and May 2003 among 1,487 undergraduate students in the database of the International Office at Northern Arizona University. These students had studied abroad during the period of January 2001 to May 2003, were either incoming (to the United States) or outgoing (from the United States), and represented numerous majors and disciplines, as well as various age levels. Questionnaire Design The questionnaire was designed to gain insights into the perceptions of stu?dents about their study abroad experiences. As stated earlier, its intent was to determine whether students corroborated the opinions expressed in the literature on international education. The payoffs of international education as identified in the literature can be summarized as follows: (a) exposure to different social and cultural environments; (b) changing of stereotypes that might exist; and (c) students become more mature because they live in other cultures and become well-rounded, culturally sensitive adults. Questions such as, "Why did you decide to study abroad as an exchange student?" "What do you consider the greatest benefit of studying abroad?" and "What do you consider the greatest challenge of studying abroad?" for instance, directly addressed some of these issues (see Appendix). Of secondary relevance was the fact that this survey provided the administra?tors and educators at this particular university with valuable information about their own performance in educating and taking care of international students, as well as with information about their exchange partners. It was decided to use a Web-based survey format in this study. The primary reason for doing so was that it could be distributed to a large target audience at a much lower cost and more quickly than a traditional survey (Couper, 2000; Schonland & Williams, 1996). Moreover, data collection and conversion could be done automatically, and the target audience could be encouraged by meansof a personal e-mail message. Its most important benefits, though, were the conve?nience for both the respondents and the researchers and the fact that it was felt that respondents in this particular age group would be more likely to respond to an electronic format than to any of the more traditional survey tools. An important concern about Web surveys is their low response rate, espe?cially when sent out to the general population (Schaefer & Dillman, 1998; Tse, 1998). Yet, in this case, the population under study was relatively small, and its members could be reached at their personal e-mail addresses. It was expected that these students would be interested in sharing their opinions about their semester abroad experiences, which was supported by the relatively high response rate obtained. The questionnaire was a four-page, self-administered instrument (see Appen?dix). It was estimated that it would take respondents about 10 minutes to com?plete. Most of the questions were closed-ended, requiring a choice from a num?ber of alternatives presented. In the first part of the survey, respondents were asked to provide demographic information. They were asked to provide information about their gender, their country of origin, the country where they had studied abroad, the institution they had studied at, their academic status (freshman, sophomore, etc.), their majors at their home institution and at their exchange institution, and how long theyhad studied abroad. The second part of the survey was divided into six sections and examined the students' perceptions about their international studies and experiences. In the first section, two questions asked them what their reasons were for studying abroad and why they had selected the institution in particular. They were asked to compare their exchange programs to their home institutions by means of rat?ing them on a 5-point Likert-type scale. The questions looked at (a) academic level of difficulty, (b) care for their general needs as students, (c) housing arrangements, and (d) overall levels of organization and structure at the exchange institution. The third section examined what they liked most and least about their exchange institution and what they perceived to be the main difference between studying at home and abroad. Three questions (once again on a 5-point scale)in the fourth section then asked them to rate the relevance of their semester abroad to future job opportunities, their academic program at home, and their own per?sonal development. The fifth section contained four questions. The first two asked the respon?dents if they would study abroad again at the same institution and if they would study abroad again at another institution. Then they rated the overall quality of the academic program abroad and how they felt about the overall experience. The final section then asked them to describe what they felt were the greatest benefits and challenges of studying abroad and what advice they would give to students who were also considering studying abroad. This was done in an open-ended format. Sample Design, Data Collection, and Limitations Sample design. As stated earlier, all 1,487 undergraduate students who were in the database of the International Office at Northern Arizona University were selected to participate in this study for the following reasons: 1. The database was readily available and up-to-date at the university's International Office, with e-mail addresses of all the respondents being part of the database; 2. The International Office was very willing to participate in the study, as they would obtain valuable information about their own performance at the university they represented; 3. The students' interest in the topic and their willingness to complete the survey were expected to be high, due to the nature of the experience; 4. Respondents could be contacted easily by means of e-mail. Data collection. On February 26, 2003, a letter signed by both the director of the International Office at Northern Arizona University and the researchers was sent to a pilot group of 60 students. In the letter, the respondents were requested to cooperate and were directed to a Web site that contained the survey. One week later, 40 pilot group respondents had completed the survey. As there were no major adjustments to be made based on the feedback from the pilot group, the letter was then sent to all the remaining students in the database on March 7, 2003, by means of e-mail. On March 24, 2003, a reminder was sent out. The Web site with the survey was kept open until the end of the spring 2003 semester, May 9, 2003. At that time, a total of 353 students had responded to the survey, a 23.74% response. Given the concern that Web surveys generally tend to generate a low response rate, this was deemed very good. Limitations. The main limitation of this study is the fact that it was based on a database of students at only one university. All outgoing students studied at one of the 10 colleges and schools at Northern Arizona University, and all incoming stu?dents came to the university from its established network of partners abroad. Opin?ions therefore say more about Northern Arizona University and its foreign partners than about other universities, and the results cannot be generalized beyond the scope of the study. Yet, with incoming students coming from 22 different countries, outgo?ing students going to 23 different countries, and more than 50 different majors repre?sented in the sample, the results can be considered characteristic of some general ten?dencies and representative of opinions of students worldwide. This article will first discuss the demographic data and the descriptive results of the analyses. After that, it will look at the outcomes of various comparative analyses and describe whether any observed differences between groups in the descriptive section were significant. Finally, it will summarize some of the pre?dominant opinions about the benefits and challenges of studying abroad and offer some suggestions for further research. All data analyses were done using SPSS 11.0. DESCRIPTIVE RESULTS Demographics Of the 353 students who responded to the survey, 250 (70.8%) were female and 103 (29.2%) were male. As stated earlier, these students came from 22 dif?ferent countries, with a large majority coming from the United States (80.7%). Among these outgoing American students, the largest numbers went to such countries as the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, and Mexico. But there were also students who went to Costa Rica, Chile, Malta, Korea, Japan, Ireland, Italy, Russia, China, and Sweden, for instance. Among the incoming students, Germany and the Netherlands were most heavily represented in the sample. Examples of other countries represented were the United Kingdom, Australia, Mexico, Spain, France, Czech Republic, China, Malaysia, Bulgaria, Belgium, and the Ukraine. Of course, these countries of ori?gin reflect the international contacts of the university. Yet, they are also indica?tive of the multitude of nationalities in the sample. A large majority (93.7%) of the respondents were juniors (3rd year) or seniors (4th year) at their home institutions, reflecting a trend among universi?ties not to send students abroad very early on in their academic careers. The num?ber of majors represented was considerable, with more than 50 distinctly differ?ent majors or fields of study being identified. These majors ranged from business and management to art, from chemistry to education, from languageto history, and from ceramics to journalism. Most of the respondents had studied abroad for one semester (63.0%), with the remainder either going for two semes?ters (28.7%) or three or more (8.3%) (see Table 1). Reasons for Studying Abroad In the first section of the survey, the respondents were asked why they had decided to study abroad and were requested to rank a number of distinctly different reasons in order of importance. The three most important reasons for studying abroad identified were as follows: 1. It is/was a good opportunity to live in another culture; 2. It is/was a good opportunity to travel; 3. I liked the country my exchange program was located in. Table 1 Student Demographics (N = 353) N Valid % Gender Male 103 29.2 Female 250 70.8 Incoming/outgoinga Incoming 32 9.1 Outgoing 321 90.9 Academic statusa Freshman 3 .9 Sophomore 17 5.3 Junior 98 30.5 Senior 203 63.2 Durationa One semester 213 63.0 Two semesters 97 28.7 Three or more semesters 28 8.3 a. Total N is not 353 because of missing values for the variable. When asked why they had selected the particular institution abroad, the three most important reasons were as follows: 1. It was available as a partner at my home institution; 2. I liked the country the program was located in; 3. People I know also go/went there. Assessments: Academics, Care, Housing, and Organization at the Receiving Institution In four questions, the survey then asked the respondents to rate the academic level of difficulty, care for their needs as a student, housing, and organization/ structure at the exchange institution as compared to their home institution. This was done on a 5-point Likert-type scale, with 1 being much worse/much easier,3 being same,and5being much better/much more difficult. This scale was primar?ily used to allow for comparative analysis of opinions later. A majority of the respondents (59.0%) felt that the academic level of diffi?culty of the program abroad was the same (25.5%) or easier (33.5%) as com?pared to their home institutions, whereas 41.0% felt that academics were more demanding abroad. The mean rating was 3.02, with a standard deviation of 1.05. In terms of the care they received for their needs as students (such as staff avail?ability, academic advising, and counseling), 39.2% of them rated it as better, 30.0% felt it was the same, and 30.8% felt it was worse than at home, a very even distribution (M = 3.08, SD = 1.18). Housing is always a major concern for students when they go abroad, and not only for them but also, for instance, for their parents. In this case, 45.2% of the respondents felt that their housing arrangements were better than at home, 25.7% felt it was the same, and only 29.2% felt they were worse than at home (M =3.25, SD = 1.07). Finally, when asked how they assessed the overall level of structure and organization at their exchange institution, 26.4% rated it as better, 33.0% felt it was the same, and 42.6% thought it was worse than at home (M = 2.81, SD = 1.12) (see Table 2). Relevance of the Experience Three questions asked the respondents to rate the relevance of their interna?tional experience to future job opportunities, the academic program at their home institution, and their own personal development. It is reasonable to assume that it would be difficult for students at this stage of their lives to assessthe rele?vance of the international experience on future job opportunities and their own personal development accurately. Yet, these questions were included for various reasons. First, the answers to these questions could be used to reinforce opinions expressed in other questions about the importance the study abroad respondents attach to the experience. Second, the answers could also be used to provide some insight into whether young adults think about the consequences of their interna?tional experience to their personal and professional lives and place the experi?ence in a much broader perspective. Third, the answers to these questions could be compared to opinions expressed in the literature. Ratings were on a 5-point scale again, with 1 being completely irrelevant,3 being relevant,and5being extremely relevant. When asked to rate the relevance of the experience to their future job opportunities, 58.1% of the students rated it as very or extremely relevant, 33.1% rated it relevant, and only 8.9% felt itwas irrelevant (M = 3.75, SD = .98). With regard to their academic program at home, the ratings were 48.5% very or extremely relevant, 37.5% relevant, and 14.0% irrelevant (M = 3.52, SD = 1.06). Yet, when it came to determining what it had meant to their personal development, the respondents were most enthusiastic: 67.7% considered it extremely relevant, 23.0% felt it was very relevant, and only 2 respondents (.6%) considered it irrelevant. This almost unanimous enthusi?asm was reflected in the mean rating of 4.57 and a standard deviation of .69 (see Table 3). Table 2 Student Assessment of Academic Difficulty, Care, Housing, and Organization: Exchange Institution Compared to Home Institution Exchange Program Compared to Home Na Valid % M/SD Academic level of difficulty Much easier 28 7.9 M: 3.02 Easier 82 24.9 SD: 1.05 Same 84 25.5 More difficult 124 37.7 Much more difficult 11 3.3 Level of care for your general needs Much worse 39 11.8 M: 3.08 Worse 63 19.1 SD: 1.18 Same 99 30.0 Better 91 27.6 Much better 38 11.5 Housing arrangements Much worse 10 3.1 M: 3.25 Worse 85 26.0 SD: 1.07 Same 84 25.7 Better 108 33.0 Much better 40 12.2 Overall level of organization/structure Much worse 42 12.7 M: 2.81 Worse 92 27.9 SD: 1.12 Same 109 33.0 Better 62 18.8 Much better 25 7.6 a. Total N is not 353 because of missing values for the variable. Would You Do It Again? Under the heading of "Would you do it again?" the respondents' opinions and feelings about their semesters abroad were further analyzed. They were asked, if it were possible, whether they would study abroad again at the same institution and at another institution. Moreover, they had the option here to indicate why they would or would not choose to repeat the experience, providing important information on the quality of the programs and the experience to organizersof those programs. Two thirds (61.1%) of the respondents indicated that they would study again at the same institution, and 95.0% of them said that they would study abroad again at another institution-a ringing endorsement, yet more so for the study abroad experience than for the institution they studied at. A sampling of the rea? Table 3 The Relevance of the Study Abroad Experience Relevance of Semester Abroad Experience to Na Valid % M/SD Future job opportunities Completely irrelevant 4 1.4 M: 3.75 Irrelevant 22 7.4 SD: 0.98 Relevant 98 33.1 Very relevant 91 30.7 Extremely relevant 81 27.4 Academic program at home Completely irrelevant 12 4.0 M: 3.52 Irrelevant 30 10.0 SD: 1.06 Relevant 112 37.5 Very relevant 82 27.4 Extremely relevant 63 21.1 Your personal development Completely irrelevant 1 .3 M: 4.57 Irrelevant 1 .3 SD: 0.69 Relevant 26 8.7 Very relevant 69 23.0 Extremely relevant 203 67.7 a. Total N is not 353 because of missing values for the variable. sons for not wanting to go back to the same school includes such comments as "courses are irrelevant," "been there, done that," "I got bored there," "too unor?ganized," and "I would like to get a broader perspective and experience something new." By the same token, some of the reasons that students overwhelmingly endorsed the experience rather than the individual programs were, "the dynam?ics of an exchange teach you a lot," "I realize there are more opportunities now," and "my personal development was incredible, and I want to see more." Overall Ratings Finally, when it was time to ask for some overall assessments, the respondents looked at the overall quality of the academic program they did abroad, and the overall quality of the experience in general, on a scale where 1 = very poor,3= neutral,and5= outstanding. As became apparent throughout all of the other questions, the study abroad experience was perceived as having a much larger effect on the students' personal developments than on their academic careers, as 71.9% of them rated the overall quality of the academic program as good or out?standing (M = 3.84, SD = .92). Nearly all of them (96.2%) felt that the quality of the overall study abroad experience was good or outstanding (M = 4.65, SD = .57). COMPARATIVE RESULTS To determine if any of the observed differences of opinion were significant, t tests were used to compare the groups. The groups compared in this sample were males and females, and incoming versus outgoing students, which was by far the most important comparison. The Effect of Gender on Perceptions The study first looked at whether the gender of the respondent had any signifi?cant effect on his or her perceptions about the study abroad experience. As there were two groups separated based on the value of a single variable (male-female), and as the level of data provided by the questions using the 5-point Likert-type scale was ordinal, this analysis was done by means of t tests. In all instances, the null hypotheses assumed that the population means were equal, and the alpha levelwas setat.05. The study found only one significant difference of opinion between male and female students. It was found that female students rated the level of care for their personal needs as a student at the exchange institution significantly higher than males. With a significance score of .050, the null hypothesis of equality of mean ratings could be rejected. In none of the other questions was there a significant difference of opinions between males and females (see Table 4). Although hardly any of the differences of opinion were found to be signifi?cant, a closer look at the mean ratings of males and females, as expressed in Table 4, shows that in all cases, the female ratings were higher than those ofthe males, suggesting that female students were generally more appreciative of many of the aspects of the study abroad experience than males. The Effect of Incoming Versus Outgoing The obvious and most important comparison this study performed was to look at the differences of opinion between incoming and outgoing students. Once again, t tests were used to determine if any of the differences of opinions were significant. The alpha level was set at .05, and the null hypotheses assumed equality of mean ratings. In this case, the study noticed several significant differences of opinion between the two groups. First, it was found that incoming students rated the overall quality of the academic programs in the United States significantly lower Table 4 Effect of Gender on Perceptions Exchange Program Compared to Home Na M SD F Sig. Academic level of difficulty Male 96 2.93 .976 .698 .404 Female 229 3.07 1.084 Level of care for your general needs Male 96 3.06 1.103 3.862 .050** Female 230 3.10 1.220 Housing arrangements Male 93 3.12 1.051 .213 .645 Female 230 3.31 1.073 Overall level of organization/structure Male 96 2.75 1.086 .057 .811 Female 230 2.83 1.122 Relevance of Semester Abroad Experience to Na M SD F Sig. Future job opportunities Male 87 3.62 .967 .239 .626 Female 206 3.81 .988 Academic program at home Male 87 3.46 .986 1.376 .242 Female 209 3.53 1.083 Personal development Male 87 4.47 .696 1.795 .181 Female 210 4.61 .692 Rate the quality of the academic program you did abroad Male 84 3.71 .964 1.029 .311 Female 194 3.89 .907 Rate the quality of the overall experience abroad Male 84 4.63 .576 .300 .584 Female 197 4.65 .565 a. Total N is not 353 because of missing values for the variable. **Significant at the .05 level. than students who had studied outside of the United States (F prob. = .005). Sec?ond, incoming students rated the quality of the housing arrangements in the United States significantly higher than their peers who had studied outside of the United States (F prob. = .004). And finally, incoming students rated the rele?vance of their semester abroad experience to their academic program at home significantly higher than their peers from the United States who had left the country (F prob. = .17) (see Table 5). The latter was somewhat surprising, given that incoming students had rated the quality of the academic program significantly lower at an earlier stage. CONCLUSION The study of international education has started to move from a purely theo?retical and conceptual approach to a more analytical approach, a sign that inter?national education has not only gained importance as a field of study but also has become an important part of many university curricula all over the world. As more and more institutions have begun to mandate an international experience in the degree programs of their students, be it in the form of a semester of studies or an industry internship, more quantitative and qualitative research is needed to improve the quality of the programs offered and to test the validity of the assumptions on which those programs are built. It is no longer sufficient for edu?cators to say that the international study experience is invaluable and necessary in the education of our students because they think it is so. These opinions have to be backed up with hard facts, and we have to move away from mere anecdotal evidence. There is a wealth of information that needs to be explored empirically, and this study is only at the very tip of that iceberg. It is important for the study of international education to start analyzing the perceptions of the students involved in such programs, not only to corroborate predominant ideas aboutthe benefits and challenges of international education but also for purely practical reasons. The practitioners in the field, those who administer international pro?grams and maintain international relationships on behalf of their universities, need to know what students think about their product offerings. They need tobe aware of consumer sentiments when they market and sell these programs to future respondents and in making modifications to existing programs, and those decisions need to be based on facts. The results of this study can be used in several ways. They can be used not only as a means to test the validity of our theoretical assumptions about interna?tional education, a means to determine whether student perceptions agree with the literature. It can also be a practical tool in the day-to-day administration of the exchange programs. Whereas the results of this study will be of particular interest to the International Office at Northern Arizona University, the results of further research and similar studies at other institutions can benefit practitioners worldwide. Table 5 Effect of Incoming and Outgoing Status on Perceptions Exchange Program Compared to Home Na M SD F Sig. Academic level of difficulty In 26 2.65 1.129 .128 .721 Out 203 3.06 1.039 Level of care for your general needs In 26 3.08 1.093 .491 .484 Out 304 3.08 1.191 Housing arrangements In 25 3.32 .802 8.392 .004*** Out 302 3.25 1.088 Overall level of organization/structure In 26 2.46 .905 1.227 .269 Out 304 2.84 1.128 Relevance of Semester Abroad Experience to Na M SD F Sig. Future job opportunities In 23 3.87 1.180 .304 .582 Out 273 3.74 .966 Academic program at home In 23 3.57 1.343 5.748 .017** Out 276 3.51 1.032 Personal development In 24 4.67 .868 .406 .525 Out 276 4.57 .676 Rate the quality of the academic program you did abroad In 23 3.39 1.196 8.059 .005*** Out 258 3.88 .888 Rate the quality of the overall experience abroad In 23 4.74 .449 2.802 .095 Out 261 4.64 .575 a. Total N is not 353 because of missing values for the variable. **Significant at the .05 level. *** Significant at the .01 level. This study found that students generally corroborate what the literature on the topic has identified as being the most important benefits of international educa?tion. They felt that an international education first and foremost benefited them personally and that it helped them in becoming more mature and worldly adults, compassionate in the face of cultural difference, and able to live and work in environments that are dissimilar to what they are used to at home. As might have been expected, their interest in studying abroad was piqued more by the location of their host institution and by the ability to travel and see something of the world than by academics. Incoming students placed a little more emphasis on the academic aspects of an international education than outgoing students, it seemed, and they were more critical of their exchange institution in that regard. Yet, at the same time they were significantly more impressed with the structure and housing arrange?ments at their U.S. exchange university, as compared to what they experienced at their home institutions. When asked what they saw as the greatest benefits of studying abroad, by far the most common comments were that it had brought them a greater understand?ing of other cultures, that it had helped them appreciate their own culture more, that it enabled them to learn more about themselves, and that it had enriched them personally. The words and ideas that came up most often in the many chal?lenges that were described were sentiments like "adapting," "adjusting,""being away from home," "breaking stereotypes," "culture shock," "language barrier," "managing," "staying patient," and "trying to assimilate." Yet, even though these were seen as challenges, they are, in many ways, not negatives at all and valuable to the development of the student, both personally and academically. In terms of what advice they would give to students considering going abroad, the most common answers were along the lines of "Do it!"; "You'll regret it if you don't!"; "Experience as much as possible"; and "Keep an open mind." What better endorsement for international education than that? We are doing the right thing in enabling students to live, work, and study in other cultures and societies and in helping them understand what water and wine are really for, and our stu?dents agree with us wholeheartedly. APPENDIX Survey: Student Perceptions About International Exchange Programs Demographic Data 1. What is your gender? Male Female 2. What is your country of origin? 3. In which country did you spend your study abroad? Australia Mexico Chile Netherlands France Spain Germany United Kingdom Ireland USA Japan Other (please specify) 4. What is the institution you study/studied at as an exchange student? 5. What is your academic status? Freshman Sophomore Junior Senior 6. What is/was your major at your home institution? 7. What was/is your major at your exchange institution? 8. How long do/did you study abroad? One semester Two semesters More than two semesters Perceptions 1. Please rate the following in order of importance (1 = highest, 7 = lowest) as reasons why you decided to study abroad as an exchange student. It could be used as part of my degree program It is/was a good opportunity to travel My parents/relatives suggested I should go I went because I was interested in the academic institution/program abroad It was a good opportunity to live in another culture I liked the country the program was located in Other (please specify) 2. Why did you select the particular institution you studied at as an exchange student? I had heard of its reputation People I know also go/went there I liked the country it is/was located in It was available as a partner of my home institution I could not go anywhere else It was a cheap alternative Other (please specify) 3. How would you assess the academic level of difficulty of the exchange program you participate(d) in, as compared to that of your home institution? Much Easier Easier Same More Difficult Much More Difficult 4. How would you assess the level of care for your general needs as a student (academic advising, housing, availability of staff, for instance) at your exchange institution as compared to your home institution? Much Less Less Same Better Much Better 5. How would you assess the housing arrangements at your exchange institution as compared to those at your home institution? Much Worse Worse Same Better Much Better 6. How would you assess the overall level of organization and structure at your exchange institution, as compared to that at your home institution? Much Worse Worse Same Better Much Better 7. In general, what do/did you like best about your exchange institution? 8. In general, what do/did you like least about your exchange institution? 9. What was the main difference between studying at your home institution and studying at your exchange institution? 10. How would you assess the relevance of your semester abroad to your future job opportunities? Completely Extremely Irrelevant Irrelevant Relevant Very Relevant Relevant 11. How would you assess the relevance of your semester abroad to your academic program at your home institution? Completely Extremely Irrelevant Irrelevant Relevant Very Relevant Relevant 12. How would you assess the relevance of your semester abroad to your personal development? Completely Extremely Irrelevant Irrelevant Relevant Very Relevant Relevant 13. If it were possible, would you study abroad again at the same institution? Yes No Why? 14. If it were possible, would you study abroad again at another institution? Yes No Why? 15. How would you rate the overall quality of the academic program you did abroad? Very Poor Poor Neutral Good Outstanding 16. How would you rate the quality of the overall experience abroad? Very Poor Poor Neutral Good Outstanding 17. What do/did you consider to be the greatest benefit of studying abroad? 18. What do/did you consider to be the greatest challenge of studying abroad? 19. What advice would you give to students who are considering studying abroad? Thank You! REFERENCES Anderson, L. (1990). A rationale for global education. In K. A. Tye (Ed.), Global education: From thought to action (pp. 13-34). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Arndt, R. T. (1984). Rethinking international education. In W. C. Olson & L.D. Howell (Eds.), International education: The unfinished agenda (pp. 1-39). Indianapolis, IN: White River Press. Barnett, G. A., & Wu, R. Y. (1995). The international student exchange network: 1970 & 1989. Higher Education, 30, 353-368. Calleja, J. (1995). International education: A common direction for our future. In J. Calleja (Ed.), International education and the university (pp. 41-57). Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley. Couper, M. P. (2000). Web surveys: A review of issues and approaches. Public Opinion Quarterly, 64(4), 464-494. De Wit, H. (1997). Studies in international education: A research perspective. Journal of Studies in International Education, 1(1), 1-8. Frisch, N. C. (1990). An international nursing student exchange program: An educational experience that enhanced student cognitive development. Jour?nal of Nursing Education, 29(1), 10-12. Lamey, S. L. (1990). Global education: A conflict of images. In K. A. Tye (Ed.), Global education: From thought to action (pp. 49-66). Alexandria, VA: Asso?ciation for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Lawson, D., White, D. S., & Dimitriadis, S. (1998). International businessedu?cation and technology-based active learning: Student-reported benefit evalu?ations. Journal of Marketing Education, 20(2), 141-148. Remy, R. C., Nathan, J. A., Becker, J. M., & Torney, J. V. (1975). International learning and international education in a global age. Washington, DC: National Council for the Social Studies. Roberts, E. H. (1998). The innocents abroad. Do students face international internships unprepared? Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quar?terly, 39(4), 64-69. Saliba, M. (1995). An institutional framework for international education. In J. Calleja (Ed.), International education and the university (pp. 58-80). Bris?tol, PA: Jessica Kingsley. Schaefer, D. R., & Dillman, D. A. (1998). Development of standard e-mail meth?odology: Results of an experiment. Public Opinion Quarterly, 62(3), 378?397. Schonland, A. M., & Williams, P. W. (1996). Using the Internet for travel and tourism survey research: Experiences from the Net traveler survey. Journal of Travel Research, 35(2), 81-87. Stangor, C., Jonas, K., Stroebe, W., & Hewstone, M. (1994). Influence of student exchange on national stereotypes, attitudes, and perceived group variability. European Journal of Social Psychology, 26, 663-675. Swanson, G. I. (1969). International education: Portents for the future. In F. R. Paulsen (Ed.), Changing dimensions in international education (pp. 1-8). Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Tse, A. C. (1998). Comparing the response rate, speed and response quality of two methods of sending questionnaires: E-mail vs. mail. Journal of the Mar?ket Research Society, 40(4), 353-361. Van Hoof, H. B. (1996). Studeren in de Poort tot de Canyon [Studying in the gate to the canyon]. Transfer: Journal for International Cooperation in Higher Education and Research, 4(2), 28-29. Van Hoof, H. B. (1999a). The international student experience: A US industry perspective. Journal of Studies in International Education, 3(2), 57-71. Van Hoof, H. B. (1999b). Why send students abroad? A comparison of the opin?ions of hospitality industry recruiters on international internships and inter?national exchange programs. FIU Hospitality Review, 17(1&2), 63-72. Van Hoof, H. B. (2000). The international internship as part of the hospitality management curriculum: Combining work experience with international exposure. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Education, 12(1), 6-9, 15. Van Hoof, H. B. (2001). International internship exchange: Using existing resources. NAFSA International Educator, 10(1), 7-9. Van Spaandonck, M. (1995). Multicultural and global education. In J. Calleja (Ed.), International education and the university (pp. 243-260). Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley. Vestal, T. M. (1994). International education: Its history and promise for today. Westport, CT: Praeger. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Hubert B. Van Hoof, Ph.D., is the director of the School of Hospitality Manage?ment at Penn State University. Prior to his July 1, 2004, appointment at Penn State, he was the assistant dean at the School of Hotel and Restaurant Management at Northern Arizona University where he was responsible for developing and main?taining the school's international contacts. He has published extensively on the benefits of international education, in particular with regard to hospitality management education. Marja J. Verbeeten, Ed.D., is an assistant professor at the School of Hospitality Man?agement at Penn State University. A native of the Netherlands, she has taught at various universities in the United States in the area of hospitality management, with particular emphases in information technology and managerial accounting and cost control. Dur?ing the fall 2003 semester, she taught as a visiting professor at the International Univer?sity of Applied Sciences, Bad Honnef-Bonn in Germany. She was a faculty member in the Summer Studies in Europe program at Northern Arizona University from 1994 to 2004. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 15:51:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 10:51:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Scotsman: New research shows Turin Shroud is no medieval fake Message-ID: New research shows Turin Shroud is no medieval fake http://news.scotsman.com/print.cfm?id=102832005&referringtemplate=http%3A%2F%2Fnews%2Escotsman%2Ecom%2Fscitech%2Ecfm&referringquerystring=id%3D102832005 Fri 28 Jan 2005 New research shows Turin Shroud is no medieval fake JAMES REYNOLDS SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT THE Turin Shroud, dismissed as a medieval fake after scientific studies in 1988, could actually date back to 1000BC, according to new research. A study based on new analysis of the shroud, believed by many to be the burial cloth used to wrap Jesus Christ after his crucifixion, suggests it is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old. In 1988, analysis using radiocarbon dating techniques concluded it was a medieval fake. But this was dismissed by the new study, published in the US peer-reviewed journal Thermochimica Acta, which claims the sample used in that research was taken from "an expertly rewoven patch" used to repair fire damage and, as such, does not give a true measure of its age. The shroud is a large piece of linen showing the faint full-body image of a blood-covered man on its surface. Because many believe it to be the burial cloth of Jesus, researchers have tried to determine its origin through numerous modern scientific methods, including the 1988 Carbon-14 tests at three radiocarbon labs which dated the artefact from between 1260 and 1390AD. But Raymond Rogers, a chemist at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, who conducted the tests, said: "As unlikely as it seems, the sample used to test the age of the Shroud of Turin in 1988 was taken from a rewoven area. "Pyrolysis mass spectrometry results from the [new] sample area, coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations, prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original shroud. [That sample] has completely different chemical properties than the main part of the shroud relic." He went on: "The 1988 sample tested was dyed in Italy at about the time the Crusaders' last bastion fell to the Mameluke Turks in AD 1291. The radiocarbon sample cannot be older than about AD 1290, agreeing with the age determined in 1988. However, the shroud itself is actually much older." Since its existence was first recorded in France in 1357, it has been damaged in several fires, including a church inferno in 1532. It is said to have been restored by nuns, who patched the holes and stitched the garment to a reinforcing material known as the Holland cloth. The 1988 study, co-ordinated by the British Museum, which acted as the official clearing house for all its findings, apparently ruled out the possibility that the shroud wrapped the body of Christ. It led to the then Cardinal of Turin, Anastasio Alberto Ballestrero, saying the shroud was a hoax. Since then, several attempts have been made to challenge the authenticity of that analysis. Perhaps the greatest corroboration of the new study will be if the shroud's custodians permit further samples of the original, unrepaired cloth to be taken for radiocarbon analysis. If they do, these tests could confirm the new study. If not, people may draw their own conclusions. Michael Minor, the vice-president of the American Shroud of Turin Association for Research, said: "This is the most significant news about the Shroud of Turin since the C-14 dating was announced in 1988. The C-14 dating isn't being disputed. But [the new research] is saying that they dated the rewoven area." Father Paul Conroy, a spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland, said: "In order to prevent irreparable damage, only very tiny samples were made available [in 1988]. It seems they were taken from a more recent piece of cloth that was used to try and reinforce the original or repair it after fire damage. "Although the winding cloths themselves are not primary evidence and are more circumstantial, across the centuries this shroud has had a very close association with Christ and the extraordinary event which lies at the heart of the Christian Gospel, Jesus rising from the dead." From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 15:54:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 10:54:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Red Herring: The hundred-buck PC Message-ID: The hundred-buck PC http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=11203 [So once everyone has computers--I presume online instruction will be nearly free--and everyone has access to education, there will be no more need for redistribution to achieve equality of opportunity world-wide after one more generation.] MIT's Nicholas Negroponte pushes a cheap PC for the rest of the world. January 29, 2005 The founder and chairman of the MIT Media Lab wants to create a $100 portable computer for the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, says he has obtained promises of support from a number of major companies, including [35]Advanced Micro Devices, Google, [36]Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp. The low-cost computer will have a 14-inch color screen, AMD chips, and will run Linux software, Mr. Negroponte said during an interview Friday with Red Herring at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. AMD is separately working on a cheap desktop computer for emerging markets. It will be sold to governments for wide distribution. Mr. Negroponte and his supporters are planning to create a company that would manufacture and market the new portable PCs, with MIT as one of the stakeholders. It is unclear precisely what role the other four companies will play, although Mr. Negroponte hopes News Corp. will help with satellite capacity. An engineering prototype is nearly ready, with alpha units expected by year's end and real production around 18 months from now, he said. The portable PCs will be shipped directly to education ministries, with China first on the list. Only orders of 1 million or more units will be accepted. Mr. Negroponte's idea is to develop educational software and have the portable personal computer replace textbooks in schools in much the same way that France's Minitel videotext terminal, which was developed by [37]France Telecom in the 1980s, became a substitute for phone books. Mr. Negroponte has been interested in developing computing in the developing world for some time. He and his wife have funded three schools in rural Cambodia, helping outfit them with regular laptops and broadband connections. Major companies from [38]Hewlett-Packard to Microsoft to Dupont, facing saturated markets in the richest industrial countries, have shown an interest in developing less expensive products to sell in low-income countries in south Asia, Africa, and Latin America. References 35. http://studio.financialcontent.com/Engine?Account=redherring&PageName=QUOTE&Ticker=AMD 36. http://studio.financialcontent.com/Engine?Account=redherring&PageName=QUOTE&Ticker=MOT 37. http://studio.financialcontent.com/Engine?Account=redherring&PageName=QUOTE&Ticker=FTE 38. http://studio.financialcontent.com/Engine?Account=redherring&PageName=QUOTE&Ticker=HPQ From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 16:02:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 11:02:54 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Soviet Art of Brain Washing / A Synthesis of the Russian textbook on Psychopolitics Message-ID: The Soviet Art of Brain Washing / A Synthesis of the Russian textbook on Psychopolitics http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics [The other part is appended.] A synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics PSYCHOPOLITICS - the art and science of asserting and maintain- ing dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the ef- fecting of the conquest of enemy nations through "mental healing." EDITORIAL NOTE From May 2, 1936, to October 10, 1939, I was a dues-paying member of the Communist Party, operating under my own name, Kenneth Goff, and also the alias John Keats. In 1939, I voluntarily appeared before the Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, D.C., which was chairmanned at that time by Martin Dies, and my testimony can be found in Volume 9 of that year's Congressional Report. During the period that I was a member of the Communist Party, I attended their school which was located at 113 E. Wells St., Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and operated under the name Eugene Debs Labor School. Here we were trained in all phases of warfare, both psychological and physical, for the destruction of the Capitalistic society and Christian civilization. In one portion of our studies we went thoroughly into the matter of psychopolitics. This was the art of capturing the minds of a nation through brainwashing and fake mental health -- the subjecting of whole nations of people to the rule of the Kremlin by capturing their minds. We were taught that the degradation of the populace is less inhuman than their destruction by bombs, for to an animal lives only once, any life is sweeter than death. The end of a war is the control of a conquered people. If a people can be conquered in the absence of war, the end of war will have been achieved without the destructions of war. During the past few years, I have noted with horror the increase of psychopolitical warfare upon the American public. First, in the brainwashing of our boys in Korea, and then in the well financed drive of mental health propaganda by left-wing pressure groups, wherein many of our states have passed Bills which can well be used by the enemies of America to subject to torture and imprisonment, those who preach the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and who oppose the menace of Communism. A clear example of this can be seen in the Lucille Miller case. In this warfare the Communists have definitely stated: "You must recruit every agency of the nation marked for slaughter into a foaming hatred of religious healing." Another example of the warfare that is being waged can be seen in the attempt to establish a mental Siberia in Alaska, which wa called for in the Alaskan Mental Health Bill. A careful study of this Bill will make you see at once that the land set aside under the allotment could not be for that small territory, and the Bill within itself establishes such authority that it could be turned into a prison camp under the guise of mental health for everyone who raises their voice against Communism and the hidden government operating in our own nation. This book was used in underground schools, and contains the address of Beria to the American students in the Lenin University prior to 1936. The text in the book in general is from the Communist Manual of Instructions of Psychopolitical Warfare, and was used in America for the training of Communist cadre. The only revision in this book is the summary, which was added by the Communists after the atomic bomb came into being. In its contents you can see the diabolical plot of the enemies of Christ and America, as they seek to conquer our nation by subjecting the minds of our people to their will by various sinister means. This manual of the Communist Party should be in the hands of every loyal American, that they may be alerted to the fact that it is not always by armies and guns that a nation is conquered. Kenneth Goff _________________________________________________________________ CONTENTS [1]Editorial Note [2]An Address By Lavrent Pavlovich Beria [3]CHAPTER I: The History and Definition of Psychopolitics [4]CHAPTER II: The Constitution of Man as a Political Organism [5]CHAPTER III: Man as an Economic Organism [6]CHAPTER IV: State Goals for the Individual and Masses [7]CHAPTER V: An Examination of Loyalties [8]CHAPTER VI: The General Subject of Obedience [9]CHAPTER VII: The History and Definition of Psychopolitics [10]CHAPTER VIII: Degradation, Shock and Endurance [11]CHAPTER IX: The Organization of Mental Health Campaigns [12]CHAPTER X: Conduct Under Fire [13]CHAPTER XI: The Use of Psychopolitics in Spreading Communism [14]CHAPTER XII: Violent Remedies [15]CHAPTER XIII: Recruiting of Psychopolitical Dupes [16]CHAPTER XIV: The Smashing of Religious Groups [17]CHAPTER XV: Proposals Which Must Be Avoided [18]CHAPTER XVI: In Summary AN ADDRESS BY [19]LAVRENT PAVLOVICH BERIA American students at the Lenin University, I welcome your attendance at these classes on Psychopolitics. Psychopolitics is an important if less known division of Geo-politics. It is less known because it must necessarily deal with highly educated personnel, the very top strata of "mental healing." By psychopolitics our chief goals are effectively carried forward. To produce a maximum of chaos in the culture of the enemy is our first most important step. Our fruits are grown in chaos, distrust, economic depression and scientific turmoil. At least a weary populace can seek peace only in our offered Communist State, at last only Communism can resolve the problems of the masses. A psychopolitician must work hard to produce the maximum chaos in the fields of "mental healing." He must recruit and use all the agencies and facilities of "mental healing." He must labor to increase the personnel and facilities of "mental healing" until at last the entire field of mental science is entirely dominated by Communist principles and desires. To achieve these goals the psychopolitician must crush every "home-grown" variety of mental healing in America. Actual teachings of James, Eddy and Pentecostal Bible faith healers amongst your mis-guided people must be swept aside. They must be discredited, defamed, arrested, stamped upon even by their own government until there is no credit in them and only Communist-oriented "healing" remains. You must work until every teacher of psychology unknowingly or knowingly teaches only Communist doctrine under the guise of "psychology.". You must labor until every doctor and psychiatrist is either a psycho-politician or an unwitting assistant to our aims. You must labor until we have dominion over the minds and bodies of every important person in your nation. You must achieve such disrepute for the state of insanity and such authority over its pronouncement that not one statement so labeled could again be given credence by his people. you must work until suicide arising from mental imbalance is common and calls forth no general investigation or remark. With the institutions for the insane you have in your country prisons which can hold a million persons and can hold them without civil rights or any hope of freedom. And upon these people can be practiced shock and surgery so that never again will they draw a sane breath. You must make these treatments common and accepted. And you must sweep aside any treatment or any group of persons seeking to treat by effective means. You must dominate as respected men the fields of psychiatry and psychology. You must dominate the hospitals and universities. You must carry forward the myth that only a European doctor is competent in the field of insanity and thus excuse amongst you the high incidence of foreign birth and training. If and when we seize Vienna, you shall have then a common ground of meeting and can come and take your instructions as worshippers of Freud along with other psychiatrists. Psychopolitics is a solemn charge. With it you can erase our enemies as insects. You can cripple the efficiency of leaders by striking insanity into their families through the use of drugs. You can wipe them away with testimony as to their insanity. By our technologies, you can even bring about insanity itself when they seem to resistive. You can change their loyalties by psychopolitics. Given a short time with a psychopolitician you can alter forever their loyalty of a soldier in our hands or a statesman or a leader in his own country, or you can destroy his mind. However, you labor under certain dangers. It may happen that remedies for our "treatments" may be discovered. It may occur that a public hue and cry may arise against "mental healing." It may thus occur that all mental healing might be placed in the hands of ministers and taken out of the hands of our psychologists and psychiatrists. But the Capitalistic thirst for control, Capitalistic in-humanity and general public terror of insanity can be brought to guard against these things. But should they occur, should independent researchers actually discover means to undo psychopolitical procedures, you must not rest, you must not eat or sleep, you must not stint one tiniest bit of available money to campaign against it, dis-credit it , strike it down and render it void. For by an effective means all our actions and researches could be undone. In a Capitalistic state you are aided on all sides by the corruption of the philosophy of man and the times. You will discover that everything will aid you in your campaign to seize, control and use all "mental healing" to spread our doctrine and rid us of our enemies within their own borders. Use the courts, use the judges, use the Constitution of the country, use its medical societies and its laws to further our ends. Do not stint in your labor in this direction. And when you have succeeded you will discover that you can now effect your own legislation at will and you can, by careful organization of healing societies, by constant campaign about the terrors of society, by pretense as to your effectiveness make you Capitalist himself, by his own appropriations, finance a large portion of the quiet Communist conquest of the nation. By psychopolitics create chaos. Leave a nation leaderless. Kill our enemies. And bring to Earth, through Communism, the greatest peace Man has ever known. Thank You CHAPTER I THE HISTORY AND DEFINITION OF PSYCHOPOLITICS Although punishment for its own sake may not be entirely without recompense, it is, nevertheless, true that the end and goal of all punishment is the indoctrination of the person being punished with an idea, whether that idea be one of restraint or obedience. In that any ruler has, from time beyond memory, needed the obedience of his subject in order to accomplish his ends, he has thus resorted to punishment. This is true of every tribe and state in the history of Man. Today, Russian culture has evolved more certain and definite methods of aligning and securing the loyalties of persons and populace, and of enforcing obedience upon them. This modern outgrowth of old practice is called Psychopolitics. The stupidity and narrowness of nations not blessed with Russian reasoning has caused them to rely upon practices which are, today, too ancient and out-moded for the rapid and heroic pace of our time. And in view of the tremendous advance of Russian Culture in the field of mental technologies, begun with the glorious work of Pavlov and carried forward so ably by later Russians, it would be strange that an art and science would not evolve totally devoted to the aligning of loyalties and extracting the obedience of individuals and multitudes. Thus we see that psychopolitical procedures are a natural outgrowth of practices as old as Man, practices which are current in every group of men throughout the world. Thus, in psychopolitical procedures there is no ethical problem, since it is obvious and evident that Man is always coerced against his will to the greater good of the State, whether by economic gains or indoctrination into the wishes and desires of the State. Basically, Man is an animal. He is an animal which has been given a civilized veneer. Man is a collective animal, grouped together for his own protection before the threat of the environment. Those who so group and control him must have in their possession specialized techniques to direct the vagaries and energies of the animal Man toward greater efficiency in the accomplishment of the goals of the State. Psychopolitics, in one form or another, have long been used in Russia, but the subject is all but unknown outside the borders of our nation, save only where we have carefully transplanted our information and where it is used for the greater good of the nation. The definition of Psychopolitics follows. Psychopolitics is the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of the individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of the enemy nations through "mental healing." The subject of Psychopolitics breaks down into several categories, each a natural and logical proceeding from the last. Its first subject is the constitution and anatomy of Man, himself, as a political organism. The next is an examination of Man as an economic organism, as this might be controlled by his desires. The next is classification of State goals for the individual and masses. The next is an examination of loyalties. The next is the general subject of obedience. The next is the anatomy of the stimulus-response mechanisms of Man. The next is he subjects of shock and endurance. The next is categories of experience. The next is the catalyzing and aligning of experience. The next is the use of drugs. The next is the use of implantation. The next is the general application of Psychopolitics within Russia. The next is the organizations outside Russia, their composition and activity. The next is the creation of slave philosophy in a hostile nation. The next is countering anti-psychopolitical activities abroad, and the final one, the destiny of psychopolitical rule in a scientific age. To this might be added many sub categories, such as the nullification of modern weapons by psychopolitical activity. The strength and power of Psychopolitics cannot be overestimated, particularly when used in a nation decayed by pseudo-intellectualism, where exploitation of the masses combines readily with psychopolitical actions, and particularly where the greed of Capitalistic or Monarchial regimes has already brought about an overwhelming incidence of neurosis which can be employed as the groundwork for psychopolitical action and psychopolitical corps. It is part of your mission, student, to prevent psychopolitical activity to the detriment of the Russian State, just as it is your mission to carry forward in our nation and outside it, if you are so assigned, the missions and goals of Psychopolitics. No agent of Russian could be even remotely effective without a thorough grounding in Psychopolitics, and so you carry forward with you a Russian trust to use well what you are learning here. CHAPTER II THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN AS A POLITICAL ORGANISM Man is already a colonial aggregation of cells, and to consider him an individual would be an error. Colonies of cells have gathered together as one organ or another of the body, and then these organs have, themselves, gathered together to form the whole. Thus we see that man, himself, is already a political organism, even if we do not consider a mass of men. Sickness could be considered to be a disloyalty to the remaining organisms on the part of one organism. This disloyalty, becoming apparent, brings about a revolt of some part of the anatomy against the remaining whole, and thus we have, in effect, an internal revolution. The heart, becoming disaffected, falls away from close membership and service to the remainder of the organism, and we discover the entire body in all of its activities is disrupted because of the revolutionary activity of the heart. The heart is in revolt because it cannot or will not co-operate with the remainder of the body. If we permit the heart thus to revolt, the kidneys, taking the example of the heart, may in their turn rebel and cease to work for the good of the organism. This rebellion, multiplying to the other organs and the glandular system, brings about the death of the "individual." We can see with easy that the revolt is death, that the revolt of any part of the organism results in death. Thus we see that there can be no compromise with rebellion. Like the "individual" man, the State is a collection of aggregations. The political entities within the State must, all of them, co-operate for the greater good of the State lest the State itself fall asunder and die, for with the disaffection of any single distrust we discover and example set for other districts, and we discover, at length, the entire State falling. This is the danger of revolution. Look at Earth. We see here one entire organism. The organism of Earth is an individual organism. Earth has as its organs the various races and nations of men. Where one of these is permitted to remain disaffected, Earth itself is threatened with death. The threatened rebellion of one country, no matter now small, against the total organism of Earth, would find Earth sick, and the cultural state of man to suffer in consequence . Thus, the putrescent illness of Capitalist States, spreading their puss and bacteria into the healthy countries of the world would not do otherwise than bring about the death of Earth, unless these ill organisms are brought into loyalty and obedience and made to function for the greater good of the world-wide State. The constitution of Man is so composed that the individual cannot function efficiently without the alignment of each and every part and organ of his anatomy. As the average individual is incapable, in an unformed and uncultured state, as witness the barbarians of the jungle, so must he be trained into a co-ordination of his organic functions by exercise, education, and work toward specific goals. We particularly and specifically note that the individual must be directed from without to accomplish his exercise, education, and work. He must be made to realize this, for only then can he be made to function efficiently in the role assigned to him. The tenets of rugged individualism, personal determinism, self-will, imagination, and personal creativeness are alike in the masses antipathetic to the good of the Greater State. These willful and unaligned forces are no more than illnesses which will bring about the disaffection, disunity, and at length the collapse of the group to which the individual is attached. The constitution of Man lends itself easily and thoroughly to certain and positive regulation from without of all of its functions, including those of thinking, obedience, and loyalty, and these things must be controlled if a greater State is to ensue. While it may seem desirable to the surgeon to amputate one or another limb or organ in order to save the remainder, it must be pointed out that this expediency is not entirely possible of accomplishment where one considers entire nations. A body deprived of organs can be observed to be lessened by its effectiveness. The world deprived of the workers now enslaved by the insane and nonsensical idiocies of the Capitalists and Monarchs of Earth, would, if removed, create a certain disability in the world-wide State. Just as we see the victor forced to rehabilitate the population of a conquered country at the end of a war, thus any effort to depopulate a disaffected portion of the world might have some consequence. However, let us consider the inroad of virus and bacteria hostile to the organism, and we see that unless we can conquer the germ, the organ or organism which it is attacking will, itself, suffer. In any State we have certain individuals who operate in the role of the virus and germ, and these, attacking the population or any group within the population, produce, by their self-willed greed, a sickness in the organ, which then generally spreads to the whole. The constitution of Man as an individual body, or the constitution of a State or a portion of the State as a political organism are analogous. It is the mission of Psychopolitics first to align the obedience and goals of the group, and then maintain their alignment by the eradication of the effectiveness of the persons and personalities which might swerve the group towards disaffection. In our own nation, where things are better managed and where reason reigns above all else, it is not difficult to eradicate the self-willed bacteria which might attack one of our political entities. But in the field of conquest, in nations less enlightened, where the Russian State does not yet have power, it is not as feasible to remove the entire self-willed individual. Psychopolitics makes it possible to remove that art of his personality which, in itself, is making havoc with the person's own constitution as well as the group with which the person is connected. If the animal man were permitted to continue undisturbed by counter-revolutionary propaganda, if he were left to work under the well-planned management of the State, we would discover little sickness amongst Man, and we would discover no sickness in the State. But where the individual is troubled by conflicting propaganda, where he is made the effect of revolutionary activities, where he is permitted to think thoughts critical of the State itself, where he is permitted to question of those in whose natural charge he falls, we would discover his constitution to suffer. We would discover, from this disaffection, the additional disaffection of his heart and of other portions of his anatomy;. So certain is this principle that when one finds a sick individual, could one search deeply enough, he would discover a mis-aligned loyalty and an interrupted obedience to that person's group unit. There are those who foolishly have embarked upon some spiritual Alice-in-Wonderland voyage into what they call the "subconscious" or the "unconscious" mind, and who, under the guise of "psychotherapy" would seek to make well the disaffection of body organs, but it is to be noted that their results are singularly lacking in success. There is no strength in such an approach. When hypnotism was first invented in Russia, it was observed that all that was necessary was to command the unresisting individual to be well in order, many times, to accomplish that fact. The limitation of hypnotism was that many subjects were not susceptible to its uses, and thus hypnotism has had to be improved upon in order to increase the suggestibility of individuals who would not otherwise be reached. Thus, any nation has had the experience of growing well again, as a whole organism, when placing sufficient force in play against a disaffected group. Just as in hypnotism any organ can be commanded into greater loyalty and obedience, so can any political group be commanded into greater loyalty and obedience should sufficient force be employed. However, force often brings about destruction and it is occasionally not feasible to use broad mass force t o accomplish the ends in view. Thus, it is necessary to align the individual against his desire not to conform. Just as it is a recognized truth that Man must conform to his environment, so it is a recognized truth, and will become more so as the years proceed, that even the body of Man can be commanded into health. The constitution of Man renders itself peculiarly adapted to re-alignment of loyalties. Where these loyalties are indigestible to the constitution of the individual itself, such as loyalties to the 'petit bourgeoisie,' the Capitalist, to anti-Russian ideas, we find the individual body peculiarly susceptible to sickness, and thus we can clearly understand the epidemics, illnesses, mass-neuroses, tumults and confusions of the United States and other capitalist countries. Here we find the worker improperly and incorrectly loyal, and thus we find the worker ill. To save him and establish him correctly and properly upon his goal toward a greater State, it is an overpowering necessity to make it possible for him to grant his loyalties in a correct direction. In that his loyalties are swerved and his obedience cravenly demanded by persons antipathetic to his general good, and in that these persons are few, even in a Capitalist nation, the goal and direction of Psychopolitics is clearly understood. To benefit the worker in such a plight, it is necessary to eradicate, by general propaganda, by other means, and by his own co-operation, and self-willedness of perverted leaders. It is necessary, as well, to indoctrinate the educated strata into the tenets and principles of co-operation with the environment, and thus to insure the worker less warped leadership, less craven doctrine, and more co-operation with the ideas and ideals of the Communist State. The technologies of Psychopolitics are directed to this end. CHAPTER III MAN AS AN ECONOMIC ORGANISM Man is subject to certain desires and needs which are as natural to his being as they are to that of any other animal. Man, however, has the peculiarity of exaggerating some of these beyond the bounds of reason. This is obvious through the growth of leisure classes, pseudo-intellectual groups, the "petit bourgeoisie," Capitalism, and ott her ills. It has been said, with truth, that one tenth of a man's life is concerned with politics and nine-tenths with economics. Without food, the individual dies. Without clothing, he freezes. Without houses and weapons, he is prey to the starving wolves. The acquisition of sufficient items to answer these necessities of food, clothing and shelter, in reason, is the natural right of a member of an enlightened State. An excess of such items brings about unrest and disquiet. The presence of luxury items and materials, and the artificial creation and whetting of appetites, as in Capitalist advertising, are certain to accentuate the less-desirable characteristics of Man. The individual is an economic organism, in that he requires a certain amount of food, a certain amount of water, and must hold within himself a certain amount of heat in order to live. When he has more food than he can eat, more clothing than he needs to protect him, he then enters upon a certain idleness which dulls his wits and awareness, and makes him prey to difficulties which, in a less toxic state, he would have foreseen and avoided. Thus, we have a glut of being a menace to the individual. It is no less different in a group. Where the group acquires too much, its awareness of its own fellows and of the environment is accordingly reduced, and the effectiveness the group in general is lost. The maintaining of a balance between gluttony and need is the province of Economics proper, and is the fit subject and concern of the Communist State. Desire and want are a state of mind. Individuals can be educated into desiring and wanting more than they can ever possibly obtain, and such individuals are unhappy. Most of the self-willed characteristics of the Capitalists come entirely from greed. He exploits the worker far beyond any necessity on his own part, as a Capitalist, to need. In a nation where economic balances are not controlled, the appetite of the individual is unduly whetted by enchanting and fanciful persuasions to desire, and a type of insanity ensues, where each individual is persuaded to possess more than he can use, and to possess it even at the expense of his fellows. There is, in economic balances, the other side. Too great and too long privation can bring about unhealthy desires, which, in themselves, accumulate in left action, more than the individual can use. Poverty, itself, as carefully cultivated in Capitalist States, can bring about an imbalance of acquisition. Just as a vacuum will pull into it masses, in a country where enforced privation upon the masses is permitted, and where desire is artificially whetted, need turns to greed, and one easily discovers in such states exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few. If one, by the technologies of Psychopolitics, were to dull the excessive greed in the few who possess it, the worker would be freed to seek a more natural balance. Here we have two extremes. Either one of them are an insanity. If we wish to create an insanity we need only glut or deprive an individual at long length beyond the ability to withstand and we have a mental imbalance. A simple example of this is the alternation of too low with too high pressures in a chamber, an excellent psychopolitical procedure. The rapidly varied pressure brings about a chaos wherein the individual will cannot act and where other wills then, perforce, assume control. Essentially, in an entire country, one must remove the greedy by whatever means and must then create and continue a semi-privation in the masses in order to command and utterly control the nation. A continuous hope for prosperity must be indoctrinated into the masses with many dreams and visions of glut of commodity and this hope must be counter-played against the actuality of privation and the continuous threat of loss of all economic factors in case of disloyalty to the State in order to suppress the individual wills of the masses. In a nation under conquest, such as America, our slow and stealthy approach need take advantage only of the cycles of booms and depressions inherent in Capitalistic nations in order to assert of more and more strong control over individual wills. A boom is as advantageous as a depression for our ends, for during prosperity our propaganda lines must only continue to point up the wealth the period is delivering to the selected few to divorce their control of the State. During a depression one must only point out that it ensued as a result of the avarice of a few and the general political incompetence of the national leaders. The handling of economic propaganda is not properly the sphere of psychopolitics but the psychopolitician must understand the economic measures and Communist goals connected with them. The masses must at last come to believe that only excessive taxation of the rich can deliver them of the "burdensome leisure class" and can thus be brought to accept such a thing as income tax, a Marxist principle smoothly slid into Capitalistic framework in 1909-1913 in the United States. This, even though the basic law of the United States forbade it and even though Communism at that time had been active only a few years in America. Such success as the Income Tax law, had it been followed thoroughly could have brought the United States and not Russia into the world scene as the first Communist nation. But the virility and good sense of the Russian peoples won. It may not be that the United States will become entirely Communist until past the middle of the century, but when it does it will be because of our superior understanding of economics and of psychopolitics. The Communist agent skilled in economics has as his task the suborning of tax agencies and their personnel to create the maximum disturbances and chaos and the passing of laws adapted to our purposes and to him we must leave this task. The psychopolitical operator plays a distinctly different role in this drama. The rich, the skilled in finance,the well informed in government are particular and individual targets for the psychopolitician. His is the role of taking off the board those individuals who would halt or corrupt Communist economic programs. Thus every rich man, every statesman, ever person well informed and capable in government, must have brought to his side as a trusted confidant, a psychopolitical operator. The families of these persons are often deranged from idleness and glut and this fact must be played upon, even created. The normal health and wildness of a rich man's son must be twisted and perverted and explained into neurosis and then, assisted by a timely administration of drugs or violence, turned into criminality or insanity. This brings at once someone in "mental healing" into confidential contact with the family and from this point on the very most must then be made of that contact. Communism could best succeed if at the side of every rich or influential man there could be placed a psychopolitical operator, an undoubted authority in the field of "mental healing" who could then by his advice or through the medium of a wife or daughter by his guided options direct the optimum policy to embroil or upset the economic policies of the country and, when the time comes to do away forever with the rich or influential man, to administer the proper drug or treatment to bring about his complete demise in an institution as a patient or dead, as a suicide. Planted beside a country's powerful persons the psychopolitical operator can also guide other policies to the betterment of our battle. The Capitalist does not know the definition of war. He things of war as attack with force performed by soldiers and machines. He does not know that a more effective if somewhat longer w ar can be fought with bread or, in our case, with drugs and the wisdom of our art. The Capitalist has never won a war in truth. The psychopolitician is having little trouble winning this one. CHAPTER IV STATE GOALS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL AND MASSES Just as we would discover an individual to be ill, whose organs, each one, had a different goal from the rest, so we discover the individuals and the State to be ill where goals are not rigorously codified and enforced. There are those who, in less enlightened times, gave Man to believe that goals should be personally sought and held, and that, indeed, Man's entire impulse toward higher things stemmed from Freedom. We must remember that the same peoples who embraced this philosophy also continued in Man the myth of spiritual existence. All goals proceed from duress. Life is a continuous escape. Without force and threat, there can be no striving. Without pain, there can be no desire to escape from pain. Without the threat of punishment, there can be no gain. Without duress and command, there can be no alignment of bodily functions. Without rigorous and forthright control, there ca be no accomplished goals for the State. Goals of the State should be formulated by the State for the obedience and concurrence of the individuals within that State. A State without goals so formulated is a sick State. A State without the power and forthright wish to enforce its goals is a sick State. When an order is issued by the Communist State, and is not obeyed, a sickness will be discovered to ensue. Where obedience fails, the masses suffer. State goals depend upon loyalty and obedience for their accomplishment. When one discovers a State goal to be interpreted, one discovers inevitably that there has been an interposition of self-willedness, of greed, of idleness, or of rugged individualism and self-centered initiative.The interruption of a State goal will be discovered as having been interrupted by a person whose disloyalty and disobedience is the direct result of his own mis-alignment with life. It is not always necessary to remove the individual. It is possible to remove his self-willed tendencies to the improvement of the goals and gains of the whole. The technologies of Psychopolitics are graduated upon the scale which starts somewhat above the removal of the individual himself, upward toward the removal only of those tendencies which bring about his lack of co-operation. It is not enough for the State to have goals. These goals, once put forward, depend upon their completion, upon the loyalty and obedience of the workers. These, engaged for the most part, in hard labors, have little time for idle speculation, which is good. But, above them, unfortunately, there must be foremen of one or another position, and one of whom might have sufficient idleness and lack of physical occupation to cause some disaffecting independency in his conduct and behaviour. Psychopolitics remedies this tendency toward disaffection when it exceeds the common persuasions of the immediate superiors of the person in question. CHAPTER V AN EXAMINATION OF LOYALTIES If loyalty is so important in the economic and social structure, it is necessary to examine it further as itself. In the field of Psychopolitics, loyalty means simply 'alignment.' It means, more fully, alignment with the goals of the Communist State. Disloyalty means entirely mis-alignment, and more broadly, mis-alignment with the goals of the Communist State. When we consider that the goals of the Communist State are to the best possible benefit of the masses, we can see that disloyalty, as a term, can embrace Democratic alignment. Loyalty to persons not communistically indoctrinated would be quite plainly a mis-alignment. The cure of disloyalty is entirely contained in the principles of alignment. All that is necessary to do, where disloyalty is encountered, is to align the purposes of the individual toward the goals of Communism, and it will be discovered that a great many circumstances hitherto distasteful in his existence will cease to exist. A heart, or a kidney in rebellion against the remainder of the organism is being disloyal to the remainder of the organism. To cure the heart or kidney it is actually only necessary to bring its activities into alignment with the remainder of the body. The technologies of Psychopolitics adequately demonstrate the workability of this. Mild shock of the electric variety can, and does, produce the re-cooperation of a rebellious body organ. It is the shock and punishment of surgery which, in the main, accomplishes the re-alignment of a disaffected portion of the body, rather than the surgery itself. It is the bombardment of X-Rays, rather than the therapeutic value of X-Rays which causes some disaffected organ to once again turn its attention to the support of the general organism. While it is not borne out that electric shock has any therapeutic value, so far as making the individual more sane, it is adequately brought out that its punishment value will create in the patient a greater co-operative attitude. Brain surgery has no statistical data to recommend it beyond its removal of the individual personality from amongst the paths of organs which were not permitted to co-operate. These two Russian developments have never pretended to alter the state of sanity. They are only effective and workable in introducing an adequate punishment mechanism to the personality to make it cease and desist from its courses and egotistical direction of the anatomy itself. It is the violence of the electric shock and the surgery which is useful in subduing the recalcitrant personality, which is all that stands in the road of the masses or the State. It is occasionally to be discovered that the removal of the preventing personality by shock and surgery then permits the regrowth and re-establishment of organs which have been rebelled against by that personality. In what a well-regulated state is composed of organisms, not personalities, the use of electric shock and brain surgery in Psychopolitics is clearly demonstrated. The changing of loyalty consists, in its primary step, of the eradication of existing loyalties. This can be done in one of two ways. First, by demonstrating that previously existing loyalties have brought about perilous physical circumstances, such as imprisonment, lack of recognition, duress, or privation, and second by eradicating the personality itself. The first is accomplished by a steady and continuous indoctrination of the individual in the belief that his previous loyalties have been granted to an unworthy source. One of the primary instances in this is creating circumstances which apparently derive from the target of his loyalties, so as to rebuff the individual. As part of this there is the creation of a state of mind in the individual, by actually placing him under duress, and then furnishing him with false evidence to demonstrate that the target of his previous loyalties is, itself, the course of the duress. Another portion of this same method consists of defaming or degrading the individual whose loyalties are to be changed to the target of his loyalties, i.e., superiors or government, to such a degree that this target, at length, actually does hold the individual in disrepute, and so does rebuff him and serve to convince him that his loyalties have been misplaced. These are the milder methods, but have proven extremely effective. The greatest drawback in their practice is that they require time and concentration, the manufacture of false evidence, and a psychopolitical operator's time. In moments of expediency, of which there are many, the personality itself can be rearranged by shock, surgery, duress, privation, and in particular, that best of psychopolitical techniques, implantation, with the technologies of neo-hypnotism. Such duress must have in its first part a defamation of the loyalties, and in its second, the implantation of new loyalties. A good and experienced psychopolitical operator, working under the most favorable circumstances, can, by the use of psychopolitical technologies, alter the loyalties of an individual so deftly that his own companions will not suspect that they have changed. This, however, requires considerably more finesse than is usually necessary to the situation. Mass neo-hypnotism can accomplish more or less the same results when guided by an experienced psychopolitical operator. An end goal in such a procedure would be the alteration of the loyalties of an entire nation in a short period of time by mass neo-hypnotism, a thing which has been effectively accomplished among the less-usable states of Russia. It is adequately demonstrated that loyalty is entirely lacking in that mythical commodity known as 'spiritual quality.' Loyalty is entirely a thing of dependence, economic or mental, and can be changed by the crudest implementations. Observation of workers in their factories or fields demonstrates that they easily grant loyalty to a foreman or a woman, and then as easily abandon it and substitute another individual, revulsing, at the same time, toward the person to whom loyalty was primarily granted. The queasy insecurity of the masses in Capitalistic nations finds this more common than in an enlightened State, such as Russia. In Capitalistic states, dependencies are so craven, wants and privations are so exaggerated, that loyalty is entirely without ethical foundation and exists only in the realm of dependency, duress, or demand. It is fortunate that Communism so truly approaches an ideal state of mind, for this brings a certain easiness into any changing loyalties, since all other philosophies extant and practiced on Earth today are degraded and debased, compared to Communism. It is then with a certain security that a psychopolitical operator functions, for he knows that he can change the loyalty of an individual to a more ideal level by reason alone, and only expediency makes it necessary to employ the various shifts of psychopolitical technology. Any man who cannot be persuaded into Communist rationale is, of course, to be regarded as somewhat less than sane, and it is, therefore completely justified to use the techniques of insanity upon the non-Communist. In order to change loyalty it is necessary to establish first the existing loyalties of the individual. The task is made very simple in view of the fact that Capitalistic and Fascistic nations have no great security in the loyalty of their subjects. And it may be found that the loyalties of the subjects, as we call any person against whom psychopolitical technology is to be exerted, are already too faint to require eradication. It is generally only necessary to persuade with the rationale and overwhelming reasonability of Communism to have the person grant his loyalty to the Russian State. However, regulated only by the importance of the subject, no great amount of time should be expended upon the individual, but emotional duress, or electric shock, or brain surgery should be resorted to, should Communist propaganda persuasion fail. In a case of a very important person, it may be necessary to utilize the more delicate technologies of Psychopolitics so as to place the per son himself, and his associates, in ignorance of the operation. In this case a simple implantation is used, with a maximum duress and command value. Only the most skilled psychopolitical operator should be employed on such a project, as in this case of the very important person, for a bungling might disclose the tampering with his mental processes. It is much more highly recommended, if there is any doubt whatever about the success of an operation against an important person, to select out as a psychopolitical target persons i his vicinity in whom he is emotionally involved. His wife or children normally furnish the best targets, and these can be operated against without restraint. In securing the loyalty of a very important person one must place at his side a constant pleader who enters a sexual or familial chord into the situation on the side of Communism. It may not be necessary to make a Communist out of the wife, or the children, or one of the children, but it might prove efficacious to do so. In most instances, however, this is not possible. By the use of various drugs, it is, in this modern age, and well within the realm of psychopolitical reality, entirely too easy to bring about a state of severe neurosis or insanity in the wife or children, and thus pass them, with full consent of the important person, and the government in which he exists, or the bureau in which he is operating, into the hands of a psychopolitical operator, who then in his own laboratory, without restraint or fear of investigation or censor, can, with electric shock, surgery, sexual attack, drugs, or other useful means, degrade or entirely alter the personality of a family member, and create in that person a psychopolitical slave subject who, then, on command or signal, will perform outrageous actions, thus discrediting the important person, or will demand, on a more delicate level, that certain measures be taken by the important person, which measures are, of course, dictated by the psychopolitical operator. Usually when the party has no real interest in the activities of decisions of the important person, but merely wishes to remove him from effective action, the attention of the psychopolitical operator need not to be so intense, and the person need only be passed into the hands of some unwitting mental practitioner, who taught as he is by psychopolitical operators, will bring about sufficient embarrassment. When the loyalty of an individual cannot be swerved, and where the opinion, weight, or effectiveness of the individual stands firmly in the road of Communist goals, it is usually best to occasion a mild neurosis in the person by any available means, and then, having carefully given him a history of mental imbalance, to see to it that he disposes of himself by suicide, or by bringing about his demise in such a way as to resemble suicide. Psychopolitical operators have handled such situations skillfully tens of thousands of times, within and without Russia. It is a firm principle of Psychopolitics that the person to be destroyed must be involved at first or second hand in the stigma of insanity, and must have been placed in contact with psychopolitical operators or persons trained by them, with a maximum amount of tumult and publicity. The stigma of insanity is properly placed at the door of such persons' reputations and is held there firmly by bringing about irrational acts, either on his own part or in his vicinity. Such an activity can be classified as a partial destruction of alignment, and if this destruction is carried forward to its furthest extent the mis-alignment on the subject of all loyalties can be considered to be complete, and alignment on new loyalties can be embarked upon safely. By bringing about insanity or suicide on the part of the wife of an important political personage, a sufficient mis-alignment has been instigated to change his attitude. And this, carried forward firmly, or assisted by psychopolitical implantation can begin the rebuilding of his loyalties, but now slanted in a more proper and fitting direction. Another reason for the alignment of psychopolitical activities with the mis-alignment of insanity in that insanity, itself, is a despised and disgraced state, and anything connected with it is lightly viewed. Thus, a psychopolitical operator, working in the vicinity of an insane person, can refute and disprove any accusations made against him by demonstrating that the family itself is tainted with mental imbalance. This is surprisingly effective in Capitalistic countries where insanity is so thoroughly feared that no one would dream of investigating any circumstances in its vicinity. Psychopolitical propaganda works constantly and must work constantly to increase and build up this aura of mystery surrounding insanity, and must emphasize the horribleness of insanity in order to excuse non-therapeutic actions taken against the insane. Particularly in Capitalistic countries, an insane person has no rights under law. No person who is insane may hold property. No person who is insane may testify. Thus, we have an excellent road along which we can travel toward our certain goal and destiny. Entirely by bringing about public conviction that the sanity of a person is in question, it is possible to discount and eradicate all of the goals and activities of that person. By demonstrating the insanity of a group, or even a government, it is possible, then, to cause its people to disavow it. By magnifying the general human reaction to insanity, through keeping the subject of insanity, itself, forever before the public eye, and then, by utilizing this reaction by causing a revulsion on the part of a populace against its leaders or leaders, it is possible to stop any government or movement. It is important to know that the entire subject of loyalty is thus as easily handled as it is. One of the first and foremost missions of the psychopolitician is to make an attack upon Communism and insanity synonymous. It should become the definition of insanity, of the paranoid variety, that "A paranoid believes he is being attacked by Communists." Thus, at once the support of the individual so attacking Communism will fall away and wither. Instead of executing national leaders, suicide for them should be arranged under circumstances which question their demise. In this way we can select out all opposition to the Communist extension into the social orders of the world, and render populace who would oppose us leaderless, and bring about a state of chaos or mis-alignment into which we can thrust, with great simplicity, the clear and forceful doctrines of Communism. The cleverness of our attack in this field of Psychopolitics is adequate to avoid the understanding of the layman and the usual stupid official, and by operating entirely under the banner of authority, with the oft-repeated statement that the principles of psychotherapy are too devious for common understanding, an entire revolution can be effected without the suspicion of a populace until it is an accomplished fact. As insanity is the maximum mis-alignment, it can be grasped to be the maximum weapon in severance of loyalties to leaders and old social orders. Thus, it is of the utmost importance that psychopolitical operative infiltrate the healing arts of a nation marked for conquest, and bring that quarter continuous pressure against the population and the government until at last the conquest is affected. This is the subject and goal of Psychopolitics, itself. In rearranging loyalties we must have a command of their values. In the animal the first loyalty is to himself. This is destroyed by demonstrating errors to him, showing him that he does not remember, cannot act or does not trust himself. The second loyalty is to his family unit, his parents and brothers and sisters. This is destroyed by making a family unit economically non-dependent, by lessening the value of marriage, by making an easiness of divorce and by raising the children whenever possible by the State. The next loyalty is to his friends and local environment. This is destroyed by lowering his tru st and bringing about reportings upon him allegedly by his fellows or the town or village authorities. The next is to the State and this, for the purposes of Communism, is the only loyalty which should exist once the state is founded as a Communist State. To destroy loyalty to the State all manner of forbidding for youth must be put into effect so as to disenfranchise them as members of the Capitalist state and, by promises of a better lot under Communism, to gain their loyalty to a Communist movement. Denying a Capitalist country easy access to courts, bringing about and supporting propaganda to destroy the home, creating and continuous juvenile delinquentcy, forcing upon the state all manner of practices to divorce the child from it will in the end create chaos necessary to Communism. Under the saccharine guise of assistance to them, rigorous child labor laws are the best means to deny the child any right in society. By refusing to let him earn, by forcing him into unwanted dependence upon a grudging parent, by making certain in other channels that the parent is never in other than economic stress, the child can be driven in his teens into revolt. Delinquency will ensue. By making readily available drugs of various kinds, by giving the teen-ager alcohol, by praising his wildness, by stimulating him with sex literature and advertising to him or her practices as taught at the Sexpol, the psychopolitical operator can create the necessary attitude of chaos, idleness and worthlessness into which can then be cast the solution which will give the teen ager complete freedom everywhere --Communism. Should it be possible to continue conscription beyond any reasonable time by promoting unpopular wars and other means, the draft can always stand as a further barrier to the progress of youth in life, destroying any immediate hope to participate in his nation's civil life. By these means the patriotism of youth for their Capitalistic flag can be dulled to a point where they are no longer dangerous as soldiers. While this might require many decades to effect, Capitalisms short term view will never envision the lengths across which we can plan. If we could effectively kill the national pride and patriotism of just one generation, we will have won that country. Therefore, there must be continual propaganda abroad to undermine the loyalty of the citizens in general and the teen-ager in particular. The role of the psychopolitical operator in this is very strong. He can, from his position as an authority on the mind, advise all manner of destructive measures. He can teach the lack of control of this child at home. He can instruct, in an optimum situation, the entire nation in how to handle children -- and instruct them so that the children, given no control, given no real home, can run wildly about with no responsibility for their nation or themselves. The mis-alignment of the loyalty of youth to a Capitalistic nation sets the proper stage for a realignment of their loyalties toward Communism. Creating a greed for drugs, sexual misbehavior and uncontrolled freedom and presenting this to them as a benefit of Communism, will with ease, bring about our alignment. In the case of strong leaders amongst youthful groups, a psychopolitical operator can work in many ways to use or discard that leadership. If it is to be used, the character of a girl or boy must be altered carefully into criminal channels and a control by blackmail, or other means, must be maintained. But where the leadership is not susceptible, where it resists all persuasions and might become dangerous to our Cause, no pains must be spared to direct the attention of the authorities to that person and to harass him in one way or another until he can come into the hands of the juvenile authorities. When this has been effected, it can be hoped that a psychopolitical operator, by reason of child advisor status, can, in the security of the jail and cloaked by processes of law, destroy the sanity of that person. Particularly brilliant scholars, athletes and youth group leaders must be handled in either one of these two ways. In the matter of guiding the activities of juvenile courts, the psychopolitical operator entertains here one of his easier tasks. A Capitalistic nation is so filled with injustice in general that a little more passes without comment. In juvenile courts there are always persons with strange appetites whether these be judges or police man or women. If such do not exist, they can be created. By making available to them young girls or boys in the "security" of the jail or the detention home and by appearing with flash cameras or witnesses one becomes equiped with a whip adequate to direct all the future decisions of that person when these are needed. The handling of youth cases by courts should be led further and further away from law and further and further into "mental problems" until the entire nation thinks of "mental problems" instead of criminals. This places vacancies everywhere in the courts, in the offices of district attorneys, or police staffs which could then be filled with psychopolitical operators and these become the judges of the land by their influence and into their hands comes the total control of the criminal, without whose help a revolution cannot ever be accomplished. By stressing this authority over the problems of youth and adults in courts one day the demand for psychopolitical operators could become such that even the armed services will use "authorities on the mind" to work their various justices and when this occurs, the armed forces of the nation then enter into our hands as solidly as if we commanded them ourselves. With the slight bonus of having thus a skilled interrogator near every technician or handler of secret war apparatus, the country, in even of revolution, as did Germany in 1918 and 1919 will find itself immobilized by its own Army and Navy fully and entirely in Communist hands. Thus the subject of loyalties and their re-alignment is in fact the subject of non-armed conquest of an enemy. _________________________________________________________________ [20] Part 2 References 1. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics#anchorED 2. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics#anchorADD 3. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics#anchor1 4. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics#anchor2 5. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics#anchor3 6. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics#anchor4 7. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics#anchor5 8. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html#anchor6 9. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html#anchor7 10. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html#anchor8 11. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html#anchor9 12. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html#anchor10 13. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html#anchor11 14. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html#anchor12 15. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html#anchor13 16. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html#anchor14 17. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html#anchor15 18. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html#anchor16 19. http://www.dana.edu/~dwarman/rwp.htm 20. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html ----------- The Soviet Art of Brain Washing / A Synthesis of the Russian textbook on Psychopolitics http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/psychopolitics-pt2.html A synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics _________________________________________________________________ Part 2 _________________________________________________________________ CHAPTER VI THE GENERAL SUBJECT OF OBEDIENCE Obedience is the result of force. Everywhere we look in the history of the Earth we discover that obedience to new rulers has come about entirely through the demonstration on the part of those rulers of greater force than was to be discovered in the old ruler. A population overridden, conquered by war, is obedient to its conqueror. It is obedient to its conqueror because its conqueror has exhibited more force. Concurrent with force is brutality, for there are human considerations involved which also represent force. The most barbaric, unrestrained, brutal use of force, if carried far enough, invokes obedience. Savage force, sufficiently long displayed toward any individual, will bring about his concurrence with any principle or order. Force is the antithesis of humanizing actions. It is so synonymous in the human mind with savageness, lawlessness, brutality, and barbarism, that it is only necessary to display an inhuman attitude toward people, to be granted by those people the possession of force. Any organization which has the spirit and courage to display inhumanity, savageness, brutality, and an uncompromising lack of humanity, will be obeyed. Such a use of force is, itself, the essential ingredient of greatness. We have o hand no less an example to our great Communist Leaders, who, in moments of duress and trial, when faced by Czarist rule, continued over the heads of an enslaved populace, yet displayed sufficient courage never to stay their hands in the execution of the conversion of the Russian State to Communist rule. If you would have obedience you must have no compromise with humanity. If you would have obedience you must make it clearly understood that you have no mercy. Man is an animal. He understands, in the final analysis, only those things which a brute understands. As an example of this, we find an individual refusing to obey and being struck. His refusal to obey is now less vociferous. He is struck again, and his resistance is lessened once more. He is hammered and pounded again and again, until, at length, his only thought is direct and implicit obedience to that person from whom the force has emanated. This is a proven principle. It is proven because it is the main principle of Man, the animal, has used since his earliest beginnings. It is the only principle which has been effective, the only principle which has brought about a wide and continued belief. For it is to our benefit that an individual who is struck again, and again, and again from a certain source, will, at length, hypnotically believe anything he is told by the source of the blows. The stupidity of Western civilizations is best demonstrated by the fact that they believe hypnotism is a thing of the mind, of attention, and a desire for unconsciousness. This is not true. Only when a person has been beaten, punished, and mercilessly hammered, can hypnotism upon him be guaranteed in its effectiveness. It is stated by Western authorities on hypnosis that only some twenty percent of the people are susceptible to hypnotism. This statement is very untrue. Given enough punishment, all of the people in any time and place are susceptible to hypnotism. In other words, by adding force, hypnotism is made uniformly effective. Where unconsciousness could not be induced by simple concentration upon the hypnotist, unconsciousness can be induced by drugs, by blows, by electric shock, and by other means. And where unconsciousness cannot be induced so as to make an implantation or an hypnotic command effective, it is only necessary to amputate the functioning portions of the animal man's brain to render him null and void and no longer a menace. Thus, we find that hypnotism is entirely effective. The mechanisms of hypnotism demonstrate clearly that people can be made to believe in certain conditions, and even in their environments or in politics, by the administration of force. Thus, it is necessary for a psychopolitician to be an expert in the administration of forces. Thus, he can bring about implicit obedience, not only on the part of individual members of the populace, but on the entire populace itself and its government. He need only take unto himself a sufficiently savage role, a sufficiently uncompromising inhuman attitude, and he will be obeyed and believed. The subject of hypnotism is a subject of belief. What can people be made to believe? They can be made to believe anything which is administered to them with sufficient brutality and force. The obedience of a populace is as good as they will believe. Despicable religions, such as Christianity, knew this. They knew that if enough faith could be brought into being a populace could be enslaved by the Christian mockeries of humanity and mercy, and thus could be disarmed. But one need not count upon this act of faith to bring about a broad belief. One must only exhibit enough force, enough inhumanity, enough brutality and savageness to create implicit belief and therefore and thereby implicit obedience. As Communism is a mater of belief, its study is a study of force. The earliest Russian psychiatrists, pioneering this science of psychiatry, understood thoroughly that hypnosis is induced by acute fear. They discovered it could also be induced by shock of an emotional nature, and also by extreme privation, as well as by blows and drugs. In order to induce a high state of hypnosis in an individual, a group, or a population, an element of terror must always be present on the part of those who would govern. The psychiatrist is aptly suited to this role, for his brutalities are committed in the name of science and are inexplicably complex, and entirely out of the view of the human understanding. A sufficient popular terror of the psychiatrist will, in itself, bring about insanity on the part of many individuals. A psychopolitical operative, then, can, entirely cloaked with authority, commence and continue a campaign of propaganda, describing various "treatments" which are administered to the insane. He can, in all of his literature and his books, list large numbers of pretended cures by these means. But these "cures" need not actually produce any recovery from a state of disturbance. As long as the psychopolitical operative or his dupes are the only authorities as to the difference between sanity and insanity, their word as to the therapeutic value of such treatment will be the final word. No layman would dare adventure to place judgement upon the state of sanity of an individual who the psychiatrist has already declared insane. The individual, himself, is unable to complain, and his family, as will be covered later, is already discredited by the occurrence of insanity in their midst. There must be no other adjudicators of insanity, otherwise it could be disclosed that the brutalities practiced in the name of treatment are not therapeutic. A psychopolitical operative has no interest in "therapeutic means" or "cures." The greater number of insane in the country where he is operating, the larger number of the populace will come under his view, and the greater will become his facilities. Because the problem is apparently mounting into uncontrollable heights, he can more and more operate in an atmosphere of emergency, which again excuses his use of such treatments as electric shock, the pre-frontal lobotomy, trans-orbital leucotomy, and other operations long-since practiced in Russia on political prisoners. IT is to the interest of the psychopolitical operative that the possibility of curing the insane be outlawed and ruled out at all times. For the sake of obedience on the part of the population and their general reaction, a level or brutality must, at all costs, be maintained. Only in this way can the absolute judgement of the psychopolitical operative as to the sanity or insanity of public figures be maintained in complete belief. Using sufficient brutality upon their patients, the public at large will come to believe utterly anything they say about their patients. Furthermore, and much more important, the field of the mind must be sufficiently dominated by th e psychopolitical operative, so that whatever tenets of the mind are taught they will be hypnotically believed. The psychopolitical operative, having under his control all psychology classes in an area, can thus bring about a complete reformation of the future leaders of a country in their educational processes, and so prepare them for Communism. To be obeyed, once must be believed. If one is sufficiently believed, one will unquestioningly be obeyed. When he is fortunate enough to obtain into his hands anyone near to a political or important figure, this factor of obedience becomes very important. A certain amount of fear or terror must be engendered in the person under treatment so that this person will then take immediate orders, completely and unquestioningly, from the psychopolitical operative, and so be able to influence the actions of that person who is to be reached. Bringing about this state of mind on the part of a population and its leaders -- that a psychopolitical operative must, at all times, be believed -- could eventually be attended by very good fortune. It is not too much to hope that psychopolitical operatives would then, in a country such as the United States, become the very intimate advisors to political figures, even to the point of advising the entirety of a political party as to its actions in an election. The long view is the important view. Belief is engendered by a certain amount of fear and terror from an authoritative level, and this will be followed by obedience. The general propaganda which would best serve Psychopolitics would be a continual insistence that certain authoritative levels of healing, deemed this or that the correct treatment of insanity. These treatments must always include a certain amount of brutality. Propaganda should continue and stress the rising incidence of insanity in a country. The entire field of human behaviour, for the benefit of the country, can, at length, be broadened into abnormal behaviour. Thus, anyone indulging in any eccentricity, particularly the eccentricity of combatting psychopolitics, could be silenced by the authoritative opinion on the part of a psychopolitical operative that he is acting in an abnormal fashion. This, with some good fortune, could bring the person into the hands of the psychopolitical operative so as to forever more disable him, or to swerve his loyalties by pain-drug hypnotism. On the subject of obedience itself, the most optimum obedience is unthinking obedience. The command gien must be obeyed without any rationalizing on the part of the subject. The command must, therefore, be implanted below the thinking process of the subject to be influenced, and must react upon him in such a way as to bring no mental alertness on his part. It is in the interest of Psychopolitics that a population be told that an hypnotized person will not do anything against his actual will, will not commit immoral acts, and will not act so as to endanger himself. While this may be true of light, parlour hypnotism, it certainly is not true of commands implanted with the use of electric shock, drugs, or heavy punishment. It is counted upon completely that this will be discredited to the general public by psychopolitical operatives, for if it were to be generally known that individuals would obey commands harmful to themselves, and would commit immoral acts while under the influence of deep hypnotic commands, the actions of many people, working unknowingly in favor of Communism, would be too-well understood. People acting under deep hypnotic commands should be acting apparently of their own volition and out of their own convictions. The entire subject of psychopolitical hypnosis, Psychopolitics in general, depends for its defense upon continual protest from authoritative sources that such things are not possible. And, should anyone unmask a psychopolitical operative, he should at once declare the whole thing a physical impossibility, and use his authoritative position to discount any accusation. Should any writings of Psychopolitics come to view, it is only necessary to brand them a hoax and laugh them out of countenance. Thus, psychopolitical activities are easy to defend. When psychopolitical activities have reached a certain peak, from there on it is almost impossible to undo them, for the population is already under the duress of obedience to the psychopolitical operatives and their dupes. The ingredient of obedience is important, for the complete belief in the psychopolitical operative renders this statement cancelling any challenge about psychopolitical operations irrefutable. The optimum circumstances would be to occupy every position which would be consulted by officials on any question or suspicion arising on the subject of Psychopolitics. Thus, a psychiatric advisor should be placed near at hand in every government operation. As all suspicions would then be referred to him, no action would ever be taken, and the goal of Communism could be realized in that nation. Psychopolitics depends, from the viewpoint of the layman, upon its fantastic aspects. These are its best defense, but above all these defenses is implicit obedience on the part of officials and the general public, because of the character of the psychopolitical operative in the field of healing. CHAPTER VII ANATOMY OF STIMULUS-RESPONSE MECHANISMS OF MAN Man is a stimulus-response animal. His entire reasoning capabilities, even his ethics and morals, depends upon stimulus-response machinery. This has long been demonstrated by such Russians as Pavlov, and the principles have long been used in handling the recalcitrant, in training children, and in bringing about a state of optimum behaviour on the part of a population. Having no independent will of his own, Man is easily handled by stimulus-response mechanisms. It is only necessary to install a stimulus into the mental anatomy of Man to have that stimulus reactivate and respond any time an exterior command source calls it into being. The mechanisms of stimulus-response are easily understood. The body takes pictures of every action in the environment around the individual. When the environment includes brutality, terror, shock, and other such activities, the mental image picture gained, contains in itself all the ingredients of the environment. If the individual, himself, was injured during the moment, the injury, itself, will re manifest when called upon to respond by an exterior command source. As an example of this, if an individual is beaten, and is told during the entirety of the beating that he must obey certain officials, he will, in the future, feel the beginnings of the pain the moment he begins to disobey. The installed pain, itself, reacts as a policeman, for the experience of the individual demonstrates to him that he cannot combat, and will receive pain from, certain officials. The mind can become very complex in its stimulus responses. As easily demonstrated in hypnotism, an entire chain of commands, having to do with a great many complex actions, can be beaten, shocked, or terrorized into a mind, and will there lie dormant until called into view by some similarity in the circumstances of the environment to the incident of punishment. The stimulus we call the "incident of punishment" where the response mechanism need only contain small part of the stimulus to call into view the mental image picture, and cause it to exert against the body, the pain sequence. So long as the individual obeys the picture, or follows the commands of the stimulus implantation he is free from pain. The behaviour of children is regulated in this fashion in every civilized country. The father, finding himself unable to bring about immediate obedience and training on the part of his child, resorts to physical violence, and after administering punishment of a physical nature to the child on several occasions, is gratified to experience complete obedience on the part of the child each time the father speaks. In that parents are wont to be lenient with their children, they seldom administer sufficient punishment to bring about entirely optimum obedience. The ability of the organism to withstand punishment is very great. Complete and implicit response can be gained only by stimuli sufficiently brutal to actually injure the organism. The Kossack method of breaking wild horses is a useful example. The horse will not restrain itself or take any of its rider's commands. The rider, wishing to break it, mounts, and takes a flask of strong Vodka, and smashes it between the horse's ears. The horse, struck to its knees , its yes filled with alcohol, mistaking the dampness for blood, instantly and thereafter gives its attention to the rider and never needs further breaking. Difficulty in breaking horses is only occasioned when light punishments are administered. There is some mawkish sentimentality about "breaking the spirit," but what is desired here is an obedient horse, and sufficient brutality brings about an obedient horse. The stimulus-response mechanisms of the body are such that the pain and the command subdivide so as to counter each other. The mental image picture of the punishment will not become effective upon the individual unless the command content is disobeyed. It is pointed out in many early Russian writings that this is a survival mechanism. It has already been well and thoroughly used in the survival of Communism. It is only necessary to deliver into the organism a sufficient stimulus to gain an adequate response. So long as the organism obeys the stimulus whenever it is restimulated in the future, it does not suffer from the pain of the stimulus. But should it disobey the command content of the stimulus, the stimulus reacts to punish the individual. Thus, we have an optimum circumstance, and one of the basic principles of Psychopolitics. A sufficiently installed stimulus will thereafter remain as a police mechanism within the individual to cause him to follow the commands and directions given to him. Should he fail to follow these commands and directions, the stimulus mechanism will go into action. As the commands are there with the moment of duress, the commands themselves need never be repeated, and if the individual were to depart thousands of miles away from the psychopolitical operative, he will still obey the psychopolitical operative, or, himself, become extremely ill and in agony. These principles, built from the earliest days of Pavlov, by constant and continuous Russian development, have, at last, become of enormous use to us in our conquest. For less modern and well-informed countries of Earth, lacking this mechanism, failing to understand it, and coaxed into somnolence by our own psychopolitical operatives, who discount and disclaim it, cannot avoid succumbing to it. The body is less able to resist a stimulus if it has insufficient food and is weary. Therefore, it is necessary to administer all such stimuli to individuals when their ability to resist has been reduced by privation and exhaustion. Refusal to let them sleep over many days, denying them adequate food, then brings about an optimum state for the receipt of a stimulus. If the person is then given an electrical shock, and is told while the shock is in action that he must obey and do certain things, he has no choice but to do them, or to re-experience, because of his mental image picture of it, the electric shock. This highly scientific and intensely workable mechanism cannot be over-estimated in the practice of psychopolitics. Drugging the individual produces an artificial exhaustion, and if he is drugged, or shocked and beaten, and given a string of commands, his loyalties, themselves, can be definitely rearranged. This is P.D.H., or Pain-Drug Hypnosis. The psychopolitical operative in training should be thoroughly studied in the subject of hypnotism and post-hypnotic suggestion. He should pay particular attention to the "forgetter mechanism" aspect of hypnotism, which is to say, implantation in the unconscious mind. He should note particularly that a person given a command in a hypnotic state, and then told when still in that condition to forget it, will execute it on a stimulus-response signal in the environment after he has "awakened" from his hypnotic trance. Having mastered these details fully, he should, by practicing upon criminals and prisoners, or inmates available to him, produce the hypnotic trance by drugs, and drive home post-hypnotic suggestions by pain administered to the drugged person. He should then study the reactions of the person when "awakened," and should give him the stimulus-response signal which would throw into action the commands given while in a drugged state of duress. By much practice he can then learn the threshold dosages of various or additional drug shock necessary to produce the optimum obedience to the commands. He should also satisfy himself that the is no possible method known to Man -- there must be no possible method known to Man -- of bringing the patient to awareness of what has happened to him, keeping him in a state of obedience and response while ignorant of its cause. Using criminals and prisoners, the psychopolitical operative in training should then experiment with duress in the absence of privation,administering electric shocks, beatings, and terror-inducing tactics, accompanied by the same mechanisms as those employed in hypnotism, and watch the conduct of the person when no longer under duress. The operative in training should carefully remark those who show a tendency to protest, so that he may recognize possible recovery of memory of the commands implanted. Purely for his own education, he should then satisfy himself as to the efficiency of brain surgery in disabling the non-responsive prisoner. The boldness of the psychopolitical operative can be increased markedly by permitting persons who have been given pain-drug hypnosis and who have demonstrated symptoms of rebelling or recalling into the society to observe how the label of "insanity" discredits and discounts the statements of the person. Exercises in bringing about insanity seizures at will, simply by demonstrating a signal to persons upon whom pain-drug hypnosis has been used, and exercises in making the seizures come about through talking to certain persons in certain places and times should also be used. Brain surgery, as developed in Russia, should also be practiced by the psychopolitical operative in training, to give him full confidence in 1) the crudeness with which it can be done, 2) the certainty of erasure of the stimulus-response mechanism itself, 3) the production of imbecility, idiocy, and dis-coordination on the part of the patient, and 4) the small amount of comment which casualties in brain surgery occasion. Exercises in sexual attack on patients should be practiced by the psychopolitical operative to demonstrate the inability of the pain-drug hypnosis to recall the attack, while indoctrinating a lust for further sexual activity on the part of the patient. Sex, in all animals, is a powerful motivator, and is no less so in the animal Man, and the occasioning of sexual liaison between females of a target family and indicated males, under the control of the psychopolitical operative, must be demonstrated to be possible with complete security for the psychopolitical operative, thus giving into his hands and excellent weapon for the breaking down of familial relations and consequent public disgraces for the psychopolitical target. Just as a dog can be trained, so can a man be trained. Just as a horse can be trained, so can a man be trained. Sexual lust, masochism, and any other desirable perversion can be induced by pain-drug hypnosis and the benefit of the Psychopolitics. The changes of loyalties, allegiances, and sources of command can be occasioned easily by psychopolitical technologies, and these should be practiced and understood by the psychopolitical operative before he begins to tamper with psychopolitical targets of magnitude. The actual simplicity of the subject of pain-drug hypnosis, the use of electric shock, drugs, insanity-producing injections, and other material, should be masked entirely by technical nomenclature, the protest of benefit to the patient, by an authoritarian pose and position, and by carefully cultivating governmental positions in the country to be conquered. Although the psychopolitical operative working in universities where he can direct the curricula of psychology classes is often tempted to teach some of the principles of Psychopolitics to the susceptible students in the psychology classes, he must be thoroughly enjoined to limit his information in psychology classes to the transmittal of the tenets of Communism under the guise of psychology, and must limit his activities in bringing about a state of mind on the part of the students where they will accept Communist tenets as those of their own action and as modern scientific principles. The psychopolitical operative must not, at any time, educate students fully in stimulus-response mechanisms, and must not impart to them, save those who will become his fellow workers,the exact principles of Psychopolitics. It is not necessary to do so, and it is dangerous. CHAPTER VIII DEGRADATION, SHOCK AND ENDURANCE Degradation and conquest are companions. In order to be conquered, a nation must be degraded, either by acts of war, by being overrun, by being forced into humiliating treaties of peace, or by the treatment of her populace under the armies of the conqueror. However, degradation can be accomplished much more insidiously and much more effectively by consistent and continual defamation. Defamation is the best and foremost weapon of Psychopolitics on the broad field. Continual and constant degradation of national leaders, national institutions, national practices, and national heroes must be systematically carried out, but this is the chief function of the Communist Party Members, in general, not the psychopolitician. The realm of defamation and degradation, of the psychopolitician, is Man himself. By attacking the character and morals of Man himself, and by bringing about,through contamination of youth, a general degraded feeling, command of the populace is facilitated to a very marked degree. There is a curve of degradation which leads downward to a point where the endurance of an individual is almost at end, and any sudden action toward him will place him in a state of shock. Similarly, a soldier held prisoner can be abused, denied, defamed, and degraded until the slightest motion on the part of his captors will cause him to flinch. Similarly, the slightest word on the part of his captors will cause him to obey, or vary his loyalties and beliefs. Given sufficient degradation, a prisoner can be caused to murder his fellow countrymen in the same stockade. Experiments on German prisoners have lately demonstrated that only after seventy days of filthy food, little sleep, and nearly untenable quarters, that the least motion toward the prisoner would bring about a state of shock beyond his endurance threshold, and would cause him to hypnotically receive anything said to him. Thus, it is possible, in an entire stockade of prisoners, to the number of thousands, to being about a state of complete servile obedience, and without the labor of personally addressing each one, to pervert their loyalties and implant in them adequate commands to insure their future conduct, even when released to their own people. By lower the endurance of a person, a group, or a nation, and by constant degradation and defamation, it is possible to induce, thus, a state of shock which will receive adequately any command given. The first thing to be degraded in any nation is the state of Man, himself. Nations which have high ethical tone are difficult to conquer. Their loyalties are hard to shake, their allegiance to their leaders is fanatical, and what they usually call their spiritual integrity cannot be violated by duress. It is not efficient to attack a nation in such a frame of mind. It is the basic purpose of Psychopolitics to reduce that state of mind to a point where it can be ordered and enslaved. Thus, the first target is Man, himself. He must be degraded from a spiritual being to an animalistic reaction pattern. He must think of himself as an animal, capable only of animalistic reactions. He must no longer think of himself, or of his fellows, as capable of "spiritual endurance," or nobility. The best approach toward degradation in its first stages is the propaganda of "scientific approach" to Man. Man must be consistently demonstrated to be a mechanism without individuality, and it must be educated into a populace under attack that Man's individualistic reactions are the product of mental derangement. The populace must be brought into the belief that every individual within it who rebels in any way, shape, or form against the efforts and activities to enslave the whole, must be considered to be a deranged person whose eccentricities are neurotic and insane, and who must have at once the treatment of a psychopolitician. An optimum condition in such a program of degradation would address itself to the military forces of the nation, and bring them rapidly away from any other belief than the disobedient one must be subjected to "mental treatment." An enslavement of a population can fail only if these rebellious individuals are left to exert their individual influences upon their fellow citizens, sparking them into rebellion, calling into account their nobilities and freedoms. Unless these restless individuals are stamped out and given into the hands of psychopolitical operatives early in the conquest,there will be nothing but trouble as the conquest continues. The officials of the government, students, readers, partakers of entertainment,must all be indoctrinated, by whatever means, into the complete belief that the restless, the ambitions, the natural leaders, are suffering from environmental maladjustments, which can only be healed by recourse to psychopolitical operatives in the guise of mental healers. By thus degrading the general belief in the status of Man it is relatively simple, with co-operation from the economic salients being driven into the country, to drive citizens apart, one from another, to bring about a question of the wisdom of their own government, and to cause them to actively beg for enslavement. The educational programs of Psychopolitics must, at every hand, seek out the levels of youth who will become the leaders in the country's future, and educate them into the belief of the animalistic nature of Man. This must be made fashionable. They must be taught to frown upon ideas, upon individual endeavor. They must be taught, above all things, that the salvation of Man is to be found only by his adjusting thoroughly to this environment. This educational program in the field of Psychopolitics, can best be followed by bringing about a compulsory training in some subject such as psychology or other mental practice, and ascertaining that each broad program of psychopolitical training be supervised by a psychiatrist who is a trained psychopolitical operative. As it seems in foreign nations that the church is the most ennobling influence, each and every branch and activity of each and every church, must, one way or another, be discredited. Religion must become unfashionable by demonstrating broadly, through psychopolitical indoctrination, that the soul is non-existent, and that Man is an animal. The lying mechanisms of Christianity lead men to foolishly brave deeds. By teaching them that there is a life here-after, the liability of courageous acts, while living, is thus lessened. The liability of any act must be markedly increased if a populace is to be obedient. Thus, there must be no standing belief in the church, and the power of the church must be denied at every hand. The psychopolitical operative, in his program of degradation, should at all times bring into question any family which is deeply religious, and, should any neurosis or insanity be occasioned in that family, to blame and hold responsible their religious connections for the neurotic or psychotic condition. Religion must be made synonymous with neurosis and psychosis. People who are deeply religious would be less and less held responsible for their own sanity, and should more and more be relegated to the ministrations of psychopolitical operatives. By perverting the institutions of a nation and bringing about a general degradation, by interfering with the economics of a nation to the degree that privation and depression come about, only minor shocks will be necessary to produce, on the populace as a whole, an obedient reaction or an hysteria. Thus, the mere threat of war, the mere threat of aviation bombings, could cause the population to sue instantly for peace. It is a long and arduous road for the psychopolitical operative to achieve this state of mind on the part of the whole nation, but no more than twenty or thirty years should be necessary in the entire program. Having to hand, as we do, weapons with which to accomplish the goal. CHAPTER IX THE ORGANIZATION OF MENTAL HEALTH CAMPAIGNS Psychopolitical operatives should at all times be alert to the opportunity to organize "for the betterment of the community" mental health clubs or groups. By thus inviting the co-operation of the population as a whole in mental health programs, the terrors of mental aberration can be disseminated throughout the populace. Furthermore, each one of these mental health groups,properly guided, can bring, at last, legislative pressure against the government to secure adequately the position of the psychopolitical operative, and to obtain for him government grants and facilities, thus bringing a government to finance its own downfall. Mental health organizations must carefully delete from their ranks anyone actually proficient in the handling or treatment of mental health. Thus must be excluded priests, ministers, actually trained psychoanalysts, good hypnotists, or trained Dianeticists. These, with some cognizance on the subject of mental aberration and its treatment, and with some experience in observing the mentally deranged, if allowed frequency within institutions,and if permitted to receive literature, would, sooner or later, become suspicious of the activities engaged upon by the psychopolitical operative. These must be defamed and excluded as "untrained," "unskillful," "quacks," or "perpetrators of hoaxes." No mental health movement with actual goals of mental therapy should be continued in existence in any nation. For instance, the use of Chinese acupuncture in the treatment of mental and physical derangement must, in China, be stamped out and discredited thoroughly, as it has some efficacy, and, more importantly, its practitioners understand, through long conversation with it, many of the principles of actual mental health and aberration. In the field of mental health, the psychopolitician must occupy, and continue to occupy, through various arguments, the authoritative position on the subject. There is always the danger that problems of mental health may be resolved by some individual or group, which might then derange the program of the psychopolitical operative in his mental health clubs. City officials, socialites, and other unknowing individuals, on the subject of mental health, should be invited to full co-operation in the activity of mental health groups. But the entirety of this activity should be to finance better facilities for the psychopolitical practitioner. To these groups it must be continually stressed that the entire subject of mental illness is so complex that none of them, certainly, could understand any part of it. Thus, the club should be kept on a social and financial level. Where groups interested in the health of the community have already been formed, they should be infiltrated and taken over, and if this is not possible, they should be discredited and debarred, and the officialdom of the area should be invited to stamp them out as dangerous. When a hostile group dedicated to mental health is discovered, the psychopolitician should have recourse to the mechanisms of peyote, mescaline, and later drugs which cause temporary insanity. He should send persons, preferably those well under his control, into the mental health group, whether Christian Science or Dianetics or faith preachers to demonstrate their abilities upon this new person. These, in demonstrating their abilities, will usually act with enthusiasm. Midway in the course of their treatment, a quiet injection of peyote, mescaline, or other drug, or an electric shock, will produce the symptoms of insanity in the patient which has been sent to the target group. The patient thus demonstrating momentary insanity should be immediately be reported to the police and taken away to some area of incarceration managed by psychopolitical operatives, and so placed out of site. Officialdom will thus come into a belief that this group drives individuals insane by their practices,and the practices of the group will them be despised and prohibited by law. The values of a widespread mental health organization are manifest when one realizes that any government can be forced to provide facilities for psychopolitical operatives in the form of psychiatric wards in all hospitals, in national institutions totally in the hands of psychopolitical operatives, and in the establishment of clinics where youth can be contacted and arranged more seemingly to the purposes of Psychopolitics. Such groups form a political force, which can then legalize any law or authority desired for the psychopolitical operative. The securing of authority over such mental health organizations is done mainly be appeal to education. A psychopolitical operative should make sure that those psychiatrists he controls, those psychologists whom he has under his orders, have been trained for an excessively long period of time. The longer the training period which can be required, the safer the psychopolitical program, since no new group of practitioners can arise to disclose and dismay psychopolitical programs. Furthermore, the groups themselves cannot hope to obtain any full knowledge of the subject,not having behind them many, many years of intensive training. Vienna has been carefully maintained by Psychopolitics, since it was the home of Psychoanalysis. Although our activities have long been dispersed any of the gains made by Freudian groups, and have taken over these groups, the proximity of Vienna to Russia, where Psychopolitics is operating abroad, and the necessity "for further study" by psychopolitical operatives in the birth-place of Psychoanalysis, makes periodic contacts with headquarters possible. Thus the word "psychoanalysis" must be stressed at all times, and must be pretended to be a thorough part of the psychiatrist's training. Psychoanalysis has the very valuable possession of a vocabulary, and a workability which is sufficiently poor to avoid recovery of psychopolitical implantations. It can be made fashionable throughout mental health organizations, and by learning its patter, and by believing they see some of its phenomena, the members of mental health groups can believe themselves conversant with mental health. Because its stress is sex, it is, itself, adequate defamation of character, and serves the purposes of degradation well. Thus, in organizing mental health groups, the literature furnished such groups should be psychoanalytical in nature. If a group of persons interested in suppressing juvenile delinquency, in caring for the insane, and the promotion of psychopolitical operatives and their actions can be formed in every major city of a country under conquest, the success of a psychopolitical program is assured, since these groups seem to represent a large segment of the population. By releasing continuing propaganda on the subject of dope addiction, homosexuality, and depraved conduct on the part of the young, even the judges of a country can become suborned into reacting violently against the youth of the country,thus mis-aligning and aligning the support of youth. The communication lines of psychopolitics, if such mental health organizations can be well established, can thus run from its most prominent citizens to its government. It is not too much to hope that the influence of such groups could bring about a psychiatric ward in every hospital in the land,and psychiatrists in every company and regiment of the nation's army, and whole government institutes manned entirely by psychopolitical operatives, into which ailing government officials could be placed, to the advantage of the psychopolitician. If a psychiatric ward could be established in every hospital in every city of a nation, it is certain that, at one time or another, every prominent citizen of that nation could come under the ministrations of psychopolitical operatives or their dupes. The validation of psychiatric position in the armed forces and security-minded institutions of the nation under conquest could bring about a flow and fund of information unlike any other program which could be conceived. If every pilot who flies a new plane could come under the questioning of a psychopolitical operative, if the compiler of every military action could thus come under the review of psychopolitical operatives, the simplicity with which information can be extracted by the use of certain drugs, without the after-knowledge of the soldier, would entirely cripple any over action toward Communism. If the nation could be educated into turning over to psychopolitical operatives ever recalcitrant or rebellious soldier, it would lose its best fighters. Thus, the advantage of mental health organizations can be seen, for these, by exerting an apparent public pressure against the government, can achieve these ends and goals. The financing of a psychopolitical operation is difficult unless it is done by the citizens and government. Although vast sums of money can be obtained from private patients, and from relatives who wish persons put away, it is, nevertheless, difficult to obtain millions, unless the government itself is co-operating. The co-operation of the government to obtain these vast sums of money is best obtained by the organization of mental health groups composed of leading citizens, and who bring their lobbying abilities to bear against the nation's government. Thus can be financed many programs, which might otherwise have to be laid aside by the psychopolitician. The psychopolitical operative should bend consistent and continual effort toward forming and continuing in action innumerable mental health groups. The psychopolitical operative should also spare no expense in smashing out of existence, by whatever means, any actual healing group, such as that of acupuncture, in China; such as Christian Science, Dianetics and faith healing, in the United States; such as Catholicism in Italy and Spain; and the practical psychological groups of England. CHAPTER X CONDUCT UNDER FIRE The psychopolitician may well find himself under attack as an individual or a member of a group. He may be attacked as a Communist, through some leak in the organization, he may be attacked for malpractice. He may be attacked by the families of people whom he has injured. In all cases his conduct of the situation should be calm and aloof. He should have behind him the authority of many years of training, and he should have participated fully in the building of defense in field of insanity which give him the only statement as to the conditions of the mind. If he has not done his work well, hostile feeling groups may expose an individual psychopolitician. These may call into question the efficacy of psychiatric treatment such as shock, drugs, and brian surgery. Therefore, the psychopolitical operative must have to hand innumerable documents which assert enourmously encouraging figures on the subject of recovery by reason of shock, brain surgery, drugs and general treatment. Not one of these cases cited need be real, but they should be documented and printed in such a fashion as to form excellent court evidence. When his allegiance is attacked, the psychopolitical operative should explain his connection with Vienna on the grounds that Vienna is the place of study for all important matters of the mind. More importantly, he should rule into scorn, by reason of his authority, the sanity of the person attacking him, and if the psychopolitical archives of the country are adequate many defamatory data can be unearthed and presented as a rebuttal. Should anyone attempt to expose psychotherapy as a psychopolitical activity, the best defense is calling into question the sanity of the attacker. The next best defense is authority. The next best defense is a validation of psychiatric practices in terms of long and impressive figures. The next best defense is the actual removal of the attacker by giving him, or them, treatment sufficient to bring about a period of insanity for the duration of the trial. This, more than anything else, would discredit them, but it is dangerous to practice this, in the extreme. Psychopolitics should avoid murder and violence, unless it is done in the safety of the institution, on persons who have been proven to be insane. Where institution deaths appear to be unnecessary, or to rise in "unreasonable number," political capital might be made of this by city officials or legislature. If the psychopolitical operative has, himself, or if his group has done a thorough job, defamatory data concerning the person, or connections, of the would-be attacker should be on file, should be documented, and should be used in such a way as to discourage the inquiry. After a period of indoctrination, a country will expect insanity to be met by psychopolitical violence. Psychopolitical activities should become the only recognized treatment for insanity. Indeed, this can be extended to such a length that it could be made illegal for electric shock and brain surgery to be omitted in the treatment of a patient. In order to defend psychopolitical activities, a great complexity should be made of psychiatric, psychoanalytical, and psychological technology. Any hearing should be burdened by terminology too difficult to be transcribed easily. A great deal should be made out of such terms as schizophrenia, paranoia, and other relatively undefinable states. Psychopolitical tests need not necessarily be in agreement, one to another, where they are available to the public. Various types of insanity should be characterized by difficult terms. The actual state should be made obscure, but by this verbiage it can be built into the court or investigating mind that a scientific approach exists and that it is too complex for him to understand. It is not to be imagined that a judge or a committee of investigation should inquire too deeply into the subject of insanity, since they, themselves, part of the indoctrinated masses, are already intimidated if the psychopolitical activity has caused itself to be well-documented in terms of horror in magazines. In case of a hearing or trial, the terribleness of insanity itself, its threat to the society, should be exaggerated until the court or committee believes that the psychopolitical operative is vitally necessary in his post and should not be harassed for the activities of persons who are irrational. An immediate attack upon the sanity of the attacker before any possible hearing can take place is the very best defense. It should become well-known that "only the insane attack psychiatrists." The by-word should be built into the society that paranoia is a condition "in which the individual believes he is being attacked by Communists." It will be found that this defense is effective. Part of the effective defenses should include the entire lack in the society of any real psychotherapy. This must be systematically stamped out, since a real psychotherapy might possibly uncover the results of psychopolitical activities. Jurisprudence, in a Capitalistic nation,is of such clumsiness that cases are invariably tried in their newspapers. We have handled these things much better in Russia, and have uniformly brought people to trial with full confessions already arrived at (being implanted) before the trial took place. Should any whisper, or pamphlet, against psychopolitical activities be published, it should be laughed into scorn, branded an immediate hoax, and its perpetrator or publisher should be, at the first opportunity, branded as insane and by the use of drugs the insanity should be confirmed. CHAPTER XI THE USE OF PSYCHOPOLITICS IN SPREADING COMMUNISM Reactionary nations are of such a composition that they attack a word without understanding of it. As the conquest of a nation by Communism depends upon imbuing its population with communistic tenets, it is not necessary that the term "Communism" be applied at first to the educative measures employed. As an example, in the United States we have been able to alter the works of William James, and others, into a more acceptable pattern, and to place the tenets of Karl Marx, Pavlov, Lamarck, and the data of Dialectic Materialism into the textbooks of psychology, to such a degree that anyone thoroughly studying psychology becomes at once a candidate to accept the reasonableness of Communism. As every chair of psychology in the United States is occupied by persons in our connection, the consistent employment of such texts is guaranteed. They are given the authoritative ring, and they are carefully taught. Constant pressure in the legislatures of the United States can bring about legislation to the effect that every student attending a high school or university must have classes in psychology. Educating broadly the educated strata of the populace into the tenets of Communism is thus rendered relatively easy, and when the choice is given them whether to continue in a Capitalistic or a Communistic condition, they will see, suddenly, in Communism, much more reasonability than in Capitalism, which will now be of our own definition. CHAPTER XII VIOLENT REMEDIES As a populace, in general, understand that a violence is necessary in the handling of the insane, violent remedies seem to be reasonable. Starting from a relatively low level of violence, such as strait-jackets and other restraints, it is relatively easy to encroach upon the public diffidence for violence by adding more and more cruelty into the treatment of the insane. By increasing the brutality of "treatment," the public acceptance of such treatment will be assisted, and the protest of the individual to whom the treatment is given is impossible, since immediately after the treatment he is incapable. The family of the individual under treatment is suspect for having had in its midst, already, an insane person. The family's protest should be discredited. The more violent the treatment, the more command value the psychopolitical operative will accumulate. Brain operations should become standard and commonplace. While the figures of actual deaths should be repressed wherever possible, nevertheless, it is of no great concern to the psychopolitical operative that many deaths do occur. Gradually, the public should be educated into electric shock, first by believing that it is very therapeutic, then by believing that it is quieting, then by being informed that electric shock usually injures the spine and teeth, and finally, that if very often kills or at least breaks the spine and removes, violently, the teeth of the patient. It is very doubtful if anyone from the lay levels of the public could tolerate the observation of a single electric shock treatment. Certainly they could not tolerate witnessing a prefrontal lobotomy or trans-orbital leucotomy. However, they should be brought up to a level where this is possible, where it is the expected treatment, and where the details, of the treatment itself can be made known, thus to the increase of psychopolitical prestige. The more violent the treatment, the more hopeless insanity will seem to be. The society should be worked up to the level where every recalcitrant young man can be brought into court and assigned to a psychopolitical operative, be given electric shocks, and reduced into unimaginative docility for the remainder of his days. By continuous and increasing advertising of the violence of treatment, the public will at last come to tolerate the creation of zombie conditions to such a degree that they will probably employ zombies, if given to them. Thus a large strata of the society, particularly that which was rebellious, can be reduced to the service of the psychopolitician. By various means, a public must be convinced, at least, that insanity can only be met by shock, torture, deprivation, defamation, discrediting, violence, maiming, death, punishment in all its forms. The society, at the same time, must be educated into the belief of increasing insanity within its ranks. This creates an emergency, and places the psychopolitician in a saviour role, and places him, at length, in charge of the society. CHAPTER XIII THE RECRUITING OF PSYCHOPOLITICAL DUPES The psychopolitical dupe is a well-trained individual who serves in complete obedience to the psychopolitical operative. In that nearly all persons in training are expected to undergo a certain amount of treatment in any field of the mind, it is not too difficult to persuade persons in the field of mental healing to subject themselves to mild or minor drugs or shock. If this can be done, a psychological dupe on the basis of pain-drug hypnosis can immediately result. Recruitment into the ranks of "mental healing" can best be done by carefully bringing to it only those healing students who are, to some slight degree, already depraved, or who have been "treated" by psychopolitical operatives. Recruitment is effected by making the field of mental healing very attractive, financially, and sexually. The amount of promiscuity which can be induced in mental patients can work definitely to the advantage of the psychopolitical recruiting agent. The dupe can thus be induced into many lurid sexual contacts, and these, properly witnessed, can thereafter be used as blackmail material to assist any failure of pain-drug hypnosis in causing him to execute orders. The promise of unlimited sexual opportunities, the promise of complete dominion over the bodies and minds of helpless patients, the promise of having lawlessness without detection, can thus attract to "mental healing" many desirable recruits who will willingly fall in line with psychopolitical activities. In that the psychopolitician has under his control the insane of the nation, most of them have criminal tendencies, and as he can, as his movement goes forward, recruit for his ranks the criminals themselves, he has unlimited numbers of human beings to employ on whatever projects he may see fit. In that the insane will execute destructive projects without question, if given the proper amount of punishment and implantation, the degradation of the country's youth, the defamation of its leaders, the suborning of its courts becomes childlishly easy. The psychopolitician has the advantage of naming as a delusory symptom any attempt on the part of the patient to expose commands. The psychopolitician should carefully adhere to institutions and should eschew practice whenever possible, since this gives him the greatest number of human beings to control to the use of Communism. When he does act in private practice, it should be only in contact with the families of the wealthy and the officials of the country. CHAPTER XIV THE SMASHING OF RELIGIOUS GROUPS You must know that until recent times the complete subject of mental derangement, whether so light as simple worry or so heavy as insanity, was the sphere of activity of the church and only the church. Traditionally in civilized nations and barbaric ones the priesthood alone had in complete charge the mental conditions of the citizen. As a matter of great concern to the psychopolitician this tendency still exists in every public in the Western World and scientific inroads into this sphere has occurred only in official and never in public quarters. The magnificent tool wielded for us by Wundt would be as nothing if it were not for official insistence in civilized countries that "scientific practices" be applied to the problem of the mind. Without this official insistence or even if it relapsed for a moment, the masses would grasp stupidly for the priest, the minister, and the clergy when mental condition came in question. Today in Europe and America "scientific practices" in the field of the mind would not last moments if not enforced entirely by officialdom. It must be carefully hidden that the incidence of insanity has increased only since thee "scientific practices" were applied. Great remarks must be made of the "the pace of modern living" and other myths as the cause of the increased neurosis in the world. It is nothing to us what causes it if anything does. It is everything to us that no evidence of any kind shall be tolerated afoot to permit the public tendency toward the church its way. If given their heads, if left to themselves to decide, independent of officialdom, where they would place their deranged loved ones the public would choose religious sanitariums and would avoid as if plagued places where "scientific practices" prevail. Given any slightest encouragement, public support would swing on an instant all mental healing into the hands of the churches. And there are Churches waiting to receive it, clever churches. That terrible monster, the Roman Catholic Church, still dominates mental healing heavily throughout the Christian world and their well schooled priests are always at work to turn the public their way. Among Fundamentalist and Pentecostal groups, healing campaigns are conducted, which, because of their results, win many to the cult of Christianity. In the field of pure healing the Church of Christ Science of Boston, Massachusetts excels in commanding the public favor and operates many sanitariums. All of these must be swept aside. They must be ridiculed and defamed and every cure they advertise must be asserted a hoax. A full fifth of a psychopolitician's time should be devoted to smashing these threats. Just as in Russian we had to destroy, after many, many years of most arduous work, the Church, so we must destroy all faiths in nations marked for conquest. Insanity must be made to hound the footsteps of every priest and practitioner. His best results must be turned to jabbering insanities no matter what means we have to use. You need not care what effect you have upon the public. The effect you care about is the one upon officials. You must recruit every agency of the nation marked for slaughter into a foaming hatred of religious healing. You must suborn district attorneys and judges into an intense belief as fervent as an ancient faith in God that Christian Science or any other religious practice which might devote itself to mental healing is vicious, bad, insanity-causing, publicly hated and intolerable. You must suborn and recruit any medical healing organization into collusion in this campaign. You must appeal to their avarice and even their humanity to invite their co-operation in smashing all religious healing and thus, to our end, care of the insane. You must see that such societies have only qualified Communist-indoctrinees as their advisors in this matter. For you can use such societies. They are stupid and stampede easily. Their cloak and degrees can be used quite well to mask any operation we care to have masked. We must make them partners in our endeavor so that they will never be able to crawl from beneath our thumb and discredit us. We have battled in America since the century's turn to bring to nothing any and all Christian influences and we are succeeding. While we today seem to be kind to the Christian, remember, we have yet to influence the "Christian world" to our ends. When that is done we shall have an end of them everywhere. You may see them here in Russia as trained apes. They do not know their tether is long only until the apes in other lands have become unwary. You must work until "religion" is synonymous with "insanity."" You must work until the officials of city, county and state governments will not think twice before they pounce upon religious groups as public enemies. Remember, all lands are governed by the few and only pretend to consult with the many. It is no different in America. The petty official, the maker of laws alike can be made to believe the worst. It is not necessary to convince the masses. It is only necessary to work incessantly upon the official, using personal defamations, wild lies, false evidences and constant propaganda to make him fight for you against the church or against any practitioner. Like the official, the bona-fide medical healer also believes the worst if it can be shown to him as dangerous competition. And like the Christian, should he seek to take from us any right we have gained, we shall finish him as well. We must be like the vine upon the tree. We use the tree to climb and then, strangling it, grow into power on the nourishment of its flesh. We must strike from our path any opposition. We must use for our tools any authority that comes to hand. And then at last, the decades sped, we can dispense with all authority save our own and triumph the greater glory of the Party. CHAPTER XV PROPOSALS WHICH MUCH BE AVOIDED There are certain damaging movements which could interrupt the psychopolitical conquest. These coming from some quarters of the country, might gain headway and should be spotted before they do, and stamped out. Proposals may be made by large and powerful groups in the country to return the insane to the care of those who have handled mental healing for tribes and populace for centuries--the priest. Any movement to place clergymen in charge of institutions should be fought on the grounds of incompetence and the insanity brought about by religion. The most destructive thing which could happen to a psychopolitical program would be the investment of the ministry with the care of the nation's insane. If mental hospitals operated by religious groups are in existence, they must be discredited and closed, no matter what the cost, for it might occur that the actual figures of recovery in such institutions would become known, and that the lack of recovery in general institutions might be compared to them, and this might lead to a movement to place the clergy in charge of the insane. Every argument must be advanced early, to overcome any possibility of this ever occurring. A country's law must carefully be made to avoid any rights of person to the insane. Any suggested laws or Constitutional Amendments which make the harming of the insane unlawful, should be fought to the extreme, on the grounds that only violent measures can succeed. If the law were to protect the insane, as it normally does not, the entire psychopolitical program would very possibly collapse. Any movements to increase or place under surveillance the orders required to hospitalize the mentally ill should be discouraged. This should be left entirely in the hands of persons well under the control of psychopolitical operatives. It should be done with minimum formality, and no recovery of the insane from an institution should be possible by any process of law. Thus, any movement to add to the legal steps of the processes of commitment and release should be discouraged on the grounds of emergency. To obviate this, the best action is to place a psychiatric and detention ward for the mentally ill in every hospital in a land. Any writings of a psychopolitical nature, accidentally disclosing themselves, should be prevented. All actual literature on the subject of insanity and its treatment should be suppressed, first by actual security, and second by complex verbage which renders it incomprehensible. The actual figures of recovery or death should never be announced in any papers. Any investigation attempting to discover whether or not psychiatry or psychology has ever cured anyone should be immediately discouraged and laughed to scorn, and should mobilize at the point all psychopolitical operatives. At first, it should be ignored, but if this is not possible, the entire weight of all psychopoliticians in the nation should be pressed into service. Any tactic possible should be employed to prevent this from occurring. To rebut it, technical appearing papers should exist as to the tremendous number of cures effected by psychiatry and psychology, and whenever possible, percentages of cures, no matter how fictitious, should be worked into legislative papers, thus forming a background of "evidence" which would immediately rebut any effort to actually discover anyone who had ever been helped by psychiatry or psychology. If the Communistic connections of an psychopolitician should become disclosed, it should be attributed to his own carelessness, and he should, himself, be immediately branded as eccentric within his own profession. Authors of literature which seek to demonstrate the picture of a society under complete mental control and duress should be helped toward infamy or suicide to discredit their works. Any legislation liberalizing any healing practice should be immediately fought and defeated. All healing practices should gravitate entirely to authoritative levels, and no other opinions should be admitted, as these might lead to exposure. Movements to improve youth should be invaded and corrupted, as this might interrupt campaigns to produce in youth delinquency, addiction, drunkenness, and sexual promiscuity. Communist workers in the field of newspapers and radio should be protected wherever possible by striking out of action, through Psychopolitics, any persons consistently attacking them. These, in their turn, should be persuaded to give every possible publicity to the benefits of psychopolitical activities under the heading of "science." No healing group devoted to the mind must be allowed to exist within the borders of Russia or its satellites. Only well-vouched-for psychopolitical operatives can be continued in their practice, and this only for the benefit of the government or against enemy prisoners. Any effort to exclude psychiatrists or psychologists from the armed services must be fought. Any inquest into the "suicide" or sudden mental derangement of any political leader in a nation must be conducted only by psychopolitical operatives or their dupes, whether Psychopolitics is responsible or not. Death and violence against persons attacking Communism in a nation should be eschewed as forbidden. Violent activity against such persons might bring about their martyrdom. Defamation, and the accusation of insanity, alone should be employed, and they should be brought at last under the ministrations of psychopolitical operatives, such as psychiatrists and controlled psychologists. CHAPTER XVI IN SUMMARY In this time of unlimited weapons, and in national antagonisms, where atomic war with Capitalistic powers is possible, Psychopolitics must act efficiently as never before. Any and all programs of Psychopolitics must be increased to aid and abet the activities of other Communist agents throughout the nation in question. The failure of Psychopolitics might well bring about the atomic bombing of the Motherland. If Psychopolitics succeeds in its mission throughout the Capitalistic nations of the world, there will never be an atomic war, for Russia will have subjugated all of her enemies. Communism has already spread across one-sixth of the inhabited world. Marxist Doctrines have already penetrated the remainder. An extension of the Communist social order is everywhere victorious. The spread of Communism has never been by force of battle, but by conquest of the mind. In Psychopolitics we have refined this conquest to its last degree. The psychopolitical operative must succeed, for his success means a world of Peace. His failure might well mean the destruction of the civilized portions of Earth by atomic power in the hands of Capitalistic madmen. The end thoroughly justifies the means. The degradation of populace is less inhuman than their destruction by atomic fission, for to an animal who lives only once, any life is sweeter than death. The end of war is the control of a conquered people. If a people can be conquered in the absence of war, the end of war will have been achieved without the destruction of war. A worth goal. The psychopolitician has his reward in the nearly unlimited control of populace, in the uninhibited exercise of passion, and the glory of Communist conquest over the stupidity of the enemies of the People. THE END ___________________________________ This book was posted by Courageous Lion He can be emailed at... [1]Courageous Lion's Den References 1. mailto:courageouslion at amprom.org?subject=Psychopolitics From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 16:04:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 11:04:46 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A New Language Arises, and Scientists Watch It Evolve Message-ID: The New York Times > Science > A New Language Arises, and Scientists Watch It Evolve http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/science/01lang.html 5.2.1 By NICHOLAS WADE Linguists studying a signing system that spontaneously developed in an isolated Bedouin village say they have captured a new language being generated from scratch. They believe its features may reflect the innate neural circuitry that governs the brain's faculty for language. The language, known as Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, is used in a village of some 3,500 people in the Negev desert of Israel. They are descendants of a single founder, who arrived 200 years ago from Egypt and married a local woman. Two of the couple's five sons were deaf, as are about 150 members of the community today. The clan has long been known to geneticists, but only now have linguists studied its sign language. A team led by Dr. Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa says in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today that the Bedouin sign language developed spontaneously and without outside influence. It is not related to Israeli or Jordanian sign languages, and its word order differs from that of the spoken languages of the region. Linguists have long disputed whether language is transmitted just through culture, as part of the brain's general learning ability or is internally generated with the help of genetically specified neural circuits that prescribe the elements of grammar. Since children learn to speak from those around them, there is no obvious way of separating what is learned from what is innate except by observing a new language being developed from scratch, something that happens very rarely. Two special opportunities to study a new language and identify its innate elements have recently come to light. One is Nicaraguan sign language, a signing system developed spontaneously by children at a school for the deaf founded in 1977 in Nicaragua. The other is the Bedouin sign language being described today. Sign languages can possess all the properties of spoken language, including grammar, and differ only in the channel through which meaning is conveyed. Two features of the Bedouin sign language that look as if they come from some innate grammatical machinery are a distinction between subject and object, and the preference for a specific word order, said Dr. Mark Aronoff of Stony Brook University, an author of today's report. The word order is subject-object-verb, the most common in other languages. Dr. Aronoff said that the emergence of a preferred order was the critical feature, and that it was too early to tell if subject-object-verb is the particular order favored by the brain's neural circuitry. Linguists hope to learn more about the brain's language machinery by identifying the features that the Bedouin and Nicaraguan sign languages hold in common. Dr. Ann Senghas, who has studied Nicaraguan sign language for 15 years, said she agreed with Dr. Aronoff that the subject-object distinction and word order could be innate features. Dr. Senghas, who is at Barnard College in New York, said the preferred word order in Nicaraguan sign language kept changing with each cohort of children. The language has now acquired the signed equivalents of case endings, the changes used in languages like Latin to show if a word is the subject or object of a sentence. Word order can be less rigorous in languages that use case endings. The Bedouin sign language, which has not yet acquired case endings, is also under development. The third generation is signing twice as fast as the first and is using longer sentences, said Dr. Carol Padden of the University of California, San Diego, another author of the new report. Dr. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, said the Bedouin sign language was "unquestionably an important finding." Together with the work on Nicaraguan sign language and other studies, he said, it "suggests that the human mind has the motive and means to create an expressive grammatical language without requiring many generations of fine tuning, trial and error, and accumulation of cultural traditions." The absence of case endings, or inflection, in the clan's language was not surprising, Dr. Pinker said, because this form of change, known as morphology to linguists, often takes many generations to develop. Both morphology and syntax, the ordering of words in phrases, may use "fundamentally the same mental machinery, which operates inside a word in the case of morphology and inside a phrase in the case of syntax," he said. Some researchers have speculated that language evolved first in the form of a system of gestures, with sound taking over only later as the preferred channel of communication. Evidence that gesture is still deeply embedded in language can be seen in the fact that people gesticulate even when on the phone. Does the vigor and spontaneity of Bedouin and Nicaraguan sign languages support the idea that a gesture-based language evolved first? Dr. Senghas said the two languages "are not evidence about what came first" but confirm that gesture is an integral part of language. The clan sign language, which started only 70 years ago, is unusual in being understood by the whole community, not just the deaf, since hearing people use it to communicate with their deaf relatives. The signs have already become symbolic: the sign for "man" is the twirl of a finger to indicate a moustache, although men no longer wear them. The Bedouin village is not geographically remote - it is near a large McDonald's - but is socially isolated from other Bedouin who look down on its origins. There are now more contacts with the outside world, and the deaf children are being exposed to Israeli sign language in school. The Bedouin sign language may not withstand modernization and marriage outside the community. "This is a pretty short flowering," Dr. Aronoff said. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 16:05:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 11:05:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes Message-ID: The New York Times > Science > Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/science/01evo.html 5.2.1 By CORNELIA DEAN Dr. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Ala., recently when he met a young woman who had just begun work as a biology teacher in a small school district in the state. Their conversation turned to evolution. "She confided that she simply ignored evolution because she knew she'd get in trouble with the principal if word got about that she was teaching it," he recalled. "She told me other teachers were doing the same thing." Though the teaching of evolution makes the news when officials propose, as they did in Georgia, that evolution disclaimers be affixed to science textbooks, or that creationism be taught along with evolution in biology classes, stories like the one Dr. Frandsen tells are more common. In districts around the country, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue. Teaching guides and textbooks may meet the approval of biologists, but superintendents or principals discourage teachers from discussing it. Or teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests from fundamentalists in their communities. "The most common remark I've heard from teachers was that the chapter on evolution was assigned as reading but that virtually no discussion in class was taken," said Dr. John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, an evangelical Christian and a member of Alabama's curriculum review board who advocates the teaching of evolution. Teachers are afraid to raise the issue, he said in an e-mail message, and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public. Dr. Frandsen, former chairman of the committee on science and public policy of the Alabama Academy of Science, said in an interview that this fear made it impossible to say precisely how many teachers avoid the topic. "You're not going to hear about it," he said. "And for political reasons nobody will do a survey among randomly selected public school children and parents to ask just what is being taught in science classes." But he said he believed the practice of avoiding the topic was widespread, particularly in districts where many people adhere to fundamentalist faiths. "You can imagine how difficult it would be to teach evolution as the standards prescribe in ever so many little towns, not only in Alabama but in the rest of the South, the Midwest - all over," Dr. Frandsen said. Dr. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, said she heard "all the time" from teachers who did not teach evolution "because it's just too much trouble." "Or their principals tell them, 'We just don't have time to teach everything so let's leave out the things that will cause us problems,' " she said. Sometimes, Dr. Scott said, parents will ask that their children be allowed to "opt out" of any discussion of evolution and principals lean on teachers to agree. Even where evolution is taught, teachers may be hesitant to give it full weight. Ron Bier, a biology teacher at Oberlin High School in Oberlin, Ohio, said that evolution underlies many of the central ideas of biology and that it is crucial for students to understand it. But he avoids controversy, he said, by teaching it not as "a unit," but by introducing the concept here and there throughout the year. "I put out my little bits and pieces wherever I can," he said. He noted that his high school, in a college town, has many students whose parents are professors who have no problem with the teaching of evolution. But many other students come from families that may not accept the idea, he said, "and that holds me back to some extent." "I don't force things," Mr. Bier added. "I don't argue with students about it." In this, he is typical of many science teachers, according to a report by the Fordham Foundation, which studies educational issues and backs programs like charter schools and vouchers. Some teachers avoid the subject altogether, Dr. Lawrence S. Lerner, a physicist and historian of science, wrote in the report. Others give it very short shrift or discuss it without using "the E word," relying instead on what Dr. Lerner characterized as incorrect or misleading phrases, like "change over time." Dr. Gerald Wheeler, a physicist who heads the National Science Teachers Association, said many members of his organization "fly under the radar" of fundamentalists by introducing evolution as controversial, which scientifically it is not, or by noting that many people do not accept it, caveats not normally offered for other parts of the science curriculum. Dr. Wheeler said the science teachers' organization hears "constantly" from science teachers who want the organization's backing. "What they are asking for is 'Can you support me?' " he said, and the help they seek "is more political; it's not pedagogical." There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that all living things evolved from common ancestors, that evolution on earth has been going on for billions of years and that evolution can be and has been tested and confirmed by the methods of science. But in a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." And this was good news to the foundation. It was the first time one of its regular surveys showed a majority of Americans had accepted the idea. According to the foundation report, polls consistently show that a plurality of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago, and about two-thirds believe that this belief should be taught along with evolution in public schools. These findings set the United States apart from all other industrialized nations, said Dr. Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University, who has studied public attitudes toward science. Americans, he said, have been evenly divided for years on the question of evolution, with about 45 percent accepting it, 45 percent rejecting it and the rest undecided. In other industrialized countries, Dr. Miller said, 80 percent or more typically accept evolution, most of the others say they are not sure and very few people reject the idea outright. "In Japan, something like 96 percent accept evolution," he said. Even in socially conservative, predominantly Catholic countries like Poland, perhaps 75 percent of people surveyed accept evolution, he said. "It has not been a Catholic issue or an Asian issue," he said. Indeed, two popes, Pius XII in 1950 and John Paul II in 1996, have endorsed the idea that evolution and religion can coexist. "I have yet to meet a Catholic school teacher who skips evolution," Dr. Scott said. Dr. Gerald D. Skoog, a former dean of the College of Education at Texas Tech University and a former president of the science teachers' organization, said that in some classrooms, the teaching of evolution was hampered by the beliefs of the teachers themselves, who are creationists or supporters of the teaching of creationism. "Data from various studies in various states over an extended period of time indicate that about one-third of biology teachers support the teaching of creationism or 'intelligent design,' " Dr. Skoog said. Advocates for the teaching of evolution provide teachers or school officials who are challenged on it with information to help them make the case that evolution is completely accepted as a bedrock idea of science. Organizations like the science teachers' association, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science provide position papers and other information on the subject. The National Association of Biology Teachers devoted a two-day meeting to the subject last summer, Dr. Skoog said. Other advocates of teaching evolution are making the case that a person can believe both in God and the scientific method. "People have been told by some evangelical Christians and by some scientists, that you have to choose." Dr. Scott said. "That is just wrong." While plenty of scientists reject religion - the eminent evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins famously likens it to a disease - many others do not. In fact, when a researcher from the University of Georgia surveyed scientists' attitudes toward religion several years ago, he found their positions virtually unchanged from an identical survey in the early years of the 20th century. About 40 percent of scientists said not just that they believed in God, but in a God who communicates with people and to whom one may pray "in expectation of receiving an answer." Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said he thought the great variety of religious groups in the United States led to competition for congregants. This marketplace environment, he said, contributes to the politicization of issues like evolution among religious groups. He said the teaching of evolution was portrayed not as scientific instruction but as "an assault of the secular elite on the values of God-fearing people." As a result, he said, politicians don't want to touch it. "Everybody discovers the wisdom of federalism here very quickly," he said. "Leave it at the state or the local level." But several experts say scientists are feeling increasing pressure to make their case, in part, Dr. Miller said, because scriptural literalists are moving beyond evolution to challenge the teaching of geology and physics on issues like the age of the earth and the origin of the universe. "They have now decided the Big Bang has to be wrong," he said. "There are now a lot of people who are insisting that that be called only a theory without evidence and so on, and now the physicists are getting mad about this." From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 16:07:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 11:07:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: For Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They're Good at It Message-ID: The New York Times > Science > Essay: For Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They're Good at It http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/science/01math.html 5.2.1 ESSAY For Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They're Good at It By CORNELIA DEAN A few years ago, I told Donald Kennedy, editor of the journal Science, that I wanted to write an essay for his publication. It would say, "Anyone who thinks that sexism is no longer a problem in science has never been the first woman science editor of The New York Times." I never wrote the essay. But the continuing furor over Dr. Lawrence H. Summers's remarks on women and science reminds me why I thought of it. For those who missed it, Dr. Summers, the president of Harvard, told a conference last month on women and science that people worried about the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science should consider the possibility that women simply cannot hack it, that their genes or the wiring of their brains somehow leave them less fit than men for math, and therefore for science. Dr. Summers has since said clearly that he does not believe that girls are intellectually less able than boys. But maybe his original suggestion was right. If we ever figure out exactly what goes on inside the brain, or how our genes shape our abilities, we may find out that men and women do indeed differ in fundamental ways. But there are other possibilities we should consider first. One of them is the damage done by the idea that there is something wrong about a girl or woman who is really good at math. I first encountered this thinking as a seventh grader who was scarred for life when my class in an experimental state school for brainiacs was given a mathematics aptitude test. The results were posted and everyone found out I had scored several years ahead of the next brightest kid. A girl really good in math! What a freak! I resolved then and there on a career in journalism. I encountered the attitude again shortly after I became science editor, taking up a position I was to hold from 1997 to 2003. I went to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a convention that attracts thousands of researchers and teachers. My name tag listed my new position, and the scientists at the meeting all seemed to have the same reaction when they read it: "You're the new science editor of The New York Times!?" At first I was deluded enough to think they meant I was much too delightful a person for such a heavy-duty job. In fact, they were shocked it had been given to a woman. This point was driven home a few weeks later when, at a dinner for scientific eminences, a colleague introduced me to one of the nation's leading neuroscientists. "Oh yes," the scientist murmured, as he scanned the room clearly ignoring me. "Who is the new science editor of The New York Times, that twerpy little girl in short skirts?" Dumbfounded, I replied, "That would be me." A few weeks after that I was in another group of scientific eminences, this one at a luncheon at the Waldorf. The spokeswoman for the group that organized the event introduced me to one of the group's most eminent guests, a leading figure in American science policy. "Oh," he said kindly but abstractedly, "you work for The New York Times. How nice." The spokeswoman explained, again, that I was the newspaper's science editor. "An editor," he said. "How nice." The woman explained again, but again he could not take it in. "Oh, science," he said, "How nice." At this point the spokeswoman lost patience. She grabbed the honored guest by both shoulders, put her face a few inches away from his and shouted at him - "She's it!" Not long after, I answered the office telephone, and the caller, a (male) scientist, asked to speak to several of my colleagues, all male and all out. "May I help you?" I inquired. "No, no, no," he replied. "I don't want to talk to you, I want to talk to someone important!" Even at the time, I could laugh at these experiences. After all, I was a grown-up person who could take care of herself. (I informed the caller that all the men he wanted to talk to worked for me, and then I hung up. As for Dr. Twerpy, he should know that he was not the first man to refer to me professionally as "that little girl." I reported on the doings of the other one until he was indicted.) But the memories of the seventh grader are still not funny. Neither is it amusing to reflect on what happened to a college friend who was the only student in her section to pass linear algebra, the course the math department typically used to separate the sheep from the mathematical goats. Talk about stigma! She changed her major to American civilization. Another friend, graduating as a math major, was advised not to bother applying for a graduate research assistantship because they were not given to women. She eventually earned a doctorate in math, but one of her early forays into the job market ended abruptly when she was told she should stay home with her husband rather than seek employment out of town. Experiences like hers - the outright, out-loud dashing of a promising mathematician's hopes simply because of her sex - are no longer the norm. At least I hope not. But they are enough, by themselves, to tell us why there are relatively few women in the upper ranks of science and mathematics today. Meanwhile, as researchers have abundantly documented, women continue to suffer little slights and little disadvantages, everything from ridicule in high school to problems with child care, to a much greater degree than their male cohorts. After 10 or 15 years, these little things can add up to real roadblocks. So if I wanted to address the relative lack of women in the upper reaches of science, here is where I would start. By the time these problems are eliminated, maybe we'll know what really goes on inside the brain and inside the chromosomes. Then it will be time to wonder if women are inherently less fit for math and science. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 18:30:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 13:30:24 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Minds of Their Own: Birds Gain Respect Message-ID: The New York Times > Science > Minds of Their Own: Birds Gain Respect http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/science/01bird.html 5.2.1 [Click on the URL to get to a graphic.] By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Birdbrain has long been a colloquial term of ridicule. The common notion is that birds' brains are simple, or so scientists thought and taught for many years. But that notion has increasingly been called into question as crows and parrots, among other birds, have shown what appears to be behavior as intelligent as that of chimpanzees. The clash of simple brain and complex behavior has led some neuroscientists to create a new map of the avian brain. Today, in the journal Nature Neuroscience Reviews, an international group of avian experts is issuing what amounts to a manifesto. Nearly everything written in anatomy textbooks about the brains of birds is wrong, they say. The avian brain is as complex, flexible and inventive as any mammalian brain, they argue, and it is time to adopt a more accurate nomenclature that reflects a new understanding of the anatomies of bird and mammal brains. "Names have a powerful influence on the experiments we do and the way we think," said Dr. Erich D. Jarvis, a neuroscientist at Duke University and a leader of the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium. "Old terminology has hindered scientific progress." The consortium of 29 scientists from six countries met for seven years to develop new, more accurate names for structures in both avian and mammalian brains. For example, the bird's seat of intelligence or its higher brain is now termed the pallium. "The correction of terms is a great advance," said Dr. Jon Kaas, a leading expert in neuroanatomy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who did not participate in the consortium. "It's hard to get scientists to agree about anything." Scientists have come to agree that birds are indeed smart, but those who study avian intelligence differ on how birds got that way. Experts, including those in the consortium, are split into two warring camps. One holds that birds' brains make the same kinds of internal connections as do mammalian brains and that intelligence in both groups arises from these connections. The other holds that bird intelligence evolved through expanding an old part of the mammal brain and using it in new ways, and it questions how developed that intelligence is. "There are still puzzles to be solved," said Dr. Peter Marler, a leading authority on bird behavior at the University of California, Davis, who is not part of the consortium. But the realization that one can study mammal brains by using bird brains, he said, "is a revolution." "I think that birds are going to replace the white rat as the favored subject for studying functional neuroanatomy," he added. The reanalysis of avian brains gives new credibility to many behaviors that seem odd coming from presumably dumb birds. Crows not only make hooks and spears of small sticks to carry on foraging expeditions, some have learned to put walnuts on roads for cars to crack. African gray parrots not only talk, they have a sense of humor and make up new words. Baby songbirds babble like human infants, using the left sides of their brains. Avian brains got their bad reputation a century ago from the German neurobiologist Ludwig Edinger, known as the father of comparative anatomy. Edinger believed that evolution was linear, Dr. Jarvis said. Brains evolved like geologic strata. Layer upon layer, the brains evolved from old to new, from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to mammals. By Edinger's standards, fish were the least intelligent. Humans, created in God's image, were the most intelligent. Edinger cut up all kinds of vertebrate brains, noting similarities and differences, Dr. Jarvis said. In mammals, the bottom third of the brain contained neurons organized in clusters. The top two-thirds of the brain, called the neocortex, consisted of a flat sheet of cells with six layers. This new brain, the seat of higher intelligence, lay over the old brain, the seat of instinctual behaviors. In humans, the neocortex grew so immense that it was forced to assume folds and fissures, so as to fit inside the skull. Birds' brains, in contrast, were composed entirely of clusters. Edinger concluded that without a six-layered cortex, birds could not possibly be intelligent. Rather, their brains were fully dedicated to instinctual behaviors. This view persisted through the 20th century and is still found in most biology textbooks, said Dr. Harvey Karten, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the consortium, whose research has long challenged the classic view. There is a bird way and a mammal way to create intelligence, Dr. Karten said. One uses clusters. One uses flat sheet cells in six layers. Each exploits the basic design of having a lower brain and a higher brain with mutual connections. In the 1960's, Dr. Karten carried out experiments using new techniques to trace brain wiring and identify the paths taken by various brain chemicals. In humans, a chemical called dopamine is found mostly in lower brain areas, called basal ganglia, which consist of clusters. Using the same tracing techniques in birds, Dr. Karten found that dopamine also projected primarily to lower clusters and no higher. Later studies show numerous similarities between clusters in the mammalian brain and lower clusters in the avian brain. Experts now agree that the two regions are evolutionarily older structures that lie underneath a newer mantle. Where the experts divide is on the question of the upper clusters in a bird's brain. Agreed, they are not primitive basal ganglia. But where did they come from? How did they evolve? What is their function? Dr. Karten and others in the consortium think these clusters are directly analogous to layers in the mammalian brain. They migrate from similar embryonic precursors and perform the same functions. For example, in mammals, sensory information - sights, sounds, touch - flows through a lower brain region called the thalamus and enters the cortex at the fourth layer in the six-layered cortex. In birds, sensory information flows through the thalamus and enters specific clusters that are functionally equivalent to the fourth layer. In this view, other clusters perform functions done by different layers in the mammal brain. A second group, including Dr. Georg Striedter of the University of California, Irvine, a consortium member, believes that upper clusters in the avian brain are an elaboration of two mammalian structures - the claustrum and the amygdala. In this view, these structures look alike in bird and mammal embryos. But in birds they grow to enormous proportions and have evolved entirely new ways to support intelligence. In mammals, the amygdala is involved in emotional systems, Dr. Striedter said. "But birds use it for integrating information," he said. "It's not emotional anymore." Meanwhile, examples of brilliance in birds continue to flow from fields and laboratories worldwide. Dr. Nathan Emery and Dr. Nicola Clayton at the University of Cambridge in England study comparisons between apes and corvids - crows, jays, ravens and jackdaws. Relative to its body size, the crow brain is the same size as the chimpanzee brain. Everyone knows apes use simple tools like twigs, Dr. Emery said, selecting different ones for different purposes. But New Caledonian crows create more complex tools with their beaks and feet. They trim and sculpture twigs to fashion hooks for fetching food. They make spears out of barbed leaves, probing under leaf detritus for prey. In a laboratory, when a crow named Betty was given metal wires of various lengths and a four-inch vertical pipe with food at the bottom, she chose a four-inch wire, made a hook and retrieved the food. Apes and corvids are highly social. One explanation for intelligence is that it evolved to process and use social information - who is allied with whom, who is related to whom and how to use this information for deception. They also remember. Clark nutcrackers can hide up to 30,000 seeds and recover them up to six months later. Nutcrackers also hide and steal. If they see another bird watching them as they cache food, they return later, alone, to hide the food again. Some scientists believe this shows a rudimentary theory of mind - understanding that another bird has intentions and beliefs. Magpies, at an earlier age than any other creature tested, develop an understanding of the fact that when an object disappears behind a curtain, it has not vanished. At a university campus in Japan, carrion crows line up patiently at the curb waiting for a traffic light to turn red. When cars stop, they hop into the crosswalk, place walnuts from nearby trees onto the road and hop back to the curb. After the light changes and cars run over the nuts, the crows wait until it is safe and hop back out for the food. Pigeons can memorize up to 725 different visual patterns, and are capable of what looks like deception. Pigeons will pretend to have found a food source, lead other birds to it and then sneak back to the true source. Parrots, some researchers report, can converse with humans, invent syntax and teach other parrots what they know. Researchers have claimed that Alex, an African gray, can grasp important aspects of number, color concepts, the difference between presence and absence, and physical properties of objects like their shapes and materials. He can sound out letters the same way a child does. Like mammals, some birds are naturally smarter than others, Dr. Jarvis said. But given their range of behaviors, birds are extraordinarily flexible in their intelligence quotients. "They're right up there with hominids," he said. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 18:33:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 13:33:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Public Interest: Russia, The Sick Man of Europe Message-ID: Russia, The Sick Man of Europe http://www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article1.html Winter 2005 By Nicholas Eberstadt The Russian Federation today is in the grip of a steadily tightening mesh of serious demographic problems, for which the term "crisis" is no overstatement. This crisis is altering the realm of the possible for the country and its people--continuously, directly, and adversely. Russian social conditions, economic potential, military power, and international influence are today all subject to negative demographic constraints--and these constraints stand only to worsen over the years immediately ahead. Russia is now at the brink of a steep population decline--a peacetime hemorrhage framed by a collapse of the birth rate and a catastrophic surge in the death rate. The forces that have shaped this path of depopulation and debilitation are powerful ones, and they are by now deeply rooted in Russian soil. Altering Russia's demographic trajectory would be a formidable task under any circumstances. As yet, unfortunately, neither Russia's political leadership nor the voting public that sustains it have even begun to face up to the enormous magnitude of the country's demographic challenges. Negative population growth On New Year's Day 1992--one week after the dissolution of the Soviet Union--Russia's population was estimated to be 148.7 million. As of mid 2004, according to the Russian State Statistics Committee (Goskomstat), the Russian Federation's population was 143.8 million. During its first eleven and a half years of post-Communist independence, Russia's population had apparently declined by almost five million people, or over 3 percent. In proportional terms, this was by no means the largest population loss recorded during that period. According to estimates and projections by the U.N. Bureau of the Census, over a dozen states with a million people or more experienced a population decline between mid 1992 and mid 2004, 11 of these amounting to drops of 3.1 percent or more. Unlike some of these drops, however--Bosnia, for example, whose population total fell almost 10 percent--Russia's decline could not be explained by war or violent upheaval. In other places, population decline was due entirely to emigration (Armenia, Kazakhstan), or nearly so (Georgia). Russia, by contrast, had absorbed a substantial net influx of migrants during those years--a total net addition of over 5.5 million newcomers was tabulated between the territory's Soviet-era January 1989 census and its October 2002 population count. Despite the mitigating impact of immigration, Russia's post-Communist population decline was larger in absolute terms than any other country's over the past decade. Furthermore, continuing population decline--at a decidedly faster tempo--is envisioned for Russia for as far as demographers care to project into the future. The only question is how steep the downward path will be. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, offers the relatively optimistic projection of a "mere" 14 million person drop in Russia's population between 2000 and 2025--an average net decline of about 560,000 persons a year. The U.N. Population Division's (UNPD) "medium variant" projection, by contrast, suggests a drop of more than 21 million over that same quarter century--about 840,000 persons a year for the period as a whole. In the years ahead, Russia's population decline will continue to accelerate because the prospective flow of net migration into Russia is drying up. The officially tabulated annual levels of immigration to, and emigration from, Russia have declined markedly since the early 1990s-and officially measured net inflows to Russia have likewise dropped very significantly. These official numbers reflect the swelling, cresting, and spending of the migration wave of ethnic Russians from the "near abroad" who resettled to the Russian Federation during and immediately after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The draw of Russia to the (now smaller) pool of overseas Russians appears to have been much diminished, while the allure to foreign ethnics of living on Russian soil does not seem to be increasing appreciably. Russia's reported economic growth rate in the very first years of the twenty-first century has been has been positive, even brisk. Nevertheless, according to official figures, the net inflow of migration to Russia totaled less than 80,000 in all of 2002, and a mere 25,000 in the first seven months of 2003. By the first quarter of 2004, according to official statistics, the officially tallied surfeit of immigrants over emigrants was barely 4,000 persons. With in-migration flows thus subsiding, Russia's population must mirror, with ever-greater faithfulness, the actual balance of births and deaths within the country. And in post-Communist Russia, the current disproportion between deaths and births is stark, indeed astonishing. Russia, to be sure, is not the only European country registering more deaths than births nowadays--according to the Council of Europe's numbers, fully 19 European states currently report "negative natural increase." But, in other European settings, the balance is often still quite close. For example, in Italy--the poster child in many current discussions of a possible "depopulation" of Europe--there are today about 103 deaths for every 100 live births. Russia, by contrast, currently reports about 160 deaths for every 100 births. Examples of extreme surfeits of mortality over natality are, to be sure, familiar from human history. But in the past, these were witnessed only during times of famine, pestilence, war, or mass disaster. As a peacetime phenomenon it is utterly new, and while it is not unique to Russia these days--the excess of deaths over births is nearly as great today in Belarus, Bulgaria, and Latvia, and even more exaggerated in Ukraine--the Russian Federation is perhaps the most important example of this post-Communist demographic condition. Russia's abrupt and brutal swerve onto the path of depopulation began during the final crisis of the Soviet state. Over the two decades before Mikhail Gorbachev's 1985 accession to power, Russia's births regularly exceeded deaths; natural increase typically ranged from 700,000 to 1,000,000 during those years. After 1987, however, births began to fall sharply, and deaths to rise. Both tendencies were further accentuated after the collapse of the USSR. The first full year of post-Communist governance for Russia, 1992, also marked the shift to negative natural increase for the Russian Federation, with 200,000 more deaths than births. A decade later, Russia's death total was over 50 percent higher than in 1987 (2.3 million vs. 1.5 million), while its birth level was over one million lower (1.4 million vs. 2.5 million). In 1987, Russia recorded a natural increase of 968,000; in 2002, deaths surpassed births by almost exactly the same magnitude (935,000). This is an extraordinary result, but it is hardly exceptional. Tabulated deaths have outnumbered births by 900,000 or more in Russia in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002, by nearly 900,000 in 2003, and by over 420,000 in the first half of 2004. In all, between the eve of 1992 and the summer of 2004 the Russian Federation evidently recorded 10 million more burials than births. Where have all the babies gone? Russia's current depopulation bears all the trappings of a "demographic shock," reflecting the vast, historic change from Soviet totalitarianism to a commercial democracy. Though it might seem reasonable to expect that earlier, more "normal" demographic patterns would reassert themselves as the reverberations from Russia's "transition" subside, there are good reasons to believe that Russia's current, seemingly anomalous population trends define a new norm for the country. Remarkably low birth rates and terrifyingly high death rates can accurately be described as regular, rather than transitory, features of the new Russian demographic terrain. A powerful and self-reinforcing network of social factors--forces typically resistant to rapid or easy emendation--will likely keep fertility low and mortality high in the Russian Federation. Until these fundamentals change, depopulation and tragically foreshortened lives will be the distinguishing features of the Russian population profile. Consider Russia's current fertility patterns. In a society with the Russian Federation's present survival patterns, women must bear an average of about 2.33 children per lifetime to assure population stability over successive generations. In the late Soviet era, Russian fertility levels were near replacement: The country's total fertility rate (TFR) fluctuated near two births per woman from the mid 1960s through the mid 1980s. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian fertility rate likewise collapsed, plummeting from 2.19 births per woman in 1986-87 to 1.17 in 1999. Moreover, extreme subreplacement fertility is not peculiar to certain regions of Russia today; to the contrary, it prevails across almost the entire territorial expanse of the Federation. Since 2001, there have been some indications of a resurgence of fertility in the Russian Federation. For the year 2002, according to Goskomstat, the country's total fertility rate has risen to 1.32. And for the year 2003, according to Russian Federation President Vladimir V. Putin in his 2004 New Year's Day address, an "especially joyous" auspice was the absolute increase in births over the previous year. According to Goskomstat, Russia's total births rose in 2003 to 1.48 million-by that report, a 6 percent increase over the previous year. Birth figures for the first half of 2004, for their part, are 2 percent higher than for the first half of 2003. These signs of improvement raise the question: If Russian fertility fell suddenly and sharply with the demise of the Soviet Union, might it not also rebound vigorously in an auspicious political and economic environment? That possibility cannot be entirely ruled out. Demographic science, after all, lacks any robust techniques for accurately predicting future fertility patterns. But even supposing an improvement in social conditions and an increase in general levels of confidence (improvements, it should be pointed out, not entirely independent from the demographic trends under discussion here), there are a number of factors weighing against a significant upsurge in the Russian birthrate--much less a return to earlier, Soviet-era, levels of fertility. First, Russia's poor and declining overall health patterns extend to the area of reproductive health. Notably, involuntary infertility is a more significant problem for Russia than for any other Western country. And the problem is getting worse, not better. To be sure, data on infertility for contemporary Russia are not entirely reliable. According to some recent reports, however, 13 percent of Russia's married couples of childbearing age are infertile--nearly twice the 7 percent for the United States in 1995 as reported by the National Center for Health Statistics. Other Russian sources point to an even greater prevalence of infertility today, with numbers ranging as high as 30 percent of all males and females of childbearing age. Whatever the true level, medical diagnoses of infertility in Russia are clearly on the rise--suggesting that the 13 percent estimate and others of its ilk are more than just a statistical fluke. With respect more specifically to female infertility, Russia suffers today from two pronounced and highly unusual risks. For one thing, Russian womanhood has, quite literally, been scarred by the country's extraordinary popular reliance on abortion as a primary means of contraception--with the abortions in question conducted under the less-than-exemplary standards of Soviet and post-Soviet medicine. A Russian woman nowadays can expect to have more abortions than births over the course of her childbearing years. In 1988, at the end of the Soviet era, Russian women underwent an officially tabulated 4.6 million abortions--two for every live birth. In 2002, the country officially reported 1.7 million abortions--over 120 for every 100 live births. And the problem of involuntary infertility in Russia today is further exacerbated by the current explosive spread of potentially curable sexually transmitted infections (STIs). According to official figures, for example, the incidence of syphilis in 2001 was one hundred times higher in Russia than in Germany, and several hundred times higher for Russia than a number of other European countries. One recent survey in St. Petersburg calculated that 15 percent of the college students questioned had at least one sexually transmitted disease. Since untreated or inadequately treated STIs can result in sterility the potential for inadvertent impediments to childbearing for Russia's young men and women due to such infections could be appreciable. A second obstacle to an increase in the Russian birthrate is the Russian family itself. Russian patterns of family formation have been evolving markedly over the past generation--and not in a direction conducive to larger families. Simply put, young Russians are now much less likely to marry--and ever more likely to divorce if they do. Between 1981 and 2001, marriage rates fell by over one third, while divorce rates rose by one third. In 2001, Russia recorded three divorces for every four new marriages--a breakup ratio even higher than Scandinavia's. The human import of these trends can perhaps be better understood by thinking in terms of a woman's odds of getting married or divorced. In 1990, under Russia's then-prevailing nuptiality patterns, marriage was almost universal--and the odds of eventually divorcing were about 40 percent. By 1995, the odds of getting married were down to 75 percent--while the odds of eventual divorce had risen to 50 percent. In just five years a Russian woman's odds of forming a lasting marriage dropped from about three in five to three in eight. Since then, the odds of having a lasting marriage in Russia seem to have declined still further. At the same time that Russian marriages were becoming less common--and more fragile--the disposition to childbearing outside of marriage was increasing. In 1987--the recent high-water mark for Russian fertility--about 13 percent of the country's newborns were out of wedlock. By 2001, the proportion had more than doubled, to nearly 29 percent. The overwhelming majority of Russia's newly emerging cohort of illegitimate children, it seems, were being raised by single mothers. Consensual unions and cohabitation still account for the living arrangements of only a tiny fraction of Russia's young adults. The rapid decline of the two-parent family in contemporary Russia undercuts prospects for substantial increases in national fertility levels. Relative to available household resources, all other things being equal, raising children in a mother-only family is a much more expensive and difficult proposition than in an intact family. It is true that fertility rates in Russia are currently 20 to 30 percent below those of the Scandinavian countries, even though the level of marital commitment in the Nordic countries is low, and the level of illegitimacy is high. But unlike the Scandinavian welfare states, Russia does not provide generous public benefits to help mothers raise their young children--nor could the Russian state afford to do so even if it were so inclined. The third, and perhaps most important, obstacle to higher Russian birthrates is that Russian fertility rates are reflective of larger European trends. True, Russia's levels currently list toward the lower end of the European spectrum. Even so, they are actually higher than for some other post-Communist areas whose "transitions" to democracy and free markets look rather more complete--and are scarcely lower than the current levels in a number of the established market democracies of the European Union. Viewed over a longer horizon, Russia's postwar fertility levels and trends look altogether "European." Although the precise timing of Russia's fertility decline is distinct, Russia has nevertheless clearly followed the same general path as Italy, Spain, and Germany. From a European perspective, in short, Russia's current levels of extremely low fertility would hardly stand out as exceptional. It is thus far from obvious that the further suffusion into Russia of "European" norms and attitudes about family size (to the extent that such attitudes and norms are not already firmly rooted in Russian soil) should serve to buoy childbearing in the Russian Federation. Quite to the contrary. It is equally possible that an embrace of particular aspects of childbearing patterns currently manifest through much of the European Union (EU) could actually depress birth rates in Russia in coming years. Throughout the EU, for example, the median age at marriage for women is the late 20s, while it is still about 22 in Russia; Russia's median female age at first birth, correspondingly, is distinctly lower than in most EU countries (23 vs. 27 to 29). A shift toward these EU patterns of marriage and maternity would have the immediate effect of postponing births, and thus probably lowering annual fertility further. The grim reaper cometh If Russia's low fertility rates are cause enough for concern, its mortality rates are scandalously high. Broad segments of the Russian populace have suffered a disastrous long-term retrogression in health conditions. A marked deterioration of public health in an industrialized society during peacetime is counterintuitive and highly peculiar. At first glance, the very fact that Russia's mortality catastrophe looks so anomalous might seem to suggest that the problem should be intrinsically remediable--if not positively self-correcting. The particulars of Russia's health and mortality woes, however, underscore just how difficult it will be to achieve even modest improvements in the years immediately ahead--and how vulnerable Russia remains to further degradations of public health. Over the four-plus decades between 1961-62 and 2003, life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by nearly five years for males; it also declined for females, although just slightly, making for an overall drop in life expectancy of nearly three years over this four-decade span. Age-standardized mortality rates cast an even grimmer light on Russia's continuing health crisis: Between the mid 1960s and the start of the twenty-first century, these rates underwent a long and uneven rise, climbing by over 15 percent for women and over 40 percent for men. Russia's upswing in mortality was especially concentrated among its working-age population, and here the upsurge in death rates was utterly breathtaking. Over the three decades between 1970-71 and 2001, for example, every female cohort between the ages of 20 and 59 suffered at least a 30 percent increase in death rates; for men between the ages of 40 and 59, the corresponding figures uniformly reached, and some cases exceeded, 60 percent. What accounted for this peacetime collapse in public health standards? To go by Russia's (admittedly less than perfect) cause-of-death statistics, nearly all of the increase in mortality rates for men--and absolutely all of the increase for women--can be traced to an explosion in deaths attributed to cardiovascular disease (CVD--heart disease plus strokes) and injuries. Between the mid 1960s and the end of the twentieth century, CVD mortality rates in Japan, Western Europe, and North America fell sharply. Russia, by contrast, suffered an explosion of cardiovascular death over the same period. Between 1965 and 2001, Russia's age-standardized death rate for CVD surged by 25 percent for women--and it soared by 65 percent for men. Today, CVD-related mortality in Russia is four times higher than in Ireland, five times higher than in Germany, and eight times higher than in France. As for mortality attributed to injury--murder, suicide, traffic, poisoning, and other violent causes-age-adjusted levels for Russian men and women alike more than doubled between 1965 and 2001. Among contemporary societies at peace, Russia's level of violent deaths places the country practically in a category of its own. For men under 65 years of age, Russia's death rate from injury and poisoning is currently over four times as high as Finland's, the nation with the worst rate in the EU. Russia's violent death rate for men under 65 is nearly six times as high as Belgium's, over nine times as high as Israel's, and over a dozen times that of the United Kingdom. As is well known, men are more likely than women to die violent deaths--but in a gruesome crossover, these death rates for Russian women are now higher than for most western European men. Russia's dismal health record can be explained in terms of a multiplicity of unfavorable social, behavioral, and policy tendencies: pervasive smoking; poor diets; sedentary life styles; increasing social atomization and anomie; the special economic stresses of Russia's "transition"; the unimpressive capabilities of the Soviet medical system and the limited coverage of its successor. At the end of the day, however, it is impossible to overlook the deadly contribution of the Russian love of vodka. From the sixteenth century--when vodka was first introduced to a receptive public--up to the present day, Russians have always demonstrated a predilection to drink heavy spirits in astonishing excess--a fact remarked upon by visiting foreigners for centuries. Russia's thirst for hard liquor seems to have reached dizzying new heights in the late Soviet era, and then again in the early post-Communist era. By 1984, according to some estimates, the per capita level of alcohol intake in Russia was roughly three times as high as in 1913 (that pre-revolutionary era not exactly being remembered as a time of temperance). By the mid 1990s, Russian per capita alcohol intake may have even slightly surpassed its previous, Communist-era, zenith. In 1994, for example, the estimate of pure alcohol consumed by the population aged 15 and older amounted to 18.5 liters per capita annually--the equivalent of 125 cc. of vodka for everyone, every day. As it happens, in recent decades variations in alcohol consumption seem to track fairly closely with changes in Russian mortality (and especially with male mortality)--the former being a leading indicator for the latter. Heavy drinking is directly associated with Russia's appallingly high risk of deadly injury--and Russia's binge drinking habits also seems to be closely associated with death through cardiac failure. At the moment, the expert prognosis for Russian mortality in the years immediately ahead is pessimistic. The U.N. Population Division, for example, estimates the life expectancy for Russian men today to be lower than the average for men from the world's "less developed regions" (such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America)--and though UNPD projections envision improvements for Russia in the coming decades, Russia does not reach the level of the less developed regions until around 2020. The U.S. Census Bureau, for its part, estimates that life expectancy for Russian men over the coming two decades will approximate the levels for their counterparts in Bangladesh and Pakistan--and will remain steadily below the levels anticipated for India. Yet somber as these readings appear, they may nevertheless prove excessively optimistic. The Census Bureau projections for Russian mortality, for example, have tended to err on the high side: Where the Census Bureau projections in 2002 put Russian male life expectancy for 2002 at 62.3 years, Goskomstat's actual data for that year turned out to be three and a half years lower. And although the UNPD is imagining unexceptional improvements in male health levels over the next two decades--less than four years' increase between 2000-5 and 2020-25--there are reasons to think such a goal highly ambitious under Russia's current circumstances. The problem, simply put, is that today's Russians seem to be less healthy than their parents. Consequently, merely managing to re-attain the survival rates reported by that earlier generation will take some doing. It is an accomplishment that cannot be taken for granted. Comparing the mortality schedules of successive birth cohorts in Russia places the problem of "negative health momentum" in even clearer perspective. In industrialized Western societies in the postwar era, younger generations have come routinely to enjoy better survival rates than their predecessors. Sometimes these improvements have been truly dramatic. In contemporary Japan, for example, men born in the early 1950s have, over their life course thus far, experienced death rates roughly half as high at any given age as those that were recorded for the cohort born 20 years before them. By contrast, there has been no improvement in survival schedules for rising birth cohorts among the two generations of Russian men born between the late 1920s and the late 1980s. Quite the opposite: Over its life course, each rising cohort of Russian men seems to be charting out a more dismal mortality trajectory than the one traced by its immediate predecessors. The "negative momentum" apparent in Russia's modern-day mortality trends makes the objective of broad, sustained improvements in public health especially unlikely in the years ahead. And this analysis, it is worth noting, has yet to take into account the possibility of additional new health troubles on the horizon. Yet such problems are, quite plainly, gathering today. Foremost among them may be Russia's still-mounting epidemic of HIV/AIDS. As we have already seen, curable STIs are now rampant in Russia--and generally speaking, epidemic levels of curable STIs seem to serve as a leading indicator for the spread of HIV. Russian authorities have registered a cumulative total of just under 300,000 cases of HIV, while the U.N. Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that over 800,000 Russians were living with HIV as of 2003 (with an upper estimate of 1.4 million). The U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) suggests that the true number as of 2002 could have been as high as 2 million. If the UNAIDS central estimate were accurate, Russia's adult HIV prevalence rate would be over 2 percent; by the NIC's 2002 estimates, it could already have been as high as 2.5 percent in 2002. The future course of Russia's HIV epidemic is likewise clouded in uncertainty. Clearly, though, HIV has the potential to cancel any prospective health progress in Russia over the coming generation. Progress is, of course, to be prayed for--and under the right circumstances, some progress may be achieved. But major reductions in Russia's awful toll of excess mortality do not look to be in the cards any time soon. The tightening demographic straitjacket Russia's demographic trends have unambiguously negative implications for Russian development and security. The ramifications are manifold and far-reaching, some of them complex--but the basic outlines of the more important considerations can be briefly and simply adduced. Russia's lingering health and mortality crisis promises to be a brake on rapid economic development. In the modern era, the wealth of nations is represented, increasingly, in human rather than natural resources--and the richer the country, the more pronounced the tendency for "human capital" to overshadow or replace physical capital in the production process. Human health figures importantly in the overall composition of human capital, and thus the correspondence between human health and economic productivity has been fairly robust. In recent years, to judge by U.N. and World Bank data, an additional year of male life expectancy at birth has been associated with an increment of GNP per capita of about 8 percent. The relationship between health and economic productivity, to be sure, is multidimensional and simultaneous--improved wealth also makes for better health, and does so through a variety of avenues. But it is difficult to see how Russia can expect, in some imagined future, to maintain a western standard of living if its work force suffers from a third-world schedule of survival--or worse. Skeptics might argue that health does not seem to be constraining Russia's economic progress today--recorded growth rates, after all, have been high for the past several years. Perhaps poor health will not overly constrain Russian economic development in the years ahead, since Russia can earn large dividends from the exploitation and sale of its abundant natural resources. But Russia's dependence upon extractive industries only emphasizes just how limited the role of "human capital" is in Russia's current international trade profile. Russia's poor health prospects, furthermore, stand to influence its economic potential far into the future. According to year 2000 survival schedules, for example, a 20-year-old Russian youth had only a 46 percent chance of reaching age 65 (compared with a 79 percent chance for an American counterpart). That discrepancy will surely affect the cost-benefit calculus of investments in education and job training--and not to the benefit of Russia's younger generation or its overall economic outlook. In the short run, the collapse of Russian fertility may have little practical (as opposed to psychological) import for daily life or affairs of state. If, however, extreme subreplacement fertility persists, current and continued childbearing patterns would directly shape the Russian future. In some nontrivial respects, it could materially limit Russian national options. In the decades immediately ahead, for example, Russia looks set to contend with a sharp fall-off in the nation's youth population. Between 1975 and 2000, for example, the number of young men aged 15 to 24 ranged between 10 million and 13 million--but by 2025, in current UNPD projections, the total will be down to barely 6 million. Those figures would imply a 45 percent decrease between 2000 and 2025 in the size of this pivotal population group--as compared with a projected 15 percent decline in Russia's overall population. The military implications of the envisioned disproportionate shrinkage of the age group from which the Russian army draws its manpower are obvious enough. But there would also be serious economic and social reverberations. With fewer young people rising to replace older retirees, the question of improving (or perhaps maintaining) the average level of skills and qualifications in the economically active population would become that much more pressing. And since younger people the world over tend to be disposed toward, and associated with, innovation and entrepreneurial risk-taking, a declining younger population could have intangible, but real, consequences. In a world of still-growing populations and generally improving health conditions, Russia would seem to face an uphill struggle. Between 2000 and 2025, by UNPD medium variant projections, Russia's share of total global population is envisioned as shrinking by a third, from 2.4 percent to 1.6 percent. Over the same period, improvements in Russia's life expectancy are expected to under-perform the global average somewhat. Simply to maintain its share of world output, Russia's per capita economic growth would have to exceed the world's average by 1.6 points a year for the quarter century under consideration to compensate for relative population decline. To some important extent, a country's relative economic potential limits its international political influence and its international security. Russia's demographic prospects thus establish an obvious challenge for the nation over the coming generation. Can it avoid, through compensatory economic policies and foreign policy stratagems, the geopolitical marginalization to which demographic trends alone would seem to consign it? The politics of depopulation Russia's political leaders are by no means incognizant of the demographic vise gripping their nation. The country's politicians and policy makers talk about the nation's population constantly. However, Moscow has done almost nothing worth mentioning to reverse the demographic catastrophe that has been unfolding on Russian soil over the past decade. To the extent that Russian policy makers have concerned themselves with the country's negative natural increase problem, they have focused almost entirely upon the birth rate--and how to raise it. Not surprisingly, this pro-natalist impulse has foundered on the shoals of finance. In plain terms, serious pro-natalism is an expensive business, especially when the potential parents-to-be are educated, urbanized women accustomed to careers with paid recompense. To induce a serious and sustained increase in childbearing, a government under such circumstances must be prepared to get into the business of hiring women to be mothers--and this is a proposition that could make the funding of a national pension system look like pin money by comparison. Consequently, Russia's government has concentrated most of its pro-natalist efforts on attempting to "talk the birth rate up"--and as a century of experience with such official chatter in Western countries will attest, that gambit is almost always utterly ineffectual. In 2003, the Russian government began experimenting with another variant of "pro-natalism on the cheap": a quiet attempt to restrict the previously unconditional availability of abortion on demand. There are, of course, ethical reasons for opposition to the promiscuous destruction of fetuses. But from a strictly demographic standpoint, the dividends derived from a slight and gradual tightening of the rules on pregnancy termination are distinctly limited. Reducing the number of abortions, after all, does not mechanistically increase birth totals. If it did, there should have been a baby-boom in post-Communist Russia. (Remember: Russia had about three million fewer abortions in 2002 than in 1987--but also about a million fewer births.) To the extent that Russia's tentative steps toward the regulation of abortion may be seen as a factor boosting the nation's fertility, the effect would largely be felt through the eventual enhancement of fecundity--which is to say, fewer Russian women would be rendered involuntarily sterile through such procedures in the years ahead. But in the greater scheme of things, that could hardly be described as much of a stimulus. While Russian policy circles trained their attention on a literally fruitless and largely misdirected effort to revitalize the birth rate, they treated the country's catastrophic mortality conditions--upon which sustained interventions would have yielded some predictable results--with an insouciance verging on indifference. Indeed, Russian authorities have adopted a remarkably laissez-faire posture toward the calamitous conditions that currently lead to the "excess mortality" of something like 400,000 of their citizens each year. Russia's devastating cardiovascular epidemic and its carnage from violent death might not be immediately controlled or completely prevented, but their cost could be at least somewhat contained through carefully tailored public policies. Yet government policy makers have shown no interest in pursuing such options. Crisis in democracy Moscow's feckless approach to its ongoing national health emergency would be regarded as a scandal in most foreign quarters. But to Western eyes it also constitutes something of a mystery: How is it possible that such a manifestly inadequate health regimen is tolerated in a still somewhat open and pluralistic political system? The proximate explanation for this puzzle is that, until now, no great political pressure has been brought to bear for correction or adjustment of the government's course--and the absence of such articulated pressures reflects in turn a lack of perceived political concern by the public at large. Russia may have already lost the equivalent of its casualties in two, or more, World War I's through premature mortality since 1992. But as yet there has been almost no public outcry about this peacetime outrage, and none of the dozens of competitive parties in Russia's new electoral environment have seen fit to champion the promotion of the nation's health as its own political cause. This is more than a health crisis. It constitutes nothing less than a fundamental test for Russia's troubled fledgling democracy. This essay is based on the author's "The Russian Federation at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century," NBR Analysis 15, no. 2 and is published with permission of the National Bureau of Asian Research Copyright of The Public Interest, Issue #158 (Winter 2005), National Affairs, Inc. Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, and is a member of the Publication Committee of The Public Interest. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 18:36:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 13:36:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Prospect (UK): Mother tongue Message-ID: Mother tongue http://prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=6608 [No. 106 / Jan 2005] [33]January 2005 | 106 ? [34]Cover story ? [35]Mother tongue What does the fashion for books about the state of the English language tell us? People care about their language because it forms part of their identity, and part of the resistance to changes in English is a resistance to change itself. But correct usage is not an elite affectation; it is a badge of competence Richard Jenkyns Richard Jenkyns is professor of the classical tradition at the University of Oxford, and author of "Westminster Abbey" When you had finished reading your October Prospect, were you purple with rage? One contributor, writing about Gordon Brown, described him as an "heir apparent" who might find that someone else inherited after all. But an heir apparent must necessarily succeed; the term the writer should have used was "heir presumptive." A second contributor discussed why parliament is "like it is"; that should have been "as it is," or so we used to be taught at school. A third contributor wrote about the norms of something being "flaunted," when he meant "flouted." So it seems that even Britain's intelligent conversation is being conducted by people what haven't been learned to talk proper. Fetch me my green ink bottle: I have an article to write. Why do people get so agitated about linguistic misuses and even about changes in the language? Is English in a bad state? Are things getting worse? These questions have been made topical by Lynne Truss's bestselling Eats, Shoots & Leaves and by the spate of books (and a television show) on similar themes by authors hoping to benefit from her success. The subject of John Humphrys's stocking-filler, Lost for Words, is indicated by its subtitle, The Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language. Gobbledygook, by Don Watson, an Australian journalist, is a more serious piece of work; again, the subtitle explains its theme: How Clich?s, Sludge and Management-speak are Strangling our Public Language. Vivian Cook's Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary, produced by Profile, Truss's publisher (and mine), is somewhat different. The subtitle - Or Why Can't Anybody Spell? - may suggest that it is another "why oh why" book. In fact, it is a collection of linguistic facts and oddities assembled by a professor who loves words in both their spoken and written form. It is first-rate bedtime browsing and will surely find a place in many of Britain's most cultivated loos. There is probably little mystery about Truss's success. She is a talented journalist, with a gift for the perky phrase; the book was skilfully packaged; and like other fads, it just caught on. Reviewers in this country seem to have been almost all favourable, but on the other side of the Atlantic the book received a withering dismissal from Louis Menand in the New Yorker. Menand is a very clever man, and hiring him to deal with Truss is like sending for Red Adair to put out the bonfire at the bottom of the garden. He began by observing that Truss's first punctuation mistake comes in her dedication and found many more errors and inconsistencies, as well as poor argument. Some people have taken Truss seriously, but she herself, I think, does not. Her subtitle, The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, is mischievous, since in fact she sensibly takes a fairly relaxed view. Her long diatribe against misplaced apostrophes is a comic rant, to be enjoyed as such, and no more. The interesting issue is not the book itself but the public response to it. Reading these books and other articles, and listening to discussion on the broadcast media, I am struck by how widespread is the sense that we are being hoodwinked. "They" - politicians, academics, captains of industry, management consultants, bureaucrats - are misusing the English language as a way of deceiving us. The idea that language can be manipulated to disguise the truth, and even to control and limit thought, is, of course, one of the themes of George Orwell's 1984. Orwell also explored the topic in his famous essay "Politics and the English language," written in 1946. He took five specimens of recent writing to illustrate "various of the mental vices from which we now suffer." The first is a clumsy and contorted sentence by Harold Laski containing so many double negatives that he seems to have ended up saying the opposite of what he meant to say. The second is from another once celebrated intellectual, Lancelot Hogben, whose vices are dying metaphor, pomposity and facetiousness ("we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables"). The third, from an American essay on psychology, is a typical piece of academic prose. The fourth is taken from a ranting communist pamphlet. The last is from a letter published in Tribune, in which rant, pomposity and facetiousness are majestically combined. Orwell found certain faults common to all of these passages - ugliness, staleness of imagery and lack of precision: "The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing." Has anything changed in the last 60 years? The most obvious difference is in political language. People still distrust the politicians - at a guess, they distrust them more now than they did then - but the rant that Orwell attacked now seems quaint and dated. For him, too much heat was the danger; now the enemies of clarity and honesty are euphemism, waffle and evasion. Perhaps the most depressing part of Orwell's essay, when we read it now, is his sample of academic writing, for prolix and obscure though it is, one's first reaction is to wonder what the fuss is about: it is so much better than a great deal of today's professorial prose. The public suspects that much academic production is fraudulent, and they are partly right. Since one of Orwell's targets was imprecision of thought, it is interesting to observe how frequently the word "precisely" is found in a certain type of academic prose, almost always used where "imprecisely" would be more accurate. You can diagnose weak thought from dead language as you can diagnose firedamp from a dead canary, and "precisely" is a dead adverb. It is an example of what Orwell called a meaningless word, an upmarket version of "literally," as in: "He literally wiped the floor with his opponent." In other terms, it is a bad faith word - a symptom of bluster, vagueness or vacuity. In Orwell's fashion, Humphrys hauls in a couple of public intellectuals for questioning. Their offences are of unequal gravity. One is the sociologist Frank Furedi: the passages cited by Humphrys are indeed ineptly written, but at least Furedi is trying to say something serious. The other culprit is Susan Greenfield, in this case from a popular book. Here are the passages from Greenfield that Humphrys quotes: "These doom-laden imaginings need a pinch of salt. Setting aside the obvious precaution of not volunteering for a brain implant, even if the opportunity for psychokinesis was too valuable to pass over the direct implanting of thoughts would still not necessarily be feasible." "At last, at the turn of the century, IT has finally matured into adjectives such as 'cheap' and 'easy to use,' with the tsunami of applications and knock-on implications it has for our lives." It may seem ghoulish to linger at the scene of these verbal pile-ups, but an accident investigation is called for. The first of these passages begins with an ugly mix of metaphors and proceeds to a sentence that is barely literate. "Setting" is a dangling participle (not easily interpreted, though one realises with a shudder that this part of the sentence is meant to be humorous); "was" should be "were," and a comma is needed after "over." In the clause beginning "even if," I suspect that the word "not" has dropped out after "too valuable," but the sentence is so inarticulate that it is hard to be sure. How can an educated person write so badly? The second extract may supply the answer. The meaning towards which Greenfield is groping is probably this: "IT is now so cheap and easy to use that it is having a big effect on our lives." What on earth does "matured into adjectives such as" mean? Is she trying to say something about use of language? Probably not: the likelihood is that "has matured into adjectives such as" is Greenfieldian for "has become." "Tsunami" is pseudo-sophistication, a sort of gimcrack brightness, like those people who say "smorgasbord" for "variety." Insofar as the word makes any sense at all, that sense is wrong: the writer does not mean to say that the effect of home computers on our lives has been sudden, violent and destructive. We might wonder why she has found it so difficult to say something so simple. But that surely is the answer: it is because the proposition is so simple that the expression is so muddled. If it had been put straightforwardly, we would have seen at once that it was hardly worth making. We all know that cheap computers have made a difference. But they have not made that much difference: "tsunami" is, among other things, a factitious attempt to create a bit of drama. One of the reasons that this is bad prose is that it is dishonest prose: in each of these passages the writer is trying to hide the fact that she has very little to say. That was an extreme case; here is something much more ordinary. I read this the other day in an interview with a well-known figure, talking about industry: "You will never deliver a successful bottom line on a sustainable basis unless you have a vibrant organisational dynamic." I understand the first part of this; it means, "You will not make a profit." But what about the second part? It might mean, "unless your staff are happy in their jobs." Or it might mean something quite different: "unless your people argue vigorously with one another." Or it may be meant as a statement of the obvious: "unless your firm is well run." It is impossible to know. "Vibrant," by the way, is another of those bad faith words - a sure indicator of unconscious insincerity. As it happens, the speaker of these words is an administrator of outstanding force and clarity, and he was merely using the common currency of our day. Some people talk like this of their own accord. When I praised my university's computer service to an eminent American scientist, he agreed that it was "a truly consumer-oriented facility." But there are also political pressures to make us talk like this. For instance, universities are now expected to produce mission statements. That ought to be easy: "We teach, study and write, and try to do these things as well as we can." But of course such plain, frank words will not do, and we are driven to swathe simple meaning in the language of bureaucracy. I am unsure why the language of management, Don Watson's main target, is so deplorable, but it is a serious matter, as it clogs the working of schools, hospitals and other public and private businesses. In the academic world, it may be easier to detect the forces which discourage good, plain English. Modern societies have created large salaried intelligentsias, which are required to keep publishing. Some subject matter is essentially difficult: philosophy, for example, must often be done at a high level of abstraction. But the aim ought always to be to make difficult matters as simple as the subject allows, and the conditions of modern academic life tempt people to do the opposite. History is an almost limitless field, and my impression is that historians usually write well. But the study of popular culture easily tends to statement of the obvious, and its practitioners naturally want to disguise that fact. The English literature industry is so big that in many areas there is not enough material to go around, and here the temptation is to claim that even the most perspicuous authors need the professionals to interpret them. It is like the plumber telling you that it will cost a grand to fix that leaky tap. As for politics, all governments reasonably stress their successes and palliate their failures, but many people seem to feel that the present government is more widely and systematically dishonest with fact and language than any of its predecessors. In my view, this suspicion is justified. To take a small example, Labour has for many years deliberately confused the important distinction between spending and investment by avoiding the former word: Gordon Brown would invest in a packet of Polo mints. Tony Blair himself is one of the two most interesting users of English in politics today. Humphrys refers to a couple of notorious habits: his tendency to change his accent to fit his audience, and his use of sentences without verbs when he wants to empty his language of determinate meaning. His 1999 conference speech on the "forces of conservatism" - incidentally, in its demonising of opponents and its aspiration to make the Labour party the political arm of the British people, perhaps the most fascistic speech ever made by a mainstream British politician - exploited the fact that in spoken English, "conservatism" and "Conservatism" are indistinguishable. In his most recent conference speech, he said, "I can apologise" (for the equivocations over Iraq), and the newspapers next morning reported both that he had apologised and that he had not. Perhaps that was too clever by half, but at least it enabled him to utter the cathartic word "apologise" (and to avoid the plain word "sorry" - apologies are what we send when we cannot attend a committee meeting). Later, in the House of Commons, he declared that he took responsibility for the security services. This sounded bold, but was actually a way of acknowledging formal responsibility while denying real responsibility. The long Latinate word "responsibility," like "apologise," was helpful. The five-letter words which would have got to the heart of the matter were "sorry," "fault" and "blame." The use of smear and sneer words to block open-minded thought has declined since Orwell's time (except for "racist" and perhaps the pejorative use of "politically correct"). But in other respects the situation is no better, and in many ways worse. Much of the current fuss over language, however, is about something different from Orwell's concern, although it is related. Take the examples in my very first paragraph. In none of these cases is the meaning in any doubt; if they are objectionable, it is for other reasons. There is a feeling around which might express itself like this: "Everything's going to the dogs. They aren't taught grammar in schools, they can't spell... and don't you hate the way people say 'ballpark figure' and 'at this moment in time.'" People care about their language because it forms part of their identity. Consider Blair's chameleon shifts of accent. Mass immigration has reminded us about the importance of accent: a person who talks with a native accent is "one of us," whatever his skin colour, while a person with a foreign accent, however well respected, remains a foreigner. On the whole, this is good news, for it suggests that shared habits of speech can help a diverse society to hold together. People's sense of local and national identity is often based on things that were familiar when they were young: policemen in tall helmets, Routemaster buses, roast beef for Sunday lunch. People feel like that about language, and part of the resistance to changes in English is a resistance to change itself. It is also significant that, as Humphrys notes, Americanisms are especially resented. Once the change is complete, however, no one notices. Who now sympathises with the don who, on being told by a visitor that he wanted to contact her, replied: "I am delighted that you have arrived in Oxford. The verb 'To contact' has not."? One of the examples in my first paragraph represents language in transition. The use of "like" as a conjunction is now general even in educated speech, and it may soon become accepted in written English too. It grates on me, but it may not grate on the next generation. In the case of manifest language errors, the rule should be simple: resist as long as you can, but once the battle is lost, surrender. It is still worth trying to keep "media" and "data" as plural words, but it would be silly to say, "Her stamina are remarkable." One of the lessons of books like Lost for Words is that everyone has his own b?te noire (one of mine is b?te noir; one of Orwell's was the use of pretentious foreign phrases). One of Humphrys's is the plural in, for example, "the caller withheld their number." "Aargh!" he says (not all his comments are very sophisticated). But "their" is what we have always said in ordinary speech. True, we used to be taught to avoid this in writing, but if people think that so-called inclusive language is important, it is surely better than the ugly and obtrusive "his or her." Humphrys also hates redundancies like "safe haven" and "future prospect," but although these are faults, they are pretty minor ones. What would he make of Webster? I am acquainted with sad misery As the tanned galley-slave is with his oar. No doubt something lingers here of the original meaning of "sad," which was "persistent," but the dull repetition in "sad misery" movingly expresses the monotonous continuance of the Duchess of Malfi's sorrows. In our ordinary discourse, a little redundancy may help to make meaning clear. Nor should we be automatically hostile to padding, as both Orwell and Humphrys are. In the 16th century, Cranmer gave the liturgy rhythm and dignity, in a language much less polysyllabic than Latin, by repetitions, often yoking together an Anglo-Saxon and a classically derived word: "Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain... perfect remission and forgiveness." Clich?s such as "at the end of the day" and "at this moment in time" have become trite with use, but in origin they were virtuous: they grow out of an instinct to give language shape and flow. There are several misunderstandings about clich?. There are clich?s of thought; I used one in my first paragraph, when I referred to the myth that angry letters to the press are written in green ink. These are like family jokes; they are part of the national conversation, and are not to be regretted. Some clich?s are modestly useful, like "tip of the iceberg." Many are metaphors, and of these, some are plain bad, while others were once fresh but have become stale with time, such as "sick as a parrot." But "over the moon," though now horribly hackneyed, was once rather a charming phrase, with a pleasing touch of the surreal; and there was, I suppose, an allusion to the cow jumping over the moon in the nursery rhyme. The nature of grammar, too, is often misunderstood. When Ernie Wise talked about "the play what I wrote," he was using a grammar, but it was not the grammar of educated English. No native English-speaker would say "the play whom I wrote," a mistake which a foreigner learning the language might well make. That would indeed be contrary to English grammar. Another fact which often confuses people is that grammars include irregularities. Humphrys frets over the form "aren't I," before coming to the sensible conclusion that it is all right. But there was never a problem to start with. "Aren't I" is the correct form in modern English; it is simply an irregularity. We need to distinguish ugly language from ungrammatical language: plenty of language is ugly but grammatically correct. And we also need to distinguish between the grammar of informal speech ("aren't I"), non-standard grammar ("what I wrote"), and incorrect grammar ("whom I wrote"). There is a story of a German spy who was caught because his English was "too correct." If he was caught because the natives' speech was muddled and slovenly, he was unlucky; but if he was speaking like a book, he deserved his capture. Spoken English is different from written English - a point which Humphrys makes well - and the foreigner who has not learned this has not fully mastered the language. Some people stress the importance of grammar, in the sense of educated speech and writing; others, in reaction, deny that it matters, and may even claim that it is an elite conspiracy to keep the proles in their place. A similar reaction insists that the English language is in good health, and that there is no need to be concerned about it. This was the claim made by Jean Aitchison at the time of her Reith lectures in 1996, but she seemed to have no criteria for distinguishing good language from bad. It is certainly wrong to suppose that languages cannot improve or deteriorate, or to deny that different languages have particular strengths and weaknesses. Among the disadvantages of English, for example, are the comparatively inflexible word order, the use of "s" both for the genitive case and for the plural and a general excess of sibilance, the inability to distinguish the singular and plural of the second person, and the awkwardness of having to use "it" for what the French distinguish as il and ce. The strength of English is the variety of its registers. The base of our language is Germanic, but it has been overlaid in three stages by words of Latin derivation: those that arrived in Anglo-Saxon times, those that came from French after 1066, and the abstract vocabulary that entered from the Renaissance onwards. We have cases of two words derived from the same Latin original, such as "frail" and "fragile," or "ransom" and "redemption." Good prose can exploit this range of register. We can use short, plain words or sesquipedalian polysyllables; we may want to use both. We should learn educated English, as we should learn to spell, if only because it is a certificate of competence. Mistakes like "should of" or "flaunt" for "flout" are literally childish: they are the result of people picking up language by imitation, as children do, and misunderstanding what they have heard. We should flaunt the rules of grammar, not flout them, if only to show that we know what we are up to. But there is a nobler reason for knowing the rules, and that is that it enables one to speak more variously and effectively. Language does more than inform: there are occasions when it should be sonorous, poetic, dignified or inspiring; and at times it needs to be blunt and coarse. I said earlier that Tony Blair was one of the two most interesting users of English in present politics; the other is Chris Patten. He speaks and writes with force and elegance; he quoted Shakespeare after losing his seat, but he also understands the value of a drop into the demotic ("gobsmacked"). You cannot drop into the demotic, however, unless you have a height to drop from. Patten's case may suggest that there is a practical advantage to good English. Hardly anyone knows whether he did a good job or not in Brussels, but he has acquired the reputation of a wise statesman, and that surely owes much to his way with words. On the other hand, Blair has been immensely successful in electoral politics, and Patten has not, so maybe the price of good language is respect without power. But there are grounds for being cautiously hopeful. I suspect that behind the fuss about grammar, spelling and clich? there lies a larger uneasiness. The feeling is abroad that government and society are hostile to high culture, or at least uneasy with it; that anything demanding has to be simplified or smoothed out ("accessibility" is the weasel word here); that no serious matter can now be treated seriously, the malaise summed up in the phrase "dumbing down." Humphrys's heart is in the right place, but his book, alas, is itself an example of dumbing down, for it is written in a relentlessly chirpy, folksy prose, as though he were trying to jolly along a class of 14 year olds suffering from attention deficit. Popularisation need not and should not be patronising. Think of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation: Clark was superbly patrician, but the reverse of patronising, for he treated us as people who would want to hear a serious argument, elegantly made. Civilisation was popular, and something of the same kind could be popular again now, for there is in the land a hunger to be more serious. The hungry sheep look up, and it is time for them to be fed; why, there might even be money in it. End of the article From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 18:37:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 13:37:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Of Mice, Men and In-Between Message-ID: Of Mice, Men and In-Between http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63731-2004Nov19?language=printer Scientists Debate Blending Of Human, Animal Forms By Rick Weiss Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, November 20, 2004; Page A01 In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. These are not outcasts from "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the 1896 novel by H.G. Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research. Biologists call these hybrid animals chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. They are the products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal fetuses. Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how nascent human cells and organs mature and interact -- not in the cold isolation of laboratory dishes but inside the bodies of living creatures. Some are already revealing deep secrets of human biology and pointing the way toward new medical treatments. But with no federal guidelines in place, an awkward question hovers above the work: How human must a chimera be before more stringent research rules should kick in? The National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government, has been studying the issue and hopes to make recommendations by February. Yet the range of opinions it has received so far suggests that reaching consensus may be difficult. During one recent meeting, scientists disagreed on such basic issues as whether it would be unethical for a human embryo to begin its development in an animal's womb, and whether a mouse would be better or worse off with a brain made of human neurons. "This is an area where we really need to come to a reasonable consensus," said James Battey, chairman of the National Institutes of Health's Stem Cell Task Force. "We need to establish some kind of guidelines as to what the scientific community ought to do and ought not to do." Beyond Twins and Moms Chimeras (ki-MER-ahs) -- meaning mixtures of two or more individuals in a single body -- are not inherently unnatural. Most twins carry at least a few cells from the sibling with whom they shared a womb, and most mothers carry in their blood at least a few cells from each child they have born. Recipients of organ transplants are also chimeras, as are the many people whose defective heart valves have been replaced with those from pigs or cows. And scientists for years have added human genes to bacteria and even to farm animals -- feats of genetic engineering that allow those critters to make human proteins such as insulin for use as medicines. "Chimeras are not as strange and alien as at first blush they seem," said Henry Greely, a law professor and ethicist at Stanford University who has reviewed proposals to create human-mouse chimeras there. But chimerism becomes a more sensitive topic when it involves growing entire human organs inside animals. And it becomes especially sensitive when it deals in brain cells, the building blocks of the organ credited with making humans human. In experiments like those, Greely told the academy last month, "there is a nontrivial risk of conferring some significant aspects of humanity" on the animal. Greely and his colleagues did not conclude that such experiments should never be done. Indeed, he and many other philosophers have been wrestling with the question of why so many people believe it is wrong to breach the species barrier. Does the repugnance reflect an understanding of an important natural law? Or is it just another cultural bias, like the once widespread rejection of interracial marriage? Many turn to the Bible's repeated invocation that animals should multiply "after their kind" as evidence that such experiments are wrong. Others, however, have concluded that the core problem is not necessarily the creation of chimeras but rather the way they are likely to be treated. Imagine, said Robert Streiffer, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, a human-chimpanzee chimera endowed with speech and an enhanced potential to learn -- what some have called a "humanzee." "There's a knee-jerk reaction that enhancing the moral status of an animal is bad," Streiffer said. "But if you did it, and you gave it the protections it deserves, how could the animal complain?" Unfortunately, said Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel, speaking last fall at a meeting of the President's Council on Bioethics, such protections are unlikely. "Chances are we would make them perform menial jobs or dangerous jobs," Sandel said. "That would be an objection." A Research Breakthrough The potential power of chimeras as research tools became clear about a decade ago in a series of dramatic experiments by Evan Balaban, now at McGill University in Montreal. Balaban took small sections of brain from developing quails and transplanted them into the developing brains of chickens. The resulting chickens exhibited vocal trills and head bobs unique to quails, proving that the transplanted parts of the brain contained the neural circuitry for quail calls. It also offered astonishing proof that complex behaviors could be transferred across species. No one has proposed similar experiments between, say, humans and apes. But the discovery of human embryonic stem cells in 1998 allowed researchers to envision related experiments that might reveal a lot about how embryos grow. The cells, found in 5-day-old human embryos, multiply prolifically and -- unlike adult cells -- have the potential to turn into any of the body's 200 or so cell types. Scientists hope to cultivate them in laboratory dishes and grow replacement tissues for patients. But with those applications years away, the cells are gaining in popularity for basic research. The most radical experiment, still not conducted, would be to inject human stem cells into an animal embryo and then transfer that chimeric embryo into an animal's womb. Scientists suspect the proliferating human cells would spread throughout the animal embryo as it matured into a fetus and integrate themselves into every organ. Such "humanized" animals could have countless uses. They would almost certainly provide better ways to test a new drug's efficacy and toxicity, for example, than the ordinary mice typically used today. But few scientists are eager to do that experiment. The risk, they say, is that some human cells will find their way to the developing testes or ovaries, where they might grow into human sperm and eggs. If two such chimeras -- say, mice -- were to mate, a human embryo might form, trapped in a mouse. Not everyone agrees that this would be a terrible result. "What would be so dreadful?" asked Ann McLaren, a renowned developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge in England. After all, she said, no human embryo could develop successfully in a mouse womb. It would simply die, she told the academy. No harm done. But others disagree -- if only out of fear of a public backlash. "Certainly you'd get a negative response from people to have a human embryo trying to grow in the wrong place," said Cynthia B. Cohen, a senior research fellow at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics and a member of Canada's Stem Cell Oversight Committee, which supported a ban on such experiments there. How Human? But what about experiments in which scientists add human stem cells not to an animal embryo but to an animal fetus, which has already made its eggs and sperm? Then the only question is how human a creature one dares to make. In one ongoing set of experiments, Jeffrey L. Platt at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has created human-pig chimeras by adding human-blood-forming stem cells to pig fetuses. The resulting pigs have both pig and human blood in their vessels. And it's not just pig blood cells being swept along with human blood cells; some of the cells themselves have merged, creating hybrids. It is important to have learned that human and pig cells can fuse, Platt said, because he and others have been considering transplanting modified pig organs into people and have been wondering if that might pose a risk of pig viruses getting into patient's cells. Now scientists know the risk is real, he said, because the viruses may gain access when the two cells fuse. In other experiments led by Esmail Zanjani, chairman of animal biotechnology at the University of Nevada at Reno, scientists have been adding human stem cells to sheep fetuses. The team now has sheep whose livers are up to 80 percent human -- and make all the compounds human livers make. Zanjani's goal is to make the humanized livers available to people who need transplants. The sheep portions will be rejected by the immune system, he predicted, while the human part will take root. "I don't see why anyone would raise objections to our work," Zanjani said in an interview. Immunity Advantages Perhaps the most ambitious efforts to make use of chimeras come from Irving Weissman, director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Weissman helped make the first mouse with a nearly complete human immune system -- an animal that has proved invaluable for tests of new drugs against the AIDS virus, which does not infect conventional mice. More recently his team injected human neural stem cells into mouse fetuses, creating mice whose brains are about 1 percent human. By dissecting the mice at various stages, the researchers were able to see how the added brain cells moved about as they multiplied and made connections with mouse cells. Already, he said, they have learned things they "never would have learned had there been a bioethical ban." Now he wants to add human brain stem cells that have the defects that cause Parkinson's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease and other brain ailments -- and study how those cells make connections. Scientists suspect that these diseases, though they manifest themselves in adulthood, begin when something goes wrong early in development. If those errors can be found, researchers would have a much better chance of designing useful drugs, Weissman said. And those drugs could be tested in the chimeras in ways not possible in patients. Now Weissman says he is thinking about making chimeric mice whose brains are 100 percent human. He proposes keeping tabs on the mice as they develop. If the brains look as if they are taking on a distinctly human architecture -- a development that could hint at a glimmer of humanness -- they could be killed, he said. If they look as if they are organizing themselves in a mouse brain architecture, they could be used for research. So far this is just a "thought experiment," Weissman said, but he asked the university's ethics group for an opinion anyway. "Everyone said the mice would be useful," he said. "But no one was sure if it should be done." From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 18:38:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 13:38:16 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Paul Krugman: Confusions about Social Security Message-ID: Paul Krugman: Confusions about Social Security Woodrow Wilson Schoo, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 The Economists' Voice Volume 2, Issue 1 2005 Article 1 A Special Issue on Social Security http://www.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=ev converted from PDF with http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html Summary There is a lot of confusion in the debate over Social Security privatization, much of it deliberate. This essay discusses the meaning of the trust fund, which privatizers declare either real or fictional at their convenience; the likely rate of return on private accounts, which has been greatly overstated; and the (ir)relevance of putative reductions in far future liabilities. KEYWORDS: Social Security, public finance Introduction Since the Bush administration has put Social Security privatization at the top of the agenda, I'll be writing a lot about the subject in my New York Times column over the next few months. But it's hard to do the subject justice in a series of 700- word snippets. So I thought it might be helpful to lay out the situation as I see it in an integrated piece. There are three main points of confusion in the Social Security debate (confusion that is deliberately created, for the most part, but never mind that for now). These are: * The meaning of the trust fund: in order to create a sense of crisis, proponents of privatization consider the trust fund either real or fictional, depending on what is convenient * The rate of return that can be expected on private accounts: privatizers claim that there is a huge free lunch from the creation of these accounts, a free lunch that is based on very dubious claims about future stock returns * How to think about implicit liabilities in the far future: privatizers brush aside the huge negative fiscal consequences of their plans in the short run, claiming that reductions in promised payments many decades in the future are an adequate offset Without further ado, let me address each confusion in turn. The Trust Fund Social Security is a government program supported by a dedicated tax, like highway maintenance. Now you can say that assigning a particular tax to a particular program is merely a fiction, but in fact such assignments have both legal and political force. If Ronald Reagan had said, back in the 1980s, "Let's increase a regressive tax that falls mainly on the working class, while cutting taxes that fall mainly on much richer people," he would have faced a political firestorm. But because the increase in the regressive payroll tax was recommended by the Greenspan Commission to support Social Security, it was politically in a different box - you might even call it a lockbox - from Reagan's tax cuts. The purpose of that tax increase was to maintain the dedicated tax system into the future, by having Social Security's assigned tax take in more money than the system paid out while the baby boomers were still working, then use the trust fund built up by those surpluses to pay future bills. Viewed in its own terms, that strategy was highly successful. The date at which the trust fund will run out, according to Social Security Administration projections, has receded steadily into the future: 10 years ago it was 2029, now it's 2042. As Kevin Drum, Brad DeLong, and others have pointed out, the SSA estimates are very conservative, and quite moderate projections of economic growth push the exhaustion date into the indefinite future. But the privatizers won't take yes for an answer when it comes to the sustainability of Social Security. Their answer to the pretty good numbers is to say that the trust fund is meaningless, because it's invested in U.S. government bonds. They aren't really saying that government bonds are worthless; their point is that the whole notion of a separate budget for Social Security is a fiction. And if that's true, the idea that one part of the government can have a positive trust fund while the government as a whole is in debt does become strange. But there are two problems with their position. The lesser problem is that if you say that there is no link between the payroll tax and future Social Security benefits - which is what denying the reality of the trust fund amounts to - then Greenspan and company pulled a fast one back in the 1980s: they sold a regressive tax switch, raising taxes on workers while cutting them on the wealthy, on false pretenses. More broadly, we're breaking a major promise if we now, after 20 years of high payroll taxes to pay for Social Security's future, declare that it was all a little joke on the public. The bigger problem for those who want to see a crisis in Social Security's future is this: if Social Security is just part of the federal budget, with no budget or trust fund of its own, then, well, it's just part of the federal budget: there can't be a Social Security crisis. All you can have is a general budget crisis. Rising Social Security benefit payments might be one reason for that crisis, but it's hard to make the case that it will be central. But those who insist that we face a Social Security crisis want to have it both ways. Having invoked the concept of a unified budget to reject the existence of a trust fund, they refuse to accept the implications of that unified budget going forward. Instead, having changed the rules to make the trust fund meaningless, they want to change the rules back around 15 years from now: today, when the payroll tax takes in more revenue than SS benefits, they say that's meaningless, but when - in 2018 or later - benefits start to exceed the payroll tax, why, that's a crisis. Huh? I don't know why this contradiction is so hard to understand, except to echo Upton Sinclair: it's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary (or, in the current situation, his membership in the political club) depends on his not understanding it. But let me try this one more time, by asking the following: What happens in 2018 or whenever, when benefits payments exceed payroll tax revenues? The answer, very clearly, is nothing. The Social Security system won't be in trouble: it will, in fact, still have a growing trust fund, because of the interest that the trust earns on its accumulated surplus. The only way Social Security gets in trouble is if Congress votes not to honor U.S. government bonds held by Social Security. That's not going to happen. So legally, mechanically, 2018 has no meaning. Now it's true that rising benefit costs will be a drag on the federal budget. So will rising Medicare costs. So will the ongoing drain from tax cuts. So will whatever wars we get into. I can't find a story under which Social Security payments, as opposed to other things, become a crucial budgetary problem in 2018. What we really have is a looming crisis in the General Fund. Social Security, with its own dedicated tax, has been run responsibly; the rest of the government has not. So why are we talking about a Social Security crisis? It's interesting to ask what would have happened if the General Fund actually had been run responsibly - which is to say, if Social Security surpluses had been kept in a "lockbox", and the General Fund had been balanced on average. In that case, the accumulating trust fund would have been a very real contribution to the government as a whole's ability to pay future benefits. As long as Social Security surpluses were being invested in government bonds, they would have reduced the government's debt to the public, and hence its interest bill. We would, it's true, eventually have reached a point at which there was no more debt to buy, that is, a point at which the government's debt to the public had been more or less paid off. At that point, it would have been necessary to invest the growing trust fund in private-sector assets. This would have raised some management issues: to protect the investments from political influence, the trust fund would have had to be placed in a broad index. But the point is that the trust fund would have continued to make a real contribution to the government's ability to pay future benefits. And if we are now much less optimistic about the government's ability to honor future obligations than we were four years ago, when Alan Greenspan urged Congress to cut taxes to avoid excessive surpluses, it's not because Social Security's finances have deteriorated - they have actually improved (the projected exhaustion date of the trust fund has moved back 5 years since that testimony.) It's because the General Fund has plunged into huge deficit, with Bush's tax cuts the biggest single cause. I'm not a Pollyanna; I think that we may well be facing a fiscal crisis. But it's deeply misleading, and in fact an evasion of the real issues, to call it a Social Security crisis. Rates of Return on Private Accounts Privatizers believe that privatization can improve the government's long-term finances without requiring any sacrifice by anyone - no new taxes, no net benefit cuts (guaranteed benefits will be cut, but people will make it up with the returns on their accounts.) How is this possible? The answer is that they assume that stocks, which will make up part of those private accounts, will yield a much higher return than bonds, with minimal longterm risk. Now it's true that in the past stocks have yielded a very good return, around 7 percent in real terms - more than enough to compensate for additional risk. But a weird thing has happened in the debate: proposals by erstwhile serious economists such as Martin Feldstein appear to be based on the assertion that it's a sort of economic law that stocks will always yield a much higher rate of return than bonds. They seem to treat that 7 percent rate of return as if it were a natural constant, like the speed of light. What ordinary economics tells us is just the opposite: if there is a natural law here, it's that easy returns get competed away, and there's no such thing as a free lunch. If, as Jeremy Siegel tells us, stocks have yielded a high rate of return with relatively little risk for long-run investors, that doesn't tell us that they will always do so in the future. It tells us that in the past stocks were underpriced. And we can expect the market to correct that. In fact, a major correction has already taken place. Historically, the priceearnings ratio averaged about 14. Now, it's about 20. Siegel tells us that the real rate of return tends to be equal to the inverse of the price-earnings ratio, which makes a lot of sense.1 More generally, if people are paying more for an asset, the rate of return is lower. So now that a typical price- earnings ratio is 20, a good estimate of the real rate of return on stocks in the future is 5 percent, not 7 percent. [1 For those who want to know: suppose that the economy is in steady-state growth, with both the rental rate on capital and Tobin's q constant. Then the rate of return on stocks is equal to the earnings-price ratio. Obviously that's an oversimplification, but it looks pretty good as a rule of thumb.] Here's another way to arrive at the same result. Suppose that dividends are 3 percent of stock prices, and that the economy grows at 3 percent (enough, by the way, to make the trust fund more or less perpetual.) Not all of that 3 percent growth accrues to existing firms; the Dow of today is a very different set of firms than the Dow of 50 years ago. So at best, 3 percent economic growth is 2 percent growth for the set of existing firms; add to dividend yield, and we've got 5 percent again. That's still not bad, you may say. But now let's do the arithmetic of private accounts. These accounts won't be 100 percent in stocks; more like 60 percent. With a 2 percent real rate on bonds, we're down to 3.8 percent. Then there are management fees. In Britain, they're about 1.1 percent. So now we're down to 2.7 percent on personal accounts - barely above the implicit return on Social Security right now, but with lots of added risk. Except for Wall Street firms collecting fees, this is a formula to make everyone worse off. Privatizers say that they'll keep fees very low by restricting choice to a few index funds. Two points. First, I don't believe it. In the December 21 New York Times story on the subject, there was a crucial giveaway: "At first, individuals would be offered a limited range of investment vehicles, mostly low-cost indexed funds. After a time, account holders would be given the option to upgrade to actively managed funds, which would invest in a more diverse range of assets with higher risk and potentially larger fees." (My emphasis.) At first? Hmm. So the low-fee thing wouldn't be a permanent commitment. Within months, not years, the agitation to allow "choice" would begin. And the British experience shows that this would quickly lead to substantial dissipation on management fees. Second point: if you're requiring that private accounts be invested in index funds chosen by government officials, what's the point of calling them private accounts? We're back where we were above, with the trust fund investing in the market via an index. Now I know that the privatizers have one more trick up their sleeve: they claim that because these are called private accounts, the mass of account holders will rise up and cry foul if the government tries to politicize investments. Just like large numbers of small stockholders police governance problems at corporations, right? (That's a joke, by the way.) If we are going to invest Social Security funds in stocks, keeping those investments as part of a government-run trust fund protects against a much clearer political economy danger than politicization of investments: the risk that Wall Street lobbyists will turn this into a giant fee-generating scheme. To sum up: claims that stocks will always yield high, low-risk returns are just bad economics. And tens of millions of small private accounts are a bad way to take advantage of whatever the stock market does have to offer. There is no free lunch, and certainly not from private accounts. The Distant Future The distant future plays a strangely large role in the current discussion. To convince us of the direness of our plight, privatizers invoke the vast combined infinite-horizon unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. Their answer to that supposed danger is to borrow trillions of dollars to pay for private accounts, which supposedly will solve the problem through the magic of high stock returns (a supposition I've just debunked.) And all that borrowing will be harmless, say the privatizers, because the long-run budget position of the federal government won't be affected: payments 30, 40, 50 years from now will be reduced, and in present value terms that will offset the borrowing over the nearer term. I'm all for looking ahead. But most of this is just wrong-headed, on multiple levels. Let me start with the easiest piece: why the distant future of Medicare is something we really should ignore. And bear in mind that most of those huge numbers you hear about implicit liabilities come from Medicare, not Social Security; more to the point, they mostly come from projected increases in medical costs, not demography. Now the main reason medical costs keep rising is that the range of things medicine can do keeps increasing. In the last few years my father and mother-inlaw have both had life-saving and life-enhancing medical procedures that didn't exist a decade or two ago; it's procedures like those that account for the rising cost of Medicare. Long-run projections assume, perhaps correctly, that this trend will continue. In 2100 Medicare may be paying for rejuvenation techniques or prosthetic brain replacements, and that will cost a lot of money. But does it make any sense to worry now about how to pay for all that? Intergenerational responsibility is a fine thing, but I can't see why the cost of medical treatments that have not yet been invented, applied to people who have not yet been born, should play any role in shaping today's policy. Social Security's distant future isn't quite as speculative, but it's still pretty uncertain. What do you think the world will look like in 2105? My guess is that by then the computers will be smarter than we are, and we can let them deal with things; but the truth is that we haven't the faintest idea. I doubt that anyone really believes that it's important to look beyond the traditional 75-year window. It has only become fashionable lately because it's a way to make the situation look more dire. Now let's return slightly more to the world outside science fiction, and ask the question: can we really count purported savings several decades out as an offset to huge borrowing today? The answer should be a clear no, for one simple reason: a bond issue is a true commitment to repay, while a purported change in future benefits is just a suggestion to whoever is running the country decades from now. If the Bush plan cuts guaranteed benefits 30 years out, what does that mean? Maybe benefits will actually be cut on schedule, but then again maybe they won't - remember, the over-65 voting bloc will be even bigger then than it is now. Or maybe, under budgetary pressure, benefits would have been cut regardless of what Bush does now, in which case his plan doesn't really save money in the out years. Financial markets, we can be sure, will pay very little attention to projections about how today's policies will affect the budget 30 years ahead. In fact, we've just had a demonstration of how little attention they will pay: the prescription drug plan. As has been widely noted, last year's prescription drug law, if it really goes into effect as promised, worsens the long-run federal budget by much more than the entire accounting deficit of Social Security. If markets really looked far ahead, the passage of that law should have caused a sharp rise in interest rates, maybe even a crisis of confidence in federal solvency. In fact, everyone pretty much ignored the thing - just as they'll ignore the putative future savings in the Bush plan. What markets will pay attention to, just as they did in Argentina, is the surge in good old-fashioned debt. Privatization is a solution in search of a problem As I've described it, the case for privatization is a mix of strange and inconsistent budget doctrines, bad economics, dubious political economy, and science fiction. What's wrong with these people? The answer is definitely not that they are stupid. In fact, the case made by the privatizers is fiendishly ingenious in its Jesuitical logic, its persuasiveness to the unprepared mind. But many of the people supporting privatization have to know better. Why, then, don't they say so? Because Social Security privatization is a solution in search of a problem. The right has always disliked Social Security; it has always been looking for some reason to dismantle it. Now, with a window of opportunity created by the public's rally-around-the-flag response after 9/11, the Republican leadership is making a full-court press for privatization, using any arguments at hand. There are both crude and subtle reasons why economists who know better don't take a stand against the illogic of many of the privatizers' positions. The crude reason is that a conservative economist who doesn't support every twist and turn of the push for privatization faces political exile. Any hint of intellectual unease would, for example, kill the chances of anyone hoping to be appointed as Greenspan's successor. The subtle reason is that many economists hold the defensible position that a pay-as-you-go system is bad for savings and long-run growth. And they hope that a bad privatization plan may nonetheless be the start of a reform that eventually creates a better system. But those hopes are surely misplaced. So far, everyone - and I mean everyone - who has signed on to Bush administration plans in the hope that they can be converted into something better has ended up used, abused, and discarded. It happened to John DiIulio, it happened to Colin Powell, it happened to Greg Mankiw, and it's a safe prediction that those who think they can turn the Bush drive to dismantle Social Security into something good will suffer the same fate. Paul Krugman won the John Bates Clark medal in 1991--awarded every second year to a single economist--for his work on imperfect competition and international trade. He is now a Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and a regular op-ed columnist for the New York Times. Ph.D. MIT 1977 Letters Commenting on this piece or others may be submitted at http://www.bepress.com/cgi/submit.cgi?context=ev From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 1 18:47:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 13:47:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Index on Censorship: D D Guttenplan: How Many Jews Does It Take...? Message-ID: How Many Jews Does It Take...? : Should freedom of speech stop at Holocaust denial? By D D Guttenplan http://www.indexonline.org/en/news/articles/2005/1/britain-holocaust-rememberance.shtml This article will appear in issue 2/05 of Index on Censorship: Forgive or Forget. As the world commemorates the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz as Holocaust Memorial Day, there are still those who for their own reasons, deny the testimony of history. D D Guttenplan, author of The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case asks: should freedom of speech stop at Holocaust denial? ----------- The ironies of history are seldom subtle. Thus Charles Clarke's announcement, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, that the government will seek to end the centuries-long right of habeas corpus and that henceforth mere suspicion of certain terrorist activities may result in detention. Listening to the Prime Minister's plea that we retain a sense of proportion, and that the new measures will only affect "a handful of people" (though the newspaper accounts suggested that coverage would extend to animal rights activists and Northern Irish militants as well as suspected al-Qaeda cells) one could hardly help recalling Martin Niemoller's auto-indictment: `First, they came for the Communists...". So I may perhaps be excused for pointing out that the conflict at the centre of proposals to outlaw Holocaust Denial in Britain -- between freedom of speech and freedom from a form of racist harassment -- has its own history. In 1949 the United States Supreme Court had to decide whether the city of Chicago acted rightly in fining Arthur Terminiello, a Roman Catholic priest, $100 for breaching the peace by making a speech attacking "atheistic, communistic Jewish or Zionist Jews". The record doesn't show whether Terminiello's career as a Jew-baiter extended to Holocaust denial, but his case is relevant to the current debate even without such obvious cues. Robert Jackson, one of the judges who heard Terminiello's appeal, had been chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg. Weimar Germany's failure to defend its constitutional order was still fresh in his mind when Jackson warned his colleagues "if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the Constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact". Not everyone who favours making Holocaust Denial a crime in Britain advances a rational argument for doing so. When Tony Blair said in 1997 that there was "a very strong case" for a law against Holocaust denial he never went into specifics -- an omission which looks prudent now that his government has apparently lost its enthusiasm. Still, while it is unfashionable to say so, I believe there are at least two strong arguments in favor of such a law, and that both arguments deserve to be taken seriously. The first argument is that Holocaust denial is a form of racial abuse directed not just at Jews but at a particularly vulnerable subset of Jews. As someone who spent more time than I liked reading the works of Robert Faurisson, Arthur Butz and David Irving I can attest that this is the case. For all their pseudo-scholarly decoration, the deniers' devotion to historical argument is on a par with Terminiello's contribution to theological disputation. To fail to acknowledge the pain felt by Holocaust survivors at the negation of their own experience -- or to treat such pain as a particularly Jewish problem which need not trouble anyone else -- is to deny our common humanity. Which in many cases is precisely the abuser's aim--not to lure the rest of us into joining in, but simply to further isolate the victims by our indifference. And as a general proposition Jackson was right. Free societies do have not only a right but an obligation to defend themselves. As individuals we are free to emulate Voltaire's willingness "to give my life to make it possible" for someone whose views we detest to continue to express them. But we do not have the right to impose such self-abnegation on our fellow citizens. Jackson's fellow justices needed no reminder of where Jew-baiting could lead. Yet by a 5-4 majority the court overturned Terminiello's conviction, and though I think they were right to do so, the thinness of the margin also seems appropriate. This is not a question where certainty is warranted on either side. In Britain and the United States we regard Free Speech as sacred. Americans venerate the First Amendment, while Britons cite Milton, who in Areopagitica said true Liberty only exists "when free born men / Having to advise the public may speak free". Holocaust denial is currently a crime in Austria, France, Germany, Israel, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania and Switzerland. Do the citizens of those countries value freedom less than we do? Or might other factors be involved? Robert Kahn, author of Holocaust Denial and the Law, points to a "fault time" separating the "common law countries" of the US, Britain, and former British colonies from the "civil law countries of continental Europe". In civil law countries the law is generally more prescriptive. Also under the civil law regime the judge acts more as an inquisitor, gathering and presenting evidence as well as interpreting it. Unlike the Anglo-American adversarial system, where fairness is the primary attribute of justice, and the judge functions as a referee, trials under the continental system aim at arriving at the truth. This divergence has a number of consequences. One of them was on view when David Irving, a British author, sued Deborah Lipsadt, an American academic. Irving claimed that since the Holocaust never happened, it was libellous to call him a Holocaust denier. As the claimant under British law Irving was able to force Lipstadt to prove him wrong by in effect proving the historical actuality of the Holocaust. This put an enormous additional burden on Mr Justice Charles Gray, who in presiding over the trial had to constantly attend to the claims of truth as well as justice. Continental judges also have much greater latitude in taking "judicial notice" -- ie in declaring that certain facts are well-established and need not be proven anew. The result is a system where, by habit if not by aptitude, the courts are more comfortable in simply pronouncing on questions of historical fact. Ultimately, though, it is the difference in historical experience that ought to constrain our attitude to other countries. In Germany and Austria Holocaust denial is not "mere" Jew-baiting but also a channel for Nazi resurgence much like the Hitler salute and the display of the swastika, which are also banned. The case for a ban in Israel should also be obvious, if not beyond argument. Similarly, countries where the experience of occupation and the shame of collaboration still rankle ought to be able to make their own decisions. Blasphemy is still illegal in this country, and though Americans are theoretically free to do all sorts of things no American these days can afford to be smug about anyone else's liberty. Nor, after Bosnia and Rwanda, can we pretend that free speech is an absolute value. Sticks and stones may break bones, but name-calling can clear a path for genocide. Where should we set the balance in Britain? My own view is that the existing laws against incitement to racial hatred are sufficient. Making a special case for Holocaust denial might be justified if British Jews were in jeopardy, or if there were a fascist movement in this country, fueled by Holocaust denial, which posed a genuine threat to democracy. Happily we are far from such dangers, and if we take the Prime Minister at his word and retain our sense of proportion we ought to recognise that we have far more to lose from even such a tiny erosion of our liberties. In 1949 the radical journalist I F Stone described himself as "exactly what Terminiello in his harangues meant by an 'atheistic, communistic, zionistic Jew'. I would not demean myself or my people by denying him the right to say it." Stone's denunciation of judges "who would have permitted some measure of suppression in my protection" as "not men whose championship I would care to have" could have been written of any number of recent Home Secretaries. In rejecting Justice Jackson's analogy between Weimar Germany and post-war America Stone proved a better historian as well as a more robust libertarian. As an American Jew resident in twenty-first century Britain it seems to me that free speech is still worth the risk. D D Guttenplan is the author of The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice and the David Irving Libel Case. London correspondent for The Nation, he is currently writing a biography of I F Stone. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 1 19:09:37 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 11:09:37 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] No missiles or submarines needed Message-ID: <01C5084E.857907A0.shovland@mindspring.com> Any one of those uninspected cargo containers could take a nuke anywhere in the world. If we need to make war to halt proliferation, Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel are the most obvious targets. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 1 19:18:56 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 11:18:56 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Kerrey on Social Security Message-ID: <01C5084F.D25AC5D0.shovland@mindspring.com> If it is true that Social Security money would pump up the market, then the market would also go down when the money is withdrawn to finance retirement expenditures. The market is not magic, and there is no free lunch. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2005 6:00 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] Kerrey on Social Security No, not John Kerry, the smart Kerrey. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006234 Pride and Prejudice "Hell no, we won't go" is the wrong liberal approach on Social Security reform. BY BOB KERREY Tuesday, February 1, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST The late Pat Moynihan used to joke when I asked him why liberals were so reluctant to consider changing Social Security so that it guaranteed wealth as well as income: "It's because they worry that wealth will turn Democrats into Republicans." Leaving aside that possible correlation, it will be a shame if liberal voices, values and ideas are not brought into the debate initiated by President Bush's Social Security reform proposal. To make certain the reforms are done correctly liberal thinking is urgently needed. There is no doubt that Social Security and Medicare are two of liberalism's most enduring and popular triumphs. And there is no doubt that a vocal and influential minority remains true to its strong conservative belief that the Social Security Act of 1935 and the 1965 amendments to this act, which created Medicare and Medicaid, represent socialistic and dangerous interferences with the marketplace. However, liberals are wrong to fear that President Bush's proposal represents a threat to Social Security. I sincerely hope they do not merely defend their proudest achievement. I hope they see that President Bush is giving them an opportunity to finally do something about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. First of all, fears that Social Security will be destroyed are exaggerated. Across all generations and within both major parties, Social Security and Medicare are seen as a vital part of American life. They represent a powerful intergenerational contract between younger Americans in the work force who agree to be taxed on behalf of older, eligible Americans. What makes the contract work is that the expectation of those in the work force is that when they pass the age of eligibility, successive generations of workers will not object to the taxes that must be imposed on them to cover the costs of their income and health benefits. Secondly, President Bush's fears of a bankrupt Social Security and his rhetoric of the program being in financial crisis are also exaggerated. Relatively small changes in taxes and/or benefits would restore the promise to all living beneficiaries--those eligible today and those eligible in the future. Unlike the situation that existed in 1983, when Congress and the president acted to avoid a financial crisis, today's financial problems are relatively small. On the other hand, there are two problems with Social Security that are serious enough to be called a crisis. The first is that in eight years the income from a 12.4% payroll tax will be insufficient to pay the old age, survivor and disability benefits owed at that time. From that point on, Social Security will begin to redeem some of the hundreds of billions of dollars of Treasury bonds it has "accumulated in the trust fund" in order to issue monthly checks to beneficiaries. Though these bonds are far from "worthless," as some critics allege, the picture of them "accumulating in a trust fund" is not accurate either. That is because, in order to convert these bonds into cash, the U.S. Treasury will use the cash from individual and corporate income taxes. While some income taxes are currently used to pay Social Security benefits, the dollar amounts do not pose a serious budgetary challenge. In eight years that will change. Coupled with the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, the annual benefit demands of Social Security will put real pressure on Congress to cut spending on defense and nondefense appropriations. It is at this point in time that the demographic and monetary demands of the baby boom generation will become painfully apparent. The disinvestment in public infrastructure caused by the growth in Medicare and Medicaid will become even worse than it is today. And the nature of this crisis will be considerably more daunting than that faced squarely by Congress and the president in 1983. Liberals, who have silently watched the share of state and federal spending apportioned to the elderly grow at the expense of education, training, child care and research, will be appalled to discover how much their silence has cost them. The second crisis is the one for which liberals are even more urgently needed. This crisis is the shockingly low rates of savings and pitifully inadequate amount of preparation being made by American households for their old age. If liberals were to join this debate and insist upon provisions that would lead to dramatic reductions of the numbers of poor elderly, the outcome could be a dramatically enhanced quality of life for all, reduced dependency upon welfare in old age, and downward pressure on the social costs of growing old. If liberals joined this debate they would insist that the guaranteed transfer payment of Social Security remain intact. With the evidence that trade, technology and immigration are putting downward pressure on unskilled wages, they might even be able to succeed in changing the current benefit formula so that more than 50% of the first $900 of income was replaced. Perhaps they could even convince their Republican colleagues to eliminate penalties that affect stay-at-home women. Liberals would fight to make certain that contributions to private accounts were progressive in order to benefit lower-wage workers. They might even argue that accounts be opened at birth, thus giving Americans the longest possible time to accumulate wealth. No doubt they would insist that investment options be carefully regulated to keep administrative costs and risks as low as possible. And since liberals oftentimes understand the good that markets can do even more than some of their conservative colleagues, they could see the wisdom of changing the tax code so that no income taxes were levied on income that went into these savings accounts. All of these would practically guarantee a muscular market response that would give future Americans larger amounts of insured non-employment income to add to the $800 per month on average they receive from Social Security. None of this will happen if liberals merely shout "hell no, we won't go." The best they can hope for with that strategy is to prevent reform from happening. They should feel no pride of accomplishment if that is the result. Mr. Kerrey, a Democratic former senator from Nebraska, is the president of New School University, in New York City. _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 2 14:25:15 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 06:25:15 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Where are the Iraq exit polls? Message-ID: <01C508EF.F57E7AC0.shovland@mindspring.com> Isn't it suspicious that no one was asked on the way out? What if the exit polls said one thing and the vote count said another? Very embarrassing... Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From n.j.c.bannan at reading.ac.uk Wed Feb 2 15:10:08 2005 From: n.j.c.bannan at reading.ac.uk (Nicholas Bannan) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 15:10:08 -0000 Subject: [Paleopsych] Where are the Iraq exit polls? References: <01C508EF.F57E7AC0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <019001c50939$48d2fd60$6882e186@.rdg.ac.uk> Exit poll operative at the Iraqi elections sounds to me like one of those jokes we used to coin as children in the category Most Dangerous Job In The World. I think the guys could be forgiven for not buying into this aspect of journalism-led Western practice. Is there any evidence that exit polls ever validate the due process? I would estimate that they are as likely to distort it. Nicholas ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "paleopsych at paleopsych. org (E-mail)" Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 2:25 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] Where are the Iraq exit polls? > Isn't it suspicious that no one was asked on the way out? > > What if the exit polls said one thing and the vote count > said another? Very embarrassing... > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Feb 2 19:18:36 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 11:18:36 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] deceptive marketing In-Reply-To: <200502021912.j12JClC25922@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050202191836.22312.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> The influence of deceptive marketing grows in the GOP (those familiar with Newt's GOPAC memo and other PR strategies won't be too surprised): NO SHAME by Sheldon Rampton Thanks to PR Watch forums contributor "El Gringo" for calling our attention to a really atrocious example of dishonest propaganda. The graphic at right is by Linda Eddy, an artist for the website, IowaPresidentialWatch.com. Owned by Roger Hughes, chairman of the Republican Party in Hamilton County, Iowa, the website spent the recent U.S. presidential election calling Democratic candidate John Kerry a habitual liar and comparing him to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels - which is awfully ironic in light of its own promotion of a big lie. The image you see here might lead you to believe that the child in the picture has been made "glad" and secure thanks to the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. As "El Gringo" discovered, however, Lindy Eddy doctored the photograph. The original photo, taken by a journalist, depicted a young girl who had just received bullet wounds during a firefight in which her mother was killed and her father was wounded. Eddy doctored the photo by erasing the little girl's own face (which carries the listless expression you would expect from an injured child) and replacing it with someone else's face to make her look positively radiant and adoring. http://www.prwatch.org/node/3220 ===== My blog: http://shallowreflections.blogspot.com/ Link to my website, including art, flash poetry and fledgling CafePress store (t-shirts, bumperstickers etc): http://www.soulaquarium.net We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell "We don't fear the unknown. We fear how the unknown might cause us to re-evaluate the known." - Unknown __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 2 20:21:10 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 12:21:10 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] deceptive marketing Message-ID: <01C50921.AE62F9E0.shovland@mindspring.com> I wonder why some people think I'm a cynic? :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 11:19 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] deceptive marketing The influence of deceptive marketing grows in the GOP (those familiar with Newt's GOPAC memo and other PR strategies won't be too surprised): NO SHAME by Sheldon Rampton Thanks to PR Watch forums contributor "El Gringo" for calling our attention to a really atrocious example of dishonest propaganda. The graphic at right is by Linda Eddy, an artist for the website, IowaPresidentialWatch.com. Owned by Roger Hughes, chairman of the Republican Party in Hamilton County, Iowa, the website spent the recent U.S. presidential election calling Democratic candidate John Kerry a habitual liar and comparing him to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels - which is awfully ironic in light of its own promotion of a big lie. The image you see here might lead you to believe that the child in the picture has been made "glad" and secure thanks to the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. As "El Gringo" discovered, however, Lindy Eddy doctored the photograph. The original photo, taken by a journalist, depicted a young girl who had just received bullet wounds during a firefight in which her mother was killed and her father was wounded. Eddy doctored the photo by erasing the little girl's own face (which carries the listless expression you would expect from an injured child) and replacing it with someone else's face to make her look positively radiant and adoring. http://www.prwatch.org/node/3220 ===== My blog: http://shallowreflections.blogspot.com/ Link to my website, including art, flash poetry and fledgling CafePress store (t-shirts, bumperstickers etc): http://www.soulaquarium.net We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell "We don't fear the unknown. We fear how the unknown might cause us to re-evaluate the known." - Unknown __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. 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 Feb 2 21:36:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:36:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 039: Ayn Rand Centennial: Patch Still Needed Message-ID: Meme 039: Ayn Rand Centennial: Patch Still Needed sent 2005.2.2 Atlas Shrugged was the book that influenced me more than any other. I read it, at the suggestion of my best friend back home in Colorado, during the Summer between my second and third year in college, that is in 1964, when I was 19. He said, read it a hundred pages a week and you'll be finished by the end of the Summer. At first I thought it was a caricature, and was three or four weeks into the reading before I got caught up in it. I finished it quickly. I had gotten bored with the graduate math courses I had been taking ever since I arrived at the University of Virginia. The beginning graduate level courses were very good, but the later ones struck me as pointless piling up of abstractions. My professors told me that even they lacked intuitive understanding of their research work but nevertheless could crank out papers. So Atlas Shrugged gave me a new direction in life. Most of the books she recommended reading were in economics. At it happened, U.Va. had one of the few free-market graduate economics schools in the world. I convinced James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock on the economics faculty there I could do the work, even though I had had no courses, so I switched majors. However, there was a fight between the "conservative" economics faculty and the Dean of the Graduate School, who was a mediocre political science scholar and a liberal. He was not only envious of Tullock's outstanding scholarship but resented the incursion of economics into his turf of political science. He used his power to block Tullock's promotion to a full professor. Tullock left U.Va. as a result. Next year, Buchanan threatened to leave if Tullock were not brought back. He wasn't and he left, too. I was associated with the Buchanan-Tullock group and was too naive then--and am probably too naive today--to play dissertation politics. I was told, "Mr. Forman, if you give us a dissertation, we will give you a Ph.D.", in other words, no assistance. I went to work for the federal government temporarily in 1969 and am still there! First for the Civil Aeronautics Board, where I came out for deregulation much too early, like the day I arrived. My first boss, Sam Brown, agreed with me, and he gave me my only promotion. His section was abolished after his research questioned the merits of some of the CAB's actions. The Board was abolished at the end of 1984, and I've worked at the U.S. Department of Education ever since. I would keep only that part of it that generates information, which is a public good, or about 1% of it. This attitude, plus the fact that I have worked in policy units and am too hard of hearing to play the policy game even if I were cynically bent on doing so, has kept me stuck at a low level. I am not sure which is the more important factor. Back to the story, I had pretty much forgotten about Ayn Rand by the end of 1984, but I started corresponding with Buchanan about another matter, namely the philosophy of Mario Bunge, who was writing an eight-volume Treatise on Basic Philosophy, designed to show what the world is to actual scientists by clarifying and systematizing their implicit assumptions. Bunge is as Aristotelian as Ayn Rand and far more knowledgeable about science. I told Buchanan that Bunge's "systemism" had the key to reconciling the conflicts between individualism and collectivism. Having moved from Virginia Tech to George Mason, he invited me to write a dissertation under him at GMU, which I did. I got my Ph.D. in 1985, no promotion at work, but an enormous personal satisfaction at having finished a dissertation at last, and under so distinguished an economist. There was only part of a chapter on Ayn Rand in the dissertation, which I expanded into a full chapter in my book, _The Metaphysics of Liberty_ (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic, 1989). The book is on my website, http://www.panix.com/~checker (don't forget the tilde). I lost interest again in Ayn Rand, until I got my first home connection to the Net in early 1995 and spent a great deal of time arguing about Objectivism. On June 7 I sent forth the essay right below. There were a couple of feeble replies and then silence. The need for a patch remains. It took me a few more years to become a Recovered Objectivist, which is to say, just rather bored with the controversies. There are several essays of mine pertaining to Objectivism on my site. I follow my essay with a bunch of items on the centenary that I found from Google News. I do not regret the years I spent wrapped up in Ayn Rand, nor anything about my life, really, and most esp. not the other path down the road of biology and human group differences. I might have been more productive of ideas had I not spent so much time chasing down so many byways. I don't think, bar a major upgrade in the quality of our species, that the grand hopes of a final vision promised by the Enlightenment are going to materialize. I've become a thoroughgoing post-modernist in this respect, and a transhumanist is urging the upgrading. The quest is as important as the vision, anyhow. My autobiography is mostly what I read, readings that I have been sharing with you on my lists, not any partial conclusions that never seem to settle down to anything I can write up. Nietzsche and Peirce had the same problems, not in not writing at all (Wittgenstein stopped after one dissertation and one article) though on a higher level. Thank you, Ayn Rand, for your leading me in the path of righteousness for your name's sake. Wrong metaphor. PATCH NEEDED FOR "THE OBJECTIVIST ETHICS" by Frank Forman Summary I have restudied Ayn Rand's key essay, "The Objectivist Ethics," very closely, but I find a hole in her argument, a gap in her reasoning. She passes from the indisputable fact that dead men make no choices to an entire system of egoist ethics. In what follows, I am going to outline her argument. I shall be arguing that she moves from survival as the supreme aim to happiness. This move requires a patch to cover the hole in her argument, and that patch I denominate the Objectivist psychology, which is at bottom a theory of virtue. But all this is so far mostly implicit. If there are other writings of hers that can provide a fully satisfying patch to cover the hole, or if any readers can provide the patch on their own, we certainly want to hear it. I'm using _The Virtue of Selfishness_ for pagination. Some Concepts **Morality** (here equated with ethics) is "a code of values to guide man's choices and actions--the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life" (p. 13, the first page of the essay, which ends on p. 35). So, she defines a word, "morality," in terms of other words, "code," "value," "guide," "choice," "action," "determine," "purpose," "course," and "life." Most of the words are not likely to give any trouble, at least not here and at least not now. We can argue how comprehensive this code should be, where the principles leave off, and where one just goes ahead and makes cost-benefit estimates or just acts on one's tastes. We can also argue over the various meanings of "determine." But for now, only "value" and "purpose" are apt to give problems. I am not trying to maximize quibbling, rather to isolate a hole in an argument interpreted as best as I can. **Value** "is that which one acts to gain and/or keep" (p. 15). This definition has been quoted many times by Ayn Rand's fans and/or critics. She does not specify the scope of values or which levels they cover: first level desires like tastes, second level desires that are more considered and deal with longer-range achievements, and what may be top-level values having to do with the overarching purpose of one's life. Again, "purpose" is a word that will be causing trouble. In any case, "value" here is simply a matter of what one does in fact act "to gain and/or keep." Life or Death She goes on: "The concept 'value' is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to _whom_ and for _what_? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and values are possible" (p. 15). Well, yes, but the definition seems clear enough: the value is that which *one* *acts* to gain and/or keep. There is an actor and the value is what that actor acts to gain and/or keep. What she means by a "*primary* concept" is not clear. But I don't want to quibble; nor will I quibble that a new concept, "goal," has been introduced. Then she, speaking through John Galt, tells us that "there is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence--and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self- generated action...." (p. 15). Diamonds, of course, are entities and can cease to exist by being heated to a certain temperature, even though the elemental carbon continues, but diamonds cannot act. So perhaps she means values are to be attributed only to entities that can act. On the next page, however, she speaks of her famous hypothetical "indestructible robot" (p. 16), which (she says) can have no values (cannot act to gain and/or keep anything), since it does not face the "one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence." The term "fundamental" has been introduced without definition, so I cannot be certain whether she is mistaken about there being "only one fundamental alternative in the universe." My own view is that indestructible robots violate the laws of physics, but they are at least logical possibilities and they could indeed have values. Life or Reproduction I make these points only because her next paragraph introduces something that is contrary to what we know about biology: "On the _physical_ level, the functions of all living organisms...are actions generated by the organism itself and directed toward a single goal: the maintenance of the organism's _life_" (p. 16). We know from biology (Miss Rand was not up to date) that *reproduction* is every bit as much the goal of organisms, if not more so, as the maintenance of life. True enough, the organism must remain alive long enough to get the sperm or eggs out (sometimes it dies before birth of its offspring is actually achieved), but the goal of continuing to live can be, and often is, overridden by the goal of reproducing. Self = two children = four grandchildren = ... is the governing equation, since the self is going to die anyway. Organisms, often, will go on living after the birth of their children, but the end is to serve getting one's offspring to the point of _their_ reproduction, not to keep oneself alive. Once Mom and Pop have outlived their usefulness, they die; indeed, they are genetically programmed to die, or so at least claim most biologists. So the "fundamental alternative" is not life but reproduction. Now this view of biology, known as the "selfish gene" view, is not without its critics. The older view, which was Darwin's, was that the individual organism is the fundamental and only unit of selection. Now the consensus view is that individual genes are the sole units. But then there are those claiming that units larger than the individual, even entire species and higher taxa, can also be units of evolution. This gives rise to the difficulties of what is called group selection: there must be a genetic disposition to what biologists call "altruism," meaning a willingness to sacrifice one's life for the good of some group larger than the carrier's of one's own genes. But this means that those organisms with such a disposition will be bred out of the population. Group selection can arise in very limited circumstances, nevertheless, but such circumstances are quite rare, or so goes the consensus opinion. I mention all this, since the question of units of selection has never been satisfactorily conceptualized. I should also state that the biological world is rife with cases of apparent "altruism," and accounting for them is regarded by many biologists, including E.O. Wilson, as the central issue of sociobiology. A great deal of apparent "altruism" can indeed be explained away: how big the residual of unexplained instances is, I do not know. I have not browsed sci.bio.evolution enough to check on any debates there. Objectivism will certainly have to be developed much further, or be replaced with a scientific metaphysics of the sort Mario Bunge has developed, or merged with it, to tackle this extremely important and difficult issue. A Truism Ayn Rand continues: "An _ultimate_ [not _fundamental_, but this seems to be no big change] value is the final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means--and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are _evaluated_. An organism's life is its _standard of value_: that which furthers its life is the _good_, that which threatens it is the _evil_.... the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values [recall: that which one acts to gain and/or keep] and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is it own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity _is_, determines what it _ought_ to do. So much for the issue of the relation between "_is_" and "_ought_" (p. 17). Forget for now the problems biologists have with life, not reproduction, being the *fundamental* (or *ultimate*) value. What she is saying, and *all* that she is saying, is that in order for an organism to act to gain and/or keep anything at all, it must stay alive, that *enough* of its actions must be such as to succeed at keeping alive. In other words, though this is a conclusion she did not draw, the organism might act to gain and/or keep any number of things^, but it has to value staying alive and moreover its actions must in fact succeed in its staying alive. ^[What constitutes "things" is unspecified: Ayn Rand just says "that which."] This seems like an utterly harmless truism. Living things are *constrained* in the sorts of action they can undertake, but how constrained is the question. An ethics, at all worthy of the name, can get out of this seemingly harmless truism *only* if the constraints are really vigorous. The task for ethics is to formulate just what these constraints are. Ayn Rand does not go into the full details of what living things must do to get an adequate amount of food, but she does state that plants do so automatically.^ Animals (the higher ones, at any rate) also need consciousness, of at least the sensational variety, to go hunt for their food, and animals higher yet need to operate on the perceptual level. But men have to operate on the _conceptual_ level as well, at least sometimes and perhaps a great deal of the time, if they are to stay alive. Moreover, making concepts is voluntary (p. 20). She never explains why, since she was largely uninterested in biology, but she could have read a statement of V.C. Wynne- Edwards: "Compliance with the social code can be made obligatory and automatic, and it probably is so in almost all animals that possess social homeostatic systems at all. In at least some of the mammals, on the contrary, the individual has been released from this rigid compulsion, probably because a certain amount of intelligent individual enterprise has proved advantageous to the group."^^ ^[So do certain lowly animals like sponges, but I won't quibble.] ^^[V.C. Wynne-Edwards, "Intergroup Selection in the Evolution of Social Systems," _Nature_ 200: 623-26 (1963)). This was available before the paperback edition of _The Virtue of Selfishness_, though no one should blame Ayn Rand for not knowing the article.] Now if Ayn Rand can quote John Galt, I can quote me: "Such an explanation invokes group selection and is bound to be controversial. An alternative explanation might be that a) thinking requires work (uses up costly brain chemicals) and b) free-will circuity allows the animal (or maybe just certain humans) to choose both whether to think and what to think about. Far less brain hardware, in other words, may be required by taking the free will route"^ ^[Frank Forman, _The Metaphysics of Liberty_ (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic, 1989), p. 155).] But now what do we have? Only that, to survive, each individual man must engage in a certain amount of conceptualizing. There is much more to be done before we arrive at the Objectivist ethics as we know it. Ayn Rand goes on in the next few pages to discuss what concepts are ("mental integrations of two or more perceptual concretes" (p. 20)), what reason is ("the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by the senses" (p. 20)), and what thinking is (the process of reasoning) and requires ("a state of full, focused awareness" (p. 20)). She redefines consciousness "in the sense of the word applicable to man" to mean the (voluntary) focusing of his mind. She adds, "the choice 'to be conscious or not' is the choice of life or death" (p. 21). The Hole in the Argument What has happened is that there is an elision between *some* focusing as being necessary to any man's survival and "a state of full, focused awareness." ****It is this elision that constitutes the major hole in the Objectivist ethics and needs to be patched up****. She adds that "a process of thought...is not infallible" (peculiar grammar here) and that man "has to discover how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, _the laws of logic_, to direct his thinking" (pp. 20-21). How man survived the hundreds of thousands of years before he did all these things is not addressed. Again, there is an elision between the minimum necessary and virtuous aspirations. Here is a potential patch: "If some men do not choose to think [at what depth?], but survive by imitating and repeating, like trained animals, the routine of sounds and motions they learned from others, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by those who did choose to think and discover the motions they are repeating. [This is true of nearly all the thinkers, too.] The survival of such mental parasites depends on blind chance; their unfocused minds are unable to know _whom_ to imitate, _whose_ motions it is safe to follow. _They_ are the men who march into the abyss, trailing after any destroyer who promises them to assume the responsibility of being conscious" (p. 23). Or, you'd better think for yourself, lest you be at the mercy of others. But Ayn Rand, as in many other cases, dichotomizes a continuum: you'd better think and focus to the hilt, or you're a mental parasite and your survival depends on blind chance. She adds presently, "The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals,...by rejecting reason and counting on productive _men_ to serve as their prey. Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment at the price of destruction: the destruction of their victims and their own. As evidence, I offer you any criminal or any dictatorship" (pp. 23-24). (Note that the last sentence here and the last sentence of the previous paragraph leave the individual and discuss social consequences.) Same problem. The hole in her argument, the gap in her reasoning, is still there: this "moment" may very well last an entire lifetime, and it is only a *claim* that if "man is to succeed at the task of survival, if his actions are not to be aimed at his own destruction, man has to choose his course, his goals, his values in the context and terms of a lifetime" (p. 24). And she switches from survival to "man's survival _qua_ man," as opposed to "the momentary physical survival of a mindless brute, waiting for another brute to crush his skull" (p. 24). She adds that a man "_can_ turn himself into [such] a subhuman creature and he _can_ turn his life into a brief span of agony.... But he _cannot_ succeed, as a subhuman, in achieving anything but the subhuman--as the ugly horror of the antirational periods of mankind's history can demonstrate" (pp. 24-25). By again dragging in social consequences of the actions of individuals, she has conflated the individual man with collectivities of them. This, from a prophet of egoism! The hole is still there, but there are ten more pages to go in this essay, as well as in other essays by her and by others like Nathaniel Branden and Leonard Peikoff. And the readers here might supply the patch with their own arguments and evidence. The patch so far is the claim that hoping that others will take up the slack if you default on your thinking is risky. She presents no evidence that the risk is all that great. Her policy is what economists would call extreme "risk aversion": take no chances that others will pick up the slack. But she does not justify this policy. The Objectivist Virtues But there is another way to cover the hole. The patch in the Objectivist ethics is quite implicit in the rest of the essay, which mingles more stuff about the requirements of survival with talk about virtue and happiness. Exercising my brain may not have all that much effect on my life span, after a certain minimal point, but doing so may nevertheless make me better off in some sense. Mental exercise is on all fours with physical exercise: it is self- recommending and you may need specific advice, which you may or may not carry out. So let Ayn Rand stop being our moral *physicist* and become our moral *physician*. The patch between the two I denominate the *Objectivist* *psychology*. "_Value_ is that which one acts to gain and/or keep--_virtue_ is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it. The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics--the three values which, together, are the means to and the realization of one's ultimate value, one's own life--are: Reason, Purpose, Self- Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride. "Productive work is the central _purpose_ [not virtue] of a rational man's life, the central value [not life itself anymore] that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work--pride is the result. "Rationality is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues," and it means "the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action.^ It means one's total commitment to a state of full, conscious awareness, to the maintenance of a full mental focus in all issues, in all choices, in all of one's waking hours...." (p. 25). ^[Can we trust others very much at all? Should be all become our own physicians, if life is the standard of value?] Ayn Rand, the Moral Physician This is Ayn Rand the moral *physician*, not the moral *physicist*, talking.^ It ought to be the job of physicians get their patients actively involved with their own health, rather than just to manage their diseases, to aspire and not just do the minimum.^^ Ayn Rand fits this to a T, and that, I submit, is what her philosophy and her ethics most especially is all about. Her novels are aspirational. She said she was a novelist first. We ought to take her seriously on this. ^[Or should it be moral meta-physicist, with a thesis about life being the standard of value? It was Nathaniel Branden who went on to being a moral *coach*, with his various Institutes. Anyhow, the term metaphysicist should be reserved for Mario Bunge.] ^^[Here I go using the O-word ("ought"), but never mind.] Now watch what happens: Rationality comprises several subvirtues, among them independence, integrity, honesty, and justice. Regards the latter, "one must never seek or grant the unearned or undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit" (p. 26). Fine, but two new concepts, unearned and undeserved, have appeared out of nowhere in an essay that purports to give a foundation for ethics. You and I have a pre- philosophical understanding of what these two words mean. We have gone to Ayn Rand the moral *physician* for advice on how to live, not Ayn Rand the moral *physicist* for elucidation of ideas.^^ ^^[There's similar stuff about the virtues of productiveness and pride that follows in this part of "The Objectivist Ethics," which I do not need to cite.] And what does this moral physician promise us? Happiness. "The basic _social_ principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others--and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that _the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose_" (p. 27). The *physicist* said life was the fundamental purpose; the *physician* holds out happiness. Here's her justification for the switch: "In psychological terms, the issue of man's survival does not confront his consciousness as an issue of 'life or death,' but as an issue of 'happiness or suffering.' Happiness is the successful state of life, suffering is the warning signal of failure, or death. Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man's body is an automatic indicator of his body's welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative--so the emotional mechanism of man's consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering" (p. 25).^ ^[As is the case with thought being volitional, she does not recognize the importance of neurological or evolutionary evidence to verify this harmonious fit. Humans have emotions because the animals we evolved from do, but why animals should burden their brains with an emotional circuit instead of just straightaway doing the right thing as far as survival and reproduction go is a good question, since adding extra circuits has a cost in calories. I tried to get some answers on some other newsgroups but without success.] Cognitive Basis of Emotions What Ayn Rand does claim is that the emotions, in order to pay off in the coin of happiness, must be programmed correctly. And that calls for reason, since man is born without innate ideas.^ Full happiness cannot be obtained unless one thinks to the hilt and thereby ensures that one's values are rational. "If he chooses irrational values, he switches his emotional mechanism from the role of his guardian to the role of his destroyer. The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they _can_ destroy the wisher. If a man desires and pursue contradictions--if he wants to have his cake and eat it, too--he disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his inner life into a civil war of blind forces engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningless conflicts (which, incidentally, is the state of most people today)" (p. 28). (What were things like in Russia, then, I ask.) ^[She is wrong here. Men are afraid of snakes even in countries like Madagascar where there are no poisonous snakes. This fear is an emotional reaction by the mind and therefore, on her own theory of the cognition-emotion link, a piece of innate knowledge about snakes and their dangers.] Something very wrong has happened. An obsessive desire (as opposed to some idle daydreaming) for something one is aware is impossible will surely cause emotional problems. But we all pursue goals that turn out not to be feasible, that contradict "the facts of reality." Ayn Rand almost seems to be imagining a mind^ that has direct access to the truth and will punish emotionally those who do things contrary to this truth. What an incredible machine! Of course, she would deny any such thing; in this very essay, she stated that men are fallible. But, nevertheless, that's what she said. I will leave it to others to specify what she should have said, to figure out what she meant by irrational values. We will still need to know how to choose rational values among the myriad available ones, the only limitation being that they support life. ^[She rarely uses the word brain and almost always says "rational being" instead of "rational animal." Methinks her thought is towards the end of the spiritual pole on the spiritual-materialist continuum, even while she officially rejects the mind-body dichotomy.] The message from Ayn Rand, the moral *physician*, however, is clear enough: be ambitious; set up long term goals that are plausible; get to work; be productive; do things yourself; don't mooch; don't loot; don't swindle. Take pride in your achievements. Above all, be independent. Sounds like good advice to me, but independence comes to me naturally. I think it's in my genes. It gets me into trouble, endlessly, but I keep my self-respect and my sanity. I never did care for all those altruists who thought other people came before me. Indeed, when I first read _Atlas Shrugged_ in 1964, for the first few hundred pages, I thought the book was a modernist satire on these people. But that her advice is for everyone, I do not know. Yes, a lot of people would be happier if they were more daring and independent. That they should all be as independent as Ayn Rand is just a claim of one moral physician and one great novelist. Interpersonal Ethics The rest of the essay moves away from the individual's code for his own life to what most people regard as morality, namely rules for dealing with other people. There is more dichotomizing, which is superb exhortation but bad metaphysics. There is her famous metaphysical claim that "the _rational_ interests of men do not clash-- there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned [that word again!], who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as _traders_, giving value for value" (p. 31). She concludes her essay with political philosophy. The word "right" appears out of nowhere four lines from the bottom on page 32, but then she said she had presented the political theory of Objectivism "in full detail in Atlas Shrugged_" (p. 33). I don't think she did; in fact, I know she didn't. If there is what the metaphysicians among philosophers call "preestablished harmony" among the interests of rational men, this needs to be demonstrated. _Atlas Shrugged_ did not do the job, nor did a later essay, "The 'Conflicts' of Men's Interests." Whatever the holes, Ayn Rand, to her great credit, focused on what is generally called not "ethical egoism" but "metaethical egoism," or the doctrine that any system of morals must be justified to the individual. The problem, "Why be moral?", goes back at least to Socrates, who gave the same answer Ayn Rand did, namely that it's good for your character. Otherwise, a system of morality is something anyone can draw up however he chooses and it will remain an idle set of rules. Ayn Rand knew better. She tried to ground her system on the necessity of keeping alive. Alas, not very much can be deduced from that. But that was Ayn Rand the moral physicist. Ayn Rand the moral physician had a system that was far, far more comprehensive. But it rests upon an implicit Objectivist psychology. Until that psychology is presented, elucidated, and defended (which will involve more neurology, evolutionary biology, and more just plain empirical drudgery than she ever realized), the Objectivist ethics has holes. They need to be patched. And in the attempts to make the patches, the ethics may be get altered quite a bit, but it may also be able to answer many questions it now cannot. 1995 June 7/First Version --------------------- The New York Times > Books > Critic's Notebook: Considering the Last Romantic, Ayn Rand, at 100 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/books/02rand.html?ei=5070&en=086506d4db45b0c0&ex=1108011600&pagewanted=print&position= 5.2.2 CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN What did Ayn Rand want? Today is the centennial of her birth, and while newsletters and Web sites devoted to her continue to proliferate, and while little about her private life or public influence remains unplumbed, it is still easier to understand what she didn't want than what she did. Her scorn was unmistakable in her two novel-manifestos, "The Fountainhead" (1943), about a brilliant architect who stands proud against collective tastes and egalitarian sentimentality, and "Atlas Shrugged" (1957), about brilliant industrialists who stand proud against government bureaucrats and socialized mediocrity. It is still possible, more than 20 years after her death, to find readers choosing sides: those who see her as a subtle philosopher pitted against those who see her as a pulp novelist with pretensions. She divided her world - and her characters - in similarly stark fashion into what she wanted and what she didn't want. Here is what she didn't want: Ellsworth M. Toohey, "second-handers," Wesley Mouch, looters, relativists, collectivists, altruists. Here is what she did want: Howard Roark, John Galt, individualism, selfishness, capitalism, creation. But her villains have the best names, the most memorable quirks, the whiniest or most insinuating voices. At times, Rand even grants them a bit of compassion. Toohey, the Mephistophelean architecture critic in "The Fountainhead," could be her finest creation. And when she argued against collectivism, her cynicism had some foundation in experience: she was born in czarist Russia in 1905, witnessed the revolutions of 1917 from her St. Petersburg apartment and managed to get to the United States in 1926. Her sharpest satire can be found in some of her caricatures of collectivity. But the good guys are another story. Are "Fountainhead's" Roark and "Atlas's" Galt really plausible heroes, with their stolid ritualistic proclamations and their unwavering self-regard? Did Rand really believe that the world should be run by such creators while second-handers (ordinary workers like most of us) humbly deferred? These are not abstract questions. Fifteen million copies of her books have been sold. "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" still sell 130,000 to 150,000 copies a year. In 1999, Rand even made it onto a United States postage stamp. Her moral justifications of capitalism shaped the thinking of the young Alan Greenspan (now Federal Reserve Chairman) and other conservative acolytes. She declared it permissible to proclaim "I want" and to act to fulfill that demand. But the question remains, what did she really want? Certainly not what we have now. Many of the battles she engaged in rage on today. There are still debates about the free market, movements lobbying for collectivism and state power, and confrontations between doctrines of self-reliance and doctrines of self-sacrifice. But the world Rand actually wanted her heroes to build now seems far from revolutionary; it can even seem somewhat quaint, an almost retro fantasy. It was a Romantic utopia, in which the tensions of democratic life are not resolved but avoided. Consider, for example, works of art created by her heroes: Roark's Stoddard Temple in "The Fountainhead" or Richard Halley's Fifth Concerto in "Atlas Shrugged." Rand reportedly had Frank Lloyd Wright in mind when creating Roark; Warner Brothers tried negotiating with Wright (who admired "The Fountainhead") to create the designs that Gary Cooper's Roark would build in the film version. But Rand's descriptions of the temple hardly bring Wright to mind. She describes it as a small building of gray limestone "scaled to human height." It is a "joyous place," open to the world of nature and the city's skyscrapers in the distance. At its far end stands a statue of a naked woman, the novel's heroine, whom Roark loves. The temple, Rand makes clear, is a kind of anti-cathedral, devoted not to a god but to the spirit of man. It may even be a temple that Roark dedicated to himself, or perhaps, to his Self. The same spirit is heard in Halley's Fifth Concerto in "Atlas Shrugged." It too is a joyous celebration, a "symphony of triumph" whose sounds embody the essence of "upward motion," creating a "sunburst of sound," promising the "freedom of release." It is "the song of an immense deliverance," with a "clear, clear, complex melody at a time when no one wrote melody any more." If you love these joyous works, the novels unconvincingly assure us, your worth is certified. If you are left cold by them, then you belong with the looters who try to bring down Roark and drive Halley into exile. The two works are depicted as revolutionary in their threats and promise. The two creators reject their social surroundings and are rejected in turn. Rand's novels have similar aspirations. They too are meant to be monuments to man's spirit, promising his deliverance. They too suffered from rejection (12 publishers turned down "The Fountainhead" before it was published). And for Rand, their reception divided the world into acolytes (her inner circle had a cultic aura) and enemies. But these novels and the art described in them are actually far from revolutionary. They draw on the Romantic myth of the misunderstood artist and derive more properly from the mid-19th century than from the mid-20th. The statue in the Stoddard Temple can seem like a relic of kitschy Romanticism; Halley's waves of climaxing melody sound as if they are a throwback to Wagner; and Rand's novels can read like Romantic melodramas (one of her favorite novelists was Victor Hugo). This is Rand's utopian art: programmatic neo-Romanticism. Rand was not looking forward, but backward; in this, she shares certain tastes with Socialist Realism. Of course, the Romantic style fits Rand's theme, for mid-19th century Romanticism often celebrated the human spirit, dramatizing conflicts between the striving individual and the surrounding world. But those works were revolutionary because they challenged remnants of an aristocratic world; their notes of triumph ushered in a democratic age. Rand wanted instead the restoration of a pre-democratic age. Or more accurately, she was torn about it, and her novels and ideas reflect that ambivalence, a position that is far from unique in contemplating art in a democratic culture. Democracy, for Rand, always seems to verge on being Soviet: a culture of collectivity dominated by a supposed doctrine of equality. It stifles her heroes and motivates her villains. She referred to Toohey as "the genius of modern democracy in its worst meaning." She might have wanted to be the "genius of modern democracy" in its best meaning, leading humanity into a brave new world. In a new brief biography, "Ayn Rand" (Overlook Press), Jeff Britting, an archivist at the Ayn Rand Institute with access to her papers, shows how deeply she was attached to popular tastes. As a precocious child in Russia, she wrote action adventures and was enraptured by silent-film melodrama. She came to the United States to begin a career in the film business. Late in life she was an avid viewer of television's "Perry Mason" and "Charlie's Angels." But she could never convincingly reconcile elite achievement with democratic culture, which is why she so often seems antidemocratic. She wanted heroes who could straddle that divide. And she created heroes who could presumably be celebrated for their elite achievements within democratic society: the entrepreneur heroes like the industrialists of "Atlas Shrugged," or the artist hero in "The Fountainhead" cut from American folklore, as self-reliant as Paul Bunyan. Rand famously said: "This is the motive and purpose of my writing: the projection of an ideal man." But ultimately, these men find their ideals only in isolated rejection of democratic society, as cardboard reincarnations of the Romantic hero. Perhaps Rand really believed democracy was hopeless and wanted a government ruled by such men. Perhaps she never really cared about working any of this out. Or perhaps, in the end, she really didn't know what she wanted. At any rate, the failure to reconcile democratic culture and high achievement has not been hers alone: it is one reason readers are still choosing sides. OPA News Release, 10/2001 New fellowship for study of objectivism established at The University of Texas at Austin http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/01newsreleases/nr_200110/nr_fellowship011016.html October 16, 2001 Contact: Robin Gerrow, 232-2145 spacer [1]latest news from UT Office of Public Affairs P O Box Z Austin, Texas 78713-7509 (512) 471-3151 FAX (512) 471-5812 AUSTIN, Texas--The Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship has established a $300,000 fellowship within the Department of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin to promote the study of Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism. Funds from the fellowship will be used to educate objectivist doctoral students and help them in securing teaching positions, as well as promote the production and dissemination of scholarly works on objectivism. "Academic interest in Ayn Rand's philosophy has been growing, and we are honored to be supporting the Philosophy Department's investment in this new field of scholarship," said John McCaskey, president of the Anthem Foundation. To date, the fellowship has sponsored a graduate student, and has assisted Tara Smith, university associate professor of philosophy, in producing two papers, "The Metaphysical Case for Honesty" and "Money Can Buy Happiness." Future projects to be funded by the fellowship will include the appointment of visiting faculty and the development of distance-learning options. The Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship is a non-profit organization that sponsors teaching, writing and research on Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism through fellowships at universities and colleges at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Schools interested in such fellowships should contact [2]McCaskey. References 2. mailto:mccaskey at stanford.edu --------------- The Objectivism Store -- The Literary Art of Ayn Rand http://www.objectivismstore.com/p-277-the-literary-art-of-ayn-rand.aspx The Literary Art of Ayn Rand by William Thomas The Literary Art of Ayn Rand focuses on Rand as a writer: the brilliantly distinctive stylist, the master of aphorism and symbol, the apostle of essentialistic characterization, the rigorous integrator who insisted that all elements in a work serve a single theme, and the igenious plotter who took pride in constructing her magnum opus as a "stunt" novel of mystery and misdirection. Now in one volume, nine essays by six authors shed new light on the depth and complexity behind Rand's inspiring and entertaining writing. The contributors include: Kirsti Minsaas: "Structural Integration in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged" "The Visual Power of Ayn Rand's Fiction" "The Stylization of Mind in Ayn Rand's Fiction." Susan McCloskey: "Odysseus, Jesus, and Dagny: Ayn Rand's Conception of the Hero" "Work and Love in The Fountainhead" Mimi Reisel Gladstein: "Breakthroughs in Ayn Rand Literary Criticism" Nathaniel Branden: "The Literary Method of Ayn Rand" David Kelley: "The Code of the Creator" Stephen Cox: "The Literary Achievement of The Fountainhead" _________________________________________________________________ The Literary Art of Ayn Rand SKU: OPP-OA043 In Stock: Yes Price: $14.95 ----------- Education | A growing concern http://education.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4315554-108234,00.html Mainstream academic interest in the Russian-born novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand continues to grow around the world, writes David Cohen Friday December 7, 2001 The recent news that the philosophy department at one of America's leading public universities has established a $300,000 fellowship in honour of Ayn Rand offered another reminder - if one were needed - of the growing academic dimension to the international following enjoyed by this rather odd Russian-born novelist-philosopher. The fellowship, sponsored by the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship, has been established at the University of Texas at Austin and will promote the study of Rand's philosophy of objectivism. The funding will be used to educate objectivist doctoral students and help them secure teaching positions. It will also promote the production and dissemination of scholarly works on the late author's anarcho-capitalist ideas. Rand, a self-styled high empress of the libertarian right, who died in 1982 has long enjoyed wide popularity outside academe. Her coterie extends beyond the 30m (and counting, at a pace of several hundred thousand a year) readers who have purchased her books to include such pop stars as Simon Le Bon and the tennis player Billie Jean King, along with an array of trade union bosses, economists and political insiders on both sides of the Atlantic. Probably her most influential disciple is the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, who has said of his old friend: "She taught me that capitalism is not only practical and efficient but also moral." Educators have until now largely been absent from the roll-call, though, perhaps not surprisingly given the scorn Rand seemed to reserve for universities and their faculties, which she often viewed as being intellectually corrupt. Two long-standing exceptions to this general rule have been American-based academic organisations: the Ayn Rand Institute, based in California, and the Objectivist Center, in New York, both of which have produced an impressive amount of material related to her work over the years, particularly a recently published book, The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand, written by David Kelley, a Princeton-trained philosopher. Those groups are largely in-house affairs, however, catering more to Rand's popular following than to academe, while at times also being riven by such ill-feeling over what constitutes the true Ayn Rand message that the former group refuses communication with the latter. Over the past two years, however, a rash of new scholarly books from more mainstream academic sources have appeared on aspects of Rand's aesthetics, moral philosophy, and relevance to such scholarly disciplines as women's studies and the sciences. After years of neglect, in the view of her supporters, her work is finally appearing in a number of general philosophy encyclopaedias and university textbooks as well. The latest issue of a relatively new scholarly publication, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, contains papers written by a dozen or more international academics from prestigious universities, including professors from Britain and continental Europe. Elsewhere on international campuses, if a quick web search is any guide, the list of new student groups from across the world dedicated to Rand's ideas appears to be getting even lengthier than the jumbo-sized neoliberal orations sprinkled throughout her novels and non-fiction. Similar groups now exist in Australia, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and the US. Ayn Rand never looked the type of person to gather such devotion. A diminutive Russian Jew, she was born Alissa Rosenbaum, in St Petersburg in 1905, the daughter of bourgeois parents. She loathed socialism, particularly as she experienced it during her own years as a student at the University of Leningrad, and emigrated to the US when she was 21, changing her name en route to Rand, after the typewriter she brought with her to the New World. She headed to Hollywood and worked as a movie extra and screenwriter, before moving to New York for a succession of jobs for motion picture companies. In 1943 she published The Fountainhead, the best-seller about an idealistic architect who blows up his construction project when he finds its design has been tampered with by yobbish bureaucrats. Fourteen years later came Atlas Shrugged, a 1,084-page epic about a future decade in which big government and trade unions strangle individualism, leading to a strike by the "men of the mind" and the collapse of future society. These novels, like her later non-fictional writings, came underpinned by objectivism, the author's world-view prizing the "virtue" of selfishness and its corollary, laissez faire capitalism. At a sales conference Rand was once asked to systematically define this philosophy while standing on one foot. This she did, defining it thus: metaphysics - reality; epistemology - reason; ethics - rational self-interest; politics - capitalism. Such gestures pretty much defined her style to the end, and her extremely black and white view of life in general. "In this universe everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly," the critic Whittaker Chambers once noted in a brilliantly corrosive review published many years ago in the conservative American magazine National Review magazine. "This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storytelling. And, in fact, the somewhat ferro-concrete fairytale the author pours here is, basically, the old one known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures." A generation on, the accusation of caricature remains, even at a time when Rand's intellectual reputation appears to be on an upward cultural trend elsewhere. Heading the school of Randian naysayers is Jeff Walker, author of The Ayn Rand Cult and a sceptic of the deepest dye. Mr Walker, a Canadian writer, compares Rand to a cult leader, while battering her followers claims about her originality, literary talent and morality. The book contains startling anecdotes drawn from within Rand's inner circle, including descriptions of non-smokers being ostracised from the chain-smoking guru's social gatherings during her lifetime (she later died of lung cancer), and a bizarre love triangle involving Rand and a younger husband and wife team she at one time designated as her intellectual heirs. As for the scholarly value of Rand's work, Mr Walker might just as well have adapted Edward Gibbon's famous view of Thomas Aquinas - her better ideas tend to be borrowed; the words, alas, are entirely her own. He writes that objectivism's greatest intellectual appeal remains with keen minded yet sadly impressionable youths or else platitudinous dullards with a taste for the cult life. In the end, Mr Walker's recently published book may be even more hysterical than the movement he seeks to disparage. What's probably most significant about it, in 2001, is that any student or professor with an interest in debating the kinds of issues it raises can now find haven for the debate in a growing number of institutions of higher learning. ----------- The Ayn Rand Institute: Clarification of ARI's Position on Government Help to Tsunami Victims http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr011=nhuj43n1y2.app7a&page=NewsArticle&id=10728&news_iv_ctrl=1021&printer_friendly=1 Friday, January 7, 2005 On December 30, 2004, the Ayn Rand Institute released as a letter to the editor and as an op-ed a piece that condemned the U.S. government's use of taxpayers' money to help victims of the recent tsunami ("U.S. Should Not Help Tsunami Victims"). That piece was inappropriate and did not accurately convey the Institute's position. We would like to clarify our position. Obviously, the tsunami, with the thousands of innocent victims left in its wake, is a horrible disaster. The first concern of survivors and of those trying to help them is to provide basic necessities and then to begin rebuilding. The American public's predictably generous response to assist these efforts is motivated by goodwill toward their fellow man. In the face of the enormous and undeserved suffering, American individuals and corporations have donated millions of dollars in aid; they have done so by and large not out of some sense of altruistic duty but in the name of the potential value that another human being represents. This benevolence, which we share, is not the same thing as altruism. The ugly hand of altruism--the moral view that need entitles a person to the values of others, whose corresponding duty is to sacrifice their values for that person's sake--did show itself in the petulant demands of U.N. and other officials that "stingy" countries must give more. On their view, the U.S. has no right to the wealth it has produced, because it has produced it; the helpless victims of the tsunami have a right to that wealth, because they desperately need it. This perverse view is not an expression of goodwill toward man. In generously providing aid, the U.S. government should repudiate all such altruistic demands and refuse to associate with the organizations that make them. In a fully free, fully capitalist society--a society toward which ARI works--the government would not have the power to tax citizens and redistribute their wealth for the purpose of charity, domestic or foreign. The government would be restricted to one fundamental function: to protect the citizens' individual rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. To accomplish this, the government would need only a police force and a military to protect citizens from aggressors, and a legal system to adjudicate disputes among citizens who allege that their rights have been infringed. Charity would be left to private individuals and organizations, as it was successfully left in 19th century America (in even a semi-capitalist system, there is no shortage of wealth or of benevolence, as the public's response to the tsunami illustrates). But of all the ways in which our government today fails to uphold individual rights, providing (through compulsory taxation) short-term, emergency relief to foreign victims of a natural disaster is among the most innocuous. It was therefore inappropriate to single out for condemnation the government's offer of assistance. True, it would be preferable to use the aid money for a legitimate function of government, such as to purchase needed military equipment and armor for our soldiers in Iraq, who are being asked to risk their lives to defend our freedom. It is likely, moreover, that the increase in aid offered by our government in the days after the disaster stemmed not from benevolence but from surrender to the altruists' corrupt demand that the U.S. had not sacrificed enough. Nevertheless, thousands of the government's actions are more damaging to our rights. Far worse, for instance, would have been to pour the aid money into government programs and agencies whose very purpose is to violate individual rights, such as into the antitrust division of the Justice Department, which persecutes successful businesses for out-competing other companies on a free market. If one wants to fight the government's growing encroachment on individual rights, such are the areas on which to focus, not emergency relief. The crucial issue in the battle for a free society is to restrict the government to its only legitimate purpose: the protection of individual rights. (The issue of compulsory taxation, the focus of the original piece, is a derivative; it pertains to the appropriate means by which a proper government would finance its activities, and is the last issue to address in establishing a free society. For elaboration, see Ayn Rand's article "Government Financing in a Free Society" in --------------- The evolution of Ayn Rand -- The Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20050201-094832-2692r By Steve Chapman Published February 2, 2005 _________________________________________________________________ Has Ayn Rand gone mainstream? The radical champion of individualism and capitalism, who died in 1982, is no longer an exotic taste. Her image has adorned a U.S. postage stamp. Her ideas have been detected in a new mass-market animated comedy film, "The Incredibles." And today on the 100th anniversary of her birth, there will be a Rand commemoration at the Library of Congress -- an odd site for a ceremony honoring a fierce anti-statist. In her day, Miss Rand was at odds with almost every prevailing American social attitude. She infuriated liberals by preaching economic laissez-faire and lionizing titans of business. She appalled conservatives by rejecting religion in any form while celebrating, she said, "sexual enjoyment as an end in itself." But her novels found countless readers. "The Fountainhead," published in 1943, and "Atlas Shrugged," which followed in 1957, are still in print. In 1991, when the Book of the Month Club polled Americans asking what book had most influenced their lives, "Atlas Shrugged" finished second only to the Bible. In all, Miss Rand's books have sold some 22 million copies and continue selling more than half a million a year. Miss Rand emerged in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the New Deal and World War II -- which were taken as proving the obsolescence of the free market, that prosperity required an all-intrusive government, and that national success demanded subordination of the individual to collective purposes. After the traumas of the 1930s and '40s, America was intent on building a well-ordered welfare state by compromise and consensus. In that setting, Ayn Rand resembled the female athlete in Apple Computer's 1984 Super Bowl commercial, who sprinted into a mass assembly of oppressed drones to hurl a sledgehammer at the Big Brother orating from a giant TV screen -- smashing it and bathing the audience in dazzling light. Miss Rand, a Russian immigrant, saw herself harking back to the Enlightenment values of reason, limited government and personal liberty that fueled the American Revolution. "The United States," she declared, "was the first moral society in history." Her novels were derided by critics, who saw them as interminable philosophical diatribes disguised as melodrama. What she regarded as thoroughgoing consistency struck many readers as overbearing dogmatism. Her political ideas attracted only a fringe following. Outside a tiny band of true believers, few people counted themselves as disciples of Ayn Rand. But many people absorbed much of her thinking and incorporated it into their worldviews. Public figures as diverse as Hillary Clinton, Clarence Thomas and Cal Ripken have cited her influence, on top of millions of other unfamous people. In time, her work bore fruit. By the mid-1970s, wage-and-price controls had wrecked the economy, in perfect accord with Miss Rand's predictions. Her view of capitalism not as a necessary evil but a moral good helped turn public opinion toward free markets, opening the way for the Reagan Revolution. Her celebration of individual joy also echoed in the leftist counterculture of the 1960s, which rebelled against the sterile conformity of the Eisenhower era. However, Ayn Rand had no use for the irresponsible hedonism that spawned the saying, "If it feels good, do it." That was a perversion of her insight that pleasure is not cause for guilt. You can hear Miss Rand even in Bruce Springsteen: "It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive." That's just one illustration of how her influence went beyond economics and political theory. In her eyes, there was no greater good than each person's integrity and self-fulfillment. One of her essay collections had the surprising title, "The Virtue of Selfishness." Looking back, it's hard to recapture how jarring that phrase was a generation ago, when altruism and self-sacrifice were seen as the central elements of an exemplary life. Today, Americans take it for granted that they are entitled to live for their own happiness, without apology. It may seem curious to honor a writer who merely defended free markets, preached the superiority of reason over blind faith and extolled the American ideal of the pursuit of happiness. David Kelley, head of the Rand-oriented Objectivist Center, jokes that he's reminded of the theatergoer who complained that "Hamlet" was full of cliches. Miss Rand's beliefs have been so widely disseminated and absorbed that we have forgotten where they originated. The truth is that for all she did, they are no longer her ideas. To a large extent, they are ours. Steve Chapman is a nationally syndicated columnist. ------------- The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Entertainment http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Entertainment/Books/03SceneBOOK06020205.htm Rand's philosophy, influence still hold weight Cox News Service Last update: February 02, 2005 ATLANTA -- Fay Stephenson's old copy of "Atlas Shrugged" was turned into soggy mush when her basement flooded and ruined a bunch of stored books. Bill Fallin keeps his copy of the novel in his desk and re-reads sections occasionally. Ron Mahre read "The Fountainhead" when he was in college and now plans to give his battered original copy to his 17-year-old daughter Bethany. Like a first rock concert or a first slow dance, some people never forget their first encounter with Ayn Rand, the passionate, controversial author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead," creator of the philosophy called objectivism, patron saint of libertarians (both capital "L" and small "l") and galvanizer of several generations of intellectually inclined teenagers. "I think at that age you're still sort of forming who you are and who you will become," said Stephenson, 49, a former marketing executive, recalling her own teenage infatuation with "Atlas Shrugged" while in high school in New York. There was something rebellious and utopian about Rand's harsh but romantic critique of society, she said, that appeals strongly to young people. Today is Rand's centenary -- the 100th anniversary of her birth -- to be marked with a conference at the Library of Congress in Washington sponsored by The Objectivist Center, and a private party in Atlanta Saturday for the Georgia Objectivists. A new illustrated biography, "Ayn Rand," by Jeffrey Britting in the Overlook Illustrated Lives series will be released, and the new issue of Reason magazine devotes its cover story to re-assessing Rand. Ayn (rhymes with "fine") Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and immigrated to the United States in 1926. She was an extra in movies, including Cecil B. DeMille's "King of Kings," but soon made a name for herself as a writer. The most widely read of her many books are "The Fountainhead," her 1943 novel about an architect with a rigid code of honor, and "Atlas Shurgged," a 1,000-plus page 1957 novel about the greatest achievers of the world going on strike. Huge, overblown, romantic, it's packed with lengthy speeches on philosophy and spawned the catchphrase "Who is John Galt?" (the novel's mysterious hero). Rand died in 1982, but her books continue to sell well -- "Atlas" alone sells more than 150,000 copies a year, with overall sales past 5.5 million, according to the Ayn Rand Institute. In a 1991 Library of Congress public opinon poll, it was cited as the second most influential book ever -- after the Bible. Rand was "a cult figure with plenty of worshippers and plenty of desecrators," contributing editor Cathy Young writes in Reason, noting that she offered her millions of readers "a bold, ardent vision of defiance, struggle, creative achievement, joy and romantic love." Yet Rand's intense celebration of the individual, rationalism and capitalism remains, for many readers, "a way station on a journey to some wider outlook," Young writes. Which is another way of saying that many people go through an "Ayn Rand phase." "You initially get sucked in by the pulpiness of her novels," said Merridith Kristoffersen, 34, a trainer for a real estate company, who read "Atlas" and "Fountainhead" in high school in Florida. "They're kind of racy and lavish, but she's sending a message that's more weighty than just pulp." While still a fan of the novels, Kristofferson said Rand's philosophy of unfettered capitalism wouldn't work in today's society. Jean Crabbe, a stay-at-home mother of three, was so into Rand's novels in high school that she wrote her senior term paper on Rand -- "The Fountainhead of Objectivism," she titled it. "Imagine remembering that after all these years and forgetting so much else," she laughs. She remembers arguing with friends in the early '70s over which was the greater novel -- "Atlas Shrugged" or "Lord of the Rings." "And I have to say now in looking back, maybe they were right," Crabbe said. "Maybe 'Lord of the Rings' was better." Better or not, "Lord" hasn't influenced public policy as much as "Atlas." Rand's promotion of laissez-faire capitalism free of all government regulations made her a fountainhead for many economists and conservative thinkers. Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, no less, wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 1957, responding to the paper's negative review of "Atlas Shrugged" and calling it "a celebration of life and happiness." Greenspan has called Rand "clearly a major contribution to my intellectual development." Like Greenspan's, some love affairs with Rand last a lifetime and are not a "phase." Bill Fallin, 74, read "Atlas Shugged" more than 30 years ago, when he was on the verge of bankruptcy. The book's message inspired him to turn his business life around, and he went on to be president of three companies. "I've guided a lot of people toward that book," Fallin said. "I've probably recommended it to 200 or 300 people over the years." Like many fans, Fallin agrees with only some of Rand's philosophy. Rand was an atheist, but Fallin, like others, says he has no problem being a Christian and also being inspired by Rand's message. During her life, however, Rand would not have stood for such disagreement among her acolytes. Although she preached individualism as the highest value, she demanded that her close followers agree with her every pronouncement or face banishment from her inner circle. "I was overwhelmed when I first read her," Crabbe said. "It seemed like she had the answers and had it all figured out. When you're that age, that's the way you look at the world. It's either/or, with no in-betweens. Now I understand that that's just not realistic." OBJECTIVISM'S MAIN POINTS -- Reality exists as an absolute -- facts are facts, independent of feelings, wishes, hopes or fears. -- Reason is man's only means of perceiving reality, and his only source of knowledge. (A corollary: Faith in God is not a part of reason, and therefore not a part of objectivism.) -- Every man is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. -- The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. The government should act only as a policeman that protects man's rights; it uses physical force only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. -- Condensed from the Web site of the Ayn Rand Institute [51](www.aynrand.org) -------------- Ayn Rand at 100 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3661&print=Y February 2, 2005 by David Boaz David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute, author of [1]Libertarianism: A Primer (Free Press, 1998), and editor of [2]The Libertarian Reader (Free Press, 1998), which includes a lengthy interview with Ayn Rand by Alvin Toffler. Interest in the bestselling novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand continues to grow, 20 years after her death and 60 years after she first hit the bestseller lists with The Fountainhead. Rand was born February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia. In the dark year of 1943, in the depths of World War II and the Holocaust, when the United States was allied with one totalitarian power to defeat another, three remarkable women published books that gave birth to the modern libertarian movement. Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had written Little House on the Prairie and other stories of American rugged individualism, published a passionate historical essay called The Discovery of Freedom. Novelist and literary critic Isabel Paterson produced The God of the Machine, which defended individualism as the source of progress in the world. The other great book of 1943 was The Fountainhead, a powerful novel about architecture and integrity by Ayn Rand. The book's individualist theme did not fit with the spirit of the age, and reviewers savaged it. But the book found its intended readers. Sales started slowly, then built and built. It was still on the New York Times bestseller list two full years later. Hundreds of thousands of people read it in the 1940s, millions eventually, and many of them were inspired to seek more information about Ayn Rand's ideas. Rand went on to write an even more successful novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957, and to found an association of people who shared her philosophy, which she called Objectivism. Although her political philosophy was libertarian, not all libertarians shared her views on metaphysics, ethics, and religion. Others were put off by the starkness of her presentation and by her cult following. Like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, Rand demonstrates the importance of immigration not just to America but to American libertarianism. Mises had fled his native Austria right before the Nazis confiscated his library, Rand fled the Communists who came to power in her native Russia. When a heckler asked her at a public speech, "Why should we care what a foreigner thinks?", she replied with her usual fire, "I chose to be an American. What did you ever do, except for having been born?" George Gilder called Atlas Shrugged the most important novel of ideas since War and Peace. Writing in the Washington Post, he explained her impact on the world of ideas and especially the world of capitalist ideas: Rand flung her gigantic books into the teeth of an intelligentsia still intoxicated by state power, during an era when even Dwight Eisenhower maintained tax rates of 90 percent and confessed his inability to answer Nikita Khrushchev's assertion that capitalism was immoral because it was based on greed. Rands books first appeared when no one seemed to support freedom and capitalism, and when even capitalisms greatest defenders emphasized its utility, not its morality. It was often said at the time that socialism is a good idea in theory, but human beings just arent good enough for socialism. Ayn Rand insisted that socialism is not good enough for human beings. Her books attracted millions of readers because they presented a passionate philosophical case for individual rights and capitalism, and did so through the medium of the vivid, cant-put-it-down novel. The people who read Rand and got the point didnt just become aware of costs and benefits, incentives and trade-offs. They became passionate advocates of liberty. Rand was an anomaly in the 1940s and 1950s, an advocate of reason and individualism in time of big government and conformity. But she was a shaper of the 1960s, the age of do your own thing and youth rebellion; the 1970s, pejoratively described as the Me Decade but perhaps better understood as an age of skepticism about institutions and a turn toward self-improvement and personal happiness; and the 1980s, the decade of tax cuts and entrepreneurship. Throughout those decades her books continued to sell -- 22 million copies over the years, and they still move off the shelves. According to Penguin/Putnam, publisher of her books, sales of Atlas Shrugged exceeded 140,000 copies in 2002, up 10 percent from the previous year. Combined sales of all four of her novels in paperback exceeded 374,000 copies. That level was higher than any year since Rands death in 1982. Add in purchases of hardcovers, book club editions, and Rands nonfiction works, and readers are buying 500,000 copies of her books per year. College students, professors, businessmen, Alan Greenspan, the rock group Rush, and the top economic adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin all proclaim themselves fans of Ayn Rand. Both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged appear on Barnes and Nobles list of the top 50 classic bestsellers, and screenwriters are working on movie scripts for both. In a survey of Book of the Month Club readers for the Library of Congress, Atlas Shrugged came in second to the Bible as the most influential book for Americans today. Recently Rand has been the subject of profiles in USA Today, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and C-SPANs American Writers series. Her name has turned up in novels by Tobias Wolff and William F. Buckley, Jr.; in stories about Playboys 50th anniversary; in Playbill, the theater magazine; in newspaper profiles of her friend Mickey Spillane; in a Showtime movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand, starring Helen Mirren; and in a documentary, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1997. She even appeared on a first-class stamp as part of the Postal Services Literary Arts series. A quotation from Rand greets visitors to the American pavilion at Walt Disney Worlds Epcot Center. Few writers are more popular or more controversial than Ayn Rand. Despite the enormous commercial success of her books, and the major influence shes had on American culture, reviewers and other intellectuals have generally been hostile. Theyve dismissed her support for individualism and capitalism, ridiculed her purple prose, and mocked her black-and-white morality. None of which seems to have dissuaded her millions of readers. Although she did not like to acknowledge debts to other thinkers, Rands work rests squarely within the libertarian tradition, with roots going back to Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Jefferson, Paine, Bastiat, Spencer, Mill, and Mises. She infused her novels with the ideas of individualism, liberty, and limited government in ways that often changed the lives of her readers. The cultural values she championed -- reason, science, individualism, achievement, and happiness -- are spreading across the world. References 1. http://www.catostore.org/index.asp?fa=ProductDetails&method=cats&scid=14&pid=1441021 2. http://www.catostore.org/index.asp?fa=ProductDetails&method=cats&scid=14&pid=144978 ----------------- Reason: Rand-O-Rama: Ayn Rand's long shelf life in American culture http://www.reason.com/0503/fe.rand.shtml March 2005 This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.Nothing she has to say is said in a second-rate fashion. You have to think of The Magic Mountainwhen you think of The Fountainhead. Lorine Pruette, The New York Times Book Review (1943) From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: To the gas chambersgo!.A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie [sic] Nation. Whittaker Chambers, National Review (1957) Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. [The New York Times reviewer] suspiciously wonders about a person who sustains such a mood through the writing of 1,168 pages and some fourteen years of work. This reader wonders about a person who finds unrelenting justice personally disturbing. Alan Greenspan, future chairman of the Federal Reserve, responding to a negative review of Atlas Shrugged, in The New York Times (1957) Its all great, Hef! Exceptdo you really think our readers will dig a nude fold-out of Ayn Rand? Hefner and His Pals, a comic strip in Mad magazine (1967) Like most of my contemporaries, I first read The Fountainhead when I was 18 years old. I loved it. I too missed the point. I thought it was a book about a strong-willed architect...and his love life.I deliberately skipped over all the passages about egoism and altruism. And I spent the next year hoping I would meet a gaunt, orange-haired architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect who would rape me. Or failing that, an architect. I am certain that The Fountainhead did a great deal more for architects than Architectural Forum ever dreamed. Nora Ephron, The New York Times Book Review (1968) He spent several days deciding on the artifacts [that would be found with his dead body]....He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rands The Fountainhead (which would prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by his scorn) and an unfinished letter to Exxon protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card. Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (1977) With acknowledgement to the genius of Ayn Rand liner notes to the Rush album 2112 (1976) JENNIFER GREY: You cant just leave [the girl you impregnated]. MAX CANTOR: I could blow a summer hauling toasted bagels just to bail out some little chick who probably balled every guy in the place.Some people count, and some people dont. [pulls The Fountainhead from his pocket] Read it. I think its a book youll enjoy. But be sure you return itI have notes in the margin. Dirty Dancing, 1987 Lots of girls fell in love with Definitism because of the erotic power of the books. No one wanted to admit how important the sex was, but lets face itthe books were very erotic. There were all these intrigues going on, all these little girls wanting to satisfy their sexual cravings. Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991) MARGE: Maggielikes a bottle of warm milk before nap time. MS. SINCLAIR: A bottle? Mrs. Simpson, do you know what a babys saying when she reaches for a bottle? MARGE: Ba Ba? MS. SINCLAIR: Shes saying I am a leech! Our aim here is to develop the bottle within. MARGE: That sounds awfully harsh. conversation between Marge and the proprietor of the Ayn Rand School for Tots, The Simpsons (1992) LOUIS: I could have you arrested you.creep. Theyd think I put you in jail for beating me up. JOE: I never hit anyone before, I LOUIS: But itd really be for those decisions. It was like a sex scene in an Ayn Rand novel, huh? JOE: I hurt you! Im sorry, Louis. I never hit anyone before, I from Angels in America, by Tony Kushner, conversation between lovers (1992) Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of shit, I am never reading again. police officer Barbrady, South Park (1998) However completely you think you preside over your own schedule, there are inflexibilities there. Inflexibilities which not even one of Ayn Rands heroes could do very much about. William F. Buckley Jr., Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography (2004) Unlikeany other Marvel [Comics] author, [Spider-Man co-creator Steve] Ditko received plotting credit as early as Amazing Spider-Man #25 (1965), an unprecedented concession that was most likely the result of Ditkos contemporaneous discovery of Ayn Rands Objectivism, with its hatred of creative dilution and unearned rewards. Andrew Hultkrans in Give Our Regards to the Atom Smashers!: Writers on Comics (2004) The Incrediblessuggests a thorough, feverish immersion in both the history of American comic books and the philosophy of Ayn Rand.Luckily, though, [writer and director Brad] Birds disdain for mediocrity is not simply ventriloquized through his characters, but is manifest in his meticulous, fiercely coherent approach to animation. A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2004) ----------- Reason: Ayn Rand at 100: Loved, hated, and always controversial, the best-selling author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is more relevant than ever. http://www.reason.com/0503/fe.cy.ayn.shtml March 2005 [20]Cathy Young A hundred years after her birth and nearly 25 years after her death, Ayn Rand remains a fascinating and enigmatic presence. She has been mainstreamed enough to have been honored by a U.S. Postal Service stamp in 1999 and to have been featured on C-SPANs American Writers series in 2002. Her novels figure prominently in readers lists of the 20th centurys greatest books. Notably, in a 1991 survey of more than 2,000 Book-of-the-Month Club members about books that made a difference in their lives, Rands magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, came in secondalbeit a very distant secondto the Bible. Rand, a devout atheist, might have seen that as an insult rather than an honor. Yet in many ways Rand remains an outlier and an oddity on the cultural scene, a cult figure with plenty of worshippers and plenty of desecrators. No other modern author has had such extravagant claims of greatness made on her behalf: Followers of her philosophy, Objectivism, regard her as the greatest thinker to have graced this earth since Aristotle and the greatest writer of all time. Mainstream intellectuals tend to dismiss her as a writer of glorified pulp fiction and a pseudo-philosophical quack with an appeal for impressionable teens. Politically, too, Rand is an outsider: Liberals shrink from her defiant pro-capitalist stance, conservatives from her militant atheism, and conservatives and liberals alike from her individualism. Libertarianism, the movement most closely connected to Rands ideas, is less an offspring than a rebel stepchild. In her insistence that political philosophy must be based on a proper epistemology, she rejected the libertarian movement, which embraced a wide variety of reasons for advocating free markets and free minds, as among her enemies. In recent years, at last, some analysis of Rand has appeared that is neither uncritical adulation nor unrelenting bashing. Some of it has come from unorthodox neo-Objectivists, such as the feminist scholar Mimi Gladstein or the political philosopher Chris Matthew Sciabarra. (The two edited the 1999 book Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, and Sciabarra wrote 1996s controversial Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.) The five-year-old Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, co-founded by Sciabarra, often features essays by mainstream intellectuals that treat Rands legacy in a non-hagiographic way. Two controversial books about Rand the person remain a good place to start for an understanding, but not adulatory, look at her life and work: The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986) by Barbara Branden, no doubt the first-ever sympathetic biography whose subject slept with the biographers husband, and Judgment Day: My Years With Ayn Rand (1989) by Nathaniel Branden, the husband in question. In 1962, when they were still among the faithful, the Brandens co-wrote a book called Who Is Ayn Rand? More than 40 years later, the question still stands. The Appeal of Ayn Rand Reading Rands philosophy can be an exhilarating, head-turning experience; it was for me when I first picked up her nonfiction manifesto For the New Intellectual at the age of 19, two years after coming to the United States from the Soviet Union. (Rand herself was an American immigrant from the Soviet Union, leaving her family behind to move here in 1926.) Rands rejection of the moral code that condemns selfishness as the ultimate evil and holds up self-sacrifice as the ultimate good is a radical challenge to received wisdom, an invitation to a startlingly new way to see the world. While Rand was hardly the first philosopher to advocate an ethos of individualism, reason, and self-interest, no one formulated it as accessibly or persuasively as she didor as passionately. In Rands hands, the virtue of selfishness was not a dry, abstract rationalist construct with a bloodless economic man at its center. It became a bold, ardent vision of defiance, struggle, creative achievement, joy, and romantic love. That vibrancy, more than anything else, accounts for her extraordinary appeal. Politically, Rand wanted to provide liberal capitalism with a moral foundation, to take on the prevalent notion that communism was a noble if unworkable idea while the free market was a necessary evil best suited to flawed human nature. In this she succeeded brilliantly (even if the notion that socialism failed because it has never been properly tried is still alive and well among the intelligentsia). Her arguments against compassionate redistributionand persecutionof wealth have lost none of their power in the decades after they were made. Yet there is a reason Objectivism remains, for most people, a way station on a journey to some wider outlook. Even Nathaniel Branden, who still espouses most Objectivist tenets, has been severely critical of Rands judgmental and contemptuous attitude toward all emotions she deemed irrational, her tendency to glorify emotional repression, and her lukewarm support even for voluntary, non-self-sacrificing mutual aid. The Limits of Ayn Rand Perhaps Rands biggest error was the totalism of her philosophy. Having rightly concluded that the values of the free market were moral, she went on to make the sweeping assertion that those values were the only moral ones, and that all human relations must be based on the principles of trade. Yet there is nothing unreasonable and nothing anti-market or anti-individualist to the belief that individualistic and market-based values need something to complement them. The Victorians emphasized the importance of charity and viewed family and community as havens in a heartless world. This value system had its serious drawbacksfrom preachy sentimentalism to fairly rigid gender roles, with women virtually excluded from economic and intellectual endeavors and relegated to the complementary sphere of love, care giving, and charity. But at least the Victorians recognized the need for a balance and variety of virtues. Politically, too, Rands insistence on de-emphasizing, or even denigrating, family, community, and private charity is not a particularly clever tactic for capitalisms defenders. These are the very institutions that can be expected, in the absence of a massive welfare state, to meet those human needs that people prove unable to satisfy through the market. Rand did claim to be in favor of benevolence, in contrast to altruism; but it would be fruitless to look for providers of private charitable aid among her good guys, except for those who lend a helping hand to a friend. When charity is mentioned in Rands fiction, it is nearly always in a negative context. In The Fountainhead, the chorus of second-handers eager to condemn her heroic, individualist architect protagonist, Howard Roark, include the society woman dressing for a charity bazaar who uses charity as an excuse to flaunt her virtue; in Atlas Shrugged, a club providing shelter to needy young women is mocked for offering help to unworthy sufferers such as drinkers, dope users, and unwed mothers-to-be. Family fares even worse in Rands universe. The virtual absence of children in her work has been noted by many critics, starting with Whittaker Chambers in his infamous roasting of Atlas Shrugged in National Review. Actually, John Galts private utopia in Atlas features a nameless young woman who makes it her career to raise rational children; but this brief passage comes across as little more than a pro forma nod to motherhood. In her 1964 Playboy interview Rand flatly declared that it was immoral to place family ties and friendship above productive work; in her fiction, family life is depicted as a stifling, soul-killing, mainly feminine swamp. Its noteworthy that in The Fountainhead, the heroesRoark, newspaper magnate Gail Wynand, and Roarks troubled lover, Dominique Franconhave all grown up motherless, while the arch-villain, critic Ellsworth Toohey, spent his childhood as his mothers pet and the worthless Peter Keating, who relies on Roark to do his architecture work, has a grotesque caricature of a selfless, smothering, tyrannical mother. The only Randian heroic couple to actually reproduce is the hero of Anthem and his girlfriend, who is pregnant at the end of the dystopian science fiction novelette; but they have the excuse of needing to breed a new race of free men, since the world around them has regressed to post-apocalyptic primitivism and slavery. In its pure form, Rands philosophy would work very well indeed if human beings were never helpless and dependent through no fault of their own. Thus, its hardly surprising that so many people become infatuated with Objectivism as teenagers and grow out of it later, when concerns of family, children, and old agetheir own and their familiesmake that fantasy seem more and more impossible. The Darkness in Ayn Rand In the heyday of the Objectivist movement, Rand used to brush off charges that her ?bermensch heroes were unrealistic by pointing to herself and the Brandens, at one point shouting during a debate, Am I impossible? In fact, what is revealed of Rand in the Brandens biographies dramatically illustrates the gap between ideology and reality in her own life. In the Randiverse, a man whose beloved left him for another would manfully accept her rational decisionmay the best ?bermensch win!and remain friends with her and her new partner. In real life, Rands rational affair with Branden, whom she fantasized as a Galt or Roark come alive, caused devastation all around, to themselves as much as to their spouses. Rands unshakable belief in the power of the human mind led her to refuse to recognize the mental deterioration of her husband, Frank OConnor, and she tormented him with exercises in psycho-epistemology. When she herself was diagnosed with cancer, she refused to disclose her illness publicly, evidently because she believed, according to Barbara Branden, that cancer was the result of philosophical and psychological errors. Rands detractors often brand her a fascist. She is not, of course; but does her work have overtones of a totalitarian or dictatorial mentality? This charge irks even ambivalent Rand admirers, such as Nathaniel Branden, who fully recognize the dogmatism and intolerance in the Objectivist movement. They point out that Rand decisively rejects the use of force except in self-defense. True; but as Branden has observed on the topic of emotional repression, it would be wise to pay attention not just to what Rand says but to what she doesin this case, in her novels. Near the end of Atlas Shrugged, when the heroes go to rescue John Galt from the baddies, female railroad magnate Dagny Taggart calmly and quite unnecessarily shoots a guard who cant decide whether to let her in or not. The man, you see, wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousnessobviously a capital crime. Still more troubling is an earlier passage in Atlas in which bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance lead to a terrible train wreck. Many would say, Rand wryly notes, that the people who died in the accident were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them. Then, in a series of brief portraits, Rand endeavors to show that the passengers were guilty indeed: All of them had benefited from evil government programs, promoted evil political or philosophical ideas, or both. Rand does not advocate their murder, of course (though she sympathetically depicts a trainmaster who chooses not to avert the disaster, partly in revenge against the regulators); but she does suggest that they had it coming. In Atlas and the nonfiction essays she turned to in her final decades, political and ideological debates are treated as wars with no innocent bystanders, and the dehumanization of the enemy reaches levels reminiscent of communist or fascist propaganda. One inevitable consequence of this attitude toward most other human beings is, to quote the title of a George Orwell essay, the prevention of literature. There can be no question that Rand was a highly talented writer with a great gift for plot, description, and yes, characterization. The Fountainhead is a brilliant book, and so is Rands often underappreciated first novel, We the Living, a richly textured, passionate, moving story of life in post-revolutionary Russia. But in these novels Rands philosophy has not yet petrified into dogma. Even the larger-than-life romantic heroes have recognizable human emotions. (Rands detractors often claim that Roark is a robotically unfeeling superman, but consider this passage, when Dominique tells him of her marriage to Peter Keating: It would have been easy, if she had seen a man distorting his mouth to bite off sound, closing his fists and twisting them in defense against himself. But it was not easy, because she did not see him doing this, yet knew that this was being done, without the relief of a physical gesture.) Rands moral scale in The Fountainhead still allows for shades of gray. The power-seeking Gail Wynand is a tragic figure whom Roark loves despite the error of his ways; Dominiques father, Guy Francon, is basically a good guy despite exemplifying none of the Randian virtues; even the despicable Peter Keating merits some sympathy, and his failed romance with his true love, Katie, has some dignity and poignancy. But in Atlas Shrugged, Rands final novel, the ideologue crushes the writer almost completely. While a few characters show occasional glimpses of humanity, most of the heroes are abstractions of greatness, while the villains are subhuman vermin. The story suffocates under endless speechifying and analysis in which each point is flogged to death and each un-Randian idea is reduced to a straw man the heroes can easily beat down and shred. In this effort, all life and beauty are drained from Rands prose style, and we are treated to passages like this one, when industrialist Hank Reardens wife tries to hurt him by telling him she has slept with a man he despises: There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, non-property, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another. The Paradox of Ayn Rand For all her flaws, Rand remains a towering figure on the last centurys cultural landscape. She arose in an era of competing totalitarian ideologies and declared that communism and Nazism were not opposites but evil twins, and that their true opposite was freedom. In an era when collectivism was seen as the way of the future, she unapologetically asserted the worth of the individual and his right to exist for himself, and declared the spiritual dimension of material achievement. In an age of existential doubt, she offered a celebration of creativity, of the human mind, of the joy of life on this earth. (The Fountainhead has a glorious passage in which a young man who is starting to despair of finding beauty or purpose in life is moved and inspired by the sight of Roarks just-finished construction project.) Atlas Shrugged, clunky and extremist though it is, contains some brilliant and powerful pro-capitalist polemicssuch as Francisco DAnconias speech on the meaning of money and the tale of one factorys disastrous experiment in implementing the slogan, From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Rand zealots, and even moderate fans such as the Brandens, are often prone to credit her with almost single-handedly rolling back the tide of socialist ideology in the 20th century. Thats quite an exaggeration, as is the notion that her philosophy sprang whole from her mind like Athena from the skull of Zeus. Still, Rand was the most successful and widely read popularizer of the ideas of individual liberty and the free market of her day. In the 21st century, as we face Islamist terrorism abroad and when public discourse at home often seems dominated by religious conservatism on the right and politically correct pieties on the left, Rands message of reason and liberty, if its stripped of its odder features, could be a rallying point for what the neo-Objectivist philosopher David Kelley, who runs the Objectivist Center, calls Enlightenment-based values. From yet another perspective, Rand can be seen as a great eccentric thinker and writer whose work is less about a practical guide to real life than about a unique, individual, stylized vision, a romantic vision that transforms and transcends real life. Rands philosophy admitted no contradictions or paradoxes in reality; but reality is full of apparently irreconcilable truths. The truth of what Rand said about the heroic human spirit and individual self-determination does not negate the truth that human beings often find themselves at the mercy of circumstances beyond their control and dependent on others through no fault of theirs. The truth of the self-sufficient soul coexists with the truth of the vital importance of human connections. Rand herself was a creature of paradox. She was a prophet of freedom and individualism who tolerated no disobedience or independent thought in her acolytes, a rationalist who refused to debate her views. She was an atheist whose worship of Man led her to see the human mind as a godlike entity, impervious to the failings of the body or to environmental influences. (Nathaniel Branden reports that she even disliked the idea of evolution.) She was a strong woman who created independent heroines yet saw sexual submission as the essence of femininity and argued that no healthy woman would want to be president of the United States because it would put her above all men. This is perhaps how Rand is best appreciated: as a figure of great achievement and great contradictions, a visionary whose vision is one among many, whose truths are important but by no means exclusive. Rand, it is safe to say, would have regarded such appreciation as far worse than outright rejection. But thats just another paradox of life. ------------------------------------- Contributing Editor Cathy Young is a columnist for the Boston Globe. References 20. mailto:CathyYoung63 at aol.com --------------- Reason: Editor's Note: Rand Redux http://www.reason.com/0503/ed.ng.editors.shtml March 2005 Rand Redux Reason does Ayn Rand on her 100th birthday Nick Gillespie Let me admit up front that I'm no great fan of this month's cover girl, Ayn Rand, whose 100th birthday falls on February 2 and whose legacy we analyze on page 22. It's a doubly embarrassing admission: Not only is Rand one of the most important figures in the libertarian movement of which reason is a part, but this magazine's name is an homage to her philosophy, Objectivism, which ascribes a key role to rationality. When a Boston University student named Lanny Friedlander started reason back in 1968 as a mimeographed call to arms--well, let's just say he very much grokked the Russian-born writer. You'd never catch me writing a letter of complaint like the one former Rand acolyte and current Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan sent to The New York Times in 1957 after the paper blasted Atlas Shrugged. Just what was wrong with a novel in which "parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should?" huffed the man who decades later would popularize the term "irrational exuberance." I'm more simpatico with Officer Barbrady, the illiterate cop on South Park who declared, "At first I was happy to be learning to read...but then I read...Atlas Shrugged... because of this, I am never reading again." Yet as Contributing Editor Cathy Young shows in her brilliant essay about "Ayn Rand at 100," Rand continues not merely to draw our attention but to command it. A century after her birth and more than a decade after her death, Rand remains one of the best-selling and most widely influential figures in American thought and culture. As we document in "Rand-O-Rama," she casts a long shadow, not simply providing punch lines for South Park but infusing such recent movie hits as The Incredibles with what a Times reviewer called "a disdain for mediocrity." She is even getting newfound respect from academics. What's the secret of Rand's cultural staying power? At her best, notes Young, Rand provided "liberal capitalism with a moral foundation." That's no small feat in a world that, even after the fall of Nazism, communism, and other collectivist ideologies, still looks with suspicion on economic self-interest. Rand also celebrated the individual in a mass age, creating a series of memorable, compelling characters who embodied or emboldened the aspirations of millions in a time of often stultifying conformity, bureaucracy, and routinization. But as important to Rand's hold on the public imagination is the great gulf between her fictional heroes and the often tawdry, disheartening details of her own biography, especially the cult-like obedience she demanded of her inner circle. In the gap between Rand's soaring ideals and her lived reality, we see in particularly strong relief both the creative power of individual desire and its vast capacity for intolerance and delusion. In a world in which more people have more control over their lives than ever before, that's something to always be pondering. --Nick Gillespie -------------- ESR | January 31, 2005 | The appeal of Ayn Rand http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0205/0205aynrand.htm The appeal of Ayn Rand By Onkar Ghate web posted January 31, 2005 Ayn Rand February 2 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of America's most controversial and inspiring writers, Ayn Rand. She continues to be wildly popular among the young: some 14,000 high school students per year submit entries to essay contests on her novels and, in the past two years alone, high school teachers have requested over 130,000 copies of Anthem and The Fountainhead to use in their classrooms. They know that students respond to her stories and heroes as to few other books. It remains, however, all too common for a young person to be told that his interest in Ayn Rand is a stage he will soon grow out of. "It's fine to believe in that now," the refrain goes, "but wait until you're older. You'll discover that life is not like that." But when one actually considers the essence of what Rand teaches, the accusation that her philosophy is childish over-simplification stands as condemnation not of her ideas but of the adult world from which the accusation stems. The key to Rand's popularity is that she appeals to the idealism of youth. She wrote in 1969: "There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days--the conviction that ideas matter." The nature of this conviction? "That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth." To sustain this youthful conviction throughout life, Rand argues, one must achieve a radical independence of mind. Independence does not mean doing whatever one feels like doing but rather forging one's convictions and choosing one's actions rationally, logically, scientifically. It is refusal to surrender one's ideas or values to the "public interest," as liberals demand, or to the "glory of God," as conservatives demand. It is refusal to grant obedience to any authority, human or divine. The independent mind rejects faith, secular or supernatural, and embraces reason as an absolute. "The noblest act you have ever performed," declares the hero of Rand's last novel, Atlas Shrugged, "is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four." She meant it. The conviction that ideas matter represents a profound dedication to self. It requires that one regard one's own reasoning mind as competent to judge good and evil. And it requires that one pursue knowledge because one sees that correct ideas are indispensable to achieving the irreplaceable value of one's own life and happiness. "To take ideas seriously," Rand states, "means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true," that you recognize "that truth and knowledge are of crucial, personal, selfish importance to you and to your own life." Her approach here is the opposite of the view that ideals transcend this world, one's interests and human comprehension--that idealism is, in the words of the religious exhortation to America's youth in Bush's inaugural address, "to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself." The advice Rand offers the young? Think, reason, logically consider matters of truth and morality. And then, because your own life and happiness depend on it, pursue unwaveringly the true and the good. On this approach, the moral and the practical unite. On this approach, there exists no temptation to think that life on earth requires compromise, the halfway, the middle of the road. "In any compromise between food and poison," she writes, "it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit." In a world where our President (as well as the religious warriors we're battling against in the Middle East) equates idealism with otherworldliness, faith, and sacrifice of self, and where commentators otherwise sympathetic to his message lament that it leaves no room for worldly compromises, since, as Peggy Noonan puts it, "perfection in the life of man on earth" is impossible--Ayn Rand stands alone. She argues that perfection is possible to man the rational animal. Hold your own life as your highest value, follow reason, submit to no authority, create a life of productive achievement and joy--enact these demanding values and virtues, Rand teaches, and an ideal world, here on earth, is "real, it's possible--it's yours." Does an adult world that dismisses this philosophy as "simplistic" not convict itself? The centenary of Rand's birth is an appropriate time to recognize the thinker who was courageous enough to take on that world and challenge its rampant skepticism, eager cynicism, and unyielding demand for compromise, the thinker who portrayed and explained--at the most fundamental level--the heroic in man. [esr.jpg] Onkar Ghate, Ph.D. in philosophy, is a senior fellow at the [2]Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the ideas of Ayn Rand--best-selling author of [3]Atlas Shrugged and [4]The Fountainhead and originator of the philosophy she called "Objectivism." ----------- Ayn Rand's Contribution to the Cause of Freedom - Mises Institute http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=1738&id=77 Wednesday, February 02, 2005 Ayn Rand's Contribution to the Cause of Freedom by Roderick T. Long [Posted February 2, 2005] Today marks the centenary of Ayn Rand's birth. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2nd, 1905, Rand would go on to become one of the 20th century's foremost voices for human freedom. After living through the Russian Revolution, and the economic chaos and political repression that came in its wake--events she would later dramatize in her novel [14]We the Living--Rand fled the Soviet Union for the United States in 1926 to begin her career as screenwriter, playwright, and novelist. Dividing her time between Hollywood and New York, the fiercely anticommunist Rand began to develop a philosophy of ethical and political individualism, and to make the acquaintance of such leaders of the libertarian "Old Right" as John Flynn, Henry Hazlitt, Rose Wilder Lane, H.L. Mencken, Isabel Paterson, Leonard Read, and a fellow refugee from European totalitarianism, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. Rand's chief popular success came from [15]The Fountainhead (1943) and [16]Atlas Shrugged (1957), two epic philosophical novels on the model of Dostoyevksy that quickly established her as one of the century's most controversial authors. The enthusiastic audience these works brought her enabled Rand to build a politico-philosophical movement based on the system of thought she would call "Objectivism," and Rand's attention accordingly turned thereafter to nonfiction; she would devote the remainder of her career to editing a series of Objectivist periodicals and to penning philosophical essays, political commentary, and cultural criticism. Rand always stressed the importance of placing political arguments in a wider philosophical context, insisting that she was "not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism," and "not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason." Rand's influence on the libertarian movement is incalculable; despite her own frequent antipathy toward that movement and even toward the word "libertarian," Rand played a crucial role in helping both to create new advocates of laissez-faire and to radicalize existing ones; Rand encouraged libertarians to view their standpoint as an alternative to, rather than a branch of, conservatism, and to base the case for liberty on moral principle and not on pragmatic economic benefits alone. Rand's influence on popular culture is likewise enormous; an oft-cited Library of Congress survey of "most influential books" placed Atlas Shrugged second only to the Bible. Rand owed much of her success to the power and directness of her writing style. She was a master at what one of my colleagues calls reductio ad claritatem, "reduction to clarity"-- i.e., the method of refuting a position by stating it clearly--as when she wrote that "if some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor," or when she summarized the view that human perception is unreliable because limited by the nature of our sensory organs as: "man is blind, because he has eyes--deaf, because he has ears." Upon the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Mises [17]wrote to Rand praising both her "masterful construction of the plot" and her "cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society"; in another context he called her "the most courageous man in America." Rand in turn enthusiastically promoted Mises's writings in her periodicals, and declared that her ideal curriculum would be "Aristotle in philosophy, von Mises in economics, Montessori in education, Hugo in literature." Rand's biographer Barbara Branden notes that beginning in the late fifties and continuing for more than ten years, Ayn began a concerted campaign to have [Mises's ] work read and appreciated: she published reviews, she cited him in articles and in public speeches [and] recommended him to admirers of her philosophy. A number of economists have said that it was largely as a result of Ayn's efforts that the work of Von Mises began to reach its potential audience. ([18]The Passion of Ayn Rand, p. 188.) A brief intellectual association with Mises's student Murray Rothbard was less successful, beginning in mutual appreciation but dissolving over ideological and personal differences--though Rand and Rothbard would nonetheless share the honor of being drummed out of the "respectable" Right by a statist-minded conservative establishment. (The forthcoming Spring 2005 issue of the [19]Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is devoted to an exploration of the connections between Rand and the Austrian School, and includes contributions from a number of contemporary Austrians.) Because Rand called big business a "persecuted minority" and dismissed the military-industrial complex as "a myth or worse," she is often taken as a na?ve apologist for the corporatist ?lite; but she also condemned the "type of businessmen who sought special advantages by government action" as the "actual war profiteers of all mixed economies"; and it's easy to forget that most of the businessmen characters in Rand's novels are statist villains. As [20]Chris Sciabarra reminds us, Rand likewise grasped the symbiotic relationship between militarism abroad and neo-fascist politics at home; in an era when many of her followers are enthusiastic supporters of American military intervention overseas, it's worth remembering that Rand herself opposed U.S. involvement in World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Rand's philosophy--her rejection of altruism and her embrace of ethical egoism--is also one of the most misunderstood. Despite her sometimes [21]misleading rhetoric about "the virtue of selfishness," the point of her egoism was not to advocate the pursuit of one's own interests at the expense of others', but rather to reject the entire conflictual model of interests according to which "the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another," in favor of an older, more Aristotelean conception of self-interest as excellent human functioning. It was on such Aristotelean grounds that she rejected not only the subordination of one's own interests to those of others (and it is this, rather than mere benevolence, that she labeled "altruism") but also the subordination of others' interests to one's own (which she labeled "selfishness without a self"). For Rand, the Aristotelean recognition of properly understood human interests as rationally harmonious was the essential foundation for a free society. Discussion of Rand since her death in 1982 has often focused on her dogmatic tone and personal eccentricities--traits sometimes imitated by her followers, and effectively satirized by Rothbard in his one-act play [22]Mozart Was a Red. But as David Kelley argues in his book [23]The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand, Rand's intellectual contribution, like anyone else's, can and should be disentangled from the vagaries of her personality. In an era when libertarianism and Aristoteleanism were unfashionable enough separately, Rand had the audacity to defend their systematic fusion, and identified Enlightenment liberalism's roots in the Thomistic recovery of Aristotle at a time when this connection was less widely recognized than it is today. (Though Rand's followers have sometimes intemperately proclaimed her the greatest philosopher of all time, Rand always firmly insisted that Aristotle was the greatest and that Thomas Aquinas was the second greatest--her own atheism notwithstanding.) Whether her specific versions of libertarianism and Aristoteleanism, and the specific terms on which she attempted to unite them, were ultimately the [24]most philosophically defensible ones is perhaps less important than the example she set in making the attempt. In the decades since Rand first began constructing her maverick philosophical system, the philosophical mainstream has moved in Rand's direction. Professional philosophers are far more likely today than they were in the 1960s to agree with Rand about the directness of sense-perception, the relation between meaning and reference, the incompatibility of utilitarianism with individual rights, or the prospects for a neo-Aristotelean ethical theory (or indeed a neo-Aristotelean philosophical approach generally); and many of the dichotomies she rejected--between empiricism and rationalism, analytic and synthetic statements, dualism and materialism, nominalism and conceptual realism, fact and value, liberalism and an ethics of virtue--have fallen into increasing disfavor. These developments are largely independent of Rand's own influence (and, ironically, stem in part from the recent resurgence of Rand's philosophical nemesis Immanuel Kant--who, despite Rand's impassioned denunciations, is actually her ally on most of these points), but they are not entirely so; I can testify, from two decades' experience in the profession, that the number of academic philosophers who will privately admit having been decisively influenced by Rand is far greater than the number who can be found citing her in print. It's a mistake, though, to think that the validation of Rand's legacy depends on academic approval. Human progress is often driven by people either outside or on the margins of the academic establishment, as for example the philosophes of the 18th century or the Austrian revival of the 20th. Whether or not the academy understands or acknowledges her achievements, Rand's inspiring vision of the grandeur of human reason and human liberty has made its mark on modern thought. Still, for what it's worth, scholarly recognition of Rand's work is currently at an [25]all-time high. The days when nearly all discussion of Rand was either slavishly adulatory or sneeringly dismissive seem to be passing, and the new century is likely to see a just assessment of Rand's place in the history of philosophy and the cause of liberty. Happy Birthday, Ayn Rand. _____________________________ Roderick T. Long ([26]email) is senior fellow of the Mises Institute, professor of philosophy at Auburn University, and the new editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. See his [27]website. Subscribe to the [28]Journal today. Post your comments on the [29]blog. References 14. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451187849 15. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451191153 16. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451191145 17. http://www.mises.org/etexts/misesatlas.pdf 18. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/038524388X 19. http://aynrandstudies.com/ 20. http://www.solohq.com/Articles/Sciabarra/Understanding_the_Global_Crisis__Reclaiming_Rands_Radical_Legacy.shtml 21. http://praxeology.net/unblog11-02.htm#ego 22. http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/mozart.html 23. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0765808633 24. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1577240456 25. http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/9929.html 26. mailto:rlong at mises.org 27. http://praxeology.net/ 28. http://www.mises.org/store/product1.asp?SID=2&Product_ID=122 ------------- Chicago Tribune: Rereading 'Atlas' on Ayn Rand's 100th http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0501300446jan30,1,2299567,print.story?coll=chi-leisurearts-hed&ctrack=3&cset=true LITERATURE By Julia Keller Tribune cultural critic January 30, 2005 There it sits, a thick rectangle whose soft sides -- it's made of paper, after all, ordinary paper -- belie the harsh astringency within. You sense the need to keep an eye on it. You can't just leave it there on a corner of your desktop as if it were an ordinary book, letting it cool its heels amid the messy papers and dried-up pens and the dark-chocolate wafer of your laptop. No telling what it might do, this paperback copy of "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) by Ayn Rand, all 1,069 pages of it. No telling what impact it might have on the desk's detritus or the rest of the room. It's like a radiation leak: You can't see the danger, but you know it's there. Rand, of course, would adore the notion that the novel she began writing six decades ago, right after she'd wrapped up "The Fountainhead" (1943), still is regarded as perilous and possibly even lethal -- lethal, that is, to complacency and lazy thinking and easy goals. Wednesday marks the 100th anniversary of Rand's birth in St. Petersburg, Russia. She died in 1982 -- at least in the narrow physical sense. Measured across the historical timeline of ideas, however, Ayn Rand ("Ayn" rhymes with "fine," although it's often mispronounced "Ann") remains vibrantly alive. The philosophy she created and espoused in novels, plays and nonfiction treatises still enthralls and disgusts, still intrigues and outrages -- there's no middle ground -- a whole new generation. Known as Objectivism, its message of rationality, self-reliance and unrestrained capitalism, and its rejection of altruism or empathy, is perhaps best summarized by the title of one of Rand's non-fiction works: "The Virtues of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism" (1964). "Her impact is large and goes well beyond the world of literature," declares Mimi Gladstein, chair of the department of theater, dance and film at the University of Texas at El Paso, who has written two books and co-written a third about Rand's work. "I do think she's being taken more seriously now." Objectivism is always lighting fires under people's backsides -- it's the wisest thing in the history of the world, it's the dumbest bunch of malarkey on the planet -- but our concern here is not the philosophy but the chief vessel in which Rand chose to serve it up: her novels. And most especially "Atlas Shrugged," the purest, longest, loudest statement of her beliefs, the preposterously romantic tale of railroad magnate Dagny Taggart and the mysterious John Galt. This much, at least, is irrefutable: "Atlas Shrugged" grabs hold of you and shakes you up and challenges everything you thought you believed about the world, about God, about good and evil. That's why it can't be exiled to a corner of your desk, where its slightly curled-back cover looks, in the right light, like a tiny sneer of reproach: How dare you not be reading me now, this minute. How dare you. Rand's fiction has been critically scorned in some quarters, her philosophy reviled, but her influence is undeniable. Did somebody say "influence"? Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, counts himself among her devoted flock. Rand's books, vastly popular in her lifetime, continue to sell at a nifty clip: More than 5.5 million copies of "Atlas Shrugged" have been snapped up since its initial publication, and in the last few years, sales have averaged about 150,000 copies annually, reports Richard E. Ralston, publishing manager for the Ayn Rand Institute. "The Fountainhead" has sold more than 6 million copies, with annual sales currently topping 130,000, he adds. Wooden characters Clearly, then, Rand knew what she was doing when she created dreadfully wooden characters to represent her philosophical and economic ideas, when she put long, impossibly windy speeches in the mouths of those characters. Because for all that, for all the technical flaws that even moderately attentive readers could red-pencil in their sleep, for all the narrative rules Rand breaks -- the novel just won't leave you alone. Of how many books can that be said? Read at the right moment in one's life -- usually in late adolescence, when the world seems like a tangled mess of hypocrisy and confusion, and you hate your parents and especially that stupid assistant principal who is seriously on your case -- "Atlas Shrugged" is a tonic, a dream, a throat-scalding draft of pure, radiant clarity. You feel as if you've been walking upside down for most of your life, seeing things the wrong way, and now -- now -- suddenly you're right-side up again and everything starts to make sense. Turns out it was the world that was upside down, not you. But here's the funny thing: Re-reading Rand as an adult in 2005 is not what you thought it would be. It's not a "Oh, wow, what a chump I was!" feeling. In fact, the ideas from "Atlas Shrugged" you thought you had outgrown don't seem all that outlandish, after all. The themes you abandoned as hopelessly naive and almost comically operatic -- all those fist-shaking tirades about human destiny, all those "Greed is good!" screeds that predate Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" by three decades -- somehow start making a bit of sense again, in a world upended by religious fanaticism and a nation crippled by soaring government deficits. Flaws and all, "Atlas Shrugged" still is a powerful novel, a sweeping epic that either pulls you into its sphere or scares the bejesus out of you, or maybe both. That's how it all struck Michael Paxton back in the early 1970s, when, as a kid coming of age in upstate New York, he discovered Rand's novels. "I was very lost about my direction in life, about what life meant," says Paxton, now a writer and film producer in L.A. "One day I decided to go into a bookstore and find a book that would make sense to me." He found "We the Living" (1936) and worked his way through the rest of the Rand canon. Paxton's 1998 documentary, "Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life," nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary, tells the dramatic story of Rand's life: her birth to a middle-class Russian family as Alice Rosenbaum, just before the Russian Revolution; her escape to America as an eager 21-year-old, aspiring screenwriter; her success as a playwright, novelist and essayist, as the fierceness and originality of her philosophical ideas began to captivate the public. First popular novel Her novel "The Fountainhead," the story of brilliant, headstrong architect Howard Roark, who was played by Gary Cooper in the 1949 film, was her first great popular success. Rand lived intensely, eager to defend her ideas, and she lived passionately. She had a close inner circle of admirers, within which allegiances shifted and dramatic renunciations and reconciliations were routine. But to those who weren't swept away, Rand's conviction that self-interest is a more efficient and plausible motivation than traditional Judeo-Christian ethics was just too shocking even to contemplate. "She's so maligned," Paxton says. "People think she's a fascist -- and, of course, she's the opposite of that." Gladstein believes that Rand's reputation among literary critics -- she's rarely, if ever, included on lists of the 20th Century's greatest authors -- has suffered because of her popularity. "In academe, there are people with certain ideas about `haute' literature. If it's too popular, it can't be taken seriously. They forget the fact that Shakespeare was popular too." None of her books has ever gone out of print, Ralston says. And Penguin recently reissued "The Fountainhead," "Atlas Shrugged" and "Anthem" (1938) in special paperback editions to commemorate the centenary. That is the version of "Atlas Shrugged" that simmers on my desk, an intimidating-looking white volume with a stark cover design: blue sculpture of Atlas holding up the world; simple, blunt typography. This novel is all business. But the book's dialogue -- oh, heavens, that dialogue! That stilted, florid, totally inauthentic dialogue, the kind that would be laughable in any other context but that somehow, when dangling between the pincers of Rand's big ideas, simply works. You believe it. You believe that Dagny's lover, Henry Reardon, would actually rise from the bed upon which they had just made love for the first time and say, I wanted you as one wants a whore -- for the same reason and purpose. . . . You're as vile an animal as I am. I should loathe my discovering it. I don't. Uh, OK. But somehow it holds up, this faintly absurd novel in which a bevy of business types follows the dictates of John Galt right off the edge of the world. Somehow, it works. The novel is worth reading, worth re-reading. Be careful, though; it's dense with powerful ideas and has a mind of its own. So whatever you do, don't leave "Atlas Shrugged" home alone. ------------- Now let us praise free minds (Metro Times Detroit) http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=7267 by [23]Jack Lessenberry 5.2.2 They promise you answers and a blueprint for living your life, if you promise not to think too much. Last week I gave a talk on what I called "The Myth of the Liberal Media" to a pleasingly large and well-informed group called Pointes for Peace, in (surprise) Grosse Pointe Woods. I told them there are mainly two kinds of media in this nation today -- the "mainstream media," which are about as liberal as corporate America in general, and virulently ideological right-wing media. What could honestly be called the "liberal media" consists, pretty much (apart from a few cranks like me), of a handful of columnists like Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, Paul Krugman, and -- did I mention Molly Ivins? All of this was hardly news to anyone paying attention to what Eric Alterman and Ben Bagdikian have been saying for years. This country and its press have shifted dramatically to the right in the last quarter-century, and my craft will pay for this folly for years. Being in the Grosse Pointes, I imagined I'd get challenged by people who think there's really a vast conspiracy of New York intellectuals who want to force gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and fluoridated water on us all. There was none of that. But something did happen that astonished me to the point of speechlessness. An attractive, if a bit steely, dark-haired woman on the sidelines raised her hand and, after ranting on that Bush and Kerry were equally bad, proclaimed that the only hope for salvation, or mankind, or something, was Chairman Bob Avakian's Revolutionary Communist Party. Had I been prepared, I might have allowed myself a frisson of nostalgia, and spoken to her in her own artificial language. "Sorry, comrade, but an objective analysis of current conditions demonstrates that the time is not right for the mass uprising, and that what's now needed is a popular front." Part of me wanted to sing the "Internationale" off-key in French, just to watch her swoon with desire, or nausea. But instead, I merely stood there like a geek staring at a two-headed calf until my colleague Dick Wright said, "I think we are all pretty bourgeois here," and brought down the house. Later, a sweetly grandmotherish lady, who said she was a revolutionary communist too, tried to sell me Avakian's autobiography, From Ike to Mao. I was barely mature enough not to say, "Hold the mayo." We tend to think of commies as harmless anachronisms now, which they mostly are. But back in the day -- the 1960s, say -- we tended to regard fundamentalist religious movements the same way. Not now. Both the Marxist-Leninists and the dogmatic Christians are very much alike in that they promise you answers and a blueprint for living your life, if you promise not to think too much, and keep your mouth shut if you do. That promise has proven devastatingly seductive for most men at most times. Ayn Rand offers another system with all the answers, and so does Osama bin Laden, and so do various others of what George Orwell used to call "all the smelly little orthodoxies that are now contending for our souls." What all these systems do is take parts of the truth and construct a brilliantly woven little system and substitute it for reality. Ayn Rand has a lot to say that's worthwhile about the heroic struggle of the individual. There's much that even an intelligent atheist can recognize as true and compelling in most religious dogma. Marxism is a brilliant critique of the sins of capitalism, especially capitalism as it existed during the Industrial Revolution. And most of our multinational corporations today seem to be misbehaving as though following a script written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. That may well be sparking a mini-revival of revolutionary communist movements. But the Glorious Worldwide Great Proletarian Revolution isn't coming, comrades. Unfortunately all these systems, when in power, eventually bump against annoying reality, which they try to overlook first, then suppress by killing anyone who points out the man behind the curtain, before they finally crash. And none of them rewards the person who points out, however gently, that the system has flaws, or even worse, tries to think for himself. Those who question are seen as heretics, savagely turned on, and true believers are taught to hate them more than they do their ideology's natural enemies. Orwell, my personal hero, was a writer of uncompromising honesty, a socialist who nevertheless was hated, in his day, by many on the left because he pointed out the flaws of his allies as well as his foes. He was attacked especially for noting that Soviet communism had evolved into just another form of murderous totalitarian dictatorship, something he lampooned brilliantly in his masterpieces Animal Farm and 1984. Locally, I have a couple heroes who fit this mold, both of whom, ironically, are religious, rather than political figures. The first is Bishop Tom Gumbleton, best known perhaps for trying to raise our consciousness about the conditions in places such as Haiti and Iraq and El Salvador. These are all countries in wretched shape, and in most of them our nation has managed to make things worse. He's tried to help them when he could, and tried to be a tug on our conscience too. He's no opportunistic, cynical politician with a clerical collar; he deeply believes in God. But he also believes in speaking truth to power, whether that power wears a Haitian general's uniform, works in the White House or sits in the Vatican. He was among the first to demand the Roman Catholic Church he loves come clean on the sex scandals of a few years ago. As a young man studying in Rome, Gumbleton was inspired by the excitement of renewal and the heady intellectual ferment of the Vatican II conferences, which tried to redefine the church's role in the modern world. This set his path for life; he came away believing that his church ought to dedicate itself to transforming this world into as close an imitation of the kingdom of heaven as possible. He was made a bishop in 1968. The leadership of his church is far more reactionary today. Last week, he turned 75, and bishops are traditionally supposed to offer their resignations then. Bishop Tom, who looks and acts two decades younger, has no desire to stop doing what he's doing, and more than one member of his parish (St. Leo's) has told me they'll protest if the church tries to take him from them. The irony, of course, is that the pope is a decade older and in appalling shape. Yet nobody would dare whisper that he step aside. My other hero is the Rev. Harry Cook, rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Clawson. In a lecture this week at the University of Colorado, he plans to tell the students that he fears "religion may be the death of us all." He means the kind of religion that actually caused a GOP politician to say that denuding the forests is all right because "when the last tree is felled, Jesus will come again." Cook proclaims himself a "secular agnostic humanist," for which he has taken some heat. I think he deserves more admiration than the pope. What's so moral about being good if you know you'll get paradise as a reward? What's far nobler, I think, is to try and follow Christian principles even if you have no idea what comes after this life, and grappling with the awesome challenge of trying to figure out each unique situation. These are two different, but very inspiring men, and Detroit is lucky to have them. ---------------- Boston Globe/ Opinion / Letters / Plenty of reasons Rand was wrong http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2005/02/01/plenty_of_reasons_rand_was_wrong?mode=PF 5.2.1 SOMEONE NEEDS to point out to Edward Hudgins ("Still a voice of reason," op ed Jan. 29) and other resurgent misty-eyed, laissez-faire-lovin', neo-conservatives that their heroine Ayn Rand was much more a science fiction writer than a true, insightful philosopher or economist. History is riddled with the consequences of unregulated, unbalanced, money-driven societies where power and wealth become concentrated in the top few bricks of what is essentially a very large pyramid scheme. Oftentimes Rand's rugged, ambitious individuals of high achievement might be seen to prefigure some of history's worst criminals. In this country, they were robber barons like Jim Fisk and Joy Gould, who along with other "successful businessmen" propagated the first financial "Black Friday" out of sheer, unmitigated greed devoid of any sense of conscience or concern for others. One does not have to look very hard these days to see similar traits in current "achievers" that the history-ignorant like Hudgins admire so much. BERNIE CONNEELY Somerville ----------- A Strangely Important Figure http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=8235 5.1.26 BY ANDREW STUTTAFORD To call Ayn Rand, the high priestess of the human will, a mere force of nature would to her have been an insult as well as a cliche. But how else to describe this extraordinary, maddening, and indestructible individual? Born a century ago this year into the flourishing bourgeoisie of glittering, doomed St. Petersburg, Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum was to triumph over revolution, civil war, Lenin's dictatorship, an impoverished immigrant existence, and bad reviews in the New York Times to become a strangely important figure in the history of American ideas. Even the smaller details of Rand's life come with the sort of epic implausibility found in - oh, an Ayn Rand novel. On her first day of looking for work in Hollywood, who gives her a lift in his car? Cecil B. DeMille. Of course he does. Frank Lloyd Wright designs a house for her. Years later, when she's famous, the sage of selfishness, ensconced in her Murray Hill eyrie, a young fellow by the name of Alan Greenspan becomes a member of the slightly creepy set that sits at the great woman's feet. Apparently he went on to achieve some prominence in later life. To Rand, none of this would really have mattered (well, the fame was nice). To her, an intensely Russian intellectual despite everything, it was ideas that counted. They were everything. When, after nearly 50 years, her beloved long-lost youngest sister, Nora, made it over from the USSR, they promptly fell out - over politics, naturally. Poor Nora was on her way within six weeks, back to the doubtless more easygoing embrace of Leonid Brezhnev. Scarred by her Soviet experiences, Rand was a woman on a mission. She couldn't stop: not for her sister, not for anyone. She had plenty to say, and she said it - again, and again, and again. She wrote, she lectured, she hectored, she harangued. Words flowed, how they flowed, too much sometimes, too insistent often, but infinitely preferable to the silence of the Soviet Union that she had left behind. And somehow her work has endured in the country she made her own. Her creed of ego and laissez-faire, and the reception it won, was one of the more interesting - and encouraging - cultural phenomena of mid-20th-century America. It has persisted, lasting longer, even, than the vast, daunting paragraphs that mark her prose style. Just over a decade ago, "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) was voted Americans' most influential novel in a joint poll conducted by the Book-of-the-Month club and the Library of Congress. Hers is a remarkable story, and I find it curious that one of the only publications being brought out to commemorate the 100th-birthday girl - besides new printings of the novels by Plume - is Jeff Britting's new, very very brief account (Overlook Duckworth, 144 pages, $19.95). The latest in the series of Overlook Illustrated Lives, it's too short to do Rand much justice; any reader already familiar with Rand's life won't learn much. Biographies in this series are intended as overviews rather than something more comprehensive. The author is an archivist at the Ayn Rand institute, the associate producer of an Oscar-nominated documentary about Rand, and obviously a keeper of the flame. Thus Mr. Britting has little to say about the romantic entanglements, more Peyton Place than Galt's Gulch, that devastated Rand's circle in later years. Most notably, Rand had an affair with her chosen intellectual heir, Nathaniel Brandon. While both Rand's husband and the wife of the intellectual heir agreed (sort of) to this arrangement, it added further emotional complications to what was, given Rand's prominence, a surprisingly hermetic, claustrophobic little world, one best described in "The Passion of Ayn Rand" (Bantam Dell) - the compelling, and sympathetic, biography of Rand written by, yes, the intellectual heir's ex-wife. As I said, Peyton Place. Closed, neurotic environments filled with true believers are the hallmark of a cult, and there's a good case to be made that that's exactly what Rand was running. Take a look at the way in which she treated her acolytes: angry excommunications, overbearing diktats, dramatic interventions, and, disappointing in one who preached self-determination, rather too much fuhrer prinzip. The cult-or-not controversy goes unmentioned in Mr. Britting's book. What a reader will find, particularly in the excellent selection of illustrations, is a real sense of how Rand's life related to her novels. One glance at her Hollywood-handsome husband, and the rugged succession of steely supermen who dominate her fiction make more sense ("All my heroes will always be reflections of Frank"). Rand herself, alas, was no beauty; her glorious heroines, ridiculously gorgeous, impossibly named, remarkably lithe, are less the template for - as some allege - a sinister eugenic agenda than the stuff of Ayn's randy dreams garnished with a dollop of Art Deco kitsch. The first, extraordinarily violent, coupling in "The Fountainhead" of Howard Roark with Dominique Francon is not a general prescription for the relationship between the sexes but merely Rand's own erotic fantasy ("wishful thinking," she once announced, to the cheers of a delighted crowd). Likewise, her sometimes-overwrought style is no more than - well, judge this sentence from "Atlas Shrugged" for yourself: "She looked at the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building rising in the distance - and then she thought she understood: these people hated Jim because they envied him." Call Dr. Freud. If sex in Rand's fiction can be savage, so is argument. Her sagas deal in moral absolutes, her protagonists are the whitest of knights or the blackest of villains, caricatures of good or evil lacking the shadings of gray that make literature, and life, so interesting. Yet "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead," at least, have a wild, lunatic verve that sweeps all before them. Like Busby Berkeley, the Chrysler Building, or a Caddy with fins, they are aesthetic disasters, very American aesthetic disasters, which somehow emerge as something rather grand. There is plenty in Rand to make a modern reader queasy, though you would not know so from Mr. Britting's worshipful text. For example, there is something to the claim that like so many of the intellectuals, left or right, of her time she succumbed to the cruder forms of social Darwinism. For a woman who worshiped man, Rand did not always seem that fond of mankind. But the accusation by Whittaker Chambers in National Review that there was a whiff of the gas chamber about her writings is wrong. Rand lived in an era of stark ideological choices; to argue in muted, reasonable tones was to lose the debate. As a graduate of Lenin's Russia, she knew that the stakes were high, and how effective good propaganda could be. Rand's nonfiction may have a greater claim to intellectual respectability, but it was the lurid, occasionally harsh, simplicities of her novels that would deliver her message to the mass audience she believed was out there. She was right. Her key insight was to realize that there was an appetite among Americans for a moral case for capitalism. In a restless age that believed in the Big Answer, neither historical tradition nor utilitarian notions of efficiency would suffice. Ayn Rand gave Americans that case, perhaps not the best case, but a case, and she knew how to sell it. The establishment always disapproved. Critics sneered. Academics jeered. The publishers Macmillan turned down "Anthem" (1938), saying that Rand, a refugee from the Soviet Union, "did not understand socialism." Oh, but she did, and so did those millions of Americans who bought her books, books that played their part in ensuring that the dull orthodoxies of collectivism never prevailed here. The last image in Mr. Britting's biography is of an exultant Rand speaking at a conference in New Orleans in 1981, the final public appearance of this magnificent, brilliant oddball. Her hosts tried to lure her there with the promise of payment in gold coins and travel in a private rail car. Needless to say, she accepted. Mr. Stuttaford is a contributing editor of National Review Online. ------------- Fountain Headache http://www.ocweekly.com/printme.php?&eid=60355 OC Logo January 21 - 27, 2005 Ayn Rand Institute tries to twist tsunami disaster by Nick Schou You may know Ayn Rand for her lugubrious, stultifying novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and her book of essays (with co-author Nathaniel Branden) The Virtue of Selfishness, which promulgated her "Objectivist" philosophy of personal greed as social progress. But you may not know the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), which was established in Irvine in 1985. The groups website, www.aynrand.org, says ARI was formed to spearhead a "cultural renaissance that will reverse the anti-reason, anti-capitalist trends in todays culture." But since the end of the Cold War and the concurrent demise of the global-communist conspiracy, ARI and its Randian followers have been struggling for a new bugaboo to replace socialism as the chief enemy of "reason, rational self-interest, individual rights and free-market capitalism." Since 9/11, not surprisingly, ARI has directed most of its wrath against "Islamo-fascism." But now, ARI has found an even more dangerous force in the world: poor people who die in great numbers during extreme weather events. On Dec. 30, ARI sent out an unsolicited opinion piece on the Indian Ocean tsunami which killed more than 250,000 people in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India four days earlier. Entitled "U.S. Should Not Help Tsunami Victims," the article stated that while private citizens had every right to donate cash, government-financed aid amounted to theft. Later, ARI used the tsunami to attack another enemy: environmentalists. It said nature-lovers were "dead wrong" in their claims that technology causes environmental problems. "Far from being the cause of such tragedies, science, technology and industry provide the only means of safeguarding human lives against natural disasters," ARI argued. The release went on to state that "relatively undeveloped Caribbean islands . . . suffer far worse devastation and loss of life from the same hurricanes that hammer Florida year after year" because the U.S. enjoys "the use of satellites, radar and communication technology" to "warn people well in advance of danger." Apparently, the Randians arent above issuing an apology when theyre wrong. On Jan. 7, ARI issued a follow-up press release entitled "Clarification of ARIs Position on Government Help to Tsunami Victims." ARI called its previous release "inappropriate" and said it "did not accurately convey the Institutes position." What is ARIs actual position? "The ugly hand of altruismthe moral view that need entitles a person to the values of others, whose corresponding duty is to sacrifice their values for that persons sakedid show itself in the petulant demands of U.N. and other officials that stingy countries must give more." Somewherethat would be her fountainhead-shaped graveAyn Rand groaned, not at her followers stunning lack of taste, but at their cowardly compromise. Yet theres nothing altruistic about U.S. government aid to tsunami victims. As exemplified by Colin Powells high-profile tour of the devastationnot to mention the constant footage of U.S. soldiers distributing food and watera major benefit of our assistance is positive public relations for an America widely viewed as preoccupied with blowing shit up in Iraq. Also implied in ARIs attack on the victims of the recent tsunami is the notion that hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved if only those nations had invested in the same type of early-warning system as the U.S. But as many as 160,000 Indonesiansby far the lions share of the victimsdied in the tsunami within mere minutes of the waves formation. Because many of those people lived in remote villages so close to the massive earthquakes epicenter, its unclear whether a warning system would have done much good. Secondly, at least some of the Indonesians who did survive lived in technology-free societies with an oral tradition that taught them to run for the hills when the ocean recedes. But theres an even more fundamental problem with ARIs position, especially if you take Ayn Rand and her pro-free market philosophy seriously. The U.S.-run Pacific Tsunami Warning Centerlike the National Earthquake Information Center and the National Oceanographic Service, which warns against hurricanesisnt a product of free-market capitalism. In fact, it was created through taxpayer-funded government interventionwhat ARI would call theft. So if you want to blame something for the most destructive wall of water in recent memory, dont blame nature. Blame capitalist Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka for failing to follow the socialist example of the capitalist U.S.A. by investing in a taxpayer-funded tsunami warning system. ---------- Ayn Rand Introduced Me to Libertarianism http://www.fff.org/comment/com0502a.asp by [17]Jacob G. Hornberger, February 2, 2005 My very first exposure to libertarianism was provided by Ayn Rand, whose 100th birthday is being celebrated today. One afternoon in the fall of 1974, I was sitting around watching television. At the time, I was temporarily working as a waiter in Dallas, having just completed three months of infantry school in Georgia to fulfill my Army Reserves active-duty commitment, before returning to finish law school in Austin the following semester. An afternoon movie quickly engrossed me, becoming my first exposure to libertarianism -- The Fountainhead, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The credits stated that the movie was based on Ayn Rand's novel by that name and so I ran out at once, bought it, and read it. Howard Roark and Dominique Francon quickly became my heroes! A few years later, I was rummaging through the Laredo public library for something to read and I discovered four volumes of a series of books entitled Essays on Liberty, which had been published by The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Irvington, New York. Reading those uncompromising essays caused the seed that Rand had planted a few years before to burst forth into what has become a lifelong love of libertarianism. Soon after that, I discovered Atlas Shrugged, which I've read three times (okay, skimming through Galt's speech the third time around!), along with The Virtue of Selfishness, Anthem, We the Living, the Objectivist journal, and most of Rand's other work. It was Ayn Rand and FEE's founder Leonard Read who [18]changed the course of my life. The reason: Both of them emphasized the fundamental importance of moral principles in political and economic analysis. When it came to moral principles, Rand and Read did not deal in shades of gray but rather in black and white. It is morally wrong to take what doesn't belong to you. It is morally wrong to coercively interfere with the peaceful choices that people make in their lives. It is morally right that people be free to make whatever choices they wish so long as their conduct is peaceful, even if -- or especially if -- their choices are considered irresponsible or immoral. In the intellectual arena, that means the unfettered right to write, read, or watch whatever you want without governmental interference. In the economic arena, it means the unfettered right to pursue any business or occupation without governmental permission or interference, to engage in mutually beneficial trades with anyone else anywhere in the world, to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth, and to do whatever you want with your own money -- spend, save, hoard, invest, or donate it. Thus, when it comes to morality, there was only one real choice for structuring a political order -- libertarianism, where people are free to live their lives the way the choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful, and where government's primary role is protecting the exercise of such choices by punishing violent, anti-social people who would interfere with them through such actions as murder, assault, stealing, burglary, trespass, rape, and fraud. Fortunately, God has created a consistent universe, one in which freedom produces prosperity and harmony and nurtures the values that most of us hold dear, such as compassion, love of one's neighbors, and honoring one's parents. But it was not the utilitarian case that attracted me to libertarianism. It was the moral case for freedom presented by Ayn Rand, most eloquently in Atlas Shrugged, and Leonard Read. Therefore, the main reason that I've never been attracted to so-called reform plans whose purpose is to reform, not repeal, socialist programs such as Social Security and public (i.e., government) schooling is that such plans, by their very nature, implicitly call for the continuation of an immoral act. As Rand and Read both emphasized, the right approach to an immoral action is to call for its end, not its reform. One of the highlights of my life occurred in 1990 when, in response to my September 1990 Freedom Daily essay, "[19]Letting Go of Socialism," which criticized public-school vouchers (and Social Security reform plans), Milton Friedman leveled a criticism against me in a public speech that was later reprinted in Liberty magazine. His criticism was that my position was too uncompromising, comparing it to the uncompromising positions of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises. It was one of the greatest compliments I've ever received -- and from a Nobel Laureate to boot! Another highlight in my life was watching Rand deliver her last public speech in 1981 at Jim Blanchard's National Committee for Monetary Reform (NCMR) annual conference in New Orleans. She died soon after that, on March 6, 1982. As I wrote in "Letting Go of Socialism" some 15 years ago, "People everywhere are letting go of the socialist nightmare. But they are looking through a glass darkly with respect to what should be the alternative. It shall be the Americans, I am firmly convinced, who will yet let go of socialism, once and for all, and lead the world to the highest reaches of freedom ever dreamed of by man!" When that day comes, it will be Ayn Rand who will have played a major role in the restoration of American liberty. Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him [20]email. References 17. http://www.fff.org/aboutUs/bios/jgh.asp 18. http://www.libertyhaven.com/thinkers/leonarderead/leonardmylife.html 19. http://www.fff.org/freedom/0990a.asp 20. mailto:jhornberger at fff.org ----------- On the Centenary of America's Radical for Capitalism http://www.fff.org/comment/com0502b.asp by [17]Sheldon Richman, February 2, 2005 February 2 is the centenary of the birth of Ayn Rand, the novelist who inspired tens of millions of readers with her philosophical action stories celebrating reason, individualism, and freedom under capitalism. Her death in 1982 did not stanch interest in her work either as an artist or as a philosopher. On the contrary, that work has never been taken more seriously, and books about her intellectual and artistic contributions continue to pour forth. What accounts for this growing interest? In her bestsellers [18]The Fountainhead and [19]Atlas Shrugged, Rand captured the essence of America's original identity. On the surface that may seem ironic. She was born in Russia and was a young woman when the Bolsheviks began to turn that place into a charnel house. She was fortunate to find refuge in the United States. But there is nothing ironic in the story. It is unsurprising that a refugee from brutal "humanitarian" totalitarianism would appreciate individual freedom as no native-born American could. She never had the luxury of taking liberty for granted. My favorite story about her comes from the 1940s, when someone in an audience pointed out that she was foreign-born. "That's right," she said. "I chose to become an American. What did you do besides being born?" Rand knew better than to mistake the trappings of "democracy" for actual freedom. One is not really free if the elected officeholders have the power to interfere with the lives of innocent people. Voting is preferable to violence, but how people get into office is not as important as what they can do once they get there. (Most of the commentaries on the Iraqi election have not understood that.) Rand realized that freedom, if it is to last, requires a rock-solid foundation. Just any foundation, or none at all, won't do. She grounded the case for freedom in the conditions required by the nature of man, who needs to live by reason in this world open to his understanding. According to Rand, for persons to be truly human they have to be free to think, to act on their own judgment, and to transform the physical world, that is, to engage in productive work. Each person has the moral authority to make the most of his life. He needs no one's permission. These principles -- rights -- regarding life, liberty, and property form the basis of a peaceful society in which people cooperate through the division of labor. Since all people have these rights, force and fraud are illegitimate. They rob men and women of their humanity. Rand's great achievement was to give capitalism a moral justification. Too often advocates of free markets emphasized the efficiency of markets and abandoned morality to the socialists. Rand passionately declared that capitalism isn't only efficient; it is also good because it is the only social arrangement in which each individual is free to pursue his happiness -- "exist for his own sake" -- without being made a beast of burden forced to serve others. Benevolent generosity is one thing; duty-bound self-sacrifice is quite another. Under capitalism the pursuit of rational self-interest and the attendant innovation produce a cornucopia of goods and services that benefit everyone. But as socialism's history shows, the cart can't be placed before the horse. The "common good" that arises out of rational individuals' making the most of their lives cannot be achieved directly. Another of Rand's achievements follows from this. Going back to the ancient Greeks, production and trade have been seen as degraded activities, inferior to nonmaterial concerns. Rand finally gave the producer his moral due, showing that the passion, genius, and creativity entailed by the production of material goods is like the passion, genius, and creativity entailed by the production of "spiritual" goods, such as works of art. This outlook was a consequence of Rand's rejection of the mind-body dichotomy and her embrace of man's life on earth as something lofty. Considering the squalor in which men lived before capitalism, and the wretched condition of today's remaining socialist countries, Rand, the American radical for capitalism, was surely right. Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of [20]The Freeman magazine. Send him [21]email. References 17. http://www.fff.org/aboutUs/bios/sxr.asp 18. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451191153/thefutureoffreed/103-4475146-3986250 19. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0525934189/thefutureoffreed/103-4475146-3986250 20. http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?sec=iolmisc 21. mailto:sheldon at sheldonrichman.com ----------- Neglected Fortieth Anniversary (October 1997) http://www.fff.org/comment/ed1097a.asp by [14]Sheldon Richman, January 1997 A remarkable event occurred 40 years ago this month. Not the launching of Sputnik, which in retrospect, considering the collapse of the Soviet Union, had much less significance than people suspected at the time. Ironically, the event I am thinking of involved a woman who understood from the beginning that the Soviet Union was a fraud, economically, morally, and in all other respects. The woman was Ayn Rand, who died in 1982, and the event was the publication of her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged , a grand novel that has sold more than five million copies, continues to sell very well today, and has had a deep impact on readers around the world. An indication of that impact came in a 1991 survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club, which asked 2,000 members to name a book that "made a difference" in their lives. Atlas Shrugged placed second behind the Bible. What kind of book could strike such a chord in readers? Rand's novel is big in many ways. It is more than a thousand pages long; but more important, it covers a wide range of personal, political, and economic issues. In fact, it presents a full philosophy of life, from the nature of man and reality to the nature of knowledge, from a doctrine of good and evil to the morality of a free society, from a theory of money and trade to a theory of art. That all of this is integrated into an action thriller makes the book all the more remarkable. Its many aspects are as relevant today as they were four decades ago. Two seem particularly worth mentioning now. One of Rand's lasting achievements in Atlas Shrugged was to set out a moral case for the economic system we call capitalism. Rand often called it "laissez faire capitalism" to emphasize that she meant the complete separation of state and economy. She condemned the "mixed economy," that contradictory brew of freedom and government control that has gripped the United States for much of its history. For Rand, capitalism was not merely the best system for producing material goods. (Today, unlike 40 years ago, hardly anyone disputes that.) Capitalism, Rand believed, was the only moral system, the only one suited to man's nature as a rational, creative being. The free-market economy lets people produce, trade with willing buyers without interference, and keep the fruits of their effort. It is the system that recognizes each person's right to the pursuit of happiness, to use Thomas Jefferson's radical phrase from the Declaration of Independence. Rand, who escaped Bolshevik Russia as a young woman, spent a lifetime trying to show Americans, of all people, how much a break with the past Jeffersonian America was. Until 1776, no political document had ever affirmed the right of the individual to live by his own judgment and for his own sake. That revolutionary philosophy produced the freest, most prosperous, most benevolent society the world has ever seen. Unfortunately, the country soon forgot its revolutionary origins. Rand's book is a ringing reminder of that heritage and a proclamation that the free market embodies the highest human virtues. As Hank Rearden, an industrialist in Atlas Shrugged , says, "I work for nothing but my own profit -- which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it.... I have made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with." There is a related point that shines through every page of Atlas Shrugged . Since life requires the production of values, men and women in business are heroes. They are often treated as villains, yet their ability and dedication make life possible and increasingly better. That point is at the very core of the novel. What, the book asks, would happen if the people of productive ability quit? Atlas Shrugged is a vindication and celebration of those unsung heroes who need never again be embarrassed by their profits. The manifest failure of socialism and communism as economic systems has led to a renewed respect for capitalism. But it is a grudging, half-hearted respect. The economic appreciation of capitalism has not yet been matched by a moral appreciation of the system that leaves people free to make the most of their lives, to translate their ability into achievement, to keep and enjoy the rewards for their effort, and, as an inevitable byproduct, to lift the living standards of everyone. Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, editor of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty (The Foundation for Economic Education), and author of Separating School & State: How to Liberate America's Families (1995) and Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax (1998). References 14. http://www.fff.org/aboutUs/bios/sxr. ----------- Of Course, It All Began with Ayn Rand http://www.fff.org/comment/com0502c.asp by [17]Bart Frazier, February 2, 2005 Like so many others, Ayn Rand has heavily influenced the paths that I have chosen in my life. And like most everyone else, it began with [18]Atlas Shrugged. I was nineteen when someone gave me a worn, pocket-sized edition of Atlas Shrugged. Unlike so many others my age at the time, I was not what some people might call a lost individual. I certainly felt no need to "find myself." I was a proud leftist. I paid little attention to politics, current events, or philosophical debate then. I wasn't dumb and I liked to read, but I enjoyed novels and literature and found political science, economics, and their ilk a bore. When it was handed to me, all I knew of Atlas Shrugged was that it was a work of fiction that several people had told me was a great read. And it was. It was radically different from the novels I was accustomed to reading, and the heroes were unlike the protagonists popular with people my age at the time. You simply could not understand life if you had not read Catcher in the Rye, and seen it through the blue-colored glasses of miserable Holden Caulfield. If you were not familiar with Death of a Salesman, the pointlessness of life itself could not be conveyed to you through pathetic Willy Loman. The list of my favorites at the time is long. The over-indulgent characters of Hemingway. The morally vacuous characters of Fitzgerald and the all-out assault on business of Salinger's. The portrayal of our putrid human nature by Orwell, Steinbeck, and Huxley. Don't get me wrong -- these are great books and I still love them for the great works they are. But they are not inspiring and they always draw the picture of a person that the reader would never want to emulate. Not so with Atlas Shrugged. John Galt, Dagney Taggart, Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia -- these were characters like none that I had ever encountered in a novel. They were people that a reader could aspire to be, they celebrated life, and they were heroes in the truest sense. They were honest and honorable. They believed in principle instead of pragmatism. And without my realizing it until the end of the book, they had me cheering against the government. At the time, if I had been told that Atlas Shrugged was a novel about the evil of the state, I would have declined to read it. But because it was an exciting read with an intricate plot and a mysterious protagonist, I couldn't put the book down and ended up cheering against the government along the way. Many libertarians forget how radical an idea this is to most people even today. Most people conflate the government with society. Whatever the government does is for society's benefit. Government officials always act with our benefit in mind, not their own. Our government is more than a protector of rights; it is the embodiment of the country itself. If you criticize the government or its actions, you are not a true patriot; you are un-American. As Archie Bunker would say, "My government, right or wrong!" The beauty of Atlas Shrugged is that it makes the case against government in a solid yet entertaining way. I flew through the book -- couldn't put it down. When I finished, I suddenly felt that there was more to this whole government thing. Maybe there was another viewpoint about government that I wasn't aware of. Was it possible that my representatives, my representatives, were not looking out for my best interest? Had Ayn Rand written anything else? ([19]She had, by the way.) Atlas Shrugged opened up paths that I had never considered before. Jefferson, Madison, Washington -- these were names that I equated with irrelevance, not irreverence. Wasn't Thoreau just a crazy old hermit? Who on earth is Lysander Spooner? This stuff pertains to economics? But the biggest question I had was, "Am I the only person who thinks like this?" My answer came not long after finishing Atlas Shrugged. I was driving past the capitol building in Tallahassee, Florida, where a small demonstration was going on. And among the many placards that people were waiving at the capitol steps was a sign that read, "Where is John Galt?" I knew then that I was not alone because I had just found out that for someone else, it had all begun with Ayn Rand. Bart Frazier is program director at The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him [20]email. References 17. http://www.fff.org/aboutUs/bios/bxf.asp 18. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0525934189/thefutureoffreed/103-4475146-3986250 19. http://www.ayn-rand.com/ayn-rand-biblio.asp 20. mailto:bfrazier at fff.org -------- Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/30/2005 | Assessing Rand at centenary http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/entertainment/10758015.htm By Carlin Romano Inquirer Book Critic 'I am haunted by a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche," Ayn Rand once told a Time magazine reporter, explaining her withdrawal from punditry on passing events to focus on writing philosophy. "It is not my function to be a flyswatter." No problem there. Even her enemies never accused the controversial novelist (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) and champion of individualism, rational self-interest and atheism of thinking small. "I did not want, intend or expect to be the only philosophical defender of man's rights in the country of man's rights," she declared with typical grandiosity when she closed down her regular newsletter in 1976. "But if I am, I am." OK, ditch the flyswatter. As the centenary of her birth arrives Wednesday, accompanied by special events around the country and a new illustrated biography - Ayn Rand by Jeff Britting (Overlook, $19.95) - what image does fit her today? Prophet? Steamroller? Esteemed yet occasionally embarrassing great aunt? We now live in a country where the administration in power vigorously embraces some, if not all, of Rand's once iconoclastic ideas about human freedom. A country whose Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, once sat at her feet as part of the 1950s circle of admirers she sardonically called her "Collective." "Ayn Rand was instrumental in significantly broadening the scope of my thinking," Greenspan told Rand biographer Barbara Branden for her life of the author, The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), "and was clearly a major contributor to my intellectual development, for which I remain profoundly grateful to this day." Rand's healthy profile in Washington today might be deduced from one of the centenary's main events, a symposium on her work Wednesday morning in the Members of Congress Room at the Library of Congress' Jefferson Building. Sponsored by the Objectivist Center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., one of the two major keepers of the Rand flame, its speakers will include Reps. Ed Royce (R., Calif.) and Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), and Howard Dickman, assistant chairman of programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities. The other home of Rand studies, the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. (self-described as the "authoritative" arbiter of matters Randian because Rand anointed it to carry on her legacy), will host a reception Wednesday evening at which biographer Britting, the institute's archivist, and others will talk about Rand and present an exhibition on her. "One of the great urban myths," says Britting, "is the notion that Ayn Rand was a dictator of people's tastes." He sees her as a "generous" and "fiery" philosopher devoted to argument, dialogue, and explanation of her ideas, whose greatest legacy remains her "ability to dramatize ideas." He admits that "vigorous debates about details and specifics of her philosophy" continue. No one, however, now doubts that she pulled off a major, enduring American career as both novelist and thinker, and that her influence and popularity have persisted among readers since her death in 1982. Born Alisa Rosenbaum into a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Russia - her father was a successful pharmacist and her mother a highly intellectual and opinionated homemaker - Rand emigrated alone to America at 21. Her experience of Russia's forced conversion to communism forever colored her beliefs. To pursue her ambition to be a great writer, she devised her nom de plume by taking "Ayn" from a Finnish writer she'd never read and "Rand" from her typewriter. A lucky encounter with director Cecil B. DeMille drew her into Hollywood life: jobs as a scriptwriter, marriage to actor Frank O'Connor in 1929, and early success as a playwright with The Night of January 16. Following two short novels, We the Living (1936) and Anthem (1938), The Fountainhead (1943) made Rand famous. In it, protagonist Howard Roark illustrated her belief that the model of ethical life is the "hero" - a rational, self-interested, totally independent person. Partly based on architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Roark despised mediocrity and compromise. The 1949 film version starring Gary Cooper only bolstered Rand's status as poster-woman for American individualism in a cultural world still largely inclined to the left. Her other major novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957), only enhanced that image. More schematic than The Fountainhead, it offered another ideal hero - self-assured John Galt - who projected "the virtue of selfishness" and rejection of self-sacrifice at the core of her philosophy, which she came to call Objectivism. It so impressed a young Southern businessman named Ted Turner that he bought cryptic billboard signs across the South asking, "Who is John Galt?" One complication for Rand's reputation over the years became the sharp schisms among her followers over matters of doctrine - a good source is Canadian journalist Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult (Open Court) - and her unconventional lifestyle. For a thinker who exalted "reason" as the sole guide to life, Rand radiated volatile emotion. In the 1950s, for instance, she conducted a torrid affair with the first young man whom she designated as her "intellectual heir," Nathaniel Branden, winning the grudging consent of her husband and Branden's wife, Barbara (later her biographer). She also began to cut off acolytes - including, eventually, Branden - when she fell out with them. A 1990s Showtime movie, based on Branden's bio, depicted Rand - supporters say unfairly - as histrionic and neurotic. All of that hasn't changed, you might say, the tale of the tape. A 1991 survey by the Library of Congress found Atlas Shrugged to be the American novel most influential on readers' lives. Her books have sold more than 30 million copies around the world and sell hundred of thousands every year in the United States. Even studies in academe - the sector of America most resistent to Rand in her lifetime - are increasing. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical by Chris Matthew Sciabarra (Penn State, 1995) argued that Russian ideology influenced Rand more than previously understood. What Art Is: The Aesthetic Theory of Ayn Rand by Louis Torres and Michelle Kamhi (Open Court, 2000), thoroughly explored her philosophy of art. The most recent multivolume encyclopedia of philosophy, from Routledge, included an entry on her. According to Branden's biography, Rand liked to be called "Fluff" by O'Connor, her beloved husband of 50 years. Given how her career turned out, no one would dare try that now. At her funeral, a 6-foot-high dollar sign marked the coffin. Conversion rates aside, she's still in the money. _________________________________________________________________ Contact book critic Carlin Romano at 215-854-5615 or [77]cromano at phillynews.com. From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 21:41:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:41:18 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq: 30 January election review Message-ID: Iraq: 30 January election review http://www.indexonline.org/en/news/iraq-30-january-election-review.shtml Index on Censorship On 30 January Iraqis voted for parties contesting seats in the Iraqi National Assembly, a 275-seat parliament called to serve as a transitional body until elections for a fully fledged assembly under a new constitution are held in December 2005. There were no voting districts - just a single country-wide election. This option was supported by the UN - advisors to the process - because it was thought easier to organise than drawing up electoral districts based on Iraq's cultures and ethnicities, though they did endorse a separate ballot for provincial councils in Iraq's 18 regional governorates. In Iraq's Kurdish region, there was a third ballot for the Kurdish National Parliament, with special arrangements for the disputed northern city of Kirkuk. Expatriates in 14 countries were allowed to vote in the parliamentary polls only. On election day a reported 5,232 polling centres opened throughout Iraq's 18 governorates. The first provisional results are due to be announced by 10 February by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI), established by the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2004. All Iraqis born on or before 31 December 1986 were eligible to vote, provided they could prove their citizenship. Iraq has no current official census, so voters were registered through ration cards used during the sanctions year for the UN oil-for-food programme, which began in 1996. There were roughly 7,700 candidates running for the 275 National Assembly seats and 11,300 for seats on the 18 regional legislatures, but Iraqis did not vote for individuals or specific parties in the traditional sense. Instead they picked from one of 111 "lists" of combined party groups and factions certified by the IECI. The parties picked the order in which their candidates' names appeared on their own lists. This was important as seats were allocated to lists in proportion to the percentage of votes the list collected on election day - first names first - so the higher up the list, the higher the chance the candidate would get a seat. Every third candidate in the order on the list had to be a woman. Most of the campaigners called on supporters to vote for the number of the list, rather than the name. On the day voters ticked off their choice of list from a ballot paper with the name, number, and identifying logos of the 111 lists. A lottery determined the order in which list names appeared on the ballot. Once convened the newly elected National Assembly must then elect an Iraqi president and two deputies - a trio making up a Presidency Council that will represent Iraq abroad and oversee the running of the country. The Presidency Council will be responsible for naming the prime minister and for approving ministerial appointments. The National Assembly will immediately be tasked to draft a permanent Iraqi constitution by 15 August. The constitution should be ratified by the Iraqi people in a general referendum by 15 October. If it fails to do this, it can extend the process for another six months. If a constitution is not ratified by then, its mandate will expire, and fresh elections will be held for a new assembly that will start the process again. But If the constitution is ratified according to schedule in October, Iraqis will elect a permanent government no later than 15 December. That government should assume office by 31 December. The role of the Electoral Commission The elections are organised by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI), established by the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2004. The Commission is run by a nine-member Board of Commissioners, which includes seven voting members who are Iraqi citizens, and two non-voting members. The two non-voting members are the chief electoral officer, an Iraqi, and the Colombian UN expert Carlos Valenzuela, a veteran of 13 previous UN election missions. The UN selected the IECI membership from 1,878 applications short-listed to 25. The Iraqi Commission members were sent on a three week training course in Mexico by the UN. Thirty other U.N. election specialists provided technical expertise to a staff of about 6,000 Iraqi election clerks and monitors. These teams faced severe violence, including a 19 December ambush in central Baghdad, in which three were killed. The US army reported that virtually every election worker in Nineveh province, which includes predominantly Arab Sunni Mosul, quit before the election because of security fears. There were other resignations reported in several other cities, though the Commission frequently disputed or dismissed reports, or claimed that the staff who had resigned had been promptly replaced. Overseas voting was supervised by the International Organisation for Migration, though only 21 percent of the 1.2 million eligible expatriates registered to vote despite the IOM's intensive efforts. Voting papers were printed in Switzerland to avoid counterfeiting and centres established in each of the 18 provinces to collate results before sending them on to Baghdad. The better than expected turnout and the relatively limited scale of the threatened insurgent assault on the process reflected well on the IECI. Its performance was not without its critics among both Iraqi & international media. IECI spokesman Farid Ayar was reported to be in dispute with the commission membership in the days before the vote, while on the day his delivery of interim turnout results to the media was confusing - some said unintentionally misleading. The process itself did not appear flawless. Some polling stations in the so-called `hot areas' did not open when insufficient numbers of election workers turned up to run them. On the day Ayar said that voters in these areas could vote at other stations, without saying where or how they could be reached with regional travel so heavily restricted. Like the turnout the commission's tally of polling stations that opened as planned on 30 January seemed over-estimated, given the flow of media reports from the field, including Samarra, the oil refinery town of Beiji and Baghdad's mainly Iraqi Sunni district of Azamiyah, and ravaged al-Fallujah where no voting at all was said to have taken place. There was no independent monitoring body to confirm or support the validation of interim results from the commission. The UN, having helped organise the election, had made it clear in advance that it would not be involved in observing it, and Carlos Valenzuela, its lead official at the Commission distanced himself and the world body from the IECI's early statements on turnout and totals. A hastily organised independent monitoring group of foreign election experts remained in Amman, Jordan, its members unable to get security clearance to move its operations into Iraq. Instead the specially-founded International Mission for Iraqi Elections (IMIE) plans to `audit' and `assess' the data from Iraqi observers and evaluate the process after the event. The IECI itself, with UN support, had trained several thousand Iraqi election observers, and briefed thousands more from the parties, but their true effectiveness has yet to be independently assessed. In its preliminary statements, the IMIE team in Jordan said it had identified "several strong points regarding today's election, including the extent and quality of (the IECI's) election planning and organisation, and its independence." But it added that "areas recommended for further development include transparency regarding financial contributions and expenditures, improvements to the voter registration process, and reviewing the criteria for candidate eligibility". Registration of candidates, parties and voters Any Iraqi who is at least 30 years old, has a high-school diploma and was not a high-ranking member of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party or responsible for atrocities under Hussein's regime was allowed to run for office. Lower ranking members of the Ba'ath Party who have renounced their affiliation may run. Current serving members of the Iraqi armed services were barred from standing. Under the 30 January system, which like all else in the current voting process, is open to review and may be changed by the National Assembly during 2005 ahead of the next vote, candidates may run as independents or on a list. A list is defined as a political party, an association or a group of people with a common political agenda - such as women's or human rights groups - that submits candidates. Individuals can also apply and, if certified, they can run alone or form a coalition with other certified political entities. Names must appear in rank order on the party lists and every third candidate in order must be a woman. Seats were allocated through a system of proportional representation, with seats allocated proportionate to the percentage of the vote given to each of the 111 lists. The actual names of the 7,471 candidates on the 111 lists were kept secret up until two days before the poll to protect them against insurgent attack. Iraqis born on or before 31 December 1986 were eligible to vote, provided they can prove their citizenship. Iraq has no official census, so voters were registered through ration cards used for the UN oil-for-food programme, which began in 1996. Those voters who did not have ration cards were allowed to vote if they produced two official papers, such as citizenship certificates, identity cards, passports, or military service documents. Where the security situation permitted the process went smoothly, despite some problems with the registration of would be voters born in 1986. Registration was allowed right up to election day on 30 January in the violence-plagued governorates of al-Anbar and Nineveh, where Mosul is located. But in many areas insurgents made verification of the voter lists virtually impossible. Iraq's interim president Ghazi al-Yawar conceded before the vote that there were areas where not one voter registration sheet had been handed out. Some 200,000 refugees who fled the November 2004 US assault on al-Fallujah also faced severe practical difficulties registering and voting, beyond the physical threat posed by insurgents. Even in the relatively peaceful northern governorates, Human Rights Watch reported up to 90 percent of the voter registration forms in Arbil province had mistakes that needed correction and that up to 70,000 people in the area might lose their right to vote as a result. The development of a more rigidly operated registration list, possibly as part of a nationwide census, will be a priority for the Iraqi government in 2005. This will be a politically contentious task, especially in disputed areas such as Kirkuk, and among minorities - Assyrian Christians, and Turkomans in particular - who do not believe their political presence should be measured only by their numbers. Iraq has a population of more than 25 million people, but it is a young country - 40 percent of the population are under the age of 14, twice the percentage recorded in the United Kingdom & United States. That left just 15.5 million Iraqis eligible to vote, with 1.2 million of them living outside the country. Overseas voting was supervised by the International Organisation for Migration, though only 281,000 of the 1.2 million eligible expatriates registered to vote and of them just over two-thirds actually cast a ballot, despite intensive efforts by the IOM. Future overseas registration and voting will probably be managed by Iraqi embassies abroad, as is the case with other nations. Main Party Lists - 30 January 2005 United Iraqi List o Iraqi National Congress (secular) - leader Ahmad Chalabi o Islamic Action Organisation (Shi'ite Islamist) - leader Ibrahim al-Matiri o Islamic Dawa Party in Iraq (Shi'ite Islamist) - leader Iraqi Vice President Ibrahim Jaafari o Islamic Dawa Party Iraq Organisation (Shi'ite Islamist) - leader Abdul Karim Anizi o Islamic Virtue Party (Shi'ite Islamist) - leader Nadim Issa Jabiri o Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Shi'ite Islamist) - leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim o Turkmen Islamic Union (Turkmen) - leader Abbas Hassan al-Bayati o Also includes nine other Shi'ite and Turkmen parties and prominent Saddam-era dissenter Hussain al-Shahristani Iraqi List o Iraqi National Accord (secular) - leader Prime Minister Iyad Allawi o With five other secular parties and one individual Kurdistan Alliance List o Kurdistan Democratic Party (Kurdish) - leader Massoud Barzani o Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (Kurdish) - leader Jalal Talabani o With nine other Kurdish parties Patriotic Rafidain Party o Assyrian Democratic Movement (Christian) - leader Yonadim Kanna o Chaldean National Council (Christian) People's Union o Iraqi Communist Party (secular) - leader Hamid Majid Moussa o With one additional individual candidate Main Single Party Lists o Constitutional Monarchy (secular) - leader al-Sharif Ali Bin Hussein o Independent Democratic Movement (secular) - leader Adnan Pachachi o Iraqi Islamic Party (Sunni Islamist) - leader Mohsen Abdul Hamid o Iraqi National Gathering (secular) - leader Hussein al-Jibouri o Iraqis (secular) - leader Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawar o Reconciliation and Liberation Bloc (secular) - leader Mishaan Jibouri Electoral boundaries There were no voting districts for the National Assembly vote - just a single country-wide election. This controversial plan was endorsed by the UN because it was thought easier to organise than drawing up electoral districts based on Iraq's cultures and ethnicities. But the system, not uncommon in Europe and Asia, has its problems. A key part of building representative parliaments and governments is building a sense of confidence that both are accountable to their constituents. Iraq's 30 January system weakens that confidence. Under the 30 January system politicians are more accountable to their party leaders than to Iraqi voters. The party leader can `punish' MPs who put local interests ahead of party interests by pushing them down the order of names in the party list. That way they will be less likely to retain their seat in the next election. Party leaders can also use the list system to promote individuals - including some with Ba'athist era records or hardcore agendas - who would never win popular votes in a straight vote for individually named candidates. Generally, the use of nationwide party lists elsewhere in the Middle East has tended to bolster religious, ethnic and sectarian parties there. The agenda is fixed on the national not local level. And under the 30 January system, because the National Assembly elections are not tied to districts, there will be towns that have no local citizens in the Iraqi Assembly and other towns with scores of them. The new National Assembly will be looking closely at the effectiveness of the separate ballot for provincial councils in Iraq's 18 governorates held on 30 January and the regional ballot for the Kurdish National Parliament as options when it comes to decide on how local the next elections will be. But again, provincial level elections tend to favour tribal identities or the wishes of locally powerful clergy. In Jordan they found that by dividing election areas into smaller voting districts changed the political agenda and the Muslim Brotherhood vote by half. In other countries the local focus has strengthened the hand of parties such as Hezbollah where they have turned to active community-level activism. Voters in single-member districts tend to focus on local issues, such as schools, health provision, electricity, and policing - and in Iraq the polls are clear that it is these issues that are the priority. Finally one of many factors driving the pre- 30 January calls for an Iraqi Sunni election boycott was the understanding that under the agreed system, that 20 percent of the Assembly seats would be the best they could expect in any circumstance. In a vote based purely on national identities, this would inevitably be seen a defeat. But in a vote based on local factors, sectarian matters would be less essential to the voters' choice. NB: Up to mid-January, Kurdish political parties threatened to boycott elections in Kirkuk, alleging that Kurdish residents of Kirkuk who had been expelled from the area during Saddam Hussein's `Arabisation' programme in the 1980s and 1990s were forbidden to vote in the provincial election. On 14 January the IECI ruled that displaced Kurds from the area - up to 100,000 people - could vote in Kirkuk for the al-Tamin provincial government locally. Arab and Turkmen leaders in Kirkuk condemned the decision, complaining that the decision gave the Kurds leadership of the al-Tamin local government throughout 2005, when Kirkuk's territorial status in Iraq is scheduled to be determined. How the media managed "We feel defeated and we are frustrated... We fear that we will be branded as the spies and collaborators of the occupation. There are many whom we fear: The Board of Muslim Clerics, the foreign Jihadis, Muqtada al-Sadr, Zarqawi's people, and finally Saddam's henchmen." Ali Hasan, Institute for War and Peace Reporting. The Iraqi media entered the start of the election campaign period on 15 December working on what media rights groups had already dubbed the world's most dangerous assignment. Nearly 40 journalists and media workers, most of them Iraqis, were killed in the line of duty in 2004. Journalists are no longer seen as impartial observers - by either side. Reporters were beaten, threatened, detained without cause, kidnapped for criminal and political reasons and killed, sometimes deliberately, all to often carelessly by trigger-happy troops. And afterwards it was often impossible for reporters to discover the true circumstances of their colleagues' deaths - whether deliberate or accidental - let alone see the perpetrators brought to justice. This encouraged a climate of impunity, where perpetrators could expect to escape serious consequences for their acts. Conflicting messages were sent out by the US authorities - on the one hand advocating a free media, while on the other, closing down newspapers and detaining accredited journalists. The handover to an interim Iraqi government had not improved matters, as the new authorities had learnt bad lessons from their predecessors. "We face different dangers now and there is no law to protect journalists in Iraq," Hussein Muhammad al-Ajil of al-Mada newspaper told Iranian-American journalist Borzou Daragahi. "There are threats from three sides: the Americans might shoot you if they're ambushed; the Iraqi security forces might stop you or beat you if they suspect you're with the resistance; and the resistance might kill you if they think you're a spy." The danger increased in the run up to the election. On 12 September 2004 al-Arabiya journalist Mazen Tumeisi died in an US helicopter attack. He was the eighth al-Arabiya staffer to die since March 2003, and one of three killed by the US army in circumstances that have yet to be fully explained.. Al-Arabiya reporter Abdel Kader al-Saadi was detained by US troops despite being clearly identified as a journalist and in circumstances that gave rise to allegations of deliberate intimidation. His station has also received numerous threats from claimed supporters of the Jordanian insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, demanding that it support the "jihad" against the US occupation and Iraqi government. The insurgents and the country's criminals have also struck. Al-Sharqiyya television reporter Likaa Abdelrazzak was killed in the street in Baghdad on Oct. 27, Sada Wasit newspaper reporter Raad Beriaej al-Azzawi was kidnapped in November, one among many. Another Iraqi journalist reporting on police patrols in the town of Allawi was caught by the insurgents. They took his notes and tapes and told him to get out of town. Daragahi also reported that one journalist at al-Mada was threatened with death after he wrote about alleged corruption in an Iraqi government ministry and had to flee the country. Al-Mada newspaper was also targeted by rockets. Western journalists, largely trapped in their hotels, relied on Iraqi reporters (stringers) to get information they couldn't, and as the target profile of western journalists increased, so did the threat to Iraqis working with them. A leaflet circulated in al-Fallujah offered money to anyone giving information about Iraqi journalists, translators and drivers working with foreign media. All the Iraqi media faced similar threats, plus the attentions of an interim authority that has sought in the past to impose its views on the media and ordering it not to attach `patriotic descriptions' to the insurgents and criminals," and asked the media to "set aside space in news coverage to make the position of the Iraqi government, which expresses the aspirations of most Iraqis, clear," or face the consequences. Yet with most election hopefuls unable to get out and campaign on the streets, names of candidates kept secret until shortly before the election, and the vote itself judged on national issues, not local agendas, the Iraqi media became the main player in the campaign. The view is that they performed better than expected. "Sunni groups opposed to participating in the election regularly espouse their views in supporting newspapers and are often quoted in what would be considered the popular press, owned by independent or pro-election party newspapers," noted Kathleen Ridolfo of Radio Free Europe before the election. "Sunni groups that will participate in the elections despite some hesitancy over the issue have also made their platforms known." Reports and commentaries in the print media did not shy from discussions about the role that Islam will play in a future Iraqi state with a Shi'ite majority, the possible withdrawal of multinational forces, the Kurdish issue and the coming constitution. Newspapers have covered the activities of the Election Commission. As for television, said Ridolfo, Allawi - "whether by virtue of being prime minister or by intention -- has dominated the airwaves". A new feature for Iraqis was the use of sleekly-produced TV adverts to persuade people to vote and close to election day, to try and persuade Iraqi Sunnis to defy boycott calls. Chat shows on Iraqi radio made a dramatic impact. Party supporters filled streets with campaign posters, replaced as soon as they were ripped down by rivals with new ones. A variety of alternative promotional techniques emerged: the Iraqi Hezbollah published a calendar with its campaign message, another party distributed video CDs with party messages interspersed with comedy clips. The role of election observers The United Nations said from the outset that it would encourage the electoral commission to ask for international observers for the election, though the world body, having helped organise the poll, would not be involved in observing it. About 7,000 representatives of Iraqi political parties and nongovernmental organisations have registered to observe voting, and each list has the right to have members present while votes are counted. International monitoring of the 30 January elections in Iraq was heavily restricted. The United Nations said from the outset that it would encourage the electoral commission to ask for international observers for the election, though the U.N., having helped organise the poll, would not be involved in observing it. A group of two dozen experts brought together by the specially-founded International Mission for Iraqi Elections (IMIE) did its work from over the border in Amman, Jordan. The high profile of some of the figures concerned their national governments, all senior election officials from countries ranging from Albania to Yemen under team leader, Elections Canada chief Jean-Pierre Kingsley. In the end their home governments barred them from crossing the border into Iraq. Observer team members argued that not crossing the border made their job impossible, but others said that trying to cover the election under strict security restrictions would give an inaccurate impression that the vote had been properly observed and validated. In the end Kingsley's team opted for a limited mission, `auditing' and `assessing' the data from Iraqi observers and evaluate the process after the event. Their lection day studies focussed on the following areas: o legal framework o voter registration o electoral preparations o voter information and education o equitable access to media o out-of-country registration and voting o pre-polling complaint procedures o certification of political parties, coalitions and candidates o polling o vote counting and compilation of results o post-election complaints Some 6,000 volunteer Iraqi monitors from some 150 Iraqi organisations were trained by a UN sponsored programme to act as independent observers, registered with the Election Commission while there were a reported 23,000 registered observers from different political parties who stood by to watch the process in action. But this is an unusual methodology. Normally foreign observers are heavily in attendance at this kind of vote. The European Union declined an invitation from Iraq to send observers while the Carter Center, which has monitored more than 50 elections overseas, also decided not to send observers. The 9 January Palestinian elections drew 800 official observers, led by former US president Jimmy Carter and two former European prime ministers. Even the October 2004 Afghanistan polls, where the threats to foreign observers was well stated in advance, drew more than 100 foreign observers. "An election is "free" when it reflects the full expression of the political will of the people concerned. Freedom in this sense involves the ability to participate in the political process without intimidation, coercion, discrimination, or the abridgment of the rights to associate with others, to assemble, and to receive or impart information. The "fairness" of an election refers to the right to vote on the basis of equality, non-discrimination, and universality. No portion of the electorate should be arbitrarily disqualified, or have their votes given extra weight." Human Rights Watch Measures of support: Guestimates & opinion polls Numbers - and predictions of numbers - were the all important issue during the 30 January election. For the US-led forces in Iraq, the actual turnout of voters in the face of the threat of violence was used as a measure of the insurgents' weakness, for example. But the major numbers debate spun around the calls for an Iraqi Sunni boycott before the vote. The decision to base the 30 January elections on a national slate of party lists was logical, but it left Iraqi Sunnis in a quandary. The national slate system could leave them with only no more than 20 percent of the representation in the National Assembly if they voted as Sunnis, but what would it give them if they voted as Iraqis? As it became clear that the closer the number of Iraqi Sunni voters got to 20 percent of the total votes cast, the more the new government would be able claim legitimacy, the issue of the Iraqi Sunni turnout on election day took on major significance. Pre-vote polls by foreign organisations focused heavily on this issue. A poll by the US International Republican Institute from early January projected that 65 percent of Iraqis were `likely' to vote, and 20 percent `very likely'. The difference between the first and the second number was in the people's perceptions of threat, and the appeal of the very diverse arguments for a boycott. It was here that the Iraqi media played a key role. The threat of violence deterred extensive studies by opinion pollsters, and exit polling on the day. Security rules requiring pollsters to stand about 700 yards away from polling stations - outside the security cordons - inhibited them from carrying out exit polls. Though neither are wholly reliable guides to the real level of voter opinion, without them the Iraqi media was given extra responsibility to accurately represent the situation before and during the vote. The media is always tasked to provide the information that the people need to make informed decisions, but here it was also backing up decisions on physical safety. The tone of the coverage as well as the facts reported played as much of a role in this. In addition there were non-sectarian party lists with Iraqi Sunni involvement trying to appeal to voters in the four predominantly Iraqi Sunni provinces where the threat of violence was high and campaigning was largely impossible. The local media - and to an extent, the Arab satellite TV networks - was one of their few means of reaching voters in these areas, and its effectiveness in doing so may have been the Iraqi media's greatest test in the run up to 30 January. Security Security was set predictably high for the election, with major restrictions on movements around election day. Iraq's land borders were closed from January 29-31; only pilgrims returning from the Hajj in Saudi Arabia were allowed to enter the country. Travel between Iraq's provinces was allowed only by special permits, and most civilian travel of all kinds barred on election day to obstruct car bombers. The ban on car travel made it difficult for some voters to reach the polls, especially if they have moved from the neighbourhood where they are registered. The media were required to get special accreditation and coverage from the polling stations was strictly regulated. A reported 100,000 Iraqi police and 60,000 Iraqi National Guardsmen were deployed to protect the stations, backed up by 150,000 US and 10,000 British soldiers. Radio Free Europe reported that an unsigned directive posted to a jihadist website in early January advised militants in Iraq to "prevent the continuation of participation by any members of the election committees through persuasion, threats, kidnapping, and other methods." It continued: "Make sure that once they agree to withdraw from the election committee, their withdrawal is not announced except during the critical and narrow time frame (so that) the government cannot replace them with other (workers).... This will make it extremely difficult to find trained people to manage the elections in such a short period of time." In the week before the election, the government announced the arrest of several senior aides to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suggesting it was making inroads against the group that had sworn to turn polling day into a bloodbath. However, Reuters reported some government officials had cast doubt on the importance of the arrests, suggesting the announcements were designed to build confidence in security arrangements. Rohan Jayasekera is an associate editor at Index on Censorship and is currently directing Index's programmes of monitoring, publishing, training and advocacy in Iraq. Journalists & media workers killed in Iraq during 2004 1. Duraid Isa Mohammed, producer and translator, CNN - 27 January 2004 2. Yasser Khatab, driver, CNN - 27 January 2004 3. Haymin Mohamed Salih, Qulan TV - 01 February 2004 4. Ayoub Mohamed, Kurdistan TV - 01 February 2004 5. Gharib Mohamed Salih, Kurdistan TV - 01 February 2004 6. Semko Karim Mohyideen, freelance - 01 February 2004 7. Abdel Sattar Abdel Karim, al-Ta'akhi - 01 February 2004 8. Safir Nader, Qulan TV - 01 February 2004 9. Ali Al-Khatib, Al-Arabiya - 18 March 2004 10. Ali Abdel Aziz, Al-Arabiya - 18 March 2004 11. Nadia Nasrat, Diyala Television - 18 March 2004 12. Majid Rachid, technician, Diyala Television - 18 March 2004 13. Mohamad Ahmad, security agent, Diyala Television - 18 March 2004 14. Bourhan Mohammad al-Louhaybi, ABC News - 26 March 2004 15. Omar Hashim Kamal, translator, Time - 26 March 2004 16. Assad Kadhim, Al-Iraqiya TV - 19 April 2004 17. Hussein Saleh, driver, Al-Iraquiya TV - 29 April 2004 18. Mounir Bouamrane, TVP - 07 May 2004 19. Waldemar Milewicz, TVP - 07 May 2004 20. Rachid Hamid Wali, cameraman assistant, Al-Jazira - 21 May 2004 21. Unknown, translator - 25 May 2004 22. Kotaro Ogawa, Nikkan Gendai - 27 May 2004 23. Shinsuke Hashida, Nikkan Gendai - 27 May 2004 24. Unknown, translator - 27 May 2004 25. Mahmoud Ismael Daood, bodyguard, Al-Sabah al-Jadid - 29 May 2004 26. Samia Abdeljabar, driver, Al-Sabah al-Jadid - 29 May 2004 27. Sahar Saad Eddine Nouami, Al-Hayat Al-Gadida - 03 June 2004 28. Mahmoud Hamid Abbas, ZDF - 15 August 2004 29. Hossam Ali, freelance. - 15 August 2004 30. Jamal Tawfiq Salmane, Gazeta Wyborcza - 25 August 2004 31. Enzo Baldoni, Diario della settimana - 26 August 2004 32. Mazen al-Tomaizi, Al-Arabiya - 12 September 2004 33. Ahmad Jassem, Nivive television - 07 October 2004 34. Dina Mohamad Hassan, Al Hurriya Television - 14 October 2004 35. Karam Hussein, European Pressphoto Agency - 14 October 2004 36. Liqaa Abdul-Razzaq, Al-Sharqiya - 27 October 2004 37. Dhia Najim, Reuters - 01 November 2004 Reporters sans Fronti?res 30.01.2005 From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 21:42:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:42:48 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Index on Censorship: United States: Taboo subjects on campus Message-ID: United States: Taboo subjects on campus http://www.indexonline.org/en/news/articles/2005/1/united-states-taboo-subjects-on-campus.shtml Index on Censorship How free is campus speech? Furore over Harvard president's views raise wider issues. By Sara B. Miller & Amanda Paulson Harvard University president Lawrence Summers says his comment that innate differences between the sexes may partly account for male dominance in science and maths - was intended to provoke discussion. Instead they have ended up raising an even larger question: Have universities become so steeped in sensitivities that certain topics can't be openly discussed? Sara B. Miller & Amanda Paulson discuss. In the weeks since Harvard University president Lawrence Summers suggested that innate differences between the sexes may partly account for male dominance in science and math, the ensuing frenzy of discussion has become a kind of national Rorschach test. Editorialists excoriate his sexism or applaud his candour. The National Organization for Women has called for his resignation. Academics are poring over studies that deal with nature, nurture and gender differences. Dr. Summers's comments - which he said were intended to provoke discussion about why women were underrepresented in top science posts - have ended up raising an even larger question: Have universities become so steeped in sensitivities that certain topics can't be openly discussed? Historically, ivory towers have been society's bulwarks of free intellectual exploration. But critics say that role is jeopardized on issues ranging from gender and race to religion and the politics of the Middle East. "I could give example after example where speech that is considered offensive by any particular group that has a disproportionate amount of power on the campus is subject to censorship and repression," says David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a civil liberties organization that works on college campuses. "It gives the most sensitive person the veto power on debate and discussion." Many disagree with that assessment. But the Summers flap has revived a longstanding debate on the subject - often waged along ideological lines over whether campuses are hostile to those with conservative ideas. At Columbia University, for example, a different sort of controversy has been brewing about what can and can't be said. In this case, it's not an authority figure who's ruffled feathers, but students. The tensions came to a head this fall when a documentary, Columbia Unbecoming, filmed Jewish students alleging that pro-Palestinian professors, particularly from the school's department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC), were intimidating them. In the film, one student who had served in the Israeli Army says a professor asked him how many Palestinians he had killed when he stood up to ask a question. The charges have angered both students and professors, with both sides waving the banner of academic freedom. Columbia President Lee Bollinger has formed an ad hoc faculty committee to investigate the student complaints, while one professor in MEALAC has likened the situation to a "witch hunt." While teachers say they feel threatened (one has cancelled his most controversial course), the students say theirs is the speech that's being suppressed - and that the pro-Palestinian professors have crossed a line into unacceptable territory. "I don't think I can go before class and say something blatantly racist," says Ariel Beery, a Columbia senior who appears in the documentary. "Creating a collegial environment in order to work together is what a university is about." Others have more sympathy for the professors. The controversy "raises concerns that political disagreement is being conflated with intimidation and harassment," says Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who calls the student attacks a throwback to the McCarthy era. The fact that the students have so publicly denounced the professors and administration, she says, shows that students are "quite empowered" to express opinions. The controversies at Harvard and Columbia are, of course, quite different in terms of both the complaints and who's making them. But both touch on the question of whether academia is increasingly unfriendly to vigorous debate. Summers's repeated apologies, in particular, angered many op-ed columnists who felt they were evidence of academic orthodoxy being enforced. "It would be interesting to know what would have happened if Larry Summers, after the controversy first emerged, had called a press conference and said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, this is what the university is all about,' and stopped there. I think he would have been a national hero," says Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Murray caused a similar storm a decade ago when he co-wrote The Bell Curve, suggesting that there might be innate differences among races regarding intelligence. That idea of inequality, he says, is still one of the biggest taboos. "There's just a part of the dogma in the university that centres on equality as a good in and of itself, not just equality of outcome, but equality of the raw material. It's something we didn't really anticipate when we wrote The Bell Curve." Evalyn Gates, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, sees it differently. It's the not that the idea of studying innate differences is so offensive, she says, referring to the Summers's remarks. Rather it's that other, larger reasons exist for women's poor representation in scientific fields - documented gender bias both early on and within academia, and a culture that makes it hard to balance family life and work. Biological nature, she says, is "a red herring" compared to these issues of nurture. In addition, there's the issue of who's making the comments. "If some researcher at a conference says he wants to study this possibility [of gender difference], that's fine," Dr. Gates says. "But the fact that the president of Harvard has said it I think has done damage." The charge that universities are intolerant of ideas that clash with the accepted line of thinking has been around at least since the 1960s, and gained traction during the culture wars of the 1980s and '90s. Usually the complaints come from conservatives who consider academia too liberal. One recent flash point involves bake sales at which items cost different amounts based on a student's race, used to protest affirmative-action policies, which several universities have banned. Another hot topic is religion. A question du jour: Do universities have the right to refuse to allow religious clubs to require that members hold certain beliefs? But demanding free speech, some academics point out, cuts both ways. "On the one hand, professors should be free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry they think academically sound," says Jonathan Knight, director of the American Association of University Professors' programme on academic freedom and tenure. "But they had best be prepared to deal with the criticism, no matter how acid." At Harvard, Summers has faced such criticism numerous times since he took the helm in 2001. He's angered some with remarks ranging from a rebuke of a celebrated black professor to praise of patriotism - a style that some call candour, and other see as evidence that he's insufficiently aware of the power of his words. At the recent conference, for instance, he only suggested that gender difference be studied as a possible reason for women's absence in the sciences. "But the headlines say, 'Harvard president says men are better at science than women,'" says Gates, the University of Chicago professor. "That kind of phrase repeated over and over, especially when it reinforces an underlying concept people have already, can be extremely damaging." This article first appeared in the [12]Christian Science Monitor. It is republished with permission. 29.01.2005 From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 21:43:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:43:36 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: False Memory Creation Recorded Message-ID: False Memory Creation Recorded http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-02-01-3 Brain imaging reveals biology of faulty eyewitness accounts Betterhumans Staff 2/1/2005 1:11 PM Brain imaging has provided insight into faulty eyewitness accounts. Research has shown that people's memories of complex events can be altered by misleading information provided after the event has occurred. Using noninvasive brain imaging methods, Yoko Akado and [8]Craig Stark of [9]Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland have now looked deeper into this process by examining how the brain encodes misinformation when creating a false memory. Misleading slide show For the study, participants were first shown a slide show of a man stealing a woman's wallet and then hiding behind a door. They were then shown a slightly different slide show and told it was the same sequence. Two days later, participants took a memory test in which they were asked to recall details of the slide show and which of the two presentations contained the information. Predicting misinformation Stark and Akado found that participants' brain activity predicted whether their memories would be accurate or false. For memories falsely associated with the first slide show when viewing the second, the researchers found that there was weaker activity in particular brain areas such as the prefrontal cortex. The researchers suggest that activity in the prefrontal cortex is linked with encoding memory context. Weak activity during the misinformation phase therefore suggests that the details of the second experience were poorly placed in context and as a result more easily confused. The research is reported in the journal [10]Learning & Memory. References 8. http://neuroscience.jhu.edu/peopledetail.asp?ID=320 9. http://www.jhu.edu/ 10. http://www.learnmem.org/ From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 21:50:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:50:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Really?: The Claim: Shoveling Snow Can Set Off a Heart Attack Message-ID: The New York Times > Health > Really?: The Claim: Shoveling Snow Can Set Off a Heart Attack http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/health/01real.html 5.2.1 REALLY? The Claim: Shoveling Snow Can Set Off a Heart Attack By ANAHAD O'CONNOR T HE FACTS As Americans dig their way out of the blizzard that blanketed parts of the Northeast last month, reports of people suffering heart attacks, snow shovel in hand, have surfaced. Many people do not take the risk seriously. But the claim that clearing snow is so strenuous that it can be deadly is no exaggeration, experts say. Just being out in the cold raises blood pressure. Add to that the fact that shoveling is a tension-inducing isometric exercise, like weight lifting, and that it is often performed by older, otherwise sedentary men, and it is no surprise that the activity is linked to heart attacks, said Dr. Jacob I. Haft at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. In a small study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1996, Dr. Haft found that most heart attacks from shoveling resulted from trauma to coronary arteries, rupturing plaques that disrupt blood flow. Most victims have no history of heart disease. In some cases, up to a quarter of those afflicted are women, a 1999 study by the National Center for Environmental Health found. When shoveling must be done, it is best to do it early, when the snow is lighter, and in short stints, not all at once. Any exercise that involves the upper extremities puts added stress on the cardiovascular system, Dr. Haft said, so be cautious. THE BOTTOM LINE Clearing snow is a common trigger of heart attacks, particularly in people with no previous history of cardiovascular disease. From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 21:52:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:52:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Fearing Violence, Hamilton College Cancels Speech by Professor Who Called 9/11 Victims 'Little Eichmanns' Message-ID: Fearing Violence, Hamilton College Cancels Speech by Professor Who Called 9/11 Victims 'Little Eichmanns' News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.2 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/02/2005020206n.htm [NYT writeup appended.] by [45]By SCOTT SMALLWOOD Citing what it called "credible threats of violence," Hamilton College has canceled a speech planned for Thursday by a professor who has called those who died in the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center "little Eichmanns." A storm of controversy has centered on the Clinton, N.Y., college in recent days as many people, including families of September 11 victims, protested the planned speech by Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Shortly after the attacks, he wrote that those killed were not innocent civilians but a "technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire." He went on to compare them to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of sending millions of Jews to concentration camps. Mr. Churchill was originally invited to speak at Hamilton by the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture. Nancy Rabinowitz, a professor of comparative literature and the project director, had invited him to speak on American Indian issues, but after other professors and relatives of September 11 victims complained, she says, administrators asked her to change the topic. The event, retitled "Limits of Dissent," became about the controversy itself. As the calls to cancel the event increased, Joan Hinde Stewart, Hamilton's president, at first said the college would defend free speech by allowing it to go forward. But on Tuesday, she announced that holding the event, which had been expanded to a panel discussion, would be too dangerous. "We have done our best to protect what we hold most dear, the right to speak, think, and study freely," she said in a written statement. "But there is a higher responsibility that this institution carries, and that is the safety and security of our students, faculty, staff, and the community in which we live." Before the cancellation, the college had taken the unusual step of posting on its Web site hundreds of the very negative e-mail messages it had received about inviting Mr. Churchill to speak. Critics included prospective students who said they now would not attend Hamilton, parents disturbed by what they called "hate speech," and many television viewers who heard about the controversy on The O'Reilly Factor. One wrote: "I am sure the KKK and Nazi promoters would not be invited to speak at Hamilton. ... This is not a question of free speech. Mr. Churchill can say whatever he wants. ... It is a question of decency and respect. Obviously Hamilton has neither." Why this particular event blew up into such a firestorm remains unclear. Mr. Churchill is a regular speaker on issues of indigenous cultures on campuses across the country. He spoke last month at Miami University in Ohio, and about a year ago he spoke not far from Hamilton at Syracuse University. Those appearances did not generate such reaction. Ms. Rabinowitz suggested the Hamilton event may have grabbed media attention because the victims' families got involved and because the college had just recently been in the news for hiring Susan Rosenberg, a former radical leftist who spent 16 years in federal prison. Ms. Rabinowitz said she was saddened by the president's decision to cancel the event. "I don't sit in her shoes," she said. "I wasn't in the room when they were talking about it." But the decision will chill free speech, she said: "Not just that it's canceled because of the threats, but it will make you rethink other events." In Colorado, meanwhile, Gov. Bill Owens on Tuesday called for Mr. Churchill to resign from the faculty. The professor had already announced on Monday that he was stepping down as chairman of the ethnic-studies department but that he would remain as a faculty member. In addition, the University of Colorado's Board of Regents plans to hold a special meeting on Thursday to discuss Mr. Churchill. Attempts to reach Mr. Churchill were unsuccessful. Ms. Rabinowitz said that the professor was disappointed that the Hamilton event had been canceled and that he and his wife, who was also scheduled to speak, had been prepared to attend the discussion despite receiving death threats. In a written statement released on Monday, Mr. Churchill said the analysis of his comments had been "grossly inaccurate." He said he was not defending the September 11 attacks, "but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned." He also said that the best way to avoid another such attack is for American citizens to force the U.S. government to comply with the rule of law. "The lesson of Nuremburg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation," he said. "To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the 'good Germans' of the 1930s and 40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences." _________________________________________________________________ Background article from The Chronicle: * [61]Former Radical Withdraws From Hamilton College Post (1/7/2005) References 45. mailto:scott.smallwood at chronicle.com 61. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18a00701.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. ----------- College Cancels Speech by Professor Who Disparaged 9/11 Attack Victims http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/education/02hamilton.html?ei=5070&en=f2dad76faf777b82&ex=1108011600&pagewanted=print&position= New York Times, 5.2.2 By PATRICK D. HEALY CLINTON, N.Y., Feb. 1 - Over the last five days, tiny Hamilton College in upstate New York has been barraged with more than 6,000 e-mail messages full of fury, some threatening violence. Some donors have canceled pledges to an ambitious capital campaign. And prospective students have withdrawn applications or refused to enroll. Then, on Monday night, a caller to the college threatened to bring a gun to campus. Stunned and frightened, Hamilton leaders sought to end the turmoil on Tuesday by canceling the event that set it off: a planned speech by a Colorado professor who was invited to talk about American Indian activism but whose earlier essay on the Sept. 11 attacks fueled the criticism and threats. The professor, Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote disparagingly of the victims inside the twin towers and referred to them at one point as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust. The speech, scheduled for Thursday night, was canceled for security reasons, Hamilton officials said. Mr. Churchill said he and his wife had received more than 100 death threats, and other warnings of violence mentioned Hamilton officials, including the president, Joan Hinde Stewart. Yet the uproar also adds a twist to decades of battles over free speech on campus, showing the powerful emotional resonance of Sept. 11. In a telephone interview on Tuesday night, Mr. Churchill called the threats against Hamilton College "American terrorism." He urged those making the threats to "take a look in the mirror." Matt House, a freshman studying government, said, "We have controversial speakers on campus all the time, but I think everyone's so upset because it's only been three years since 9/11 and this is striking New York too close to home." "In this case, 9/11 trumps free speech, I guess," added Brian J. Farnkoff, a senior majoring in public policy. "In the end, free speech couldn't happen at Hamilton." In recent days, Gov. George E. Pataki said he was appalled at Mr. Churchill's remarks and at Hamilton for inviting him, and a Fox News host, Bill O'Reilly, repeatedly urged viewers to e-mail the college in protest. Ms. Stewart, the president, as well as the professors who invited Mr. Churchill, said they did not know about his essay before asking him to campus. She denounced his comments in December, but said rescinding the invitation would harm First Amendment principles. "His remarks about the victims of 9/11 are repellent, but our reaction to 'repellent' is how we test the right to free speech," Ms. Stewart said in an interview on Tuesday shortly before addressing the turn of events with the Hamilton faculty, who gave her a standing ovation. "We did our best to protect the principles and the values that we believe in - the right to speak, to study, to teach freely - but the point came that I simply felt that this threat was too large for us to handle," said Ms. Stewart, who was told by campus security that even additional police officers could not ensure safety. Hamilton, a campus of 1,750 students, has always had a reputation for accepting divergent voices. In November, the same program that invited this speaker - the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture - hired Susan Rosenberg, a former member of the Weather Underground, after her release from prison on explosives charges. She later withdrew in the face of protest. On another end of the political spectrum, the scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese equated abortion to murder during her talk to a packed, polite campus auditorium last Thursday. According to The Spectator, the weekly student newspaper, she also said that empowering humans to choose who lives and who dies "opens the road to the Holocaust." Mr. Churchill - who had planned to give his remarks Thursday in a flak jacket with two bodyguards in tow - was originally scheduled to speak by himself, but Ms. Stewart and others added three people to the panel and changed its focus to free speech. One of those added was Mr. Churchill's wife, who is also a scholar. The Churchills were to be paid $3,500, but volunteered this week to forgo the money because of the complaints. In his original essay, Mr. Churchill wrote that the thousands killed at the World Trade Center had played a role in American sanctions on Iraq that "translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants." "If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it," he wrote. The bulk of the outraged e-mail messages began arriving last weekend, after Mr. O'Reilly of Fox had urged viewers to contact Hamilton. "If you allow this vile individual to speak you forever label yourself as the Auschwitz of American colleges," stated one e-mail message among nearly 400 that Hamilton posted on its Web site to show the reaction to Mr. Churchill. "Would he feel the same way about his own wife or child if they worked in the W.T.C. and were lost because they went to work that day," wrote the spouse of a rescue-operations captain who was killed. "He should be banned on the grounds of slandering the victims of such a brutal terrorist attack." Ms. Stewart said she alone received 6,000 messages, describing them as "ranging from angry to profane, obscene, violent," and asserted that Hamilton's actions had been mischaracterized by many of the writers, as well as by Mr. O'Reilly. Controversial speakers are nothing new to academic institutions: For years, Leonard Jeffries of the City University of New York would create a stir on campus and elsewhere with provocative remarks, and a Columbia University faculty panel is now investigating remarks by some pro-Palestinian professors that offended some Jewish students. In 2002, hundreds of Harvard students protested when a graduating senior was chosen to deliver a commencement speech entitled, "The American Jihad." The student, Zayed Yasin, who received a death threat, said his speech was a defense of the meaning of jihad as a nonviolent struggle to do right. After negotiations with a representative of Harvard's Jewish community, Mr. Yasin changed the title to "Of Faith and Citizenship," and delivered his remarks under tight security. Later in 2002, Harvard College's English Department canceled a campus reading by a poet who had once referred in verse to the Israeli Army as a "Zionist SS." and had criticized American-born Jewish settlers. As at Hamilton, professors at Harvard said they had not known about the remarks of the poet, Tom Paulin, before inviting him. As Hamilton was trying to contain the outrage on Tuesday, political and university officials in Colorado were criticizing Mr. Churchill. Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, called on him to resign from the university, while Representative Mark Udall, a Democrat, said in a statement that the professor was "factually inaccurate" about the terrorist attacks and owed the families of victims an apology. Mr. Churchill gave up his chairmanship of the ethnic studies department this week, and a spokeswoman said that the university's governing body, the nine-member Board of Regents, would meet Thursday to discuss his future. Kirk Johnson and Michelle York contributed reporting for this article. From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 21:56:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:56:09 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: (Lamar) Congress Should Not Impose Cost Controls on Colleges, Senate Republican Says Message-ID: Congress Should Not Impose Cost Controls on Colleges, Senate Republican Says News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.2 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/02/2005020202n.htm [Hooray for Lamar. I've long thought him the best Presidential candidate whose changes of getting elected were greater than minuscule. Note esp. what he said about Larry Summers.] [45]By KELLY FIELD Washington In a far-ranging speech delivered on Tuesday, Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and former U.S. secretary of education, spoke out against price controls and political correctness on college campuses. "The idea of price controls from Washington for colleges and universities is a bad idea," Senator Alexander said at the annual meeting of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. "It's a bad idea because what has made our system of higher education superior is autonomy and choice." The association, known as Naicu, strongly opposes price controls and last year lobbied against legislation proposed by Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, a California Republican, that would have punished colleges for large tuition increases ([62]The Chronicle, October 17, 2003). Mr. McKeon withdrew that bill in March -- citing efforts by colleges to curb costs -- but later included provisions establishing institutional reporting requirements in another bill proposed as part of Congress's work to renew the Higher Education Act. Under that bill, which House Republicans are expected to reintroduce soon, colleges that increased their tuition and other costs of attendance by more than twice the rate of inflation for three consecutive years would be required to provide the government with an explanation of the jumps. In addition, the colleges would have to outline the steps that they planned to take to slow the rate of the increase. If colleges failed to comply with that plan for two years, the institutions would be placed on a government watch list and would have to provide the department with a detailed accounting of all of their costs and expenditures, which would be made public. In addition, the Education Department's inspector general would be allowed to audit those colleges "to determine the cause of the institution[s'] failure," the bill states. While Mr. Alexander supported colleges on price controls, he chastised them for their double-talk on diversity, suggesting that some colleges have become intolerant of unpopular views. As evidence, he cited recent attacks on the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, for his comments on women in math and science. Mr. Summers was vilified by some academics for suggesting that one reason fewer women make it to the top in mathematics and science may be because of innate differences of ability from men. Colleges and universities "get a little obnoxious sometimes in their self-righteousness," said Mr. Alexander. "Institutions that preach diversity and then don't allow diverse questions to be asked are not doing a very good job of what I think colleges and universities ought to do." Meanwhile, Mr. Alexander urged colleges to combat the view "that every time we increase Pell grants, tuition increases." That theory was advanced by a recent report by the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, that concluded that increased student aid has driven up college tuition by increasing enrollment. The report recommended phasing out federal assistance to higher education over a 12-year period. Finally, Mr. Alexander vowed to work with his colleagues to reduce delays in processing visa applications for foreign students and scholars. "We're going do our best in Congress over the next year," he said, "to try to put a focus on whatever the federal government can do to make it easier for foreign students and researchers to come here." _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [63]Harvard's President Wonders Aloud About Women in Science and Math (1/28/2005) * [64]Report Blames Federal Student Aid for Rising Tuition and Urges Elimination of Aid Programs (1/26/2005) * [65]Public Colleges See a 10% Rise in Tuition for 2004-5 (10/29/2004) * [66]College Groups Displeased With Higher-Education Legislation (6/11/2004) * [67]Plan to Punish Big Increases in Tuition Is Dropped (3/12/2004) * [68]A House Divided Over Tuition-Control Bill (1/23/2004) * [69]High Stakes on Tuition: Colleges Must Control It or Face Stiff Penalties, Key Congressman Says (5/2/2003) References 45. mailto:Kelly.Field at chronicle.com 63. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i21/21a01201.htm 64. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/01/2005012602n.htm 65. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i10/10a00101.htm 66. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i40/40a01901.htm 67. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i27/27a00101.htm 68. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i20/20a02702.htm 69. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i34/34a02901.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 21:57:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:57:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Nature: Profile: Margaret Atwood Message-ID: Profile: Margaret Atwood http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050131/pf/nbt0205-163_pf.html Nature Biotechnology Published online: 31 January 2005; | doi:10.1038/nbt0205-163 Profile: Margaret Atwood Sabine Lou?t Dublin Imagine a world in which biotech could satiate every human desire and correct every human imperfection. Margaret Atwood's latest novel paints a picture and it's not all that rosy. "It is not biotech that's dangerous," claims Margaret Atwood, her sparkly blue eyes betraying the intensity of her conviction. "It is people's fears and desires." Her latest book, Oryx and Crake, paints a grim picture of the future in which a genetically engineered virus has devastated the world, leaving behind a nightmarish wasteland where insects proliferate and chimeric animals run amok. Atwood, a Canadian author with more than 30 books of fiction, short stories, poetry and literary critiques to her credit, has created a chilling vision. Even the precatastrophic world in Oryx and Crake is bleak--fixated on physical perfection and longevity, with economic and intellectual disparities reminiscent of our own. Biotech is the tool of the elite, who live in tightly protected compounds. Everyone else remains on the outside. Despite the negative tone of her book, Atwood stresses she is not antibiotech. "Biotech is not dangerous," [it is] neutral," she says. Only its uses "can be evil," she adds, especially once business interests kick in. By writing the book--part of a long dystopian tradition in fiction, including Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984--Atwood wants to warn her readers by presenting "a blueprint of what you don't want to happen." According to John Durant, professor of public understanding of science at Imperial College, London, similar to other popular media, Atwood's book provides "a thermometer...showing what's going on in public opinion." At the same time, he adds, it shapes and reinforces the public's opinion about biotech. Indeed, Atwood hopes her readers "may at least become aware of the problems facing them" in a society that has come to rely heavily on biotech and that "they may then give some thought to what they are going to do about those kinds of problems." "It is not biotech that's dangerous," claims Margaret Atwood, "It is people's fears and desires." One of the key themes of the novel is the corrupting influence of commerce on science. When business interests dominate "you enter a skewed universe where science can no longer operate as science," Atwood says. The book takes this to extremes. For example, biotech company HelthWyzer puts "hostile bioforms" into vitamin pills while at the same time marketing antidotes. "The best diseases, from a business point of view," the author writes with irony, "would be those that cause a lingering illness." Some see Atwood's book as a bellwether for public concerns about the impact of biotech on society. According to Evelyn Fox Keller, professor of history and philosophy of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, many of these fears result from the tendency of scientists to hype the importance of genes in determining who we are. "If the public has been persuaded that this is the case, no wonder they are alarmed." It does not matter whether that anxiety is misplaced. Atwood grew up among biologists; the "boys at the lab" mentioned in the novel's acknowledgments are the students and postdocs who worked with her father at a forest-insect research station in Northern Quebec. What's more, her brother, Harold, is a professor of physiology and zoology at the University of Toronto. The genesis of Oryx and Crake comes from her lifelong observance of, and interest, in science. Several of the ideas in the book are drawn directly from her childhood in Canada and later stays in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. During her time in Australia, for example, she became acquainted with the ecological havoc wrought by colonial introduction of nonindigenous species, such as pigs. In Oryx and Crake, Australian pigs translate into transgenic oddities called 'pigoons'--animals engineered to provide transplant organs, rather like those that have come from Cambridge, UK-based biotech company Immutran, now part of Novartis in Basel. These pigoons run wild after escaping the highly secluded laboratories where they were created. They have not only humanized organs but also human neocortex tissue, enabling them to compete with wild relatives and with humans in the struggle for survival following the pandemic. According to Atwood, when business interests dominate "you enter a skewed universe where science can no longer operate as science." When pressed for present-day concerns in science ethics that prompted her book, Atwood says she feels particularly strongly about the loss of independence of scientists, citing the suppression of negative data by corporate sponsors. "If you get results that are contrary to what you want to market, the temptation to suppress those results is very strong," she says. Such competing interests are becoming increasingly common as governments across the world encourage more and more scientists to become involved in commercial enterprises. Atwood describes her book as speculative, rather than science, fiction. Joan Leach, editor of the academic journal Social Epistemology and a lecturer in science communication at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia, agrees. "It's a kind of cultural critique," she explains. How far should society allow biotech to be exploited on the basis of commercial imperatives? And what are the moral and ethical responsibilities to limit the application of biotech? In her book, Atwood describes the 'ChickieNob,' a type of genetically enhanced chicken with a dozen wings on two legs. With such creations, the book's hero wonders "has [some line] been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?" The lack of oversight for biotech applications is a key problem for biotech today, according to Atwood. She believes an independent watchdog is needed to provide guidance. It would be somewhat like a "restaurant reviewer," she says, forcing scientists to "tell the truth" and rejecting biotech applications that might be ethically dubious or morally distasteful. She also suggests that new legislation should be introduced to protect whistleblowers who wish to come forward and reveal corruption or conflicts in corporate-sponsored research. Biotechnology "is the biggest toy box in the world that we've now opened," Atwood says. The question is should those toys come with more health warnings? From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 21:58:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:58:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reuters: Half of Bankruptcies in U.S. Due to Medical Bills Message-ID: Half of Bankruptcies in U.S. Due to Medical Bills http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=571&u=/nm/20050202/hl_nm/healt h_bankruptcy_dc&printer=1 Wed Feb 2, 4:28 AM ET [Thanks to James Hughes for this.] By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Half of all U.S. bankruptcies are caused by soaring medical bills and most people sent into debt by illness are middle-class workers with health insurance, researchers said on Wednesday. The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, estimated that medical bankruptcies affect about 2 million Americans every year, if both debtors and their dependents, including about 700,000 children, are counted. "Our study is frightening. Unless you're Bill Gates (news - web sites) you're just one serious illness away from bankruptcy," said Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (news - web sites) who led the study. "Most of the medically bankrupt were average Americans who happened to get sick. Health insurance offered little protection." The researchers got the permission of bankruptcy judges in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas to survey 931 people who filed for bankruptcy. "About half cited medical causes, which indicates that 1.9 to 2.2 million Americans (filers plus dependents) experienced medical bankruptcy," they wrote. "Among those whose illnesses led to bankruptcy, out-of-pocket costs averaged $11,854 since the start of illness; 75.7 percent had insurance at the onset of illness." The average bankrupt person surveyed had spent $13,460 on co-payments, deductibles and uncovered services if they had private insurance. People with no insurance spent an average of $10,893 for such out-of-pocket expenses. "Even middle-class insured families often fall prey to financial catastrophe when sick," the researchers wrote. Bankruptcy specialists said the numbers seemed sound. "From 1982 to 1989, I reviewed every bankruptcy petition filed in South Carolina, and during that period I came to the conclusion that there were two major causes of bankruptcy: medical bills and divorce," said George Cauthen, a lawyer at Columbia-based law firm Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP. "Each accounted, roughly, for about a third of all individual filings in South Carolina." He said fewer than 1 percent of all bankruptcy filings were due to credit card debt. "That truly is a myth," Cauthen said in a telephone interview. Cauthen said he was not surprised to hear that so many of the bankrupt people in the study were middle-class. "Usually people who have something to protect file bankruptcy," he said. "The truly indigent -- people that we see on the street -- there is no relief that we can give them." Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a Harvard associate professor and physician who advocates for universal health coverage, said the study supported demands for health reform. "Covering the uninsured isn't enough. We must also upgrade and guarantee continuous coverage for those who have insurance," Woolhandler said in a statement. She said many employers and politicians were pressing for what she called "stripped-down plans so riddled with co-payments, deductibles and exclusions that serious illness leads straight to bankruptcy." From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 22:00:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 17:00:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Geology Course Gives Students a Down-to-Earth Understanding of Sherlock Holmes's Worke Message-ID: Geology Course Gives Students a Down-to-Earth Understanding of Sherlock Holmes's Worke The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18a02202.htm SYLLABUS By DANIEL ENGBER In the Sherlock Holmes tale A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Watson jots down a list of Holmes's various areas of expertise. The sixth item on the list: "knowledge of geology -- practical, but limited." Students at Smith College who take Lawrence D. Meinert's class on the fictional detective, "Sherlock Holmes and the Scientific Method," can add some geology to their own lists of proficiencies. Mr. Meinert, a geologist specializing in the detection of gold deposits, hopes that his first-year seminar can serve as both a writing workshop and an introductory science course. "This is my subversive effort to get everyone to think about scientific reasoning," he explains. "When a student says, 'You tricked us. I learned some science,' that obviously makes me quite thrilled." As part of the course, students read a number of Sherlock Holmes stories and discuss how the detective uses the scientific method to solve mysteries. By making observations, gathering evidence, and then proposing a testable hypothesis, "Sherlock uses scientific reasoning in a romantic and entertaining fashion," says Mr. Meinert. Some stories, like "The Blue Carbuncle," involve minerals or gems as central plot elements. The Hound of the Baskervilles takes place on the moors, amid a variety of interesting geological features. In one writing exercise, students develop what Mr. Meinert calls "a geologic augmentation" of that story, taking its central plot and tying in the geology of the setting. Other exercises build toward a final paper, for which members of the class devise their own mysteries starring Sherlock Holmes. The story must illustrate the use of the scientific method to solve a mystery, and must incorporate a geologic phenomenon as a central plot element. Mr. Meinert asks each student to read his or her assignment out loud, which "has an amazing effect," he says. "The effect of my grading, or of their internal motivation, doesn't hold a candle to the mortification of reading your own work aloud in front of your peers." Reading list: Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volumes I and II, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Bantam Classics, 1986); Understanding Earth, by Frank Press, Raymond Siever, John Grotzinger, and Tom Jordan (W.H. Freeman & Company, 2003). Assignments: In addition to writing an original Holmes story, each student writes a short paper on dinosaurs. They go on several field trips throughout the semester, including a behind-the-scenes tour of a jewelry store and visits to dinosaur footprints, a local cemetery, and a quarry. From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 22:01:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 17:01:36 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Don Quixote at 400: Still Conquering Hearts Message-ID: Don Quixote at 400: Still Conquering Hearts The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18b01101.htm By ILAN STAVANS The Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is turning 400. By some accounts, the first part of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes's masterpiece, was available in Valladolid by Christmas Eve 1604, although Madrid didn't get copies until January 1605. Thus came to life the "ingenious gentleman" who, ill equipped with antiquated armor "stained with rust and covered with mildew," with an improvised helmet, atop an ancient nag "with more cracks than his master's pate," went out into a decaying world where there were plenty of "evils to undo, wrongs to right, injustices to correct, abuses to ameliorate, and offenses to rectify." Cervantes catches a glimpse of the down-and-out hidalgo at around 50, the prime of one's life by today's standards but a synonym of decrepitude during what was considered Spain's "Golden Age," an appellation Cervantes complicates. The protagonist, we are told, is weathered, his flesh scrawny, and his face gaunt. We know nothing of his childhood and adolescence and only a modicum about his affairs, including that too little sleep and too many chivalry novels have addled his brain. Almost 1,000 pages later, Don Quixote (or Alonso Quixada or Quexada, some names Cervantes gives to the hidalgo) lies on his deathbed. Finally, well into the second book, issued in 1615, Don Quixote dies -- but only after an impostor, Alonso Fern?ndez de Avellaneda, impatient that Cervantes kept procrastinating, brought out an unofficial second part that pushed the author to complete his work. Cervantes may also have been sensing that his own demise, which came in April 1616, was close. About to die the exemplary death, Don Quixote is nevertheless consumed by the grief of countless defeats and frustrated in his impossible mission to see his beloved Dulcinea of Toboso. Is he wiser? Disenchanted? Does he die of melancholia? The limits of age? "Don Quixote's end," we are told, "came after he had received all the sacraments and had execrated books of chivalry with many effective words. The scribe happened to be present, and he said he had never read in any book of chivalry of a knight errant dying in his bed in so tranquil and Christian a manner as Don Quixote, who, surrounded by the sympathy and tears of those present, gave up the ghost, I mean to say, he died." Don Quixote might be dead, but his ever-ambiguous ghost lives on. His admirers -- and, in unequal measure, detractors -- are legion. Operas, musicals, theatrical and film adaptations, as well as fictional recreations keep piling up: Laurence Sterne was inspired by Don Quixote's misadventures when writing Tristram Shandy; Gustave Flaubert paid homage to him in Madame Bovary, as did Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Idiot. Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" can be read as a reimagining of the knight's simplicity. And so on. Then there are the multilayered interpretations of Don Quixote's pursuit. Anybody that is somebody has put forth an opinion, from Miguel de Unamuno, Jos? Ortega y Gasset, Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo, and Am?rico Castro, to name a handful of Iberians first, to Samuel Johnson, Denis Diderot, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Lionel Trilling, and Vladimir Nabokov. Over the years, Don Quixote has been a template of the times: The 18th century believed the knight to be a lunatic, lost to reason; the Victorians approached him as a romantic dreamer, trapped, just like artists and prophets, in his own fantasy; the modernists applauded his quest for an inner language; the postmodernists adore his dislocated identity. Psychiatrists have seen him as a case study in schizophrenia. Communists have turned him into a victim of market forces. Intellectual historians have portrayed him as a portent of Spain's decline into intellectual obscurantism. Some scholars call Don Quixote the first modern novel, a bildungsroman that traces the arch of its protagonist's life and the inner transformation to which it gives room. In the spirit of Erasmus of Rotterdam's In Praise of Folly, parody reinforces the divide between the life of the mind and the strictures of society. Others stress the novel's irony, the multiple voices and blurring of fiction and reality -- the latter an aspect that Gabriel García M?rquez would pay tribute to in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Don Quixote is one of the first characters to comment on his own readers ("for me alone was Don Quixote born," Cervantes writes in the second book, in response to the publication of the sham version); he is caught at the turning point of the Enlightenment, between the secular and the religious, reason and belief. Detractors argue that Cervantes is a careless stylist and a clumsy plot-builder, pointing out the fractured nature of the novel, the endless repetitions. No doubt all that would have come as a surprise to Cervantes himself, a tax collector with a tarnished reputation, a soldier whose old battleground glories and often pathetic dreams of literary success kept him alive. He envied Lope de Vega, the dramaturge of 1,000 comedias, and was looked down upon by the snobbish literary figures of his day. In short, Cervantes was an outcast. Indeed, in spite of all the hoopla, he remains one in Spain, perhaps because Spaniards today still don't know what to make of him. In Madrid the house of de Vega has been turned into a museum; the one nearby where Cervantes wrote has been sold time and again, commemorated by a miserable plaque. One wonders: Would Don Quixote pass the test and be published in New York today? I frankly doubt it. It would be deemed what editors call "a trouble manuscript": too long, the story line problematic, the plot stuffed with too many adventures that do too little to advance the narrative and too many characters whose fate the reader gets attached to but who suddenly disappear. And that awkward conceit of a character finding a book about himself! The style! Those careless sentences that twist and turn! The first part of Cervantes's manuscript was sent (possibly under the title of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha) to the Counsel of Castilla for permission to print it. It then went to the Inquisitorial censors for approval. Around August 1604, Cervantes tried in vain to enlist a celebrity to compose a poem eulogizing his protagonist, as it was the custom of the time to include such praise at the outset of a novel. He failed, his narrative considered too lowbrow, and composed his own poems. For all that, the first part of the novel was successful early on. The initial printing of some 1,800 copies was quickly insufficient, and new editions were issued (including one in English in 1612). By the time the second part was released in 1615, Don Quixote was a best seller. The parodic quality of the novel, the way it pokes fun at erudition and paints love as the only redemption for the heart, enchanted readers. As did Cervantes's digressions on his country's delusions of grandeur. In my personal library, I have some 80 different versions, including ones produced for children, as well as translations into Yiddish, Korean, Urdu, and part of the novel that I translated into Spanglish. I guess my collection is proof of my passion. I can't think of a book that better illustrates the tension between private and public life, one that speaks louder to the power of the imagination in such an ingenious, unsettling fashion. If ever I wanted to live my life like a literary character, it would be as Cervantes's sublime creation. As the forerunner of antiheroes and superheroes, Don Quixote, with his flawed aspirations, may not subdue giants or imaginary enemies like the Knight of the Wood, but he continues to conquer hearts, precisely because he is so ridiculous, inhabiting a universe of his own concoction. He is the ultimate symbol of freedom, a self-made man championing his beliefs against all odds. His is also a story about reaching beyond one's own confinements, a lesson on how to turn poverty and the imagination into assets, and a romance that reaches beyond class and faith. Some authors are so influential that their names have been turned into adjectives: Dantean, Proustian, Hemingway-esque. But how many literary characters have undergone a similar fate? "Quixotic," "quixotism," and "quixotry," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, are all related to "Quixote," "an enthusiastic visionary person like Don Quixote, inspired by lofty and chivalrous but false or unrealizable ideals." To be an underdog, to be a fool content with one's delusions, is that what modernity is about? Or is it the impulse to pursue those delusions into action? Undoubtedly we will continue asking ourselves those questions as the enthusiastic visionary starts his fifth century, still as vibrant and mischievous, as resourceful and controversial as ever. Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His next book, The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature, will be published this month. Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion will be published by Graywolf Press in April. From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 22:03:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 17:03:50 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Anthropologists, Few in Number, Revisit a 1919 Debate Message-ID: Anthropologists, Few in Number, Revisit a 1919 Debate The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18a02901.htm By DAVID GLENN Atlanta At a sparsely attended annual convention here last month, members of the American Anthropological Association took steps to right an 85-year-old wrong done to a pioneer in the field and a founder of the association. In a unanimous (but nonbinding) vote, scholars voted to rescind the organization's 1919 censure of Franz Boas. The censure occurred in the aftermath of World War I, when Boas angered many of his peers by making sharp-tongued criticisms of anthropologists who had covertly served as wartime U.S. spies in Latin America. Boas was then a professor at Columbia University and probably the country's best-known scholarly anthropologist. He had been among the association's founders, in 1902. In late 1919, Boas published a letter in The Nation in which he announced that he had learned that "a number of men who follow science as their profession, men whom I refuse to designate any longer as scientists, have prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies." Boas's letter did not name names, but among the small circle of American anthropologists it was clear that he was referring to an espionage ring organized in 1917 by Sylvanus G. Morley, a leading scholar of the Maya who was then affiliated with Harvard University's Peabody Museum. The ring's primary task was to search for reputed German submarine bases in Mexico and Central America. Two weeks later, the association's governing council voted, 20 to 10, to censure Boas, declaring his letter un-American. Now the association would like to make posthumous amends. Scholars at December's conference approved a resolution that removes the censure and affirms that it is "immoral for scientists to use their professional identity as cover for governmental spying activities." "This is an issue that has to be revived from generation to generation," said Leni M. Silverstein, one of the resolution's authors, in a telephone interview. Ms. Silverstein, a visiting scholar at Northwestern University, pointed out that similar debates arose during the Vietnam War and are likely to arise again in relation to the conflicts in Iraq and Central Asia. Not everyone agrees with the recision. In a letter that will appear in a forthcoming issue of Anthropology News, David L. Browman, a professor of archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, suggests that Boas acted dishonorably in 1919. Among other things, Mr. Browman writes, Boas appears to have manipulated the espionage debate in an effort to win money and resources from the National Research Council for his department at Columbia. The business meeting at the convention lacked a quorum, so the vote to renounce the censure was only advisory. It is likely that the association's executive board will put the question to the entire membership in a mail ballot next year. The resolution is expected to win by a comfortable margin. Southern Exposure The anthropology conference, which had originally been scheduled for San Francisco in mid-November, drew only a fraction of its usual attendance. Less than four weeks before the conference was to have been held, the organization voted to relocate and reschedule the meeting because of a labor dispute at San Francisco's major hotels. The decision was controversial. Some scholars have argued that the association should have gone ahead with the San Francisco meeting, and others have said that the association could have shown more solidarity with the San Francisco hotel workers by completely breaking its contract with the Hilton Hotels Corporation. (The move to Atlanta was the result of a complex negotiation with Hilton, in which the association avoided any financial penalties.) Many people at the conference, however, said the move to Atlanta was the least bad option under the circumstances. More than 6,000 people had been expected to attend the San Francisco meeting, but fewer than 800 were on hand in Atlanta. The association's president, Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, said that low attendance was expected to cost the organization between $385,000 and $500,000. In the original San Francisco program, 25 panels had been announced for Friday afternoon at 1:45 -- the heart of the conference schedule. In Atlanta at that time, only six panels actually took place, with a combined audience of fewer than 100 people. At the meeting, the association's executive board unanimously approved a resolution requiring that, beginning in 2010, all association conferences must be held in unionized hotels. That resolution, too, will probably be brought to the entire membership in a mail ballot. From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 22:05:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 17:05:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Slate: You Must Remember This: Are there memory-enhancement products that work? Message-ID: You Must Remember This: Are there memory-enhancement products that work? http://slate.msn.com/id/2111758/ By Sue Halpern Posted Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2005, at 5:34 AM PT Tell someone you've been spending your days checking out memory-enhancement products and chances are they'll say something like "That's interesting"-long pause-"What did you say you were working on?" The prospect of memory loss makes people so uncomfortable they invariably make stupid jokes about it, then chuckle as if those jokes were actually funny. "Sorry, ha ha, I'm having a senior moment." "Oops, it must be early onset Alzheimer's!" Statistically speaking, unless you live till about 90, the chances of getting Alzheimer's disease or a related dementia is fairly low. Still, the brain gets less agile as we age, and for many people mental tasks that once seemed mindless, like remembering names and recalling words, become noticeably more difficult. Even minor memory lapses can generate big anxieties. So, the possibility that some thing-a vitamin, a supplement, a set of cognitive exercises, a biofeedback machine-will make us sharper, more focused, smarter, less forgetful, is desperately appealing. At least it is for me as I progress farther into my 40s, misplacing my keys and swearing I've never had conversations that others claim to recall with perfect clarity. And what does the word "synecdoche" mean anyway? I used to know. There are currently numerous products that promise stunning gains in IQ and remarkable increases in memory and the number will only increase as the population ages. But do any of them actually work? While my first inclination was to focus on over-the-counter pharmaceuticals like periwinkle extract and colloidal gold because they required no investment of time or mental effort, a quick survey of a defunct FDA Web site (resurrected on The Memory Hole) detailing the harm that had befallen people who blindly swallowed supplements assuming that because they were "natural" they were safe, as well as a recent article in the Lancet demonstrating that no supplement has yet proved to enhance memory, convinced me to stay away from things I'd have to put in my mouth. Instead, I decided to stick with products that might "grow my brain" by laying down additional neural pathways (which typically happens when you learn something new), and those that claimed they would change my brain-wave patterns, making my brain more receptive to remembering. These included compact disc recordings of certain kinds of engineered sounds intended to unite left- and right-brain hemispheres; optical stimulation machines that shoot a Morse code of white light at the eyelids; software-based mental exercise gyms; and books outlining memory programs. I started with 10 products-chosen because I had read about them in best-selling books about memory loss or on those books' Web sites, or that I had found through internet searches-jettisoned three(two because they were far too complicated and the third because it was just too dopey), and stuck with eight, which I used over a period of two months. One problem, though, was finding a reasonable research methodology. As a lone individual, I could not conduct random, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. And memory, in any case, is elusive-hard to get a bead on, let alone to measure. That you remember to pick up the dry cleaning on Monday but fail to come home with a quart of milk on Tuesday says little about the condition of your memory. (The neurologist's rule of thumb: Don't worry if you misplace the car keys, worry if you don't know what the keys are for.) Still, I needed a way, however crude, of seeing if my memory was getting sharper, so I signed up for an Internet-based memory testing site called MemCheck ($69.95 per year; $9.95 per month). Intended primarily for people with serious concerns about memory loss, such as Alzheimer's or something called Mild Cognitive Impairment, MemCheck offers subscribers two mental screening options. The first is an extensive battery of tests that examines psychomotor processing speed, executive function (defined on the site as planning, organization, and mental quickness), and short-term memory; it takes about half an hour to complete. The second, MemWatch, is an abridged version of the first. It tests short-term memory and processing speed in less than 10 minutes. After testing myself with MemCheck and finding out that my executive functioning was excellent and my short-term memory was just OK, I took the MemWatch test, which gave me a baseline score against which I could compare my results in subsequent testings, after using the various memory-enhancing programs and products. I assumed, much like a weakling entering a gym to lift weights in order to build muscle, that if any of these products worked as advertised, I'd be adding axons and dendrites to my brain that would create neural pathways that would necessarily raise my score. And the fact is, over two months, my score did go up, a full 40 points. Whether this gain is actually meaningful in a practical sort of way is not precisely relevant. What is relevant is that in mid-September I was an 85 and by mid-November I was, consistently, a 126. Something happened. It's possible that I simply got better at taking the test. It's also possible that I got better at taking the test because new neural pathways were laid down each time I took it. On the other hand, maybe my improvement was a direct result of the neural pathways that had been stimulated by one or more of the products I was using. Overall, I felt sharper, more articulate, less forgetful, quicker. I could go to the supermarket without a written list and bring home the 17 items I'd set out to buy (due to a new strategy I'd learned). For the first time in years I beat my husband at pingpong (quicker reflexes). I returned my library books on time (because I could actually recall when they were due). True, I forgot to feed the dog one morning, but these things happen. Though I would like to point to a single product to account for these changes, I can't. They complemented each other. Some taught strategy, some toned reflexes, some claimed to be integrating my brain in subliminal ways. Some were a bust. Some were fun. A couple really seemed to help. I created a rating system with four components, each of which I graded on a scale of -10 to +10: Efficacy (did the product have an effect on my MemWatch score, 0 being "not at all," 5 being "I once saw my score go up after using it" and 10 being "I saw my score go up pretty consistently"); Difficulty (how hard was the program to operate and implement, both in terms of setting it up and sticking to it, 0 being "easy" and -10 being "oy"); Irritation (how annoying was it to use, -10 being extremely and 0 being not); and Fun (was the product fun to use, 0 being "zero" and 10 being "bring it on"). I then separated the products into four categories-Aural; Books; Software; and Optical. My top pick in each category is listed first. AURAL Rembrance CD ($19.95). Rembrance is a CD of electronic music composed by J.S. Epperson using "hemi-sync" "brain-entrainment" technology developed in the 1950s by a sound engineer named Robert Monroe. By sending sounds of one frequency to the right ear and sounds of another frequency to the left ear, a third sound is apparently made by the brain itself as integrates both left and right hemispheres, trying to make sense of the information it's receiving. The name given to this third sound is binaural beat. According to Monroe and his disciples, the binaural beat can be manipulated to induce or "entrain" the brain into a variety of different states, from deep relaxation to high alertness. This particular CD is intended to lead the brain into a more focused state, where it is most receptive to remembering. While it didn't do that for me, its pleasant monotony was effective in shutting out distractions. Its creators say that it works best when listened to through headphones. Scores: Efficacy=2; Difficulty=0; Irritation=-1; Fun=4. Overall score=+5. Brain Enhancement CD (Transparent Corporation, $19.95). This is another method of using sound to trigger particular brainwave patterns that correspond to more focused and attentive states that are "typically exhibited by incredibly intelligent, overachieving individuals." The program uses various white and off-white noises like traffic and repetitious industrial machinery, neither of which is exactly pleasing to the ear. One time (out of many) I popped this in the CD drive of my computer before taking the MemWatch test and was surprised to see my score climb by five points. I took the test again and the increase held. Still, I moved to Vermont to get away from freeways and factories. At least Brain Enhancement emits no pollution. Efficacy=6; Difficulty=0; Irritation=-2; Fun=1. Overall score=+5 BOOKS The Memory Pack by Andi Bell (Carlton Books, $29.95). Andi Bell won the 1998 World Memory Championships by memorizing, among other things, the order of an entire deck of cards in 34.03 seconds. He's got that kind of mind and so, he claims, can you-if you practice the many tricks he shares in the cheesy picture book that comes in the Memory Pack box. Also included are a bean bag imprinted with an image of a bee-he suggests you leave it in a conspicuous place if there's something in particular you need to remember and when you see the beanbag it will jog your brain and make you think of that thing-a set of cards labeled with people's faces and names to help teach name recognition; and a memory board game, the rules of which I'm still trying to learn. Bell's idiosyncratic method for remembering long sequences of numbers by assigning images to every number up to 99 (zero is a hoop; nine is a cat; and 99 is Einstein, because the element Einsteinium has the atomic number 99) and so on, all of which must be memorized, requires more work than anyone but a competitive memorizer like Bell would be willing to take on. Still, he does offer a number of practical, how-to methods for remembering shopping lists and names and appointments, and they work. Efficacy=8; Difficulty=-5; Irritation=-2; Fun=5. Overall score=+6. The Einstein Factor by Win Wenger and Richard Poe (Audio Version, $89.95; paperback version, $15). I was suckered into buying this audio book by its claims that I'd become more focused, remember more, and raise my IQ score about 40 points-all while shuttling my daughter to and from school. While none of that happened (except the driving), I came to appreciate the authors' belief that each of us has a genius buried in our unconscious waiting to emerge through a kind of lucid dreaming (called "image streaming") as a way of recovering memories to spark creativity. (Thus the "portable memory bank" included with The Einstein Factor is nothing more than a blank notebook.) But memories, or stored remnants of the past, are not the same as memory, the physiological function that must precede it. So, while the book encouraged me to listen to the little voice within, it did nothing to boost my MemWatch score or keep me from leaving the Einstein Factor in the car when I meant to bring it into the house. Efficacy=0, Difficulty=0, Irritation=0; Fun=3. Overall score=+3. SOFTWARE My Brain Trainer (The site currently offers a free two-week trial membership but usually charges a nominal fee). If My Brain Trainer, which is billed as "the world's first virtual mental gymnasium" were a real gym, it would have plush towels and state-of-the art elliptical machines. Instead, it has appealing graphics and 14 challenging exercises that stretch different parts of your mind. Want to work on your psychomotor reflexes? How about improving your short-term memory or hand-eye coordination? If you're like me, you'll find yourself doing some exercises because you are good at them, and others because you think you should be better at them, just like at the real gym. I never managed to improve my psychomotor skills, but I progressed steadily on a short-term memory test that required me to remember random strings of letters until I was consistently doing much better than almost everyone else. I knew this because MBT allows each user to measure herself against herself, her age group, all users, and the top performer. It's competitive; it's addictive; and, because it trains some of the same skills as MemWatch tests, it's effective in raising MemWatch scores. Think of it as Pilates for the mind, but more fun. Efficacy=8; Annoyance=0; Difficulty=0; Fun=5. Overall score=+13 Brain Builder ($7.95 month, $49.45 year). Brain Builder started as a stand-alone piece of software, and for those who want something portable, Brain Builder 3.0 ($49.95) is still available. The online version, however, is more powerful because it has an interactive component that allows users to keep track of their progress, a built-in personal trainer, an online diary function, and a random number generator that ensures no exercise is like another. The main premise behind Brain Builder is that memory will improve as one's ability to increase one's sequential processing-remembering longer and longer lists of numbers and letters-improves. As its creators write: "Better sequential processing enables us to take in more of what there is to see and hear." Processing speed, its creators say, is also crucial to a fit working memory, so Brain Builder measures both how much you remember and how fast you can recall it. Oddly, Brain Builder's strength is also its weakness-it is relentless, a boot camp for brains, quick to flash "penalty" when you've made a mistake, and replete with anxiety-producing music meant as "encouragement" that makes you so stressed out, you don't remember why you thought this was a good idea in the first place. Efficacy=8;Difficulty=0;Irritation=-3; Fun=3. Overall score=+8 OPTICAL STIMULATION Mind Spa (A/V Stim Company, $149). Mind Spa is a little machine with big ambitions: to put its user into various brain states (meditative, creative, receptive, attentive) using a combination of flashing white lights delivered through a pair of specially designed glasses and pulsing sounds that come from headphones, both of which are attached to an easy-to-operate, cassette-sized unit. There are 12 programs (with more available on the A/V Stim Web site), each keyed to a different brainwave speed-from the quiet alphas of No. 3 to the high betas of No. 9. The idea here, as with simple aural brain entrainment, is that the sound and light will, over time, encourage new pathways in the brain. (Mind Spa's creator, psychologist Dr. Ruth Olmstead, has recently published research that seems to show that this kind of stimulation is effective in controlling ADD.) While it feels silly to sit at one's desk listening to weird throbbing sounds while wearing goofy glass light-emitting glasses, it can be surprisingly relaxing. I often fell asleep-then woke up and saw my MemWatch score inch up. One caveat: Optical stimulation machines have been known to induce seizures in people with epilepsy and those with undiagnosed seizure disorders. Efficacy= 8; Irritation=0; Difficulty=0; Fun=4. Overall score=+12 Shortly after I concluded my "experiment," I spent some time with real scientists who study the aging brain. I told them about my "work," and how my MemWatch scores kept on going up. They were skeptical. Not skeptical that I was doing better-this they attributed to the fact that my test-taking skills were improving-but skeptical that memory decline could be staved off by increasing the number of random letters one can recall, listening to hemi-syncing music, or slipping on light-emitting glasses. But one of them, a neuropsychologist who specializes in looking at why people who are mentally and physically engaged throughout their lives seem to resist dementia most successfully, was less dismissive. "Look," he said, "We don't really know. Why not do these things-they can't hurt." Sue Halpern is the author of the new novel The Book of Hard Things, as well as two previous books of nonfiction. She lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain. From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 22:05:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 17:05:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Longing to Lose, at a Great Cost Message-ID: Longing to Lose, at a Great Cost New York Times, 5.1.4 By GINA KOLATA How desperate are overweight people to shed their extra pounds? Desperate enough that they are willing to risk death. And so desperate that they value losing weight as much as severely depressed patients value relief from their illness, a new survey has found. The survey, by Dr. Christina C. Wee, an internist at Harvard Medical School and her colleagues, involved 366 patients who were part of a large medical practice based at Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. A third of the participants were overweight and 27 percent were obese. The researchers asked people to imagine a treatment that would guarantee them an effortless weight loss of varying amounts. For each amount, they were asked, would they be willing to accept a risk of death to achieve it? If so, how much of a risk of death? The fatter the person, the more he or she would risk death to lose weight. And the more weight the patient imagined he could lose, the greater the risk he would take to achieve it. Nineteen percent of overweight and 33 percent of obese people would risk death for even a modest 10 percent weight loss. In contrast, 4 percent of normal weight people would risk death to lose 10 percent of their weight. Many of the overweight and obese participants also said they would give up some of their remaining years of life if they could live those years weighing slightly less. Thirty-one percent of obese patients and 8.3 percent of overweight patients said they would trade up to 5 percent of their remaining lives to be 10 percent thinner. The survey was published in the December issue of The Journal of General Internal Medicine. Dr. Wee said doctors did not always appreciate how desperately many people longed to be thin. She said she was taken aback by the findings because patients in the study also reported that it would take a lot more than a 10 percent weight loss for them to reach their dream weights. Yet it seemed that almost any weight loss, even 10 percent, was something they longed for. "That was very surprising to me," Dr. Wee said in a telephone interview. In fact, obesity researchers say, it takes only a modest weight loss - 5 to 10 percent - to improve health. Dr. Wee said she advised patients to make small changes that they could stick to. Although she is not overweight, she said she recently switched from regular sodas to diet ones and effortlessly lost five pounds. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/health/04fatb.html From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 22:06:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 17:06:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Transhumanism: 2000 Years in the Making Message-ID: Transhumanism: 2000 Years in the Making http://www.thecbc.org/redesigned/research_display.php?id=189 by David Pauls, CBC board of directors Examination of the underlying philosophy to remake the human person exhibits qualities that are as old as the Greeks. Disdain for the body, the quest for hidden knowledgce, and the goal to lead others to a higher plane of existence all smack of ancient Gnosticism, an idea that goes back nearly two millennia. Students of New Testament history will recognize Gnosticism as an early opponent of the newfound church, fought by the early Church Fathers into the second and third century. The Gnostic impulse is first characterized by its disdain for the physical body and the general restraints of time and place. Since the temporal was thought to be evil and unredeemed, the Gnostics developed a profound dualistic schism between the body and the mind, which was spiritual and potentially immortal. The body, being bad, was eschewed while the mind was exalted. This led to two poles of behavior regarding the physical. One pole was asceticism with its denial of creature comfort. Material pleasure and comfort was disdained due to the undeserving nature of the body. The other pole was radical libertinism, with an anything goes attitude regarding the attainment of physical pleasure. Why worry about the body and behavior if it was degenerate anyway? The second primary distinction regards redemption via attainment of secret knowledge, or gnosis. This knowledge was potentially available to only a few gifted select people who were endowed with the desire and capacity to attain and use this hidden wisdom. It was only through careful, diligent study that release from the bonds of material existence. Once attained, a person would be able to transcend the bounds of time, nature and history, reaching a plane of spiritual existence. With the Transhumanist movement, one sees the Gnostic strain reasserting itself in the quest to transcend the degenerate body. The body is held in disdain. Advocates for enhancement technology exhibit disdain for the current status of the physical body. There is an abhorrence of the limitations that nature has placed upon the species. The insufficiencies of height, strength, vision, hearing, longevity and cognition are roadblocks to happiness and perpetual fulfillment. Nature has gotten the human race this far, but the inherent limits of existence are hurdles to be leapt. Like the earlier Gnostics, knowledge and insight are the keys to overcome the deficiencies of the physical. With the accumulation of research in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and neural network interfacing, man will be able to overwhelm the frailty and deficiency inherent in the human condition and transform that which was weak into strength. The ability to repair, replace or enhance the various biological systems in the body allows one to overcome the limits of finitude. A logical outcome of this is the prospect of a multitiered view of humanity. If strong advocates of transhumanism have their wish, a new species of Techno sapien will emerge. The vast majority of the population, living in an ignorant and confused state, will be led by the chosen few to a new utopian existence or left behind to wallow in their naivet?. The capability to move the mind into the machine will mark the attainment of the final goal of the Gnostics, that of overcoming the body completely, living in a psychic Nirvana with the constraints of nature, time and history left behind. The old is trotted out as the new, dressed in software, DNA, and nanomachines. An ancient proverb from Solomon says, "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun". His quote is as relevant today as it was two and a half millennia ago. From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 22:09:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 17:09:33 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: (Rushton) Social Responsibility in the Genes Message-ID: Social Responsibility in the Genes http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-06-1 Twin study suggests that DNA accounts for more than 40% of difference in such behaviors as charitable giving Betterhumans Staff 1/6/2005 1:10 PM Genes may account for more than 40% of such charitable behavior as the massive outpouring of donations following the recent South Asian tsunamis. A study comparing the social responsibility of identical and non-identical twins showed that genes account for 42% of individual differences in attitudes while common environment accounts for 23% and other factors account for the remainder. Conducted by Canadian researcher [8]J. Philippe Rushton of the [9]University of Western Ontario, the study also found that genes have a stronger influence on males than females (50% to 40%) while home upbringing has a stronger influence on females (40% to 0%), suggesting that parents may more closely watch the behavior of daughters than of sons. The study involved 322 pairs of twins. Of these, 174 were identical pairs and 148 were non-identical. If traits are more similar among identical pairs, it suggests a stronger genetic contribution because they share all their genes while non-identical twins share only half. Subjects answered 22 questions such as, "I am a person people can count on" and, "Cheating on income tax is as bad as stealing" using a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Answers are known to predict such behavior as voting and volunteering. Answers were compared to determine patterns of relationships amongst the twins. Most previous studies on the genetics of social behavior have looked at antisocial behavior. The new study reinforces earlier work by Rushton and colleagues showing that genes contribute to about half the variance of self-reported altruism, empathy, nurturance and aggression. The research is reported in the [10]Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences ([11]read abstract). References 8. http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton_bio.htm 9. http://www.uwo.ca/ 10. http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/proc_bio_homepage.shtml 11. http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/proc_bio_content/abstracts/rushton.html From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 22:12:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 17:12:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTDBR: Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature Message-ID: Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature New York Times Daily Book Review, by 4.8.2 [picked up by the International Herald Tribune maybe later. Note date.] http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=532091.html Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature Reviewed by Edward Rothstein NYT Monday, August 02, 2004 Nonfiction. By William R. Newman. 333 pages. $30. University of Chicago Press. Among the secrets revealed in this unusual history of alchemy is Leonardo da Vinci's recipe for making artificial pearls "as large as you wish" - take a small genuine pearl, dissolve it in lemon juice, dry the paste into a power, mix it with egg white, let it harden, then grind and polish. A less appealing recipe might be one the philosopher John Locke proposed for creating a toad or a serpent by using a duck or a goose: Boil the bird without salt, place it between two platters, seal them against the air with a mixture of earth, salt, sand and tarter, and let the dish sit in a warm place for two or three weeks. Locke wrote that after breaking the seal, he had "found sometimes all Serpents a foot long sometimes all Toads large and black" - a description that suggests he had the temerity to try this more than once. And why not? Over the course of a millennium, the annals of alchemy tell of all manner of generation, transmutation and transfiguration. None of it ever produced pure gold, but it did yield inks and metals and perfumes and pigments, worms and rodents and putrid flesh, and, of course, principles and theories and controversies, along with accusations of witchcraft and heresy and hubris. Alchemy was once broadly dismissed as a form of primitive, prescientific belief - like Aristotle's conviction that lice were spontaneously generated from flesh, or claims that human life was created in the forms of homunculi. But in the last few decades, alchemy emerged out of the condescending and eclipsing shadows cast by modern science. In the 1970s, one of its most radical champions, the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, baldly suggested that there was very little to distinguish between alchemy and science: The techniques were similar, and so was the accuracy of the results. Even more temperate interpreters of science, though, have been changing their ideas about alchemy. Historians now treat the enterprise less as a na?ve activity supplanted by science than as an intellectual discipline out of which science gradually evolved. In "Promethean Ambitions," William R. Newman, who teaches the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University, goes even further. For him, alchemy, from its ancient origins as a servant to the decorative arts to its 17th-century transmutation into modern chemistry, provided the crucible in which many contemporary ideas about nature and artifice were first examined. Today, he writes, "we live in the era of 'Frankenfoods,' cloning, in vitro fertilization, synthetic polymers, Artificial Intelligence, and computer generated 'Artificial Life,'" an era in which Pope John Paul II has warned of the "Promethean ambitions" of biomedical science, and the President's Council on Bioethics has studied Hawthorne's alchemical story, "The Birth-Mark." But Newman argues that most current debates about boundaries between nature and artifice, or boundaries between proper and improper scientific exploration, echo debates that run through the history of alchemy. Critics of alchemy argued that the natural world could not be replicated or improved and that such goals should not be pursued. Advocates found porous boundaries between nature and artifice that could be explored and tested. In Newman's view, this tension between nature and artifice is fundamental. Alchemy is primarily an art of transmutation: One metal is turned into another, one living creature erupts out of the substance of another. Alchemy is concerned with the character of that change. It thus pays attention to categories, differences and boundaries. If one substance is changed into another, does it change its essence or only some of its properties? Is nature being revealed or overturned? Of course, much of the change that alchemists believed was taking place we now know to be illusion - the goose doesn't turn into serpents, nor is mercury transformed into gold. That is why much alchemy really is quaintly prescientific. But Newman's probings also break down the categories in which alchemy itself is usually placed, transforming its character. He shows, for example, that alchemy actually shared many of its goals with the visual arts in the Renaissance. Both enterprises tried to replicate or improve on nature. A number of Renaissance artists, including Leonardo and the French pottery maker Bernard Palissy, even used alchemical techniques to improve colors, glazes and pigments. But artists also considered themselves alchemists' rivals and objected to their claims of superior accomplishment. Palissy, for example, argued that beautiful shells are made by the "most malformed fish that could be found in the sea" but could not be replicated by the alchemist. Palissy said that he, on the other hand, could create animals, "sculpted and enameled so close to nature that other natural lizards and serpents will often come to admire them." As an art, Newman shows, alchemy was an attempt to construct and create objects; it experimented with them. In fact, Newman argues, the methods and ideas of modern science evolved out of alchemical research. Newman even finds references to alchemy in Darwin's theory of evolution, in which animal species are transformed (metaphorically speaking) by the alchemical pressures of the environment. There is more information gathered by Newman than the casual reader can easily absorb, including difficult analyses of philosophical and religious arguments taking place over centuries in Latin, Greek and Arabic. But Newman, a clear and graceful writer, keeps his goal in view. He is an initiate - tapping, testing and transmuting - until something different, still called alchemy, gradually takes shape. From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 22:15:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 17:15:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Technology Review: Technology and Happiness Message-ID: Technology and Happiness http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/issue/surowiecki0105.asp?p=0 By James Surowiecki January 2005 In the 20th century, Americans, Europeans, and East Asians enjoyed material and technological advances that were unimaginable in previous eras. In the United States, for instance, gross domestic product per capita tripled from 1950 to 2000. Life expectancy soared. The benefits of capitalism spread more widely among the population. The boom in productivity after World War II made goods better and cheaper at the same time. Things that were once luxuries, such as jet travel and long-distance phone calls, became necessities. And even though Americans seemed to work extraordinarily hard (at least compared to Europeans), their avid pursuit of entertainment turned media and leisure into multibillion-dollar industries. By most standards, then, youd have to say that Americans are better off now than they were in the middle of the last century. Oddly, though, if you ask Americans how happy they are, you find that theyre no happier than they were in 1946 (which is when formal surveys of happiness started). In fact, the percentage of people who say theyre very happy has fallen slightly since the early 1970seven though the income of people born in 1940 has increased, on average, 116 percent over the course of their working lives. Nor is this a uniquely American phenomenon: you can find similar data for most developed countries. Perhaps the most striking example of progress having little impact on what economists call peoples sense of subjective well-being is Japan. Between 1960 and the late 1980s, Japans economy was utterly transformed, as the nation went from a low-cost supplier of cheap manufactured goods to what is perhaps the worlds most technologically sophisticated society. Over that stretch, the countrys GDP quintupled. And yet by the late 1980s, the Japanese said they were no happier than they had been in 1960. Even more strikingly, life seems worse for a significant minority of citizens in the rich world. Since the 1950s, reports of major depression have increased tenfold, and while much of that increase undoubtedly represents a new willingness to diagnose mental illness, theres a general consensus among mental-health experts that it also reflects a real development. People are more anxious, trust government and business less, and get divorced more often. In the 1960s Tom Wolfe confounded those who fretted about the gloominess of American life by insisting that Americans were in the midst of a happiness explosion. Forty years later, plenty of people would disagree. There is, though, one group of Americans that is imperturbably sunny: the Amish. Their depression rates are negligibly low relative to the rest of societys. Their happiness levels are consistently high. The Pennsylvania Amish, when asked how much they agree with the statement You are satisfied with your life (using a scale of 1 to 10), turn out to be as happy as the members of the Forbes 400. The Amish, though, do without most of what we think of as modern technology. They dont rely on the automobile, dont need the Internet, and seem to prefer stability and permanence to the heady growth that propels innovation and the U.S. economy. The comparison is a little facile (the Amish have a lot of other characteristics that make people cheerful, including strong community ties, stable families, and religious faith). But it suggests an interesting question: is it possible that technology, instead of liberating us, is holding us back? Is technological progress merely a treadmill, and if so, would we be happier if we stepped off of it? Can we trust people to know what makes them happy? The relationship between happiness and technology has been a perennial subject for social critics and philosophers since the advent of the Industrial [surowiecki20105.jpg] Revolution. But its been left largely unexamined by economists and social scientists. The attention that they have paid to the subject of happiness has involved the more capacious relationship between broad material prosperity and well-being. Gregg Easterbrooks book The Progress Paradox grappled with this question directly. The economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer published an academic survey of the subject in Happiness and Economics in 2001. But the truly groundbreaking work on the relationship between prosperity and well-being was done by the economist Richard Easterlin, who in 1974 wrote a famous paper entitled Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Easterlin showed that when it came to developed countries, there was no real correlation between a nations income level and its citizens happiness. Money, Easterlin argued, could not buy happinessat least not after a certain point. Easterlin showed that though poverty was strongly correlated with misery, once a country was solidly middle-class, getting wealthier didnt seem to make its citizens any happier. Easterlins work did not get much attention when it was first published, but its implications were profound. By suggesting that there was no direct link between wealth and well-being, Easterlin was challenging some basic assumptions of mainstream economics. Most economists begin with the idea that people act in their own self-interest most of the time, and that they usually understand that self-interest pretty well. The choices people make, therefore, must be better than the alternatives (or else people would make other choices). By this argument, wealth is a good thing because it increases peoples options and gives them more freedom to pursue whatever it is they want to pursue. For classical economists, it was almost tautological to say that the wealthier people are, the happier they are, too. Easterlins relatively simple study suggested that if what people said about themselves was to be believed, you could give people more choices and more wealth and not have much of an impact on their sense of well-being. Well-being is actually the central idea of economics, says Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton University. But weve never really tried to measure it. Weve used proxies, and weve said, If were richer, and we have more options, we must be better off. But we havent tried to find out if thats really true. One response to this, of course, is to say that you cant really trust what people say about themselves in surveys, no matter how well executed. Pay attention to what people do, and youll get a real sense of what they want. On this view, worrying about whether people say they are happy with the choices they make is nonsense. Of course they are. If people spend a lot of money and time buying and using personal computers and wireless phones and personal digital assistants, then these gadgets must make them happy. There is an inherent logic to this argument, and it has the great virtue of not asking economists to decipher peoples motives. But in the last decade or more, deciphering peoples motives (or at least their behavior) is something more economists have become interested in doing, and to great effect. Behavioral economists have moved away from assumptions about individuals perfect rationality in order to develop what they think of as a more realistic model of economic behavior. Theyve explored the idea, hardly radical outside economics but pretty radical inside it, that people might sometimes make mistakes, and that their decisions (whether individual or collective) could actually make them unhappy. For instance, behavioral economists have shown that peoples preferences are what is sometimes called time-inconsistent. We would like to save in the long term, but in the short term wed rather spend. Just as strikingly, behavioral economists have shown that human beings arent very good at anticipating their own desires. Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, demonstrated that students, when asked to eat a bowl of their favorite ice cream eight days in a row, had a poor sense of whether they would or would not enjoy the experience. Considering how many decisions about new technologies are based on little or no concrete evidence and involve guessing about the future, it seems plausible that people can get stuck with technologies that dont make them happy but that are hard to get rid of. Plausible, but not certain: as well see, when it comes to the vexed relationship between technology and happiness, certainty is not an easy thing to come by. The question of technology: net loss or net gain? In trying to decipher how technology affects well-being, then, its worth paying attention to a few things. First, there have been few rigorous studies of the specific relationship between technological change and how people feel about their own lives. So the question Does more (or better) technology make people happy? is irreducibly speculative. Second, there is something inherently unstable about peoples accounts of their own states of mind. Forget peoples uncertainty about what will make them happy in the future; can we even trust that people know what makes them happy now? Most seriously, thinking about technology is hard because people adapt so quickly to the technologies that are available to them. If you had asked someone in 1870 whether she would be happier if she had a personal vehicle that would give her the freedom to travel hundreds of miles a day, in whatever direction she chose, at relatively little cost; the opportunity to fly across the ocean in a few hours; and the ability to speak to people who were thousands of miles away in real time for a few cents a minute, chances are very good that she would have said, yes, it would make her a lot happier. But today, its the rare person who gets excited about cars, planes, and telephones. We recognize their utility, but theyre also sources of frustration and stress. On balance, most people would say theyd rather have cars and telephones than not, butand this is what makes thinking about happiness so hardits not clear they really make us happier. This seems to be close to a universal phenomenon. In fact, one of happiness scholars most important insights is that people adapt very quickly to good news. Take lottery winners. One famous study showed that although winners were very, very happy when they won, their euphoria quickly evaporated, and after a while their moods and sense of well-being were indistinguishable from what they had been before the victory. Psychologists even have a word for the phenomenon: hedonic adaptation. So, too, with technology: no matter how dramatic a new innovation is, no matter how much easier it makes our lives, it is very easy to take it for granted. You can see this principle at work in the world of technology every day, as things that once seemed miraculous soon become mundane and, worse, frustrating when they dont work perfectly. Its hard, it turns out, to keep in mind what things were like before the new technology came along. Thats why broadband users should occasionally use dial-up: it makes them appreciate just what a difference a high-speed connection really does make. Does our fast absorption of technological progress mean, then, that technology makes no difference? No. It just makes the question of technologys impact, for good and ill, more complicated. Lets start with the downside. There are certain ways in which technology makes life obviously worse. Telemarketing, traffic jams, and identity theft all come to mind. These are all phenomena that make people consciously unhappy. But for the most part, modern critiques of technology have focused not so much on specific, bad technologies as on what Heidegger called the question of technologythat is, the impact of technology on our humanity. Those critiques have staked out two apparently opposed positions, which nonetheless share a common skepticism about peoples ability to use technology to their own ends. The first position, which one can see in the work of the French critic Jacques Ellul or, more oddly, in the novels of Philip K. Dick, is that technological progress is leading to an ever more rigid, controlled, soulless society, in which its easier for people to be manipulated and monitored. The second position, which has been well articulated in books like Neil Postmans Amusing Ourselves to Death and Robert Putnams Bowling Alone, is that technology is central to the increasing privatization of experience, which in turn is creating a fragmented, chaotic society, in which traditional relationships are harder to sustain, community is increasingly an illusion, and peoples relationships to each other, mediated as they often are by machines, grow increasingly tenuous. Theres obviously something to both arguments. Privacy has become increasingly fragile in a world of linked databases. In many workplaces, technologies like keystroke monitoring and full recordings of phone calls make it easier to watch workers. The notion that technology disrupts relationships and fractures community gained mainstream prominence as an attack on television, but in recent years it has also become central to the critique of the Internet. In Bowling Alone, Putnam suggests that TV is a chief culprit in the gradual isolation of Americans from each other and the erosion of the social capital that makes societies run smoothly. Similarly, the deleterious effects of the Internet, which supposedly further isolates people from what critics always call the real world, were pointed to early on in a famous study of 169 Pittsburgh residents, Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being? According to the study, published in the September 1998 issue of American Psychologist, instead of allowing them to connect with a much wider set of potential friends and exposing them to information they might otherwise never have come across, the Internet instead made people more depressed and lonely than they would otherwise have been. This broad criticism of technologys impact on relationships is an interesting one and is especially relevant to the question of happiness, because one of the few things we can say for certain is that the more friends and close relationships people have, the happier they tend to be. But the evidence that the Internet or even television fundamentally erodes relationships as opposed to changing them is not especially convincing. For instance, when the authors of that 1998 study revisited the question a few years later, using a slightly different methodology, they arrived at the opposite conclusion, finding that the Net had a slightly beneficial impact on peoples sociability, connections with others, and sense of well-being. Obviously, a technology as wide-ranging and ubiquitous as the Net will have myriad, immeasurable effects. But the Internet is essentially a communications technology, one that, like the telephone, allows people to expand their affective and informational networks. The Net is hardly the ideal public sphere, where all discussions are rational and everyone agrees on a definition of the common good. But it is a public sphere, and one that crucially functions without gatekeepers. The dominant critiques of technology have, then, something exaggerated about them. But one way in which technology, as a rule, does make people less happy is in its relentless generation of newness. One of the key insights of happiness studies is that people have a very hard time being content with what they have, at least when they know that others have more. Today, technological change is so rapid that when you buy something, you do so knowing that in a few months theres going to be a better, faster version of the product, and that youre going to be stuck with the old one. Someone else, in other words, has it better. Its as if disappointment were built into acquisition from the very beginning (unless youre buying a 70-inch plasma screen, in which case you should be fine for at least a couple of years). Theres no way to circumvent this drooping of the spirit, which creates dissatisfaction in the heart of the modern consumer. Technology ? la carte: bad food, but bigger portions Daily stress, a nagging sense of disappointment, fear that the government knows a lot more about you than you would like it to: if these are some of the ways in which technology reduces peoples sense of well-being, how (if at all) does it increase their happiness? This is terrain that is ordinarily left to the cyberoptimists and trans- humanists, who believe that technology should be celebrated for the way it remakes and improves our bodies and minds. But setting flights of fancy aside, there is some intriguingly suggestive work about how certain new technologies make people not just objectively better off but also happier. In the marketplace, for instance, the Internet has made consumers happier not so much by cutting prices as by expanding the enormous array of choices available to them in a manageable way. In the happiness stakes, expanding consumers options is really a double-edged sword: consumers do have a preference for variety and novelty, and the more choices you have, the better the chance that youll find the thing you really want. But too much choice can actually paralyze people, leaving them, paradoxically, worse off. A well-known experiment conducted by Professors Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar (at Stanford and Columbia, respectively) illustrates the point: they set up two tables in a supermarket, one with 24 jars of jam and the other with six, and offered discount coupons to anyone who stopped to sample the jams. Of the people who stopped at the 24-jam table, only 3 percent went on to buy jam, while 30 percent of the people who stopped at the six-jam table did. More choices often make people frustrated because they have no reasonable way to navigate through them. What the Internet offers, at least in a nascent form, is a host of mechanismscollaborative filtering, shopbots, consumer-rating sitesthat give people the tools to make informed choices relatively quickly and easily, reducing paralysis and making them happier. The important point here is that among the infinite choices that the Internet offers, one is the option of less choice. Technology has also radically changed the nature of work, or at least some peoples work. This matters because the workplace is central to peoples sense of well-being and is more important to them than anything, including family. Studies show that nothingnot even divorcemakes people more unhappy than unemployment. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, technologys impact on the workplace was ambiguous at best. While the mechanization of agriculture allowed people to escape the farm, it often propelled them straight into heavy industrial labor, which was well paying but often miserable. Technology increased the productivity of workers, but it also diminished their autonomy: superiors controlled more of the details of their working days. Even the office work of the postwar period exemplified by the endless rows of desks in Billy Wilders The Apartment was deeply bureaucratic and controlled. But recently, the rise of the networked society, and the advent of knowledge-based businesses, means that workplaces have become less formal and more open, even while remaining efficient and productive. Already, as Arlie Hochschild points out in The Time Bind, a significant percentage of Americans find the atmosphere at work more congenial than the one at home. As the number of knowledge workers grows, and as companies strive to keep them happy, well-being should increase. The most important impact of technology on peoples sense of well-being, though, is in the field of health care. Before the Industrial Revolution, two out of every three Europeans died before the age of 30. Today, life expectancy for women in Western Europe is almost 80 years, and it continues to increase. The point is obvious, but important to note: the vast majority of people are happy to be alive, and the more time they get on earth, the better off they feel theyll be. (Remember, the point about prosperity and happiness is not that prosperity makes people unhappy; its that it doesnt necessarily make them happier.) Now, the picture is a little more complicated than this. Living a few extra years as a geriatric may not be ideal. But until very recently, life for the vast majority of people was (in Hobbess formulation) nasty, brutish, and short. Technology has changed that, at least for people in the rich world. As much as we should worry about the rising cost of health care and the problem of the uninsured, its also worth remembering how valuable for our spirits as well as our bodies are the benefits that medical technology and pharmaceuticals have brought us. On a deeper level, what the technological improvement of our health and our longevity underscores is a paradox of any discussion of happiness on a national or a global level: even though people may not be happier, even though they are wealthier and possess more technology, theyre still as hungry as ever for more time. Its like that old Woody Allen joke: the food may not be so great, but we want the portions to be as big as possible. Technology may only improve the taste of the meals slightly, but it makes them a lot bigger, and for most of us, that has the promise of something like happiness. NOTEBOOK [21]Thieves take brain remote control [Simson Garfinkel] The BBC has an interesting story about a poor woman who had the remote-control device for her brian implant stolen.The woman has a brain implant that provides... [22]Interview with Straton Sclavos [Simson Garfinkel] C|Net has a nice interview with Straton Sclavos, CEO of VeriSign, examining whether or not terrorists could attack us with a combination cyber attack and... [23]Get Ready for Podcasting [Wade Roush] You heard it here first: the technology word of the year for 2005 will be "podcasting." Definitions vary (which is typical for a brand new phenomenon) but the... [24]Bloggers of the Year [Wade Roush] PC Magazine recently announced its People of the Year, and they are Evan Williams, Meg Hourihan, and Paul Bausch, the co-creators of Blogger, and Ben and Mena... [25]The Tsunami and Global Warming [David Appell] A meme is starting to develop, that environmentalists and others are linking the recent tsunami to global warming. Chinese meteorologists, Richard Dawkins and... [26]> Read more posts Related Stories: References 21. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1700 22. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1699 23. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1698 24. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1697 25. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1696 26. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/index.asp From checker at panix.com Wed Feb 2 22:18:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 17:18:09 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sailer: Tom Wolfe: Clear Eye For The Different Human Message-ID: Tom Wolfe: Clear Eye For The Different Human http://vdare.com/sailer/050102_wolfe.htm 5.1.2 [12]Steve Sailer Archive Tom Wolfe--Clear Eye For The Different Human By [15]Steve Sailer With the 1979 publication of [16]The Right Stuff, a brilliant non-fiction account of the men involved in the [17]Mercury program, [18]Tom Wolfe completed a titanic decade and a half in which he revolutionized American journalism. He then set off to become the greatest satirical-realist novelist in the English language since his idol, [19]Evelyn Waugh. With his third novel, [20]I Am Charlotte Simmons, he has attained that goal. It's the story of a brilliant hillbilly virgin's first half year at Dupont U. (primarily [21]Duke U., where Wolfe's daughter [22]Alexandra graduated in 2002) and the three seniors she attracts--Hoyt, the [23]George W. Bush-like alcoholic frat boy; Adam, the nice but dorky intellectual; and JoJo, the only white starter on the NCAA champion basketball team. I like to think that, in discussing human differences frankly, Wolfe violates many of the same taboos that I do. For example, I frequently defend sensible athletes like [24]Larry Bird, Paul Hornung, [25]Dusty Baker or the late [26]Reggie White from politically-correct sportswriters who want to lynch them for telling the truth about the link between [27]racial differences in physique and sport success. And in his latest book, Wolfe parodies the [28]tired spin on an ESPN talk show where: "... four poorly postured middle-aged white sportswriters sat slouched in little, low-backed, smack-red fiberglass swivel chairs panel-discussing the 'sensitive' matter of the way black players dominated basketball. 'Look,' the well-known columnist Maury Feldtree was saying, his chin resting on a pasha's cushion of jowls, `just think about it for a second. Race, ethnicity, all that--that's just a symptom of something else. There's been whole cycles of different minorities using sports as a way out of the ghetto.'" But Wolfe makes clear the obvious reason: Even the best white players, such as the 6'-10" 250 pound JoJo, generally are inferior in musculature to the best black players--such as the freshman power forward Vernon Congers, with "his mighty pecs, delts, traps, and lats," who is threatening to take his job. Wolfe has been noticing racial differences in muscularity at least since [29]Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers back in 1970. There he noted that white poverty program bureaucrats feared the hard-muscled black protestors, but were less afraid of the Mexicans and not at all scared of the Chinese. The Samoans, however, left them dumbfounded: "Have you ever by any chance seen professional football players in person, like on the street? The thing you notice is not just that they're big but that they are so big, it's weird... From the ears down, the big yoyos are just one solid welded hulk, the size of an oil burner... Well, that will give you some idea of the Samoans, because they're bigger. The average Samoan makes [30]Bubba Smith of the Colts look like a shrimp. They start out at about 300 pounds and from there they just get wider." Although there were no Samoans in the National Football League when Wolfe wrote this, today there are dozens. "A [31]Samoan boy, according to estimates, is 40 times more likely to make it to the NFL than a boy from the mainland," writes [32]Greg Garber. As in his 1998 [33]Atlanta-based novel [34]A Man in Full, Wolfe's new book drives the conventionally-minded crazy by ignoring his characters' facial features in favor of the visible markers of their muscle to fat ratios. He rightly sees that these indicate the hormones driving their behavior. Indeed, Wolfe's book is so "hormono-centric" (as he puts it) that I can guesstimate the body fat percentages of all his new novel's characters. Using PBS fitness expert Covert Bailey's [35]table of recommendations for his clients, I'd say that lovely Charlotte is 22% body fat, while her snobbish and nearly-anorexic roommate Beverly is 16%. Exploited Adam is 21%, handsome Hoyt with his six-pack abs is 11%, jacked-up JoJo 9%, and virile Vernon 5%. Similarly, one of Wolfe's most important but least popular themes is masculinity. In [36]his previous novel, Tom Wolfe describes how a high IQ corporate staffer, known as The Wiz, views his lower IQ boss, [37]Charlie Croker, real estate developer, good old boy, and ex-football star "with a back like a Jersey Bull:" "The Wiz looked upon [Croker] as an aging, uneducated, and out-of-date country boy who had somehow, nonetheless, managed to create a large, and, until recently, wildly successful corporation. That the country boy, with half his brainpower, should be the lord of the corporation and that [the Wiz] should be his vassal was an anomaly, a perversity of fate. . . . Or part of him felt that way. The other part of him was in awe, in unconscious awe, of something the old boy had and he didn't: namely, the power to charm men and the manic drive to bend their wills into saying yes to projects they didn't want, didn't need, and never thought about before... And that thing was manhood. It was as simple as that." During my long corporate career, I repeatedly witnessed exactly the same phenomenon--but putting it so baldly in words leaves most people uncomfortable. Wolfe particularly doesn't [38]win any friends among male reviewers by pointing out that intellectuals, like Charlotte Simmons' Adam, tend to be less masculine than jocks like Jo-Jo, who, through sheer sense of alpha-male entitlement, forces his tutor (Adam) to stay up all night ghostwriting his history class reports. [39]Adam Kirsch in the neocon [40]N.Y. Sun was so unhinged by this that he threatened Wolfe with the [41]neutron bomb of accusations--anti-Semitism--although Wolfe's wife, the mother of his three children, is Jewish. (Kirsch got so many of the book's details wrong that it's hard to tell if he read it or just skimmed, looking for the naughty bits.) ([42]Here's another perfect example of a male reviewer--Theo Tait of the London Review of Books--criticizing Charlotte Simmons for everything that's true about it.) Likewise, Wolfe's message to young women--including, presumably, his daughters--that the [43]tighter rein they keep on their [44]sexual favors, the more power they have over men--has vastly annoyed the many women who don't want to be reminded about how they've [45]messed up their lives by[46] ignoring such advice. What's most striking about Wolfe's version of Duke U. is how, after 35 years of institutionalized feminism, student sexuality hasn't progressed into an egalitarian utopia. Instead, it has regressed to something that a caveman would understand--a Hobbesian sexual marketplace where muscles are the measure of the man. This is exactly why I ended my 1997 article "[47]Is Love Colorblind?" like this: "When, in the names of freedom and feminism, young women listen less to the hard-earned wisdom of older women about how to pick Mr. Right, they listen even more to their hormones. This allows cruder measures of a man's worth--like the size of his muscles--to return to prominence. The result is not a feminist utopia, but a society in which genetically gifted guys can more easily get away with acting like Mr. Wrong." Wolfe has been ahead of his time for his entire career. Indeed, the reputation of his first novel, [48]The Bonfire of the Vanities, has suffered because its [49]plot is now often thought of as a pastiche of stories ripped from the headlines about Al Sharpton's [50]Tawana Brawley hoax, the arrest of the bond king [51]Michael Milken, the [52]Crown Heights anti-Semitic pogrom, the [53]Rodney King riots, and the [54]O.J. Simpson case. But Bonfire appeared in 1987 ... before all those events it seemingly reflects. America's most distinguished jurist-intellectual, Richard A. Posner, has admitted this in his book [55]Overcoming Law: "When I first read The Bonfire of the Vanities ... it just didn't strike me as the sort of book that has anything interesting to say about the law or any other institution.... I now consider that estimate of the book ungenerous and unperceptive. The Bonfire of the Vanities has turned out to be a book that I think about a lot, in part because it describes with such vividness what Wolfe with prophetic insight (the sort of thing we attribute to [56]Kafka) identified as emerging problems of the American legal system... American legal justice today seems often to be found at a bizarre intersection of race, money, and violence, an intersection nowhere better depicted than in The Bonfire of the Vanities even thought the book was written before the intersection had come into view." Moreover, "[57]Law & Order," perhaps the most successful franchise in television history, was clearly influenced by Bonfire. Lennie Briscoe, the late [58]Jerry Orbach's wonderfully [59]sardonic detective, could have come straight from its pages. But producer Dick Wolf drained the irony from Tom Wolfe's portrayal of New York City prosecutors. Bored and depressed by an endless stream of [60]black and brown lawbreakers, they torture the law to snag a Great White Defendant. In contrast, on "Law & Order," the [61]abusive prosecutors who concoct [62]patently nonsensical legal theories to justify arresting the [63]Park Avenue rich are the heroes. Although Wolfe resembles Waugh in his conservatism, they differ in important ways. [64]Waugh was a jealous, cantankerous snob who said that his Roman Catholic faith was the only thing that kept his behavior even marginally tolerable. Except when at his writing desk, Wolfe is a gracious man, perhaps the last of the old-fashioned Virginia gentlemen. He doesn't seem to feel any personal need for religion, but strongly [65]approves of it in others. Waugh used the most elegant English prose imaginable to limn the tawdriness of modern life. In contrast, Wolfe modeled his prose style on his subject: the sloppy, vulgar, and exciting America of the booming second half of the 20th Century. His sentences tended to be flat and functional, but studded with brilliant phrases. For example, "Radical Chic," "The Me Decade," and "The Right Stuff" have all become part of the language. Over the years, Wolfe's verbal inventiveness faded. But he improved as a copy-editor of his own prose, reaching a peak in A Man in Full, which features numerous showstopping set pieces. The chapter "In the Breeding Barn," a detailed description of the astonishing process by which thoroughbred racehorses are mated, is the most overwhelming thing he's ever written. (By nature a prim and private man, Wolfe's discomfort with writing about sex paradoxically makes his descriptions of its power so memorable.) But the quality of Wolfe's writing collapsed over the last 100 pages of A Man in Full--perhaps due to his open-heart surgery and his subsequent clinical [66]depression. This left me wondering whether he'd be able to recover at an age when most people are retired. Fortunately, in Charlotte Simmons, his prose style is back to a serviceable level. And his glee over finding this great topic--student life in a modern university--that nobody important had touched in decades is palpable. Additionally, making his main character a teenage girl solves one of Wolfe's old problems: his fascination with fashion and decorating is hugely important to his books, but in the manly men he normally writes about, it always seemed a little, ahem, [67]gay. Like many artistic geniuses, Wolfe's personality encompasses a wider range of the masculine to feminine continuum than is common among us mortals. Back in the 1960s, Wolfe wrote some brilliant essays about fashionable young women. But then he researched his [68]tremendous account of Navy pilots in combat over [69]North Vietnam, "The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie," and became obsessed with male physical courage (which led to The Right Stuff and much else). He seemed to lose most of his ability to write about women--leading to the underdeveloped female characters in his first two novels. But his Charlotte is a painfully accurate depiction of a how young woman typically feels: i.e., acutely self-conscious. Wolfe has become the Beethoven of embarrassment. He orchestrates thunderous climaxes of social mortification every few pages. Although some have called I am Charlotte Simmons a can't-put-it-down book, personally, I had to put it down every 15 minutes or so. I felt so bad for the young characters as they heartbreakingly learn how the world works. Wolfe has been accused of lacking sympathy for his creations. But his empathy is infinite. As with Waugh, who was mostly dismissed as a dyspeptic middlebrow entertainer until after his death, it will likely be several decades before Wolfe's greatness as a novelist is uncontroversial. Maybe that will be when we are also allowed to be honest about the reality of human differences. [Steve Sailer [[70]email him], is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and [71]movie critic for [72]The American Conservative. His website [73]www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.] References 12. http://vdare.com/sailer/index.htm 15. http://vdare.com/sailer/index.htm 16. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553381350/vdare/103-5102193-4946247 17. http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/history/mercury/mercury-overview.htm 18. http://www.tomwolfe.com/home.html 19. http://www.doubtinghall.com/ 20. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374281580/vdare/103-5102193-4946247 21. http://www.duke.edu/ 22. http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=4619 23. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/bush_thinking.htm 24. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/lynch_mob.htm 25. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/dusty.htm 26. http://www.isteve.com/04DecB.htm#reggieist 27. http://www.isteve.com/mjelegy.htm 28. http://www.vdare.com/misc/entine_boston_marathon.htm 29. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0374520720/vdare 30. http://www.bubbascasino.com/bubbasmith.php 31. http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ws.html#People 32. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/print?id=1387626&type=story 33. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/olympic_moral.htm 34. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553580930/vdare/103-5102193-4946247 35. http://www.isteve.com/IsLoveColorblind.htm 36. http://web.archive.org/web/20000815061102/www.commentarymagazine.com/9902/books.html 37. http://www.tomwolfe.com/ManinFull-excerpt.html 38. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n01/tait01_.html 39. http://www.beatrice.com/archives/000885.html 40. http://www.nysun.com/article/3824 41. http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/foer.htm 42. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n01/tait01_.html 43. http://www.vdare.com/malkin/abstinence.htm 44. http://www.vdare.com/malkin/washingtonienne.htm 45. http://www.vdare.com/malkin/madonna.htm 46. http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/2001/march/default.htm 47. http://www.isteve.com/IsLoveColorblind.htm 48. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553275976/vdare 49. http://www.vdare.com/pb/central_park.htm 50. http://www.issues-views.com/index.php/sect/5000/article/2100 51. http://www.mikemilken.com/biography.taf?page=controversy 52. http://www.ex-iwp.org/docs/1993/Crown%20Heights%20Riot%20Aftermath.htm 53. http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1576 54. http://www.crimelibrary.com/classics4/oj/ 55. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674649265/vdare 56. http://www.kafka.org/ 57. http://www.nbc.com/Law_&_Order/about/index.html 58. http://www.isteve.com/04DecB.htm#orbach1 59. http://users.aol.com/dwalheim/lawandorder/briscoe.html 60. http://www.vdare.com/pb/taylor_review.htm 61. http://www.vdare.com/roberts/injustice2.htm 62. http://www.vdare.com/pb/death_of_due_process.htm 63. http://www.vdare.com/roberts/martha.htm 64. http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9305/articles/weigel.html 65. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/11/12/1100227565721.html?from=storylhs&oneclick=true 66. http://www.thedesertsun.com/news/stories2004/entertainment/20041107003229.shtml 67. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/gay_gene.htm 68. http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/ej/4a5.html 69. http://www.vdare.com/pb/bright_shining_lie.htm 70. mailto:steveslr at aol.com 71. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iSteve-movies/ 72. http://www.amconmag.com/ 73. http://www.isteve.com/ 74. https://www.cfau.org/asp/donate.asp From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 2 23:35:33 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 15:35:33 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: False Memory Creation Recorded Message-ID: <01C5093C.D6216E10.shovland@mindspring.com> That must be why so many people remember Saddam piloting one of the airplanes that hit the WTC :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 1:44 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; Human Biodiversity Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: False Memory Creation Recorded False Memory Creation Recorded http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-02-01-3 Brain imaging reveals biology of faulty eyewitness accounts Betterhumans Staff 2/1/2005 1:11 PM Brain imaging has provided insight into faulty eyewitness accounts. Research has shown that people's memories of complex events can be altered by misleading information provided after the event has occurred. Using noninvasive brain imaging methods, Yoko Akado and [8]Craig Stark of [9]Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland have now looked deeper into this process by examining how the brain encodes misinformation when creating a false memory. Misleading slide show For the study, participants were first shown a slide show of a man stealing a woman's wallet and then hiding behind a door. They were then shown a slightly different slide show and told it was the same sequence. Two days later, participants took a memory test in which they were asked to recall details of the slide show and which of the two presentations contained the information. Predicting misinformation Stark and Akado found that participants' brain activity predicted whether their memories would be accurate or false. For memories falsely associated with the first slide show when viewing the second, the researchers found that there was weaker activity in particular brain areas such as the prefrontal cortex. The researchers suggest that activity in the prefrontal cortex is linked with encoding memory context. Weak activity during the misinformation phase therefore suggests that the details of the second experience were poorly placed in context and as a result more easily confused. The research is reported in the journal [10]Learning & Memory. References 8. http://neuroscience.jhu.edu/peopledetail.asp?ID=320 9. http://www.jhu.edu/ 10. http://www.learnmem.org/ _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Thu Feb 3 15:20:12 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 10:20:12 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] A superpower on life support In-Reply-To: <01C507FB.A4058CA0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C507FB.A4058CA0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <4202412C.70303@uconn.edu> Steve, FYI, Brasil has always issued its bonds in US dollars, this year it is issuing 20% of them (at least) in Euros. And private export contracts have been moving to Euros too since the middle of last year. The problem with the Zero Sum game here is that the US will probably stick the gun to the face of its comercial partners before going to the same level of negotiation. As a pre-emptive measure, of course. Christian Steve Hovland wrote: > In recent years the US has been styling itself as > the last remaining superpower, able to dictate > the establishment of a Pax Americana without > significant opposition. > > If you look at our finances, you see a different > picture. > > The USSR crumbled because they could no > longer afford the Cold War game. > > We are about to crumble because we can no > longer pay cash to finance our activities. > > Most of our prosperity is financed by a mountain > of debt that now threatens the economy of the > entire planet. > > In their foolish greed our largest corporations > have exported vast amounts of capital to India > or China, who now have trade surpluses while > we have trade deficits that compound our > budget deficits. This is a zero sum game. > > The day will come when the world recognizes > that we have spent all of the gold that we found > at the end of our continental rainbow a mere > 200 years ago. > > When that day comes they will no longer buy > Dollar bonds, but Euro bonds. Indeed, the last > straw with Saddam Hussein was that he started > to price his oil in Euro's. > > When that day comes we will find that India, > China, Japan, and Europe will be our equal > partners because we won't be in any position > to refuse their demands. > > When that day comes we will no longer be > a psychotic Gulliver stomping on all who dare > to oppose us. We will be one among equals > living in a more benign equilibrium with the > planet. > > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake. - Thomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act _____________________________________________________________________ ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 18:37:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 13:37:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: What's Behind It: A Bit Of Social Engineering In Disguise Message-ID: What's Behind It: A Bit Of Social Engineering In Disguise http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28191-2005Jan22?language=printer [This is the best article I've read on Social Security. There is no CRISIS as such. Retirement age will simply get pushed upward to make ends meet. Robert Fogel, in _The Fourth Great Awakening_, calculated that half of the actuarial value of Social Security has already been taken away through increases in the retirement age. [My understanding is that private investment generates returns of 7-8 percent per year in real terms, before taxes, over the long haul. (My Federal pension gets 6-7% *after* taxes (my own calculations), making it much better. Only certain state and local governments can beat this.) Social Security returns much less, but I've never understood why, except the all-purpose explanation of government incompetence. [I agree with the article about the social engineering, but it's a tad bit disingenuous: all government action has some social engineering consequences. Likewise, a Hayekian decision to call of the bureaucrats is itself an example of rationalistic planning. Or meta-planning.] Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page B02 For Republicans, Social Security reform could be the kind of donnybrook that health care reform was for Democrats in 1994. The magnitude of the political risk is staggering. On Capitol Hill, many Republicans wonder if they are being led off a cliff. What does President Bush think he's doing? Well, he says, there's a Social Security crisis. "The crisis is now," Bush said in December. But he must know this isn't true. Economically speaking, stabilizing Social Security's long-term finances is a task of only middling difficulty and importance. It requires no fundamental change in the program and need not be tackled right away. As for private Social Security accounts, they are -- again, economically speaking -- a solution in search of a problem. No, what Bush and the Republicans are focused on is not the economy, stupid. It is conservative social engineering on the grandest possible scale. When people talk about Social Security reform, they usually mean reforms, plural. They're usually linking two changes that are conceptually and mechanically distinct. Reform No. 1 would reduce the growth of benefits -- or raise payroll taxes -- to bring the program into long-term fiscal balance. Reform No. 2 would structurally revamp the program by creating private accounts: A portion of your Social Security payroll tax would go into an investment account with your name on it instead of going to the U.S. Treasury to finance the benefits of current retirees, as now happens. Congress can adopt one idea, both ideas or neither. Either, by itself, is politically difficult; doing both -- simultaneously cutting and restructuring the program -- is audacious. Yet that is what Bush seems likely to propose. Why take the chance? On close examination, the economic payoffs are unimpressive. The moral and political dividends are potentially another matter. Earlier this month, a White House aide named Peter H. Wehner, director of strategic initiatives, sent selected conservatives a memo making the case for changing Social Security. "We consider our Social Security reform not simply an economic challenge, but a moral goal and a moral good," he wrote. "If we succeed in reforming Social Security, it will rank as one of the most significant conservative governing achievements ever." The emphasis was revealing. The memo said little about long-term growth and other economic effects. It stressed moving "away from dependency on government and toward giving greater power and responsibility to individuals." At the libertarian Cato Institute, Michael Tanner, the director of a Project on Social Security Choice and a long-time proponent of privatization, makes the same case. "We're changing fundamentally the relationship of people to their government," he says. It would be "the biggest shift since the New Deal." Bingo. Once you cancel the zeros on both sides of the equation, neither creating private Social Security accounts nor ratcheting down the growth of future benefits would constitute an economic watershed. Republicans frame Social Security reform as a dollars-and-cents issue, but what they really hope to change is not the American economy but the American psyche. Conservatives used to speak derisively of liberal social engineering. Yet the attempt to create private Social Security accounts is essentially conservative social counter-engineering. Government should help provide for unforeseeable contingencies: tsunamis, unemployment, open-heart surgery. But if there is one event in all of life that is wholly foreseeable, it is the advent of old age. Why, then, shouldn't people save for their own vretirements, instead of relying on welfare from the government -- which is what Social Security, as currently constituted, really is? Tanner argues that people who own assets see their place in society in a new light. Private accounts, he says, would encourage a culture of saving and personal responsibility; they would discourage political class warfare; they may, he argues, improve work habits and even reduce crime and other social pathologies. Create private Social Security accounts, and millions of low-income Americans will be stockholders and bondholders. GOP activists look at the way portfolio investors vote and salivate at the prospect of millions more of them. Many conservatives believe that moral values played a key role in Bush's reelection. It may seem odd, then, that Bush's boldest post-election priority is not abortion or gay marriage or schools but Social Security. The key to the paradox is that Social Security reform is not, at bottom, an economic issue with moral overtones. It is a values issue with economic overtones. By Jonathan Rauch, a senior writer for National Journal magazine, in which a longer version of this article appeared. From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 18:38:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 13:38:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Dowd: Inherit the Windbags Message-ID: Inherit the Windbags Liberties column by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, 5.2.3 WASHINGTON Do male nipples prove evolution? Not at all, according to a Web site for a planned Creation Museum devoted to showing that the Bible is literally true. Nipples may be biologically de trop for men, an "expert" on the site notes, but that doesn't mean they resulted from natural selection. They could just as well be a decorating feature of the Creator's (like a hood ornament). Who are we to question His designs, since we cannot presume to comprehend His mind? The virtual tour of the museum, to be built in rural Kentucky, says its exhibits will explain many such mysteries, like the claim that T. rex lurked around Adam and Eve - "That's the terror that Adam's sin unleashed!" - and how "Noah and his family survive 371 days alone on an animal-filled boat" ("a real 'Survivor' story"). The philosophy of the Creation Museum, part of the "Answers in Genesis" ministry, is summed up this way: "The imprint of the Creator is all around us. And the Bible's clear - heaven and earth in six 24-hour days, earth before sun, birds before lizards. Other surprises are just around the corner. Adam and apes share the same birthday. The first man walked with dinosaurs and named them all! God's Word is true, or evolution is true. No millions of years. There's no room for compromise." Personally, I've decided to stop evolving. No point, really. Evolution is so 20th century. As with Iraq, President Bush has applied his doctrine of pre-emption on evolution, cutting it off before it can pose a threat to our well-being. Ever since he observed during his 2000 campaign that "on the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the earth," Mr. Bush has been reeling backward as fast as he can toward the Garden of Eden, which, if creationists are to be believed, was really "Jurassic Park." Seeing the powerful role of evangelicals in getting Mr. Bush re-elected, teachers across the country are quietly ignoring evolution, even when the subject is in their curriculums. Many teachers take the hint on evolution even without overt pressure, Cornelia Dean wrote this week in Science Times: "Teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests." On eBay, you can even find replicas of the stickers that a Georgia county put on science textbooks to warn that evolution is "a theory, not a fact." Talk about sticker shock. So much for the Tree of Knowledge. Mr. Bush gives us the Ficus of Faith. I knew the president, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich wanted to wipe out the psychedelic "if it feels good do it" post-Vietnam 60's and go back to the black-and-white 50's - a meaner "Happy Days." They wanted to yank us back in a time machine to a place before Vietnam was lost, free love was found, Roe v. Wade was enacted; they could roll back science to smother stem cells' promise. (Since it was reported last week that all human embryonic lines approved for federally financed research are tainted with a foreign molecule from mice, the administration can't even feign an interest in scientific progress. Who'd a-thunk that science's great hope would turn out to be Arnold Schwarzenegger?) I misunderestimated this ambitious president. His social engineering schemes in the Middle East and America are breathtakingly brazen. He doesn't just want to dismantle the 60's. He wants to dismantle the whole century - from the Scopes trial to Social Security. He can shred one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal and then go after other big safety-net Democratic programs, reversing the prevailing philosophy of many decades that our tax and social welfare systems should equalize the distribution of wealth, just a little bit. Barry Goldwater wouldn't have had the brass to take a jackhammer to that edifice. The White House seems to think Social Security was corrupt from the moment it was enacted in 1935. It wants to replace it with private accounts that will fatten the wallets of stockbrokers and put the savings of Americans who didn't inherit vast fortunes at risk. Mr. Bush and his crew not only want to scrap the New Deal. By weakening environmental and safety protections and trying to flatten the progressive income tax, they're trying to eradicate not just one Roosevelt but two, going after the progressive legacy of Theodore. With their brutal assault on history and their sanctimonious manner, they give a whole new meaning to Teddy's philosophy of the presidency. Bully pulpit, indeed. E-mail: liberties at nytimes.com From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 18:39:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 13:39:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Relations With Germany Are Broken Off Message-ID: Relations With Germany Are Broken Off http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0203.html [I'm sorry for the delay in forwarding this. This event took place on February 3, 1917, and was reported in the The New York Times the following day. Relations With Germany Are Broken Off _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Break With Austria Too _________________________________________________________________ Notice of Her Blockade Arrives as President is Speaking _________________________________________________________________ EXPECTS NEUTRAL SUPPORT _________________________________________________________________ President Expresses Belief That They Will Follow America's Course _________________________________________________________________ STILL HOPES AGAINST WAR _________________________________________________________________ Mr. Wilson Unable to Believe That Germany Means to Carry Out Threat _________________________________________________________________ Special to The New York Times RELATED HEADLINES American Ship Housatonic Sunk, Crew Safe: First Sinking Reported: London Hears No Warning Was Given Housatonic Off Scilly Islands: 25 Americans on Board: Armed British Steamer Picks Up the Officers and Crew of the Vessel: News Stirs in Washington: But if U-Boat Took Precautions Attack Will Not Be Adequate Cause for Action Militia Called Out: State Forces Ready Today: Mobilization of Land and Naval Units Starts at Once: Guards Doubled at Forts: Police Posted on Bridges and Home Defense League Ordered to Prepare for Duty: Governors Island Busy: Corporation Employes to Protect Plants -- Germans Meeting Places Listed German Ships Seized: Teuton Ships Are Seized: Federal Officials Take Over Vessels Held in Our Ports: Dispossess Appam's Crew: Two German Auxiliary Cruisers Also Are Among Those Now in Custody: Liner Had Been Crippled: Kronprinzessin Cecile is Found Useless -- Austrian Ship Here is Damaged. Text of President Wilson's Address Bernstorff Was Not Surprised: But on Receiving Passports Did Not Hide His Concern Over Failure of His Efforts: Has No Safe Conduct Yet: Details of Arrangements for His Departure Not Settled -- His Wife an American The St. Louis Held; May Mount Guns: Convoy or Six Rapid-Firers to Protect American Liner on Voyage to Europe: Sailing Tomorrow Likely: Adriatic Leaves for the War Zone With 44 Passengers -- Others to Depart Attempt to Scuttle Destroyer Jacob Jones At Philadelphia; Petty Officer Put In Irons W ashington, Feb. 3 -- Diplomatic relations between Germany and the United States were severed today. It was President Wilson's answer to the German notice that any merchant vessel which entered prescribed areas would be sunk without warning. Count von Bernstorff, the Kaiser's Ambassador, has received his passports, in other words, he has been dismissed by this Government. James W. Gerard, the American Ambassador at Berlin, has been ordered to return home with his staff. President Wilson made the sensational answer in a momentous address delivered before the two houses of Congress assembled in joint session this afternoon. Congress appears to be unanimous in a determination to stand by the President in whatever measures he takes. Party lines have been obliterated in the general desire to support the Administration in dealing with a critical situation that most observers expect to result in the entrance of the United States into the European conflict. War has not been declared. The President in his address said: "we do not desire any hostile conflict with the German Government." But preparations for war are being made. Many yards have been closed to the public. For the present private shipbuilding concerns and other plants engaged in Government work will take their own precautionary measures. Private ship builders have offered to place their establishments under the control of the Government, and a provision authorizing the Secretary of the Navy to do this will be offered by the Naval Committee in the House on Monday. German merchant ships at American ports are being closely guarded, and some have been seized. Our war vessels are said to have received precautionary orders. Army arsenals have been told to guard against danger. Public buildings here and elsewhere are being guarded also. Break With Austria, Too Diplomatic relations with Austria-Hungary are to be severed also. This was made certain by the receipt by the State Department today of a note from the Vienna Government containing notice of adherence to the German submarine blockade policy. President Wilson did not know this when he went to the Capitol. Count Tarnowski von Tarnow, the newly accredited Ambassador of Austria-Hungary, who had reached the United States on Thursday, went to the State Department today to arrange for his formal presentation to President Wilson. Word was brought to him that Secretary Lansing would be unable to receive him. Hardly had the Ambassador gone when the department received a cable message from Frederic C. Penfield, giving the text of the Austro-Hungarian adherence to the German war zone order. As Count Tarnowski has not been formally received by this Government he may not be dismissed in the same way as Count von Bernstorff was, but he will be invited to leave the country, with the members of his suite and embassy staff. Ambassador Penfield and his embassy staff will be ordered home. If war results it will be war with Austria-Hungary and Turkey as well, and possibly with Bulgaria. Demands Release of Americans Taking it for granted that war is inevitable, speculation is being indulged in here as to how soon the clash will come. That it will come soon is a general opinion tonight. A German submarine is reported to have sunk the American freight steamer Housatonic. Word came officially today that Germany was holding as prisoners of war sixty-odd American citizens taken from merchant ships by a German raider. This Government has demanded their release immediately. If Germany refuses - and this is expected- the President may ask Congress to authorize him to take measures of reprisal. He will certainly do so if Germany does not spare American merchantman entering the forbidden areas. An important aspect of the situation to which little attention has been attracted is that President Wilson hopes that other neutral nations will join the United States in blacklisting Germany in proclaiming that Government unworthy of association with other nations in the great world family. The President, as his intention is understood, wants Germany "sent to Coventry," not to be spoken to until she has shown herself worthy of recognition again. The United States stands ready to champion the integrity of neutral rights. Whether this will be done single-handed or with the cooperation of other neutral nations is not known. An exchange of views between the United States and the Foreign Offices of South America and Europe is expected to be in progress by Monday. In Spain's recent reply to President Wilson's note to the belligerent nations that country's willingness to participate in any concert of neutrals was indicated. Other European neutrals are known to be ready to arrive at an understanding with American Government. The President gave a hint of this intention in the address he delivered to Congress today. After he had indicated that he might find it necessary later on that "authority be given to me to use any means that may be necessary for the protection of our seamen and our people to the prosecution of their peaceful and legitimate errands on the high seas," the President said, "I take it for granted that all neutral nations will take the same course." Bernstorff Promptly Notified The note of dismissal handed to Count von Bernstorff was practically a paraphrase of the President's address to Congress. It was signed by Robert Lansing, Secretary of State, and was given to the German Ambassador personally by Lester H. Woolsey, an assistant solicitor of the State Department who does most of the confidential legal work for Secretary Lansing. Mr. Woolsey went to the German Embassy in Massachusetts Avenue at exactly 2 o'clock and was received immediately by Count von Bernstorff. Mr. Woolsey's arrival at the embassy was timed to correspond to the moment when President Wilson appeared in the hall of the House of Representatives to inform Congress that diplomatic relations with Germany had been severed. With the note handed to the German Ambassador by Mr. Woolsey were the passports guaranteeing Count von Bernstorff safe conduct out of the United States. When and how he will depart and where he will go are questions to be determined. Count von Bernstorff is still at the embassy. The concluding paragraph of the note of dismissal to Count von Bernstorff gives in brief form the action taken by this Government today, which breaks officially for the first time in history the friendly relations existing between Germany or any German State and the United States. That paragraph reads: "The President has, therefore, directed me to announce to your Excellency that all diplomatic relations between the United States and the German Empire are severed, and that the American Ambassador at Berlin will be immediately withdrawn, and in accordance with such announcement to deliver to your Excellency your passports." And the Secretary of State, whose language was scrupulously courteous throughout his communication, had "the honor to be, your Excellency's obedient servant, Robert Lansing." Precautions at Capital Washington is calm outwardly, but under the surface, the excitement is intense. Having recovered from its first shock of realization that the break with Germany which might mean war had come at last, Washington began to discuss the situation and arrived at the conclusion that a break was the only possible outcome of the German notice that ruthless methods of submarine warfare were to be resumed. This of course, applies to Washington generally. Official Washington showed a bit of excitement as the day wore along. It was impossible not to come under the spell of the air of activity in the Government Departments where the wheels were humming in a way suggestive of the period of the war with Spain. Persons who have been in the habit of passing regularly in and out of Government buildings were stopped at the entrances and told that they could not enter unless they furnished evidence that they were Government employes attending engagements with officials. The great host of clerks who make their homeward way nightly through the White House grounds were politely told by policemen that the grounds were closed to the public for an indefinite period. The gates leading to the footways were closed., and while the gates of the entrances to the driveways were open they were guarded by policemen. Suffragists bearing banners inquiring of President Wilson how long women must wait for liberty and what the President would do for suffrage kept up their vigil at the White House gates. It was bitterly could, but the women stood their watches cheerfully. The part of the White House grounds closed today has never been closed except for the brief periods of ceremonial occasions. Joseph P. Tumulty, Secretary to the President, said the grounds had been closed merely out of excess of caution. He thought it well to take that action in a time likely to lead to great popular excitement. Decision Reached at Night President Wilson's decision to break with Germany at once was apparently reached in the still watches of the night. When he left the Capitol yesterday evening after consulting with sixteen Senators, he did not indicate what course he intended to follow in dealing with the German Government. All that was known was that the new submarine policy of Germany made a break inevitable. But when it was to come was problematical. The President had been advised by some of his conferees to break at once. Others had thought he should wait for an actual sinking of a merchantman without warning by a German submarine. Some - but they were few - suggested that another diplomatic note should be sent to Germany before a severance of relations. Which of these courses the President would be inclined to follow he did not indicate when he left the Capitol. It was about 10:30 o'clock this morning that the President sent for secretary Lansing and told him that he had determined that diplomatic relations with Germany should be broken at once. He then arranged for addressing Congress at 2 o'clock. Secretary Lansing went back to the State Department, to make the necessary arrangements for dismissing Ambassador von Bernstorff and recalling Ambassador Gerard. The scene when President Wilson appeared at the House at 2 o'clock was dramatic. Reports had been in circulation that the President had ordered a break with Germany, but comparatively few persons in that large audience were certain as to what attitude the President had decided to adopt. Floor and galleries were packed and jammed when the President entered the chamber. He got a cordial reception. In the thirty minutes that he stood at the rostrum facing that breathless, eager gathering of men and women, only twice did his hearers become really demonstrative. He had received a round of hand clapping and a cheer or two when he appeared. The audience listened attentively to the President's words as he read from little printed pages. Draws Volleys of Cheers The President had sketched the steps the Government had taken to bring Germany to a realization of her responsibility to other nations in the conduct of submarine warfare. It was near the close of the address when the crowd broke into applause over his declaration that he had directed that all diplomatic relations between Germany and the United States should be severed. A moment later there was another outbreak of approval when he said that he refused to believe that the German Government intended to do in fact what it had given warning of intention to do, but this applause was not very marked. When near the very end of the address, the President said he would come before Congress again to ask authority to protect Americans on the seas if Germany carried out her threats, the audience burst into spontaneous cheering. On the whole the businesslike and direct character of the address brought general commendation from those who heard it and a careful canvass of opinion among Senators and Representatives showed that party lines were obliterated in the patriotic desire to prove to the President that the nation's legislators stood behind him in the most important action he has undertaken in his Presidential term. From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 18:40:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 13:40:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: U.N. Aims to Cut Poverty in Half as Experts Wonder How to Measure It Message-ID: The New York Times > Business > World Business > Economic Scene: U.N. Aims to Cut Poverty in Half as Experts Wonder How to Measure It http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/03/business/worldbusiness/03scenes.html 5.2.3 ECONOMIC SCENE By ALAN B. KRUEGER ONE of the United Nations' top goals is to cut in half the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, compared with 1990. The World Bank is responsible for keeping track. Accurately monitoring poverty is essential for knowing whether the goal is achieved and whether antipoverty strategies are working. But measuring poverty is difficult for a particular country, let alone the world. The movie star Angelina Jolie challenged celebrities at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week to know "absolutely what they're talking about" when it comes to poverty, yet even experts would have trouble meeting her standard. Knowing the extent of the rise or fall of worldwide poverty is difficult because poverty is not easy to define or measure. First, establishing a poverty line - or level of consumption below which one is considered impoverished - involves an element of arbitrariness. For many poor families, not having enough money amounts to not having enough food. But there is no particular threshold level of income or expenditures above which people automatically become fully functioning, nourished members of society. "Poverty lines are as much political as scientific constructions," said Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist and expert on economic development. In such places as different as the United States and India, the poverty line was initially set with reference to minimum standards of food consumption. Yet over time, Professor Deaton noted, the poverty lines in both countries were adjusted to keep pace with overall price inflation, not the price of food or the share of food in the average family's budget. Despite straying from its original conception, the poverty line survived because of its political and administrative usefulness. The U.N. has set the line for extreme poverty at living on less than $1 a day. This threshold has obvious rhetorical appeal and surely qualifies as extreme poverty by any standard in developed countries; it is also not far off the poverty line used by many of the poorest countries themselves. Once an international poverty line is set, it must be converted to local currencies. This is trickier than it sounds. Currency exchange rates are inappropriate because most of the items that the poor consume are not traded on world markets. Living expenses are much lower in rural India than in New York, but this fact is not fully captured if prices are converted with currency exchange rates. To convert the $1 poverty line into foreign currencies, the World Bank uses indexes of "purchasing power parity." Simply put, these indexes reflect the cost of buying a standard bundle of goods in each country. Although it is desirable to use purchasing indexes, they are not available for all countries and are skewed toward representing the purchases of the wealthiest households, not the poorest, when they are available. Another problem is that the bundle of goods that poor families actually buy varies from country to country because of differences in tastes and availability. Thus, the $1 poverty line is best viewed as an approximation. Once the poverty line is set in local currency, the consumption of a representative sample of households must be compared with the line to determine the percent of people getting by on less than $1 a day. (Each household's consumption is spread equally among its members, another leap of faith.) Again, this is harder than it sounds. The World Bank typically relies on whatever government surveys that countries routinely produce. But there is no uniform standard in the way countries collect and process their data, which is important because the poverty rate is sensitive to how consumption is measured. Consider India, home to 33 percent of the world's poor - or 20 percent, depending on how the data are collected. India was a pioneer in social surveys and has one of the best government statistical agencies in the world. Still, uncertainty shrouds the level of poverty in India. In one experiment, India's national survey organization asked half of the households it surveyed to report their spending on certain items over a 30-day period and half over a seven-day period. Households reported 30 percent higher food consumption per day in the shorter interval, enough to cut the poverty rate in half. It is not certain which measure is more accurate, although follow-up work points toward the longer interval. Perhaps the best one can hope for is consistency of measurement within countries to detect changes in poverty over time. But continuing past practices can prolong the use of misleading poverty counts that are not comparable across countries. Clearly, there is a need for Latin American countries, which usually measure poverty by income rather than consumption, to collect reliable household consumption data because consumption is a better measure of living standards. The herculean measurement problems aside, careful research by Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank indicates that much progress has been made toward the goal of halving poverty in China and India. But, they found, little progress has occurred in Latin America and Africa, and the former Soviet states are slipping into deeper poverty. Because China and India accounted for 60 percent of the world's poor in 1990, the goal of halving poverty may be achieved a decade from now, even while many regions see no progress. Despite the progress in China and India, 18 percent of the world's population still somehow survives on less than $1 a day. The United Nations has recently held a number of brainstorming sessions to gather proposals for the secretary general's report to the General Assembly on achieving the development goals, which will be delivered next month. An essential prerequisite is to improve poverty statistics and ensure their integrity. Although the process of setting a poverty line is necessarily political, the task of measuring poverty should be insulated from political influences. The World Bank, however, is an inherently political institution. Yet no other international body currently has the expertise or resources to monitor worldwide poverty, so it is important for the next president of the World Bank to value and protect the impartiality of the statistical and research staff. The U.N. could also help by working with statistical agencies around the world to develop uniform standards for poverty surveys and then to ensure that their data are adequately documented and publicly archived. To this end, the U.N. could restart its Household Survey Capability Program, which supported statistical offices in developing countries in the 1980's. This may not be a cause that celebrities are ready to line up for, but improving poverty data will put the world in a better position to monitor progress and evaluate poverty reduction strategies by the time the poverty line is moved up to $2 a day. Alan B. Krueger is the Bendheim professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. E-mail: akrueger at princeton.edu From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 18:43:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 13:43:26 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Sharing and Apart, as a Life Ebbs (5 Letters Message-ID: The New York Times > Opinion > Sharing and Apart, as a Life Ebbs (5 Letters) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/03/opinion/l03aging.html 5.3.3 To the Editor: In "Under One Roof, Aging Together Yet Alone" (front page, Jan. 30), the underlying sadness was evident. While money may afford assisted living residents a nice, comfortable atmosphere with everything they could possibly want, the question that kept coming to my mind was, Where are their children, and why are they not taking care of their parents? We have such vision for the rest of the world in terms of democratizing it and making it like us. And yet we often overlook that we would do well to learn from other countries that honor their responsibility in taking care of their parents. Sara Salvania Provo, Utah, Jan. 30, 2005 To the Editor: Cranky in an assisted living facility, residents wonder why they aren't as happy as those depicted in the glossy brochures. Realistically, one wonders how they could possibly emulate those smiling couples. Old, often alone without a partner, removed from what has been familiar, the possibility of money running out, a limited life. Who wouldn't turn into a first-class curmudgeon? Has a secret been exposed? The myth that this stage of life is one of contentment is questionable. Assisted living facilities are necessary, and they serve a much-needed purpose as we live longer. Should this be in my future down the road, I will simply endure. But save me from Bingo games, and hope I am able to make the best of it. What other options are there? Mary Ramniceanu New York, Jan. 31, 2005 To the Editor: "Humbled by the loss of control and fearful of the future." This phrase from "Under One Roof, Aging Together Yet Alone," made me think of Oregon and its Death With Dignity Act, which was enacted in 1997. Since then, more people have chosen to avail themselves of the act because of their fear of loss of control than for any other reason, including pain. If loss of control is one of our greatest fears (I am 74), why is it only Oregon that allows those who wish to choose the time and manner of their deaths to do so? When will those of us who live elsewhere gain that advantage? Betsy Carpenter Portola Valley, Calif., Jan. 30, 2005 To the Editor: I discovered last July that I had cancer, went through chemo and radiation and still have cancer. I'm going to die, and I know and accept it. But I'm much happier than the people I read about in the article. I was divorced and met a widow some eight years ago, and we decided to share our lives together. We each lived alone and finally wondered why. Now that cancer has entered the scene, nothing has changed because of the great woman I am with, who doesn't want me to leave home and go anywhere. And I don't want to leave. We will share our lives to the end. Families who are considering placing a loved one in one of these assisted living communities might do better to find an organization that places a man and a woman together to share what income they have, staying at home and being happy. It's not a project that can be attempted and completed overnight, but it would benefit everybody. There are plenty of people living alone who would like to share their lives with someone. All it would take would be for someone to start an organization that could accomplish this task. My lady went through open-heart surgery, and I cared for her during her yearlong recovery. Now she is doing the same for me until my end comes. It's called love. Jerry Babb Oakland, Me., Jan. 30, 2005 To the Editor: Having to leave assisted living to go to a nursing home points out a sad, irrational fact of the American health care system. What sense does it make to move a person from an appropriate, less expensive setting - assisted living - to an inappropriate, much more expensive nursing home? It makes no sense at all. This parallels another irrationality in our health care system. Insurance companies and government health financing agencies will pay tens of thousands of dollars for psychiatric hospitalization, but severely limit money for cost-effective outpatient psychotherapy, despite well-documented research showing that outpatient treatment will prevent the much greater expenditure of hospitalization. The gold standard for health care is providing services in the least restrictive setting. The practice of inappropriately shunting people into hospitals and nursing homes grossly violates this standard. In my years of practice as a psychologist, I have not been able to figure out the reason for these truly irrational practices. The best I have been able to come up with is that hospitals and nursing homes have better lobbyists and deeper pockets for political contributions. They certainly - because of the wastrel ways of the government and insurance companies - have more money to spend. Ira Rosofsky New Haven, Jan. 31, 2005 The writer is a psychologist who provides services to nursing homes and assisted living centers. From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 19:59:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 14:59:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Jerusalem Report: (Slezkine) Some of My Best Friends Are Mercurians Message-ID: Some of My Best Friends Are Mercurians http://jrep.com/Info/10thAnniversary/ Noah Efron The Jerusalem Report Twenty-five years ago, I met an old American expatriate in Moscow. I was a college kid, sent by the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry to bring prayer books and blue jeans (to be sold or bartered) to Jews denied emigration visas for Israel. In 10 days, I met dozens of these refuseniks, but the man I'll call Josef stood out. His parents had lived in Flatbush, my grandparents' old neighborhood. They had followed news of the Russian Revolution with excitement, Josef told me, and by the time he was 5 years old, in 1920, America to them had become a soulless Babylon, where money and trivial comforts were all that mattered. To raise a boy there, his parents felt, was to sentence him to the life of a petty shopkeeper. But to raise a boy in revolutionary Russia, that was to give him a future with meaning and honor. Eventually Josef's parents sold their books and furniture, and boarded a steamer bound for Libau, in Latvia. From there, they made their way to Moscow, where they took up residence in a tiny third-floor apartment they shared with two other families. It was there, 60 years later, that he gratefully accepted the Levis I brought, and told me tearfully, in Brooklyn-accented English, that his well-meaning parents had thrown away his life before it had ever begun. I took this personally. Josef was born 12 years before my father, just a few blocks over, and it seemed a mere accident that it was his parents, and not my father's, who quit America for the revolution. It could, after all, have been me in a dismal Moscow flat, pathetically taking jeans from some rich, self-important American kid. And it was personal in another way as well. My grandparents had come to America from eastern Europe before the revolution, and while I was thankful that I had avoided Soviet life, I did not find the results of their decision altogether satisfactory. In fact, I too had come to see America as soulless and materialistic, banal and debauched. Which is why I, too, had decided to quit America. I would finish college as I promised my mother and father, but then I would move to Israel to join a desert kibbutz. There I planned to become a wholly different man. I would be ruddy and sinewy; my hands would be rough. I'd farm. I'd serve in the army. I would stop reading the New York Review of Books. (The diploma that cost my parents $150,000 would hang in the bathroom.) I would be earnest and "authentic." And so it came to pass that three years after I'd met Josef, I was a kibbutznik on an army transit nervously accompanying my infantry unit into Sidon, Lebanon. A Jew reinventing himself is by now so familiar a notion that it is easy to overlook the oddity of the expatriate's story, and my own. The experience of Jews in the 20th century was one of grand movements, in both senses of the word. Millions of Jews moved from one place to another, often liquidating possessions, crossing seas, shattering families, learning new languages, and acquiring new passports (and, of course, in wartime Europe, riding the rails to their deaths). And, in the same period, millions of Jews joined movements - communist, socialist, bundist, Zionist and more, in every imaginable combination. Many of my heroes growing up - Rosa Luxembourg, Samuel Gompers, Leon Trotsky, Albert Einstein, David Ben-Gurion - were movement Jews in both senses. Each ended up an ocean away from where he or she began. And each tried to remake the world he or she lived in, along the lines of some creed or ideology. Why were Jews in the 20th century such visible peripatetics, such visible radicals and, in particular, such visible peripatetic radicals? Pick any standard you wish, and Western Jews have excelled by it; first in Europe before the rise of the Nazis, and then in the United States, and then (though less so) in Israel. Why? These are huge questions, of course. Over the years a great number of answers have been given: Jews succeed because they're so damn smart (as Raphael Patai suggested); because generations of Talmudic casuistry sharpened minds and encouraged Jews to question tradition and authority (as Warner Sombart suggested); because the long history of pariahdom forced upon Jews by unaccepting surroundings gave them a kind of detached wisdom (as Thorsten Veblen suggested); or, because their late emancipation left them with fewer restraints of "conservative and traditional thinking," allowing them to ignore or attack existing institutions (as Nathan Glazer suggested). A few of these explanations probably have no validity at all; but even the ones that have something to them are dwarfed by the most recent effort to make sense of this history, Yuri Slezkine's eccentric and brilliant "The Jewish Century." Slezkine, a Russian ?migr? history professor at Berkeley, who learned to his surprise at age 11 that his father's mother was Jewish, begins by challenging the "Jews, God & History" dogma drilled ceaselessly into the mind of every kid who ever attended Hebrew school, the dogma that Jewish history is unique because Jews are unique. "There was nothing particularly unusual about the social and economic position of the Jews in medieval and early Modern Europe," Slezkine writes. Jews belong to a class of ethnic tribes (along with gypsies, Armenians, Nestorians, overseas Chinese, East African Indians and many more) who, for centuries and throughout the world, have assumed certain occupations and dispatched them in a certain way. Slezkine calls these tribes "mercurian," after Mercury, "the god of all those who did not herd animals, till the soil, or live by the sword": messengers, craftsmen, merchants, healers and other intermediaries. Mercurians set down their stakes among "apollonians," after Apollo, the god of agriculture and livestock. Apollonian societies are dominated by farmers, along with soldiers and priests. There was a symbiosis between mercurians and their apollonian hosts, but it was an uneasy one. Mercurians were also susceptible to the charge that they were disloyal parasites who compensate for their weakness (they do no physical labor) with scheming craftiness. Though apollonian societies needed mercurians for their goods and services, they also disparaged and despised them, expressing their disdain in "sporadic grassroots pogroms. and periodic confiscations, conversions, expulsions, and executions." This pattern has repeated itself, Slezkine writes, over centuries and continents. Much of what we rather parochially think of as "anti-Semitism," then, is only a private instance of the far more general phenomenon of anti-mercurianism. But this is only the beginning. In recent generations, the West has quickly, if fitfully, abandoned its apollonian heritage. In Europe and America, fewer and fewer people spend their days on farms, in churches or barracks. Populations have steadily seeped from countryside to city or suburb. Most citizens now work in professions and service industries. In other words, the West has quickly become mercurian. Pick at random a Russian or German or Virginian on the street, and it is far more likely that he earns his living in a manner similar to my (Jewish) great-grandfather than to his own (say, Protestant) great-grandfather; he is more likely to work in Walmart than he is to drive a tractor. In that sense, the past century has been the mercurian century and, since Jews have long been the most visible, literate and successful mercurians in the West, the Jewish century. This, in and of itself, partly explains recent Jewish economic and cultural success, because success in the newly mercurian West demands precisely the sorts of skills that Jews have honed for many generations. Essentially, Jews excelled in the 20th century because they had the home-field advantage. But Slezkine's story gets more complicated still. Pastoral, romantic apollonianism was never completely extinguished. It retained a powerful appeal among people dismayed by the rootless and restless rationality of modern life. Nazism was, to some degree, a revolt against mercurianism, a fact that may shed some light on the passion with which Nazis exterminated Jews (and Roma-gypsies and others). But there were benign rejections of mercurianism as well, one of the most successful being agrarian and labor Zionism. Jews themselves could be found among the most strident critics of their own mercurian past. The Jewish century saw the first great revolt against Jewish mercurianism. Having set out this grand scheme of modern Western history, Slezkine devotes the largest portion of his book to describing the three great migrations of 20th-century Jews, from the Russian Pale to three very different "paradises." The first was to the United States, the most mercurian of all societies. The second was to Palestine, to establish an apollonian, organic Jewish peasant society. And the third was to Moscow and Leningrad, after a revolution that promised to dissolve the age-old dichotomy between the apollonian and mercurian. It is not surprising that, being a Russian historian, Slezkine devotes most of his effort to the fascinating, untold story of Jewish migration from the Pale to the revolution, and their extraordinary success when they arrived. We all tend to see the history of Soviet Jews through the prism of their last generation as a disaffected and persecuted minority. Slezkine describes the stunning integration of Jews in the early Soviet bureaucracy and government, and the influence they achieved in science, academia, arts, administration, army and police, as well as the sincerity of their commitment to the revolution (and to Pushkin). "The Jewish Century" is history on a majestic scale. It explains the great successes of Jews in the liberal West (as well as why Jews tended toward some professions and not others). It explains the radical recoil of many Jews against liberal modernity, in favor of more romantic movements. It explains modern anti-Semitism, and especially the great resonance of romantic anti-Semitism, including Nazism. It explains the central place of Jews in the Soviet Union, and also the eventual deterioration of both their position and their commitment to the state and its revolution, in the century's second half. And it explains all these things in a way that is fresh, compelling and frequently startling. Of course, like any theory that explains so much, it is schematic, relying perhaps too much on archetypes. There is much complexity that Slezkine overlooks, as when he presents American Jews as wholeheartedly liberal mercurians and Israelis as unmitigated apollonians, thereby ignoring, say, the American Jewish back-to-the-land agriculturalist movement (now forgotten, but dynamic in the first third of the 20th century) and the unrepentantly bourgeois Tel Aviv Jews. In fact, of the three great Jewish experiments of the 20th century - the liberal United States, Zionist/statist Israel and Communist Soviet Union - Slezkine explores only the last in satisfying detail (a reasonable choice, since this is the only one of the three that has never been well explored in the past). Still, the schematic nature of Slezkine's analysis is an unavoidable cost of writing on such a capacious scale, and it's a price well worth paying. The clarity of analysis is extraordinary, and the relatively simple conceptual tools Slezkine provides are unexpectedly powerful. After reading Darwin for the first time, Thomas Henry Huxley registered shock that so clear and simple an explanation could explain so much, and that it had been overlooked for so long. I could be Slezkine's Huxley. It's now 22 years since I moved to Israel to remake myself as an apollonian, and I find myself a fat university professor in a room lined with books, waiting for the next issue of the New York Review to arrive. The Soviet Union is gone, of course, and the great-grandchildren of Jewish revolutionaries are mostly trying to make a living in Brooklyn and Bat Yam. We are all mercurians now, but as Slezkine has shown, it may be that my personal failure to remold myself ultimately owes to the Jews' great success remolding the world we all live in. Noah Efron is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and teaches history & philosophy of science at Bar-Ilan University. His book "Real Jews" was published by Basic Books in 2003. The Jewish Century / by Yuri Slezkine. Princeton University Press: 438 pp.: $29.95 http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:Xa46nSgH5QEJ:jrep.com/Books/Article-0.html+Jerusalem+Report+slezkine&hl=en&client=firefox-a From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:00:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:00:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Z: Churchill Replies by Ward Churchill Message-ID: Churchill Replies by Ward Churchill http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=7160 5.2.2 In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been. * The piece circulating on the internet was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Most of the book is a detailed chronology of U.S. military interventions since 1776 and U.S. violations of international law since World War II. My point is that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences. * I am not a "defender"of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people "should" engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable." * This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world. My feelings are reflected in Dr. King's April 1967 Riverside speech, where, when asked about the wave of urban rebellions in U.S. cities, he said, "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed . . . without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government." * In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that "we" had decided it was "worth the cost." I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths. * Finally, I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as "Nazis." What I said was that the "technocrats of empire" working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns." Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies. * It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American "command and control infrastructure" in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a "legitimate" target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than "collateral damage." If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these "standards" when the are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them. * It should be emphasized that I applied the "little Eichmanns" characterization only to those described as "technicians." Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack. According to Pentagon logic, were simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's my point. It's no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name. * The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9-1-1-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the "Good Germans" of the 1930s and '40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else. * These points are clearly stated and documented in my book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which recently won Honorary Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award. for best writing on human rights. Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today's world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country. Ward Churchill Boulder, Colorado January 31, 2005 From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:02:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:02:36 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Bookforum: Editorial on Copyright Message-ID: BOOKFORUM | feb/mar 2005 http://bookforum.com/boynton.html Who owns the words you're reading right now? if you're holding a copy of Bookforum in your hands, the law permits you to lend or sell it to whomever you like. If you're reading this article on the Internet, you are allowed to link to it, but are prohibited from duplicating it on your web site or chat room without permission. You are free to make copies of it for teaching purposes, but aren't allowed to sell those copies to your students without permission. A critic who misrepresents my ideas or uses some of my words to attack me in an article of his own is well within his rights to do so. But were I to fashion these pages into a work of collage art and sell it, my customer would be breaking the law if he altered it. Furthermore, were I to set these words to music, I'd receive royalties when it was played on the radio; the band performing it, however, would get nothing. In the end, the copyright to these words belongs to me, and I've given Bookforum the right to publish them. But even my ownership is limited. Unlike a house, which I may pass on to my heirs (and they to theirs), my copyright will expire seventy years after my death, and these words will enter the public domain, where anyone is free to use them. But those doodles you're drawing in the margins of this page? Have no fear: They belong entirely to you. While it was once believed that Marxism would overhaul notions of ownership, the combination of capitalism and the Internet has transformed our ideas of property to an extent far beyond the dreams of even the most fervent revolutionary. Which is not to say that anything resembling a collectivist utopia has come to pass. Quite the opposite. In fact, the laws regulating property--and intellectual property, in particular--have never before been so complex, onerous, and rigid. Copyright protection has been growing in fits and starts since the early days of the Republic. In 1790, a copyright lasted for fourteen years and could be renewed once before the work entered the public domain. Between 1831 and 1909, the maximum term was increased from twenty-eight to fifty-six years. It was extended several more times during the twentieth century until 1998, when the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act added twenty additional years (to both existing and future intellectual property), increasing copyright protection to seventy years after the death of an author. Some of the most significant changes in intellectual property law took place in the Copyright Act of 1976, after which it was no longer required to register one's work in order to protect it. Anything "fixed in a tangible medium"--e-mail messages, those doodles in the margins of this magazine--automatically became copyrighted. Recent laws--like the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which increased protection of copyrighted material on the Internet, and the Sonny Bono Act--have elevated intellectual property's status to such a degree that many courts and corporations often treat it in virtually the same way as they do physical property. This is a category mistake, and one explicitly forbidden according to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.'' Unlike Europe, whose laws center on the "moral rights" of the author to control his creation, American copyright law has always had the strictly utilitarian goal of providing just enough incentive for someone to create. Copyright is a bargain: The government grants a limited right to profit from your intellectual property in exchange for your agreement to give the public limited access to it during that period (such as the "fair use" right of a teacher to make class copies of an essay), and, eventually, for it to lapse into the public domain. But as copyright terms lengthened and intellectual property became a larger part of American industry, the logic of incentive has been overshadowed by the logic of reward, the thinking being that if my work continues to have value, why shouldn't I profit from it for as long as I want? "In our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value of creativity," writes Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig in his most recent book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. "Yet the current debate has this turned around. We have become so concerned with protecting the instrument that we are losing sight of the value." But if we have fallen into what New York University communications professor Siva Vaidhyanathan calls "the property-talk trap," it has had the unintended effect of mobilizing citizens by demonstrating the stake we all have in the debate over how intellectual property should be considered. Once an arcane part of the American legal system, intellectual property law is now at the center of major disputes in the arts, sciences, and politics. People are increasingly aware of the role intellectual property plays in their everyday lives; they bump up against it every time they discover they can't print a passage from an e-book or transfer a song from their computer to their iPod. These days, it is not uncommon to hear people casually conversing about legal concepts like "fair use" and the "first sale doctrine." Much of this awareness results from the well-publicized lawsuits the Recording Industry Association of America has brought against music downloaders. This is unfortunate, because it has created the impression that those in favor of liberalizing copyright law condone the theft of intellectual property. Leaving aside questions about the appropriate legal remedies for, and the economic implications of, downloading, taking copyrighted material for which one has not paid is simply illegal. The fact that illegal downloading is a mass phenomenon indicates that our intellectual property laws aren't working in much the same way that the speakeasies of the '20s and '30s pointed out the irrationality of Prohibition. Neither downloading nor drinking, however, made the activities more legal. It is in more common--and only marginally illegal--pursuits that ordinary citizens are realizing they have a legitimate stake in the debate over the scope of copyright law. As the price of digital video cameras and editing software plummets, the number of people who sync home movies to music, splice together clips from favorite television shows, and even produce documentaries has soared. TiVo and other digital video recorders have made it possible to trade programs over the broadband Internet connections that are finding their way into homes across the country. Young fathers are practically required to transplant images of their newborns into great works of art by way of Photoshop. In December 2004, Google announced "Google Print," a project to bring millions of easily searchable, digitized books to the Internet. The project, which has already begun and may take a decade to complete, will further heighten awareness of our vexed relationship to intellectual property. After digitizing the entire holdings of Stanford and the University of Michigan libraries (as well as sections of the libraries of Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library), Google Print will search the texts of these books--although one will only be able to read the entire text of those works whose copyright has lapsed and are therefore in the public domain. As for copyrighted titles, one will be able to search their text for names and key phrases but won't be allowed to read the books themselves (a function like Amazon's helpful, but similarly limited, "Search inside this book" service). Instead, one will be directed to a library or bookstore where the book can be located. As amazing an effort as Google Print is (creating nothing less than a virtual "universal library of knowledge"), its logical goal--giving readers full access to the entire contents of that library--will be undercut by our intellectual property laws. It is an inherently unstable situation, and it is only a matter of time before someone (Amazon? Random House?) develops software to link this vast cache of literature to a convenient print-on-demand service (for which the hardware already exists). When it becomes possible to hold an inexpensive, physical copy of one of Google's digitized titles in one's hands--but only if it was first published prior to 1923 and is therefore in the public domain--people will begin to understand the implications of having something so obviously beneficial (universal access to universal knowledge) tethered to laws from another era. Google Print may be the Trojan Horse of the copyright wars. * * * While a range of copyright-infringing technologies has been changing the way we interact with our culture, critics of excessive copyright protection have been forging a coalition to demand that the law be brought more in line with the capabilities of these technologies. The challenge is considerable. Individual intellectual property rights are often in conflict with one another, and the only groups with a common interest in the direction of such laws are those corporations who want to lock up culture in perpetuity (or "forever minus a day," as former Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti once suggested). Even following the twists and turns of the debate is difficult, since negotiations are seldom held in public. "This cultural war is almost invisible," writes David Bollier in Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture. "It is happening quietly and incrementally--in rulings by distant courts, in hearing rooms on Capital Hill and obscure federal agencies, in the digital code that Hollywood and record labels surreptitiously implant into DVDs and CDs." One of the most suggestive responses to this dilemma has come from Duke University law professor James Boyle, who, in his landmark book Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (1996), diagnosed the problem succinctly. "What we have right now is an exponentially expanding intellectual land grab, a land grab that is not only bad but dumb, about which the progressive community is largely silent, the center overly sanguine, and the right wing short-sighted." Boyle's subsequent work is an extended plea that we value the public domain. "Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property,'' he writes. Boyle is one of the founders of "digital environmentalism," the movement that is fashioning a new understanding of what the public domain--the "commons," as Boyle and others have called it--might be. The great achievement of the environmental movement, from which Boyle draws inspiration, was its ability to convince a swath of the population--consumers and industrialists alike--that they all had a stake in this thing called "the environment," rather than just the small patch of land where they lived. Similarly, digital environmentalists are raising our awareness of the intellectual "land" to which people ought to feel entitled. Digital environmentalism is a two-pronged movement, with one group raising the awareness of the cultural stakes of intellectual property among everyday citizens, and the other pressing for legislative and legal change. The difference between the two is one of emphasis, with each participating in the battles of the other. Neither are anarchists or utopians; rather, both perceive of themselves as conservatives in the traditional sense of the term. "The point is not that copyright and trademark law needs to be overthrown," writes Bollier. "It is that its original goals need to be restored. Individual creators need to be empowered more than ever. The volume and free flow of information and creativity need to be protected. The public's rights of access and use must be honored. We must strike a new balance of private and public interests that takes account of the special dynamics of the Internet and digital technology." For those in the legal camp, the central event of recent years was Eldred v. Ashcroft, the 2002 Supreme Court case that challenged the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Appearing before the court, Lessig argued that perpetually extending the term of copyright violated the Constitution's stipulation that copyright exist for only "a limited time.'' The court rejected Lessig's position by a vote of seven to two, holding that while the extension was perhaps unwise on policy grounds, it was still within Congress's constitutional authority. A second legal challenge, which Lessig brought in 2004, went nowhere. Developments on the legislative front have been, if anything, more discouraging. Laws that strengthen copyright and increase penalties for infringement are introduced, and reintroduced, in Congress every year. In 2004, the Induce Act, a bill so broadly drawn that it would have held manufacturers of TiVo and iPods legally responsible if their customers used them for infringing copyright, died in committee, but it is only a matter of time before a similar piece of legislation passes. The cultural prong of digital environmentalism has had somewhat more success. Represented by writers like Bollier, Vaidhyanathan (Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System), Kembrew McLeod (Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity), and others, they all advocate the path of activism and resistance. Working within existing law, they propose that artists and authors aggressively exercise their intellectual property rights in the face of threats and legal challenges from overbearing copyright holders. Bollier, for one, perceives the work of digital environmentalists as benefiting from the momentum generated by legal challenges like Lessig's. "Acts of civil disobedience against the antisocial, personally intrusive claims of copyright law have only grown since the Eldred ruling, in part because of it," he writes. Their premise is that, like a muscle, intellectual rights grow stronger only when exercised. "For the most part, we don't need any new legislation. Fair use is a great solution, but for it to have any real impact on our culture we need to vigorously and confidently (though not carelessly) employ this legal doctrine in daily life," writes McLeod. The problem, they contend, is less the laws than the lawyers. Lawyers representing copyright holders encourage their clients to limit access to their intellectual property as much as possible. "The lawyers tell us 'You may gaze upon and buy the products of American culture,'" Bollier writes in Brand Name Bullies. "'But don't be so na?ve as to think that you can actually use them for your own purposes. We own them.'" And the lawyers representing creators (artists, writers, and filmmakers, for example) who want access to copyrighted material for their work have decided that the transaction cost of boldly exercising fair-use rights is simply too high. Their primary goal is to avoid confrontation, even when they know that the outcome--should the case come to court--would favor their clients. The strategy of the cultural digital environmentalists is twofold. First, they challenge the lawyers at cultural institutions, whether they are book publishers, Internet providers, or movie distributors. Second, they spread the word about how poorly the current intellectual property system balances the rights of individuals and society. This tactic has given birth to the genre of the "copyright horror story." These are tales of intellectual property laws run amok: The artist who receives a cease-and-desist letter from the Vatican for using an image from the Sistine Chapel in a collage titled "The Sistine Bowl-Off." The company that was sued for devising software to teach tricks to a robot dog. McDonald's claim to own phrases like "Play and fun for everyone" and "Hey, it could happen." An Adobe e-book of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that bears a warning forbidding one to read it aloud. In telling such stories, digital-environmentalist writers are trying to do for intellectual property what muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens did for corrupt governments and Eric Schlosser did for fast food: Go behind the curtain to reveal how something we take for granted--in this case, the cultural commons--really works. "We, as citizens, own these commons. They include resources that we have paid for as taxpayers and resources that we have inherited from previous generations," Bollier writes in his previous book, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth. "They are not just an inventory of marketable assets, but social institutions and cultural traditions that define us as Americans and enliven us as human beings." Some copyright horror stories read like science fiction, depicting life in an anticommons in which everything is owned: letters of the alphabet, familiar phrases, and popular songs like "God Bless America" and "Happy Birthday" (which won't enter the public domain until 2030). And like the best science fiction, these stories pose a serious question: To what extent do we already live in such a place? Is our world an intellectual property version of The Matrix where, despite the illusion of freedom, we are little more than digital sharecroppers, licensers of a culture we mistakenly assume is ours? The science-fiction metaphor helps explain a tension central to the intellectual property wars. We do, in a sense, live in the space between two competing realities: According to the letter of the law, intellectual property is well protected, but legitimate access to it (by artists, parodists, critics) is guaranteed. In practice, however, our rights to access are ambiguously drawn and, as a result, prohibitively expensive to exercise. The difference in views between the commons and the anticommons is one of perspective. Can an artist who spends a fortune in legal fees successfully defending his legitimate fair use of a copyrighted image really be said to have won? "Fuck fair use," Lessig is fond of saying. "Fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create." * * * The line between science fiction and reality is often difficult to discern, as exhibited by the case of the college student who received trademark #2,127,381 for the phrase "freedom of expression." Fortunately, the student was Kembrew McLeod, who applied for it in order to make a point. McLeod, now professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, is no stranger to using media pranks to exploit the absurdities of the system. In fact, he even once sold his soul in a glass jar on eBay. McLeod may be the most optimistic of the digital environmentalists. "We can fight back and win, especially because many recent court decisions have upheld free-speech rights in the age of intellectual property," he writes. Getting people to exercise those rights is another issue. "The problem is that many individuals and companies either don't know this or don't want to take a risk." McLeod's and Bollier's books are full of inspirational stories of those who have taken such risks and successfully faced down the corporations who have improperly used their copyrights, such as artist Tom Forsythe (creator of "Food Chain Barbie"), who was awarded $1.8 million in legal fees after Mattel pursued an "unreasonable and frivolous" suit against him. In September 2003, a group of Swarthmore College students posted on the Internet damning copies of internal memos written by employees of Diebold, the largest producer of electronic voting machines. The memos detailed various security flaws in Diebold's machines, and it wasn't long before the students received cease-and-desist letters demanding that they remove the memos from their websites. Although Diebold withdrew its legal threats in the wake of bad publicity, the students sued the company for falsely accusing them of copyright infringement. On September 30, 2004, a judge agreed that Diebold had deliberately misrepresented its copyright claims and awarded the students legal fees and damages. This past summer, director Robert Greenwald made "fair use" of a substantial amount of Fox News footage in order to document its conservative bias in his documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. Fox grumbled about the movie but never sued Greenwald for copyright infringement. In 2004, underground hip-hop artist DJ Danger Mouse edited together the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album with selections of the Beatles' White Album to produce The Grey Album. Despite a flurry of cease-and-desist letters from EMI/Capitol (which owns the copyright to The White Album), over 170 websites continued to host The Grey Album in support of DJ Danger Mouse's right to create. It went on to become one of the most frequently downloaded independent albums of all time. The Boston Globe called it "the most creatively captivating" album of the year. If anything, Bollier's "bullies" and McLeod's "bozos" are their own worst enemies. "As we look back twenty years from now, Mattel and other businesses like Fox News may ironically be remembered as some of the greatest promoters of fair use," writes McLeod. "Virtually every time these companies try to step on freedom of expression? in court they end up expanding the parameters of fair use in case law, and they also intensify the backlash against this kind of behavior." Recent stirrings in legal theory may give some comfort to the activist wing of digital environmentalism. Taking for granted the fact that the problem is less the letter of intellectual property law than the spirit in which it is interpreted, Richard Posner, a federal appeals judge and prolific legal theorist, and others have suggested some ways to remedy this problem. Foremost among them is the doctrine of "copyright misuse." In his California Law Review article "Fair Use and Statutory Reform in the Wake of Eldred," Posner argues that it is more valuable, and feasible, to strengthen fair-use practices than to lobby for new copyright laws. The problem with the current system, according to Posner, is that copyright owners systematically make improperly broad claims to their rights. The book, DVD, or baseball-game broadcast that comes with a notice stating that no part of the work may be copied without permission is, in fact, in violation of the doctrine of fair use (for which one doesn't need permission). Posner argues that when a copyright holder affixes a warning on copies of his work that "grossly and intentionally exaggerates the copyright holder's substantive or remedial rights, to the prejudice of publishers of public-domain works, the case for invoking the doctrine of copyright misuse" has been made. The copyright misuse doctrine is attractive for a number of reasons. It is a flexible approach to protecting the public-policy goals underlying copyright law (promoting "the progress of science and useful arts") without having to pass new laws every time a technical innovation--radio, movies, television, copy machines, VCR, the Internet--creates a new set of challenges for copyright holders. And it is especially valuable to users of copyright because it is "one of the only copyright-limiting doctrines that arise from actions taken by the copyright holder," writes Kathryn Judge in her Stanford Law Review article "Rethinking Copyright Misuse." Aside from the possibility of being sued, the primary problem for those who want to make fair use of copyrighted material is the uncertainty of their position; while the law seems to support them, their backers and/or insurers may deem the cost of exercising their rights excessive. The doctrine of copyright misuse might provide a mechanism for a creator to address that uncertainty. For example, employing the principle of copyright misuse, an artist who believes he has a legitimate right to make fair use of a copyrighted work can proactively challenge a copyright holder who he believes is protecting his work more broadly than required by copyright law. While such a maneuver wouldn't necessarily guarantee that the artist will prevail (he might of course be wrong), copyright misuse is one way the claims of the copyright holder might be tested without enduring an expensive lawsuit. Copyright misuse isn't as satisfying as a Supreme Court victory or the passing of a new set of intellectual property laws. And it isn't clear that it is robust enough to protect fair use in the way that Posner and others want it to. But perhaps by bolstering the practices of everyday people it will help reclaim a familiar cultural landscape. Because in the end, the goal of digital environmentalism is quite modest: a world in which, as McLeod writes, the digital future looks "a lot like the analog past." Robert S. Boynton is director of New York University's magazine journalism program. His new book, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft, is being published this month by Vintage. FREE CULTURE: HOW BIG MEDIA USES TECHNOLOGY AND THE LAW TO LOCK DOWN CULTURE AND CONTROL CREATIVITY BY LAWRENCE LESSIG. NEW YORK: PENGUIN. 345 PAGES. $25. [17]BUY NOW BRAND NAME BULLIES: THE QUEST TO OWN AND CONTROL CULTURE BY DAVID BOLLIER. HOBOKEN, NJ: WILEY. 320 PAGES. $25. [18]BUY NOW SHAMANS, SOFTWARE, AND SPLEENS: LAW AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE INFORMATION SOCIETY BY JAMES BOYLE. CAMBRIDGE, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 288 PAGES. $20. [19]BUY NOW FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION?: OVERZEALOUS COPYRIGHT BOZOS AND OTHER ENEMIES OF CREATIVITY BY KEMBREW MCLEOD. NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY. 384 PAGES. $25. References 7. http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28130&cgi=product&isbn=1594200068 8. http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28130&cgi=product&isbn=0471679275 9. http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28130&cgi=product&isbn=0674805232 10. http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28130&cgi=product&isbn=0385513259 11. http://bookforum.com/boynton.html#top 12. http://bookforum.com/archive.html 13. http://www.artforum.com/ 14. http://bookforum.com/contact.html 15. http://bookforum.com/subscribe.html 16. http://bookforum.com/advertise.html 17. http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28130&cgi=product&isbn=1594200068 18. http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28130&cgi=product&isbn=0471679275 19. http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28130&cgi=product&isbn=0674805232 20. http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28130&cgi=product&isbn=0385513259 From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:04:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:04:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Freeman Dyson: The Darwinian Interlude Message-ID: The Darwinian Interlude http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/03/issue/magaphone.asp?p=0 5.3 Freeman Dyson is professor emeritus of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. His research has focused on the internal physics of stars, subatomic-particle beams, and the origin of life. Carl Woese published a provocative and illuminating article, A New Biology for a New Century, in the June 2004 issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews. His main theme is the obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practiced for the last hundred years, and the need for a new biology based on communities and ecosystems rather than on genes and molecules. He also raises another profoundly important question: when did Darwinian evolution begin? By Darwinian evolution he means evolution as Darwin himself understood it, based on the intense competition for survival among noninterbreeding species. He presents evidence that Darwinian evolution did not go back to the beginning of life. In early times, the process that he calls horizontal gene transfer, the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It becomes more prevalent the further back you go in time. Carl Woese is the worlds greatest expert in the field of microbial taxonomy. Whatever he writes, even in a speculative vein, is to be taken seriously. Woese is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, during which horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species. With its superior efficiency, it continued to prosper and to evolve separately. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became another species. And so it went on, until all life was divided into species. The basic biochemical machinery of life evolved rapidly during the few hundred million years that preceded the Darwinian era and changed very little in the following two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established, evolve very little. Darwinian evolution requires species to become extinct so that new species can replace them. Three innovations helped to speed up the pace of evolution in the later stages of the Darwinian era. The first was sex, which is a form of horizontal gene transfer within species. The second innovation was multicellular organization, which opened up a whole new world of form and function. The third was brains, which opened a new world of co?rdinated sensation and action, culminating in the evolution of eyes and hands. All through the Darwinian era, occasional mass extinctions helped to open opportunities for new evolutionary ventures. Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence that we call globalization. And now, in the last 30 years, Homo sapiens has revived the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal. In the post-Darwinian era, biotechnology will be domesticated. There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners, who will use gene transfer to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also, biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general public, will give us an explosion of biodiversity. Designing genomes will be a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but all will bring joy to their creators and diversity to our fauna and flora. From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:05:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:05:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: Sex and the single robot Message-ID: Sex and the single robot http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5117562-111400,00.html Jonathan Watts, East Asia correspondent Wednesday February 2, 2005 Scientists have made them walk and talk. There are even robots that can run. But a South Korean professor is poised to take their development several steps further, and give cybersex new meaning. Kim Jong-Hwan, the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed a series of artificial chromosomes that, he says, will allow robots to feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing. He says the software, which will be installed in a robot within the next three months, will give the machines the ability to feel, reason and desire. Kim, a leading authority on technology and ethics of robotics, said: "Christians may not like it, but we must consider this the origin of an artificial species. Until now, most researchers in this field have focused only on the functionality of the machines, but we think in terms of the essence of the creatures." That "essence" is a computer code, which determines a robot's propensity to "feel" happy, sad, angry, sleepy, hungry or afraid. Kim says this software is modelled on human DNA, though equivalent to a single strand of genetic code rather than the complex double helix of a real chromosome. Kim said: "Robots will have their own personalities and emotion and - as films like I Robot warn - that could be very dangerous for humanity. If we can provide a robot with good - soft - chromosomes, they may not be such a threat." Although he admits his ideas sound fantastic, Kim is no crank. In the mid-1990s, the professor launched the robot football world cup, which has since become one of the most popular means for robotics researchers to measure their progress against competitors from around the world. From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:07:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:07:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] (no subject) Message-ID: An Unsettled Forecast for Global Warming The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18b01201.htm THE NATURAL WORLD By MALCOLM G. SCULLY Climate science, Doug Macdougall writes, "is notoriously difficult, because there are so many interconnected variables at work that cause and effect are often impossible to discern with confidence." Those variables, which Macdougall discusses in Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages, published recently by the University of California Press, have bedeviled the debate over global warming from the beginning. Complexity breeds uncertainty, and uncertainty can lead to confusion in the general public and to deliberate obfuscation on the part of those who fear that any action to stem global warming would upset the economic status quo or their narrow self-interest. So while environmental activists and many climate scientists warn that the status won't be quo much longer without bold steps to curb the emission of greenhouse gases, skeptics try to sow doubts about the need to respond at all. In that charged political climate, Macdougall, a professor of earth sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego, offers a sober look at what we have learned about climate change and what we still need to learn. His book comes as more and more scientific studies and journalistic accounts document changes that already seem to be taking place. The focus of those reports has shifted from the global phenomenon to the impacts that warming may have on particular places, habitats, and lifestyles. In November a panel of 300 scientists from eight countries released the results of a comprehensive, four-year study of the impact of warming on the Arctic region. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment concluded that the region was undergoing "some of the most rapid and severe climate change on earth." The assessment showed that 386,100 square miles of sea ice -- about 8 percent of the total in the Arctic -- had been lost in the last 30 years and that winter temperatures in Alaska and western Canada had risen by from 5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the last century. "These changes in the Arctic provide an early indication of the environmental and societal significance of global warming," the assessment said. While the changes may be most extensive in the Arctic, they appear to be worldwide. Glaciers are shrinking in the Himalayas, the Rockies, and, as Mark Lynas, a writer and activist, describes -- in High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis, published last summer by Picador -- in the Peruvian Andes. He reports that glaciers in Peru's Cordillera Central lost a third of their volume from 1970 to 1997 and "will disappear altogether in just a few decades unless global temperatures stop rising." That could have disastrous consequences for the people of Lima, Peru's capital, who depend on the R?mac River for their drinking water. Once the glaciers are gone, he says, the R?mac, "which through the late twentieth century has been temporarily charged with additional meltwater from the rapidly retreating ice fields, will suddenly -- and disastrously -- dry up for half the year." "It's difficult to imagine quite how a massive Third World city might cope with a crisis on this scale," Lynas writes. "With no water supply for six months every year, life will quickly become impossible. Where will the residents go? There is no spare land in the mountains, and few could survive in the jungle. Whilst the rich could pay for fresh water to be trucked in, the poor -- the massive majority of Lima's population, who already have difficulty accessing reliable water supplies -- will be forced to move or die." Last summer the BBC reported on the findings of Scottish scientists who found that on the Shetland and Orkney Islands hundreds of thousands of seabirds had failed to breed this year. The most likely cause, they said, was rising seawater temperatures that had led to the disappearance from waters around the islands of the sand eel, a small fish that has been a key part of the food chain for the seabirds. The scientists speculated that the plankton on which the sand-eel larvae feed are moving northward to avoid the warmer seawater temperatures. In October two environmental groups Results for America and Clean Air-Cool Planet -- held a briefing for reporters in which they warned, "Global warming already is starting to change New England's climate, endangering fall colors from hardwood forest maples and other trees. Over the next 100 years, the emerging climate-change trend could wipe out all or most of the autumnal foliage for which the region is best known and upon which its tourism economy is heavily dependent." At the briefing, Barrett N. Rock, a professor of natural resources at the University of New Hampshire, reported, "Just 40 or 50 years ago, New England and New York produced about 80 percent of the world's maple syrup, compared to 20 percent in Canada. Now the ratio has been reversed as the optimal maple-sugar growing and tapping conditions have shifted north." At another briefing in October, held at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard Medical School, James J. McCarthy, a biological oceanographer at Harvard University, said that "global warming may well be causing bigger and more powerful hurricanes. Warmer seas fuel the large storms forming over the Atlantic and Pacific, and greater evaporation generates heavy downpours." McCarthy, the lead author of one section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report, issued in 2001, added, "With warmer, saltier tropical seas, the IPCC has projected larger storms, heavier rainfalls, and higher peak winds." And a study conducted by 19 scientists of the effects of climate change on California found that warming could, among other things, have a devastating impact on the state's wineries because it would lead to poorer-quality grapes. The study, which was published in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August, also indicated that the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada could be reduced by 70 to 90 percent. Complicating the debate further, some computer models show that there will be winners and losers as global warming continues, and that -- at least in the short term -- the winners will be in the developed world. A study of the impacts of warming on agriculture by two scientists at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies suggests that climate change will economically benefit countries in temperate areas but damage crops in countries closer to the Equator. "The 'winners,' ironically, are the developed countries that have done the most to produce these warming trends," says Robert Mendelsohn, a professor of forest policy who led the study. For many scientists and environmentalists, such evidence amounts to a compelling case that human-induced warming is producing or will produce significant disruptions in our way of life. Even so, as Macdougall points out in Frozen Earth, we still don't understand exactly what is going on. "There is no such thing as average weather," he notes. "Weather is what we experience daily, and it can be misleading, because we are impressed most by the extremes." To try to understand how the climate, as opposed to the weather, is changing, he looks at large changes on a longer time scale than the last few decades, pointing out that we are still in an ice age that reached its peak 20,000 years ago. At the moment, he says, we "are in the midst of the maximum warmth of an interglacial period." More important, he notes, "A hallmark of Ice Age climate change, at least when viewed from the perspective of its impact on human societies, is abruptness. With little or no warning, there have been drastic shifts in temperature, storminess, and precipitation, both regionally and globally." Rapid climate shifts seem to take place when a threshold has been crossed, he adds, and some external process has to trigger that crossing. Recently, computer simulations have suggested that a change in ocean circulation may be one such trigger. "In particular," Macdougall writes, "changes in the way ocean circulation occurs in the North Atlantic Ocean have been implicated in some of the large and abrupt temperature changes observed in the Greenland ice-core data over the past few tens of thousands of years." He points to evidence from the distant past that large infusions of fresh water into the North Atlantic have affected ocean circulation and brought on prolonged cold periods in the Northern Hemisphere. If today's warming continues, melting glaciers in the Arctic could provide such an infusion. That prospect has caused some scientists to predict that global warming could lead to something akin to the "Little Ice Age," the period from the 14th to the 19th centuries when Europe and North America experienced extended periods of unusual cold. While the mechanisms that lead to abrupt climate change remain mysterious, he says, we have "several good examples of past civilizations collapsing as a result" of it -- from the Akkadians 4,200 years ago in Mesopotamia to the Maya 1,100 years ago in Central America. "Modern societies," he adds, "for the most part are better equipped to deal with such surprises than were those of even a hundred years ago, but are not entirely immune. Just-in-time logistics systems and highly concentrated and specialized agriculture are as likely to be disrupted by abrupt climate change as some earlier technologies." Even now, he says, energy grids have trouble dealing with heat waves and cold snaps. So, while Macdougall warns against reading too much into short-term changes in the weather, his analysis of the long term remains unsettling. We cannot predict, "even in a general way," he says, "what may happen to the climate system as a result of human influences. A great, unintended experiment in 'climate forcing' is under way as we add more and more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Whether or not we shall reach one of those thresholds that seem to separate different climate modes, and what will happen if we do, is still unknown." Malcolm G. Scully is The Chronicle's editor at large. From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:08:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:08:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Fundamentalism and Free Will (Letters) Message-ID: Fundamentalism and Free Will (Letters) The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.7 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18a06304.htm To the Editor: As a person who has been intimately involved for over a decade in the evangelical debate over the foreknowledge of God, I read [3]"Can God See the Future?" (The Chronicle, November 26) with great interest. I count as good friends both John E. Sanders and Bruce A. Ware, the two theologians featured in the article, on opposite sides. I grieve over this inquisition within the evangelical academy and hope that those who would expel open theists will achieve a broader vision of the evangelical tent. The article mistakenly refers to open theists and their supporters as "liberals" within evangelicalism. That is not the case. In fact, the open theists interpret the Bible more literally than do their critics. They derive their conclusions about God's foreknowledge from Scripture and not from modern movements such as process philosophy and theology. Furthermore, contrary to what the article implied, evangelicalism has always included believers in free will; Calvinism is not normative for evangelical theology. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist tradition (which strongly emphasizes free will), was just as evangelical as his contemporary Jonathan Edwards, a Calvinist who regarded God as the all-determining reality and who denied freedom of will. What this controversy reveals is that in spite of its own best intentions and efforts, evangelicalism has not fully emerged from its fundamentalist roots. The furor over open theism is a product of latent fundamentalist habits of the mind that continue to plague many evangelical organizations and institutions. Roger E. Olson Professor of Theology Baylor University Waco, Tex. From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:09:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:09:54 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Corante: Many-to-Many: Fukuyama's Penguin Message-ID: Many-to-Many: Fukuyama's Penguin http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/06/fukuyamas_penguin.php 5.1.6 I have this pet theory, rather grand, and falls into the category of [18]what you believe is true even though you cannot prove it. That open source will realize the end of history. In 1989 Francis Fukuyama wrote the celebrated and controversial book, The End of History, which posited that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a Hegelian triumph of liberal democracy as the last remaining form of government and political philosophy. Fukuyama went on to explore issues of social capital and tyhmos, "desire for recognition" that drives free-market economics. His critics were manifold, particularly those on the wrong side of history. Marxist criticism centered less on liberal politics than liberal economics -- particularly market failure. The classic debate over the role of government centers on what economists call market failure: when the market fails to provide social goods. Similar to how Doc says the demand side is supplying itself, with open source and open content social goods are produced through peer production. Let's explore one aspect that is less about code and more about social dynamics triumphing over economics, [19]language. For a small country like [20]Rwanda, a localized version of Office would never be supplied, so they do it themselves. Some vendors are [21]open sourcing their localization in recognition of unevenly distributed demand. While more research is required, some patterns emerge with stories behind them when comparing language support by markets and peers: Rank [22]World Population [23]Internet Population [24]Web Content [25]Wikipedia [26]LISA.org 1 Chinese (Mandarin) English English English French 2 Spanish Chinese Japanese German German 3 English Spanish German Japanese Spanish 4 Bengali Japanese Chinese French Japanese 5 Hindi German French Swedish Italian 6 Portugese French Spanish Polish Chinese 7 Russian Korean Russian Dutch Portuguese 8 Japanese Italian Portuguese Spanish Swedish 9 German Portuguese Korean Italian Dutch 10 Chinese (wu) Dutch Other Portuguese Korean World population and internet population are gauges of demand. Web content is supplied by both markets and peers. Wikipedia is produced by peers, although the stories behind the community distort the current outcome. LISA.org (Localization Industry Standards Association) is a measure of market production for localization. Wikipedia isn't a perfect gauge of peer supply when markets fail, because it is a community with rich stories of how it evolves. Perhaps over time and at greater scales the rise of the Swedish version would be a signal of bottom-up fulfillment, but today it may very well be preferential attachment spawned by early adoption and there is also a high level of market-based translation effort. The Polish exception may well be the same, but there is an interesting story here. Wikipedia has had [27]two forks in its history, both by language based communities when commercialization was a potential threat. The [28]Polish fork was resolved and re-integrated. This explains why Spanish Wikipedia is low in its ranking relative to online population: [29]Enciclopedia Libre Universal is a Spanish language wiki website, running at the University of Sevilla in Spain. It was started in January 2002 as a fork from the Spanish branch of WikiPedia, EsWikiPedia, apparently after a misunderstanding about WikiPedia founder Jimmy Wales' intentions to use advertising as a means to raise funding for the project. At the fork, the EsWikiPedia contained some 2000 articles and was among the biggest handful of non-English Wikipedias. After the fork, Enciclopedia Libre has grown faster than any non-English Wikipedia branch, and is believed to be the world's 3rd BiggestWiki (as of July 2002). [30]Arle Lommel from [31]LISA was kind enough to gather this data for me (perhaps a benefit of Socialtext's membership), and also provide some analysis which I encouraged to share openly. Beyond the tabled measures of translation in volume, he provides analysis of strategic languages that are off the chart: In contrast are "strategic" languages, i.e., those that represent new market areas with a potential for new revenue streams. In this view, China seems to be the number one language at present (I write this based on a number of LISA presentations and the general "buzz" in the industry). While we don't have any hard data at present on strategic language (for obvious reasons, companies tend to keep strategic information quite close), if we look at those countries where U.S. and European businesses are trying to establish a foot-hold for consumer-oriented products and see new large markets (and where the market can be accessed easily with a single language), you will have a picture of the strategic languages. I suspect that the list would look something like the following: 1. Chinese 2. Japanese 3. Spanish (for U.S.-based companies that see Latin America as a market) While India is rising in importance, it isn't a major localization target yet because (1) it is fairly well served with English, at least for the most affluent sectors, and (2) for those not served by English, the picture is of immense linguistic fragmentation, with hundreds of languages that could be considered part of the localization picture. One generalization is that Wikipedia lags behind all others in Chinese translation because its relatively centralized and censorable. I had coffee with Hong Kong University Researcher Andrew Lih today and I will pass on some of his research on regional language use in Wikipedia in an update later. But he made a significant point that second languages are a primary determinant of development in wikipedia. For example, users in India and the Philippines have such a high rate of English as a second language that their own languages have yet to develop within Wikipedia. But I would end with this thought of the Polish exception. A polish online encyclopedia at the scale of the wikipedia version would not have been developed with market and contractual signals alone. Social signals are driving this production and producing a social good. The story behind it is an exceptional community, but an exception that could very well become the norm as we march towards the End of History. Posted by Ross at 12:52 PM Comments and Trackbacks The example of Rwanda is telling. Rwanda was included in Jared Diamond's recent book, Collapse. He connected the genocide in Rwanda with growing hunger and plummeting living conditions driven by environmental degradation. Open software creates great new abundance, but does not help if people don't have enough to eat. Food and environmental problems are social problems. Wikis, social software and other modern communication technology like telephones can help somewhat, but the big problems are human problems about making decisions. Rich countries like the US conduct in aquifer mining in dry areas, and large scale agriculture practices that strip soil fertility. We need more than wikis to make decisions that will foster abundance in the long term. Posted by [32]Adina Levin on January 6, 2005 06:00 PM | [33]Permalink to Comment "In 1989 Francis Fukuyama wrote the celebrated and controversial book, The End of History, which posited that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a Hegelian triumph of liberal democracy as the last remaining form of government and political philosophy." I think what he was saying was a little more subtle than that. He used not history, but History, in the sense of competing worldviews. Liberal democracy won insofar as nobody really can argue that there is a better system out there. Posted by [34]praktike on January 6, 2005 07:02 PM | [35]Permalink to Comment Yes, its just the end of a philosophical debate, the sky isn't falling. Posted by [36]Ross Mayfield on January 6, 2005 10:41 PM | [37]Permalink to Comment Many Too Many Excerpt: Over at Many-2-Many we have a fascinating post, called Fukuyama's Penguin, speculating on why Chinese isn't better-represented in online contributions. This got me to singing: Many too many have stood where I stand Many more will stand here too, Why... [38]Read the rest... Trackback from Moore's Lore, Jan 7, 2005 10:17 AM References 18. http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html 19. http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/the_speed_of_la.html 20. http://news.com.com/Se+habla+open+source/2100-7344_3-5159179.html 21. http://www.lisa.org/archive_domain/newsletters/2004/4.2/redlers.html 22. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm 23. http://www.glreach.com/globstats/ 24. http://global-reach.biz/globstats/refs.php3 25. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics 26. http://www.lisa.org/blogs/index.php?id=2 27. http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiPediaIsNotTypical 28. http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/intlwiki-l/2002-March/000302.html 29. http://enciclopedia.us.es/ 30. http://www.lisa.org/blogs/index.php?id=2 31. http://www.lisa.org/ 32. http://www.alevin.com/weblog 33. http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/06/fukuyamas_penguin.php#17194 34. http://www.liberalsagainstterrorism.com/ 35. http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/06/fukuyamas_penguin.php#17198 36. http://ross.typepad.com/ 37. http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/01/06/fukuyamas_penguin.php#17206 38. http://www.corante.com/mooreslore/archives/032122.html From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:11:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:11:18 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Toronto Star: National Web library do-able, affordable, visionary Message-ID: National Web library do-able, affordable, visionary ------ Forwarded Message From: Michael Geist Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 01:56:55 -0500 To: Subject: Can a country digitize everything it has ever written? Dave, Of possible interest to IP -- my weekly Toronto Star Law Bytes column returns with a new year's resolution -- Canada should become the first country in the world to to create a comprehensive national digital library. The library, which would be fully accessible online, would contain a digitally scanned copy of every book, government report, and legal decision ever published in Canada. The column argues that the most significant barriers to a national digital library do not arise from fiscal challenges but rather from two potential copyright reforms -- an extended licensing system and an extension on the term of copyright -- currently winding their way through the system. Column, posted below, is online at http://geistvirtuallibrary.notlong.com Best, MG National Web library do-able, affordable, visionary Michael Geist Toronto Star In the mid-1990s, Ottawa established a bold new vision for the Internet in Canada. The centrepiece was a commitment to establish national Internet access from coast to coast to coast, supported by a program that would enable the country to quickly become the first in the world to connect every single school, no matter how small or large, to the Internet. Not only did Canada meet its goal, but it completed the program ahead of schedule. As we enter the middle of this decade, the time has come for Industry Minister David Emerson and his colleagues to articulate a new future-oriented vision for the Canadian Internet. While the last decade centred on access to the Internet, the dominant issue this decade is focused on access to the content on the Internet. To address that issue, the federal government should again think big. One opportunity is to greatly expand the National Library of Canada's digital efforts by becoming the first country in the world to create a comprehensive national digital library. The library, which would be fully accessible online, would contain a digitally scanned copy of every book, government report, and legal decision ever published in Canada. A national digital library would provide unparalleled access to Canadian content in English and French along with aboriginal and heritage languages such as Yiddish and Ukrainian. The library would serve as a focal point for the Internet in Canada, providing an invaluable resource to the education system and ensuring that access to knowledge is available to everyone, regardless of economic status or geographic location. From a cultural perspective, the library would establish an exceptional vehicle for promoting Canadian creativity to the world, leading to greater awareness of Canadian literature, science, and history. By extending the library to government documents and court decisions, it would help meet the broader societal goal of providing all Canadians with open access to their laws and government policies. Moreover, since the government holds the copyright associated with its own reports and legal decisions, it is able to grant complete, unrestricted access to all such materials immediately alongside the approximately 100,000 Canadian books that are already part of the public domain. Creating virtual libraries to complement the world's great physical libraries is already underway. Project Gutenberg, an all-volunteer initiative, has succeeded in bringing thousands of public domain texts to the Web. Last summer, the British Library unveiled an ambitious plan to digitize and freely post on the Internet thousands of historical newspapers that are now in the public domain. That plan will bring more than one million pages of history to the Internet, including work from a young Charles Dickens. Last month Google announced that it had reached agreement with several of the world's leading research libraries, including ones at Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Oxford, and the New York Public Library, to scan more than 15 million books into its search archive. Once the Google project is completed, the general public will enjoy complete, full-text access to thousands of books that are now part of the public domain because the term of copyright associated with those books has expired. For books that remain subject to copyright, Google will still scan a copy of the book, but will only grant the general public more modest access to its content, providing users with smaller excerpts of the work - a policy that is consistent with principles of fair use under copyright law. The Google project epitomizes the essence of the copyright balance. The public will benefit from unrestricted access to works in the public domain along with more limited access to other work, all without the need to seek any prior permission. Authors will still enjoy copyright protection in their work and will frequently find that greater access leads to increased commercial success. While digitally scanning more than 10 million Canadian books and documents is a daunting task, the Google project illustrates that it is financially feasible. Reports suggest that it will cost Google approximately $10 to scan each book. Assuming similar costs for a Canadian project and a five-year timeline, the $20 million annual price tag represents a fraction of the total governmental commitment toward Canadian culture and Internet development. In fact, the most significant barriers to a national digital library do not arise from fiscal challenges but rather from two potential copyright reforms currently winding their way through the system. First, the federal government is contemplating reversing the decade-old policy of avoiding Internet licensing by creating a new licensing system for Internet content that would create new restrictions to accessing online content. By proposing a very narrow definition of what can be accessed without compensation, the plan would effectively force millions of Canadian students to pay for access to content that is otherwise publicly available. Despite opposition from the education community, the proposal is marching forward, constituting a significant setback to the goal of encouraging Internet use in Canada. Given the Supreme Court of Canada's recent commitment to copyright balance and robust user rights, it is clear that for most uses no license is needed to provide schools with appropriate access to online content such as a potential national digital library. With this in mind, this proposal should be quickly scrapped. Second, the Canadian Heritage Minister Liza Frulla's Copyright Policy Branch recently announced that this year it plans to launch a public consultation on a proposal to extend the term of copyright in Canada from its current 50 years after the death of the author to at least 70 years after death (authors enjoy exclusive copyright in their work from the moment of creation until 50 years after they die). Extending the copyright term would deal a serious blow to a national digital library because it would instantly remove thousands of works from the public domain. Although the U.S. and European Union have extended their copyright terms by an additional 20 years, the vast majority of the world's population lives in countries that have not. Those countries have recognized that an extension is unsupportable from a policy perspective. It will not foster further creative activity, it is not required under international intellectual property law, and it effectively constitutes a massive transfer of wealth from the public to the heirs of a select group of copyright holders. Given the economic and societal dangers associated with a copyright term extension, even moving forward with a consultation constitutes an embarrassing case of putting the interests of a select few ahead of the public interest. A new year is traditionally a time for bold, new resolutions. As Parliamentarians return to Ottawa, they should be encouraged to seize the opportunity to establish a national vision for the Internet that will again propel Canada into a global leadership position. Supported by appropriate copyright policies, a national digital library comprised of every Canadian book ever published would provide an exceptional resource for Canadians at home as well as advantageously promote the export of Canadian culture abroad. -- ********************************************************************** Professor Michael A. Geist Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law University of Ottawa Law School, Common Law Section 57 Louis Pasteur St., Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5 Tel: 613-562-5800, x3319 Fax: 613-562-5124 mgeist at pobox.com http://www.michaelgeist.ca From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:12:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:12:48 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Ecnomist: (Posner) American intellectuals: The new phrenology Message-ID: American intellectuals: The new phrenology http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=975532 2.2.7 (note date) Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. By Richard A. Posner. Harvard University Press; 448 pages; $29.95 and ?20.50 "I'M NOT a donkey, and I don't have a field." So scoffed Max Weber, a great German social thinker, when a faculty non-entity criticised him for writing outside his discipline. The academic division of labour has come on apace since Weber's day (he died in 1920), and hardly a year has passed when someone from the cultural-decline crowd did not decry the narrowing of scholarship and bemoan what they took for its consequence: the death of the free-ranging intellectual. This concern is not foolish. Who does not wish that the worlds and sub-worlds of science, public affairs and humanities could better talk to one another? Who does not applaud those valuable souls who can move between these worlds with even a hint of grace or plausibility? Richard Posner, an American federal-appeals judge, law professor and prolific author, puts a new spin on these old anxieties. The trouble with the (mainly American) intellectuals that preoccupy him is not, in his view, that they are dying, but that they are not any good. He starts off by ruling out what most of us would take as archetypal intellectuals: scientists who explain science to lay people (eg, Steven Weinberg), philosophers with an influential vision of society (eg, John Rawls or Robert Nozick) and literary intellectuals of high Bohemia (eg, Susan Sontag). No, his public intellectuals are really pundits: people who opine about issues of the day on television or in newspaper columns. On the theory that if it's real it must be countable, he ranks what he calls the top 100 on the basis of scholarly citations, media mentions and web hits. Though some of his pundits (such as Henry Kissinger) have escaped from government, most are moonlighters from universities or think-tanks. As scholars, he tells us, they know much about little; as media egg-heads, they must talk about almost anything. Naturally, they fall on their faces: their stock-in-trade is prediction and some of their forecasts (he doesn't say what proportion) turn out to be wrong. There are, he adds, too many of them. The supply of commentators outruns demand, and the quality of comment is therefore falling. To improve things, he suggests that public intellectuals should pay more attention to social (particularly economic) realities, spare us their value judgments and post their columns on university websites (where colleagues will supposedly spot and correct their errors). What are we to make of this extraordinary construction, with its artificial-vanilla-flavour assumptions? Mr Posner was a founder of the law-and-economics movement, an influential view of law which, crudely, recommends economic efficiency as the test of fair allocation. Yet since writing a law-and-economics textbook he has wandered ever farther afield. Like Mr Posner himself, "Public Intellectuals" is both brilliant and maddening. His knowledge and interests are wide. He is, in a sense, a classic intellectual. His topic, the health of public debate, matters. A dry, factual take on America's commentariat is--or would have been--welcome. But he is here too partisan, too hurried and too driven by the conclusions he wants to reach. In the end, the only intellectuals he does not scorn, you feel, are those who share his reductive and utilitarian outlook. Being a serious intellectual is harder than it looks. That is Mr Posner's point. But need he have illustrated it with this book? From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:13:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:13:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Is It Dutch? Japanese? Why Not Ask the Rat? Message-ID: Is It Dutch? Japanese? Why Not Ask the Rat? NYT January 11, 2005 By NICHOLAS BAKALAR If you talk to a rat, you will not get an answer. But a team of Spanish neuroscientists has shown that a well-trained rat may be able to determine what language you are speaking. Every language has distinctive rhythms and intonations, and awareness of them is an important step in acquiring language. Only humans can learn to speak, but it has been demonstrated that tamarin monkeys, like newborn human infants, can distinguish the unique rhythms of a language even though meaning escapes them. In other words, they know when someone is speaking their language, even though they have no idea what is being said. Researchers have theorized that this ability extends to other mammals as well, but until now no nonprimate has ever demonstrated the capacity. In the new study, led by Juan Toro, a doctoral candidate at the University of Barcelona, researchers found that rats trained in either Dutch or Japanese appeared able to distinguish the two languages. The rats were trained by having them listen to synthesized sentences in the languages. Dutch and Japanese were chosen because of their vastly different rhythms. The sentences had no semantic content, but were intended to reproduce the rhythms of the language without using any real words. This simplified form of language, when spoken in a synthesized voice, leaves only rhythm as a cue, eliminating complicating factors like semantic content or the quality of the voice of a particular speaker. For the Dutch group, the rats were rewarded with food only when they pressed a lever after hearing Dutch sentences. The Japanese group was rewarded only after hearing Japanese sentences. Eventually, both groups learned to press the lever only when hearing a sentence in their own languages. Next, the rats listened to four synthesized sentences in the language they had not learned. When the Dutch mice were presented with Japanese sentences, they showed no recognition; when the Japanese mice were presented with Dutch, they were similarly baffled. But when presented with a sentence in their own languages, even a sentence they had never heard before, the rats recognized the characteristic rhythm and pressed the lever correctly. The researchers said the rats appeared to have generalized some of the rules of their language and, at least in this limited way, were able to understand an entirely new sentence, a distinctive mark of language acquisition. When the researchers played the same sentences with the tape running backward, the rats were unable to understand what language was being spoken - exactly what happens with tamarins and human infants. Rats, of course, have limitations. They had considerably more difficulty in telling one language from another when listening to normal speech, especially when uttered by different speakers, the researchers found. The multiplicity of cues in ordinary conversation - intonation, the speaker's sex, pitch and so on - utterly confused them. Human infants have some difficulty with different voices, too, but they quickly overcome it, learning to recognize their own language no matter who is talking and however varied the pitch and intonation. "What these results suggest," Mr. Toro said in an e-mail interview, "is that we share with other animals the ability to perceive some regularities, such as rhythm, in the speech signal. This is interesting because several studies with human infants have shown that these regularities may open the door to language acquisition." Does this mean rats and monkeys have the potential to understand human speech? No, said Mr. Toro. But he added, "Even though human language is special and does not seem to have parallels in the communicative systems of other species, some basic abilities we use for acquiring it may be present in other animals." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/health/11anim.html From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:14:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:14:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Anti-sleeping Pill Might Cut Cocaine Habit Message-ID: Anti-sleeping Pill Might Cut Cocaine Habit http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-10-7 Betterhumans Staff 1/10/2005 8:00 PM Treatment option? A new study has found that the narcolepsy drug modafinil helps people overcome cocaine addiction A wake-promoting agent could find a new use as one of the few drugs able to treat cocaine dependence. According to American researchers at the [8]University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, despite years of research there are still no approved drugs for treating [9]cocaine addiction. The wake-promoting drug [10]modafinil ([11]Provigil), however, which is approved for treating [12]narcolepsy, has attracted attention for its ability to blunt cocaine-induced euphoria. [13]Charles Dackis of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues have now reported a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial that found modafinil promoted cocaine abstinence in treatment-seeking outpatients. "If confirmed by further investigation, this could be the breakthrough we have been waiting for," says Dackis. Achieving abstinence Conducted between 2002 and 2003, the study involved 62 cocaine-dependent people aged 25 to 63 who were free of significant health conditions. Thirty participants received a single 400 mg dose of modafinil in the morning while 32 were giving matching placebo tablets. Treatment continued for eight weeks along with twice-weekly cognitive behavioral therapy. The researchers measured the treatment's primary effectiveness by cocaine abstinence based on urine toxicity testing. They also measured secondary effects such as the drug's impact on cravings and adverse events. Over the eight-week study, people treated with modafinil provided more cocaine-negative urine samples than those on placebo and were more likely to achieve abstinence. The researchers also found no adverse effects in those receiving modafinil, and no participant failed to complete the study due to side-effects. Three larger studies examining modafinil for cocaine dependence are underway. The research is reported in the journal [14]Neuropsychopharmacology ([15]read abstract). References 8. http://www.med.upenn.edu/ 9. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine 10. http://www.modafinil.com/ 11. http://www.provigil.com/ 12. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcolepsy 13. http://www.pennhealth.com/Wagform/MainPage.aspx?config=provider&P=PP&ID=980 14. http://www.nature.com/npp/ 15. http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/npp/journal/v30/n1/abs/1300600a.html From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:16:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:16:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Michio Kaku: Could a hole in space save man from extinction? Message-ID: Could a hole in space save man from extinction? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2005/01/05/ecrspace05.xml&sSheet=/connected/2005/01/05/ixconnrite.html (Filed: 05/01/2005) In the next decade, powerful satellites will help us to understand life, the fate of our universe and the 'theory of everything', says Michio Kaku The great 19th-century biologist Thomas Huxley once wrote that the "question of all questions for humanity... is that of the determination of man's place in Nature and his relation to the Cosmos". Other earthlings: In 2014 the Planet Finder will begin hunting for small, Earth-like planets We might soon be able to provide the answer to this huge riddle as a battery of instruments - including satellites, gravity wave detectors and laser devices - not only begins to give us startling insights into our place in the cosmos, but also forces us to confront the birth and final death of the universe - and even the possible existence of parallel universes. In the next decade, powerful new satellites will find evidence of Earth-like twins orbiting other stars. So far, our instruments are so crude that we can only detect about 130 giant, Jupiter-sized planets, which are probably devoid of life. In 2006, the Kepler satellite will be launched with a mission to analyse 100,000 stars for large planets. But in 2014, the Terrestrial Planet Finder will begin to hunt for small, Earth-like planets in 500 star systems with a telescope designed to screen out the mother stars, whose light otherwise overwhelms the faint radiation from any nearby planets. If these efforts pay off, people will have an existential shock, knowing that, when gazing at these twins in the night sky, there might be someone looking back. The thought of detecting intelligence in the universe is exhilarating to most scientists. However, as science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke once cautioned: "There may be intelligent life in space or not. Either thought is frightening." Cosmology, our understanding of the universe, might be revolutionised when the Lisa (Laser Interferometry Space Antenna) is launched in 2011. It will orbit the Sun at the same distance as the Earth, but trailing us by 30 million miles. Consisting of three satellites linked by laser beams, it will form a huge triangle of laser light about three million miles on each side. If a gravity wave from space hits this triangle, it will cause a tiny distortion in the laser beams, which will be detectable by its instruments. (Lisa will detect optical distortions one hundredth the size of an atom.) Lisa should be able to detect cosmic explosions nine billion light years from Earth, which cut across much of the visible universe, as well as colliding black holes and even the shock waves emitted a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, which are still circulating around the universe. Hence it might be capable of resolving the most perplexing and stubborn question facing cosmology: what happened before the instant of Genesis? In the various pre-Big Bang theories that have been proposed, each predicts a different type of shock wave of gravity emitted once the explosion takes place. Lisa, by analysing the precise frequencies and wave-like patterns of the gravity waves emitted at the instant of the Big Bang, should be able to distinguish between them and prove or disprove the theories. So far, the leading theory is called "inflation" and postulates an unbelievably fast, turbo-charged expansion of the early universe after the Big Bang of creation. However, if the inflation process happened once, it can happen again. The latest version of this is called "chaotic inflation", in which big bangs can happen randomly. Like soap bubbles that split and sprout other soap bubbles, universes can bud and create new "baby universes". In this picture, big bangs are happening all the time, even as you read this article. But to understand what caused inflation, physicists have to reach for a theory that can incorporate both gravity and all known forms of radiation - the so-called "theory of everything". The only candidate for this is called string theory, or M-theory, in which universes can float in 11-dimensional hyperspace in a "multiverse" of universes. Imagine two parallel sheets of paper; ants on one sheet would be invisible to ants on the other, yet they are separated by a few inches. Similarly, if a parallel universe hovered a millimetre from ours in another dimension, it would be invisible. As fantastic as these theories are, Lisa might be able to prove or disprove them because each of them leaves behind a different "fingerprint" or pattern of gravity waves when the Big Bang occurs. Ominously, satellites are also giving us a glimpse into the ultimate fate of the universe. Philosophers have wondered if the universe will die in fire or ice. The data overwhelmingly favour the Big Freeze rather than a Big Crunch. The universe, in fact, is not slowing down, but accelerating, careering out of control in runaway mode. A mysterious form of energy, dubbed "dark energy", is acting like an anti-gravity force that is pushing the galaxies apart, causing the universe to accelerate uncontrollably and eventually blowing it apart. Michio Kaku: professor of theoretical physics In the distant future, billions to trillions of years from now, the stars will exhaust their nuclear fuel, the oceans will freeze, the universe will turn dark and temperatures will plunge to almost zero. It appears inevitable that all intelligent life will perish when the universe itself freezes over. This possibility of "unyielding despair" was explored by the mathematician Bertrand Russell, who wrote, in one of the most depressing passages in the English language, that "no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve a life beyond the grave... all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; and the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins..." Today, we believe that space arks might one day preserve life after the death of the Sun in five billion years. But can you build a space ark to escape the death of the universe itself? The only possible way to avoid the death of the universe is to leave. Perhaps civilisations billions of years ahead of ours will harness enough energy to punch a hole in space and escape, in a hyper-dimensional space ark, to a new universe. Although it seems far-fetched, even preposterous, physicists have seriously considered this possibility using the known laws of physics. Einstein's equations, for example, allow for the possibility of "Einstein-Rosen bridges" connecting two parallel universes. (Imagine two horizontal parallel sheets of paper connected by a thin vertical tube.) The energy necessary to create such a "wormhole" connecting two universes is truly immense - the Planck energy, or 1019 billion electron volts (a quadrillion times the energy of our largest atom smasher). In desperation, an advanced civilisation might create huge banks of laser beams and atom smashers to create the unbelievably intense temperatures, energy and densities necessary to open up holes in space and leave the universe. Calculations show that these gigantic machines must be the size of star systems, but this might be possible for civilisations billions of years ahead of ours. Unfortunately, some preliminary calculations show that the wormhole might only be microscopic in size. If so, an advanced civilisation might resort to shooting molecular-sized robots, called "nanobots", through the wormhole. Once on the other side, these nanobots would then create huge DNA factories to grow clones and replicas of their creators. Since they would contain the entire database of their civilisation, they would use this to resurrect it in another universe. Although the physical bodies of these individuals will die when the universe freezes over, their genetic twins will live on, so that their civilisation, like a Phoenix, may flourish again. As incredible as these scenarios are, they are consistent with the known laws of physics and biology. So, when contemplating the question raised by Huxley in 1863, our true role in the universe might be to spread the precious germ of intelligent life throughout it and, one day, to spread the seed of life by leaving a dying universe for a warmer one. Michio Kaku is professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Parallel Worlds (Penguin Books), which is published on February 3. To order for ?16.99 + ?2.25 p&p, please call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222. Dr Kaku will be on tour in Britain at the end of the month: Mon Jan 31, 7.30pm, the ICA event at the London Planetarium, with Prof John Barrow, tel: ICA Box Office 020 7930 3647 Tues Feb 1, 8pm, Borders Bookshop, Cambridge, tel: 01223 306188 Wed Feb 2, 7pm, the Royal Institution, London, tel: 020 7409 2992 Thurs Feb 3, 6pm ThinkTank, Birmingham Science Museum, tel: 0121 202 2222 External links [22]NASA - Terrestrial Planet Finder [23]Terrestrial Planet Finder [24]Michio Kaku References 22. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/exit.jhtml;sessionid=NRI1L0W1QAVBXQFIQMFCM54AVCBQYJVC?exit=http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/TPF/tpf_index.html 23. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/exit.jhtml;sessionid=NRI1L0W1QAVBXQFIQMFCM54AVCBQYJVC?exit=http://www.terrestrial-planet-finder.com/ 24. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/exit.jhtml;sessionid=NRI1L0W1QAVBXQFIQMFCM54AVCBQYJVC?exit=http://www.mkaku.org From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:18:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:18:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Engineering Evolution: The Alchemy of Eugenics | Phillip D. Collins Message-ID: Engineering Evolution: The Alchemy of Eugenics | Phillip D. Collins http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/Commentary/Evolution.htm - by Phillip D. Collins, Jan. 10th, 2005 In the dark past of human civilization, the ruling class controlled humanity largely through religious institutions and mysticism. However, the turn of the century witnessed the epistemic transformation of the elite's religious power structure into a "scientific dictatorship." The history and background of this "scientific dictatorship" is a conspiracy, created and micro-managed through the historical tide of Darwinism, which has its foundations in Freemasonry. In this article, we shall examine the evolutionary alchemy of eugenics, from Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood to William Sims Bainbridge's Transhumanism. The Alchemical Transformation of Man A common misnomer that has been circulated by academia's anointed historians is that the alchemists of antiquity were attempting to transform lead into gold. In truth, this was a fiction promulgated by the alchemists themselves to conceal their ultimate objectives . . .the transformation of man into a god. Among one of the various occult organizations that aspired to complete this alchemical mission was Freemasonry. Providing a summation of Masonry's supreme goal, Masonic scholar W.L. Wilmshurst writes: "This - the evolution of man into superman [emphasis - ADDED] - was always the purpose of the ancient Mysteries, and the real purpose of modern Masonry is, not the social and charitable purposes to which so much attention is paid, but the expediting of the spiritual evolution of those who aspire to perfect their own nature and transform it into a more god-like quality. And this is a definite science, a royal art, which it is possible for each of us to put into practice; whilst to join the Craft for any other purpose than to study and pursue this science is to misunderstand its meaning." (Wilmshurst, p. 47, 1980) According to this alchemical mandate, humanity is a gradually developing deity requiring scientific assistance in its evolution. In Mystic Masonry, 32nd degree Mason J.D. Buck reiterates this theme of man as a progressively apotheosizing organism: "Humanity, 'in-toto', then, is the only Personal God" (Buck, p. 136, 1990). Of course, the concept of evolution would later be disseminated on the popular level as Darwinism and become the veritable cornerstone of contemporary science. Before its popularization, evolutionary theory was the intellectual property of Masonry. Freemason Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather, "originated almost every important idea that has since appeared in evolutionary theory" (Darlington, p. 62, 1959). It is hardly a coincidence that many of Charles Darwin's chief promoters were Freemasons, not the least of which being T.H. Huxley. It is even less of a coincidence that Charles Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton, would become one of the early expediters of Masonry's alchemical agenda. Eugenics: Alchemically Engineered Apotheosis Sir Francis Galton could be considered an early evolutionary alchemist. His own cousin's theory of evolution was one of his chief inspirations. In Memories of My Life, Galton wrote: "The publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science." (Galton, Memories of My Life, p. 287) Viewing evolutionary theory in conjunction with the alchemical mandate for man's consciously engineered apotheosis, one inevitably recognizes a belief system that exhibits all of the characteristics of a religion. This revelation is most clearly illustrated by Galton's statements in Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development: "The chief result of these Inquiries has been to elicit the religious significance of the doctrine of evolution. It suggests an alteration in our mental attitude, and imposes a new moral duty. The new mental attitude is one of a greater sense of moral freedom, responsibility, and opportunity; the new duty which is supposed to be exercised concurrently with, and not in opposition to the old ones upon which the social fabric depends, is an endeavor to further evolution, especially that of the human race." (Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, p. 337, 1883) That Galton recognized the "religious significance of evolution" is no accident. Throughout the years, this Masonically inspired religion of emergent deities has resurfaced under various appellations. Wagar enumerates its numerous manifestations: "Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought teems with time-bound emergent deities. Scores of thinkers preached some sort of faith in what is potential in time, in place of the traditional Christian and mystical faith in a power outside of time. Hegel's Weltgeist, Comte's Humanite, Spencer's organismic humanity inevitably improving itself by the laws of evolution, Nietzsche's doctrine of superhumanity, the conception of a finite God given currency by J.S. Mill, Hastings Rashdall, and William James, the vitalism of Bergson and Shaw, the emergent evolutionism of Samuel Alexander and Lloyd Morgan, the theories of divine immanence in the liberal movement in Protestant theology, and du Nouy's telefinalism - all are exhibits in evidence of the influence chiefly of evolutionary thinking, both before and after Darwin, in Western intellectual history. The faith of progress itself - especially the idea of progress as built into the evolutionary scheme of things - is in every way the psychological equivalent of religion." (Wagar, pp. 106 - 7, 1961) This emergent deity, Man (spelled with a capitalized M to denote his purported divinity), would be fully enthroned through the efforts of alchemists themselves. Galton would reintroduce the concept of alchemy under the appellation of eugenics, a term derived from Greek for "well born." The basic precepts of eugenics were delineated in Galton's Hereditary Genius, a racist polemic advocating a system of selective breeding for the purposes of providing "more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable" (Galton, Hereditary Genius, p. 24, 1869). According to Galton, society should be eugenically regimented. The framework of such a society would be a caste system where status was assigned according to genetic superiority. In an article in the January 1873 edition of Fraser's Magazine, Galton stated: "I do not see why any insolence of caste should prevent the gifted class, when they had the power, from treating their [lower caste] compatriots with all kindness, as long as they maintained celibacy. But if these continued to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual, and physical qualities, it is easy to believe that the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness." (qutd. in Chase, pp. 100, 1977) Galton hoped that such societal regimentation would promote "eugenically sound" breeding amongst the citizenry. Summarizing Galton's objectives, Allan Chase explains: "What Galton was talking about here was the power to breed people as we breed pigs" (Chase, p. 101, 1977). Of course, as George Orwell opined in Animal Farm, some pigs are more equal than others. According to Galton's cousin and racialist progenitor, Charles Darwin, the pigs of higher stock were the Anglo-Saxons. This becomes evident in Darwinian Josiah Strong's manifesto, America's Destiny. Quoting Darwin, Strong wrote: "'At the present day,' says Mr. Darwin, 'civilized nations are everywhere supplanting barbarous nations, excepting, where the climate opposes a deadly barrier; and they succeed mainly, though exclusively, through their arts, which are the products of the intellect.' He continues: 'Whether the extinction of inferior races before the advancing Anglo-Saxon seems to the reader sad or otherwise, it certainly appears probable...Is there room for reasonable doubt that this race, unless devitalized by alcohol and tobacco, is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until, in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind?'." (Strong, pp. 165 - 80, 1885) Of course, it comes as no real surprise that such thinking underpinned the racialist policies of Nazi Germany, which was a scientific dictatorship edified by Darwinian evolution. It comes as even less a surprise that Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, was vice-president of both the 1912 and 1921 International Eugenics Congresses. The first of these two meetings was the outgrowth of a 1911 gathering of the International Society for Racial Hygiene, a predominantly German organization. That Germany would see the full enactment of eugenical policies is hardly a coincidence. Planned Parenthood: The Racist Legacy of Margaret Sanger Although the Nazis' eugenical Holocaust of WWII constituted an enormous public relations disaster for proponents of eugenics, the movement would later resurface under the banner of population control and radical environmentalism. Researchers Tarpley and Chaitkin document this transmogrification: "The population control or zero population growth movement, which grew rapidly in the late 1960s thanks to free media exposure and foundation grants for a stream of pseudoscientific propaganda about the alleged 'population bomb' and the 'limits to growth,' was a continuation of the old prewar, protofascist eugenics movement, which had been forced to go into temporary eclipse when the world recoiled in horror at the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of eugenics. By mid-1960s, the same old crackpot eugenicists had resurrected themselves as the population-control and environmentalist movement. Planned Parenthood was a perfect example of the transmogrification. Now, instead of demanding the sterilization of the inferior races, the newly packaged eugenicists talked about the population bomb, giving the poor 'equal access' to birth control, and 'freedom of choice'." (Tarpley & Chaitkin, p. 203, 1992) Indeed, Planned Parenthood successfully carried the banner of eugenics into the post-WWII era. Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, a virulently racist woman who touted the slogan: "Birth Control: to create a race of thoroughbreds." Her manifesto, entitled The Pivot of Civilization, thoroughly delineates the mission of Planned Parenthood and its allied organizations in the eugenics movement. In this treatise, which featured an introduction written by Freemason and Fabian socialist H.G. Wells, Sanger reveals the true motives underpinning the promotion of birth control: "Birth Control, which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science... as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health." (Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, p. 189, 1922) Sanger believed that society's tolerance of "morons," "human weeds," and the "feeble-minded' was encouraging dysgenics. To remedy this purported genetic threat, Sanger unabashedly promoted the implementation of authoritarian measures: "The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period.... we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded." (Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, pp. 101 - 102, 1922) Understand, these are the words of a so-called "proponent of reproductive rights." Moreover, Sanger desired to see the establishment of a gulag system within America for the internment of the "feeble-minded." In an issue of Birth Control Review, she wrote: "To apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted... to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.... " (Sanger, "Plan of Peace," Birth Control Review, pp. 107-8, 1932) Although Sanger's gulag system was not formally enacted in the United States, her vision saw horrible fulfillment in Nazi Germany. It comes as little surprise that Planned Parenthood's board of directors included Nazi supporters such as Dr. Lothrop Stoddard, author of a racist tract entitled The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy. In fact, Birth Control Review acted as a conduit for the dissemination of Nazi propaganda in America. In April of 1933, Dr. Ernst Rudin, Hitler's director of genetic sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene, published an article in Birth Control Review. Entitled "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need," the article presented the following appeal: "The danger to the community of the unsegregated feeble-minded woman is more evident. Most dangerous are the middle and high grades living at large who, despite the fact that their defect is not easily recognizable, should nevertheless be prevented from procreation.... In my view we should act without delay." (Rudin, "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need," Birth Control Review, pp. 102-4, 1933) Of course, in Rudin's native country, the "feeble-minded" did not remain "unsegregrated" for very long. The same year that Sanger's publication printed Rudin's article, Ernst collaborated with Heinrich Himmler on Germany's 1933 sterilization law. This genocidal edict stipulated the sterilization of all Jews and "colored" German children. Eventually, the "undesirables" were collected, segregated, and systematically murdered. The final result of the Nazi eugenics program was the Holocaust, which claimed six million lives. Yet, how many people would have been segregated for orderly disposal according to Sanger's vision? Upon examination of army statistics, Sanger concluded that: "...nearly half - 47.3 per cent - of the population had the mentality of twelve-year-old children or less - in other words that they are morons." (Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, p. 263, 1922) Sanger expressed dismal hopes for a vast segment of the population, declaring that: "only 13,500,000 will ever show superior intelligence" (Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, p. 264, 1922). Thus, only a meager 13.5% of the population would be permitted to procreate. The rest would be segregated for orderly disposal. Evidently, Sanger's holocaust would have even dwarfed Hitler's Final Solution. In typical Darwinian fashion, Sanger showed little mercy towards the weak. In fact, Margaret expressed a distinct aversion towards the poor. Chapter Five of her book is entitled "The Cruelty of Charity." Reiterating Malthus' proposal to "disclaim the right of the poor to support," she wrote: "Organized charity itself is....the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents." (Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, p. 108, 1922) Sanger particularly loathed: "...a special type of philanthropy or benevolence,....which strikes me as being more insidiously injurious than any other.... to supply gratis medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers." (Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, p. 114, 1922) According to Margaret, such an investment of time, effort, resources, and love represented the height of futility: ".... we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all....." (Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, p. 187, 1922) Planned Parenthood retains an active role in the scientific dictatorship's project of eugenical regimentation today. Despite revelations of Nazi atrocities constituted a public relations disaster for the organization, Planned Parenthood survived and continues to tangibly enact Sanger's vision. In fact, so-called "conservative, pro-life, pro-family, Christian" President George Bush Sr. pledged his whole-hearted support to the group. Researchers Tarpley and Chaitkin explain: "Although Planned Parenthood was forced, during the fascist era and immediately thereafter, to tone down Sanger's racist rhetoric from 'race betterment' to 'family planning' for the benefit of the poor and racial minorities, the organization's basic goal of curbing the population growth rate among 'undesirables' never really changed. Bush publicly asserted that he agreed '1,000 percent' with Planned Parenthood." (Tarpley & Chaitkin, p. 195, 1992) Transhumanism: Techno-Eugenics and the End of Humanity Today, Galton's agenda of biological totalitarianism has resurfaced as the World Transhumanist Association. However, equipped with nanotechnology and genetic engineering, this movement presents a technologically augmented form of eugenics. Richard Hayes, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, elaborates: "Last June at Yale University, the World Transhumanist Association held its first national conference. The Transhumanists have chapters in more than 20 countries and advocate the breeding of 'genetically enriched' forms of 'post-human' beings. Other advocates of the new techno-eugenics, such as Princeton University professor Lee Silver, predict that by the end of this century, 'All aspects of the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, and the knowledge industry [will be] controlled by members of the GenRich class... Naturals [will] work as low-paid service providers or as laborers...'" (Hayes, 2004) Here is the vision of the Transhumanist movement... Huxley's Brave New World where the new class distinction is genetic. Yet, just how long shall the GenRich class tolerate the existence of its biological subordinates? Hayes continues: "What happens then? Here's Dr. Richard Lynn, emeritus professor at the University of Ulster, who, like Silver, supports human genetic modification: 'What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the 'phasing out' of such peoples....Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent'." (Hayes, 2004) This is a frightening proposition indeed. C. Christopher Hook delineates the philosophy underpinning Transhumanism: That we are biological creatures is simply our current status, transhumanists believe, but it is not necessary for defining who we are or who we should be. Bart Kosko, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, puts it more bluntly in his book Heaven in a Chip (2002): "Biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature's first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny." British roboticist Kevin Warwick put it this way: "I was born human. But this was an accident of fate-a condition merely of time and place." This sounds startingly reminiscent of what nihilist Frederick Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra: "I teach you the overman. Man is something to be overcome" (Hook, 2004). Like Nietzsche's overman, the roboman of Warwick and Kosko represents yet another incarnation of Adam Weishaupt's "inner Areopagites: man made perfect as a god-without-God" (Billington, p. 97, 1980). A central feature of Darwinism has been the belief in great extinctions. That belief remains firmly embedded within the crusade of the Transhumanist movement. Hook elaborates: "Katherine Hayles, a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, says in How We Became Posthuman (1999) that 'in the posthuman, there are no essential differences, or absolute demarcations, between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals.' She concludes her book with a warning: 'Humans can either go gently into that good night, joining the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but is now obsolete, or hang on for a while longer by becoming machines themselves. In either case ... the age of the human is drawing to a close'." (Hook, 2004) According to the Darwinian doctrine of the Transhumanist movement, mankind is the next species slated for extinction. How does the GenRich class intend to regulate the rest of the "dysgenics" until their ultimate extinction? Transhumanist ideologue and Deputy Director of the National Science Foundation's Division of Information and Intelligent Systems William Sims Bainbridge provides the answer: "Techniques such as genetic engineering, psychoactive drugs and electronic control of the brain make possible a transformation of the species into docile, fully-obedient, 'safe' organisms." (Bainbridge, 1982) In other words, the pharmacological totalitarianism of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Chemically numbed and anesthetized, the "dysgenics" will resign themselves to extinction in the posthuman era. Meanwhile, the eugenical alchemists of the elite continue to write the final chapter of the evolutionary script and they have left no room for humanity in the last pages. Sources Cited * Bainbridge, William Sims, "[11] Religions for a Galactic Civilization," excerpted from Science Fiction and Space Futures, edited by Eugene M. Emme. San Diego: American Astronautical Society, pages 187-201, 1982. * Billington, James H, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, Basic Books, Inc., New York, 1980. * Chase, Allan, The Legacy of Malthus, Knopf: distributed by Random House, 1977. * Darlington, "The Origin of Darwinism," Scientific American, May 1959 * Galton, Francis, Hereditary Genius, Macmillan, London, 1869. * Galton, Francis, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, New York, MacMillan and Co., 1883. * Hayes, Richard, "[12]Selective Science," February 12, 2004. * Hook, C. Christopher, "[13]The Techno Sapiens Are Coming," January 2004. * Huxley, Thomas, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, New York: Appleton, 1896. * Rudin, Ernst, "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need," Birth Control Review, Volume XVII, Number 4, April 1933. * Sagan, Carl, Cosmos, Random House, New York, 1980. * Sanger, Margaret, The Pivot of Civilization, Brentano's Press, NY, 1922. * Sanger, Margaret, "Plan for Peace," Birth Control Review, Volume XVI, Number 4, April 1932. * Strong, Josiah, Our Country, New York, 1885. * Tarpley, Webster & Anton Chaitkin, [14]George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Executive Intelligence Review, Washington D.C., 1992. * Wagar, W. Warren, H.G. Wells and the World State, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1961. * Wilmshurst, W.L., The Meaning of Masonry, Gramercy Books, New York 1980. _________________________________________________________________ About the Author Phillip D. Collins acted as the editor for The Hidden Face of Terrorism. He has an Associate of Arts and Science. Currently, he is studying for a bachelor's degree in Communications at Wright State University. During the course of his seven-year college career, Phillip has studied philosophy, religion, and classic literature. He co-authored the book, The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship: An Examination of Epistemic Autocracy, From the 19th to the 21st Century, is [15]available online here. CSS printer friendly enabled mail to a friend [16]Send this to a friend "The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." William Colby (Former CIA Director) "Language is a field of battle, the media is the artillery, and vocabulary is the ammunition. The NWO has taken the field by storm, and is proceeding with coordinated attacks on several fronts, using all the latest high-tech vocabulary ammunition. They've laid a bed of land mines that cripple us when we try to stand on them: 'liberalism', conservatism', prosperity', 'democracy'." Richard Moore, Doublespeak "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies." Thomas Jefferson "I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world -- in the field of advertizing -- and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours ... and we tend to disbelieve ours." Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S. "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill ... All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." Alexander King, Bertrand Schneider - founder and secretary, respectively, of the Club of Rome - The First Global Revolution, pp.104-105 "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), American editor, critic "This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President (Woodrow Wilson) signs the Bill, the invisible government of the Monetary Power will be legalised... The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency Bill." Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. "All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself." Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), Vol. I "Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian religious tradition." Peter Singer (father of the animal rights movement), The Deweese Report, November 1998 "The owners and managers of the press determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public." Commission On Freedom Of The Press References 11. http://web.archive.org/web/20030219105541/http://users.erols.com/bainbri/dl/relgal.htm 12. http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9937/view/print 13. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/001/1.36.html 14. http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm 15. http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?&isbn=0-595-31164-4 16. http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/sendToFriend.php 17. http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/Commentary/Evolution.htm#header 18. http://www.xdevdesign.com/ From checker at panix.com Thu Feb 3 20:20:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 15:20:00 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Telegraph: In the beginning . . . Adam walked with dinosaurs Message-ID: In the beginning . . . Adam walked with dinosaurs http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/01/02/weden02.xml&pos=portal_puff3 Wednesday 12 January 2005 By James Langton in New York (Filed: 02/01/2005) With its towering dinosaurs and a model of the Grand Canyon, America's newest tourist attraction might look like the ideal destination for fans of the film Jurassic Park. The new multi-million-dollar Museum of Creation, which will open this spring in Kentucky, will, however, be aimed not at film buffs, but at the growing ranks of fundamentalist Christians in the United States. It aims to promote the view that man was created in his present shape by God, as the Bible states, rather than by a Darwinian process of evolution, as scientists insist. The centrepiece of the museum is a series of huge model dinosaurs, built by the former head of design at Universal Studios, which are portrayed as existing alongside man, contrary to received scientific opinion that they lived millions of years apart. Other exhibits include images of Adam and Eve, a model of Noah's Ark and a planetarium demonstrating how God made the Earth in six days. The museum, which has cost a mighty $25 million (?13 million) will be the world's first significant natural history collection devoted to creationist theory. It has been set up by Ken Ham, an Australian evangelist, who runs Answers in Genesis, one of America's most prominent creationist organisations. He said that his aim was to use tourism, and the theme park's striking exhibits, to convert more people to the view that the world and its creatures, including dinosaurs, were created by God 6,000 years ago. "We want people to be confronted by the dinosaurs," said Mr Ham. "It's going to be a first class experience. Visitors are going to be hit by the professionalism of this place. It is not going to be done in an amateurish way. We are making a statement." The museum's main building was completed recently, and work on the entrance exhibit starts this week. The first phase of the museum, which lies on a 47-acre site 10 miles from Cincinatti on the border of Kentucky and Ohio, will open in the spring. Market research companies hired by the museum are predicting at least 300,000 visitors in the first year, who will pay $10 (?5.80) each. Among the projects still to be finished is a reconstruction of the Grand Canyon, purportedly formed by the swirling waters of the Great Flood - where visitors will "gape" at the bones of dinosaurs that "hint of a terrible catastrophe", according to the museum's publicity. Mr Ham is particularly proud of a planned reconstruction of the interior of Noah's Ark. "You will hear the water lapping, feel the Ark rocking and perhaps even hear people outside screaming," he said. More controversial exhibits deal with diseases and famine, which are portrayed not as random disasters, but as the result of mankind's sin. Mr Ham's Answers in Genesis movement blames the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, in which two teenagers killed 12 classmates and a teacher before killing themselves, on evolutionist teaching, claiming that the perpetrators believed in Darwin's survival of the fittest. Other exhibits in the museum will blame homosexuals for Aids. In a "Bible Authority Room" visitors are warned: "Everyone who rejects his history - including six-day creation and Noah's flood - is `wilfully' ignorant.'' Elsewhere, animated figures will be used to recreate the Garden of Eden, while in another room, visitors will see a tyrannosaurus rex pursuing Adam and Eve after their fall from grace. "That's the real terror that Adam's sin unleashed," visitors will be warned. A display showing ancient Babylon will deal with the Tower of Babel and "unravel the origin of so-called races'', while the final section will show the life of Christ, as an animated angel proclaims the coming of the Saviour and a 3D depiction of the crucifixion. In keeping with modern museum trends, there will also be a cafe with a terrace to "breathe in the fresh air of God's creation'', and a shop "crammed'' with creationist souvenirs, including T-shirts and books such as A is for Adam and Dinky Dinosaur: Creation Days. The museum's opening will reinforce the burgeoning creationist movement and evangelical Christianity in the US, which gained further strength with the re-election of President Bush in November. Followers of creationism have been pushing for their theories to be reintegrated into American schoolroom teaching ever since the celebrated 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial", when US courts upheld the right of a teacher to use textbooks that included evolutionary theory. In 1987, the US Supreme Court reinforced that position by banning the teaching of creationism in public schools on the grounds of laws that separate state and Church. Since then, however, many schools - particularly in America's religious Deep South - have got around the ban by teaching the theory of "intelligent design", which claims that evolutionary ideas alone still leave large gaps in understanding. "Since President Bush's re-election we have been getting more membership applications than we can handle,'' said Mr Ham, who expects not just the devout, but also the curious, to flock through the turnstiles. "The evolutionary elite will be getting a wake-up call." External links [25]Answers in Genesis References 25. http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/exit.jhtml;sessionid=JHA23TWQH3SNBQFIQMGCM54AVCBQUJVC?exit=http://www.answersingenesis.org/ From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:37:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:37:18 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Harvard Seeks to Advance Opportunities for Women Message-ID: The New York Times > National > Harvard Seeks to Advance Opportunities for Women http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/national/04harvard.html 5.2.4 By SAM DILLON and SARA RIMER Moving to counter widespread criticism of his comments last month on women's science capabilities, the president of Harvard University announced initiatives yesterday to improve the status of women on the faculty, including a commitment to create a senior administrative position to strengthen recruiting. The president, Lawrence H. Summers, appointed two task forces, one on women in the faculty and one on women in science and engineering, and charged them with developing recommendations on how to recruit, support and promote women more effectively. The committees are to complete their work by May 1 so the university can act on their recommendations by the fall term. In an interview, Dr. Summers declined to say how many new women the university might hire as professors in the short term, or how much the initiatives would cost. But in a public statement announcing the measures, he said, "It is time for Harvard to step up and affirm in strong and concrete terms its commitment to the advancement and support of women pursuing academic careers." Dr. Summers's actions yesterday echoed his handling of the outcry that followed his dispute in 2001 with Cornel West, a prominent member of the African-American studies department. At that time, Dr. Summers publicly affirmed his commitment to affirmative action, and Harvard subsequently created several new positions in that department. Barbara Grosz, the dean of science at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, who has long been active on women's issues at Harvard, was named to head the task force on women in science and engineering. She said she had accepted the leadership post only after receiving assurances "that our recommendations were going to be taken seriously." "There is now an opportunity that didn't exist before," Professor Grosz said, "and I am willing to put effort into grabbing that opportunity and doing what I can to see that the changes at Harvard get made." The chairwoman of the other task force, on faculty women, is Evelynn Hammonds, a professor of history of science and of African and African-American studies. Altogether, Dr. Summers named 27 professors and senior administrators - 22 women and 5 men - to participate in the two task forces. Dr. Summers's announcement came as his remarks suggesting that innate sex differences might explain the scarcity of women in math and science careers continued to stir international media coverage and controversy. Scientists, feminists and hundreds of members of his own faculty have criticized Dr. Summers as seeming to ignore years of research showing that societal and cultural obstacles, including discrimination at universities, are the most significant impairment to women's advancement in academic math and science careers. A smaller number of people, including some prominent conservatives, have praised Dr. Summers for what they call his defiance of political correctness. Dr. Summers has apologized repeatedly for his remarks, which were made on Jan. 14 at an academic conference in Cambridge and were intended to be off the record. He has said his remarks were misconstrued, but has declined to release a tape recording of them. Harvard's announcement yesterday referred only obliquely to the outpouring of criticism. "Recent public discussion about women and science has brought renewed attention to longstanding issues concerning the representation of women in the faculty," it said. Prominent female professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have been expressing concerns since June over the decline in offers of tenured professorships to women during Dr. Summers's tenure. While Dr. Summers said publicly that he would take steps to remedy the decline, many of the female professors have said they are skeptical of his commitment. At an October meeting, some 50 female professors presented Dr. Summers and William Kirby, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, with proposals to improve the number and status of women on the faculty, including the appointment of a dean of faculty diversity for Arts and Sciences. Dr. Summers and Dean Kirby rejected the proposal for the new dean, saying they thought they could help female faculty members better through existing associate deans. "The task force on women faculty will be charged with making recommendations for a series of specific institutional measures - including the creation of a new, senior position at the center of the university - to strengthen the recruitment, support and advancement of outstanding women faculty," yesterday's university statement said. From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:39:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:39:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Tom Wolfe: Several Reviews and Interviews Message-ID: Tom Wolfe: Several Reviews and Interviews Time Magazine November 8, 2004 I am Still Tom Wolfe; At 73, the man in the white suit is back with a new novel about sex and power on campus by Lev Grossman ???In 1952 a promising young pitching prospect out of Washington and Lee University showed up for a tryout with the New York Giants (the baseball Giants, that is--they hadn't yet decamped for San Francisco). The prospect made a decent showing: three innings, three men on base, no runs scored. Good screwball, nice sinker, not much heat. "If somebody had offered me a Class D professional contract," says the prospect--whose name was Tom Wolfe--many decades later, "I would have gladly put off writing for a couple of decades." ???But the Giants cut Wolfe after two days, and he became a giant of another kind. Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era. With books like The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities, he has built a towering reputation both as a journalist and as a novelist, scoring both literary acclaim and commercial success in the process. He has hung out with Black Panthers and astronauts. He has feuded with John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving simultaneously. ???Now, in his new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 676 pages), Wolfe has set himself the challenge of chronicling youthful hedonism on a college campus. But at 73, can Wolfe party with the frat boys? Or has America finally outrun its most tireless chronicler? ???In uptown Manhattan, perched on a sofa in his sumptuous apartment, with its housekeeper and its blue baby grand and its views of Central Park, Wolfe in person is a sharp contrast to his personality on the page. His prose bristles with italics and exclamation points and repetitions--repetitions!--for emphasis, but Wolfe himself speaks softly, slowly and a little hoarsely, with the ruins of a long-ago Virginia accent. He has always been dapper, but now he is a dapper old man. His appearance is not so much wolfish as avian: his frame is slight, his nose hooked and beaky, his mischievous smile a little snaggle-toothed. His hair is midlength and floppy, a la David Spade. He still wears his trademark white suit, accessorized with some kind of high-gloss old-timey shoes, but it hangs a little loose on him. When he reads small print he dons a pair of white-framed glasses. ???Wolfe's previous novel, A Man in Full, published in 1998, took him 11 long years to finish, and when he was finally through, he wasted no time looking around for fresh territory. He likes to portray himself as a literary opportunist: in his 1989 manifesto "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," he scolded American novelists for writing minimalist, self-conscious little books when there's so much rich, strange, documentary material out there. "They don't want to see the world," he has said, "they want to suck their thumbs." After A Man in Full, it occurred to Wolfe, who had a daughter at Duke, that the lives of college students were a trove of good stuff--there is, he points out, no really great novel about campus life from the student's point of view. "The whole business of the co-ed dorm fascinated me. What does go on? Because all these children assure their parents, 'It's just the way it was when you were in college.'" ???It was thus that, in his eighth decade, Tom Wolfe swapped his white suit for a less conspicuous blue blazer and set out on a tour of college campuses in search of Charlotte Simmons. "I went to fraternity parties," he recalls. "Very few of the students had any idea who I was. I was so old, and I always wore a necktie--I must have seemed somewhat odd to them." He trekked from Stanford to Ann Arbor, from Chapel Hill to the University of Florida in Gainesville. "The most valuable things were having people tell you about things like sex. I didn't see any," he adds hastily. What he did see was a kind of boot camp where teenagers are initiated into the social matrices of sex and power against the autumnal backdrop of what Wolfe describes as "the gradual--maybe not so gradual--disappearance of conventional morality." ???So who, exactly, is Charlotte Simmons? Wolfe's heroine is a freshman at prestigious, fictional Dupont University in Philadelphia. They don't come much fresher than Charlotte. A native of tiny, remote Sparta, N.C., the brilliant, virginal Charlotte arrives at Dupont full of dewy ambition, expecting to live "a life of the mind." Instead, she encounters charming, predatory frat boys like the handsome Hoyt Thorpe; jock demigods like basketball star Jojo Johanssen; and icy prep-school snobs like her roommate, the bitchy Groton grad Beverly. Instead of an ivory tower, she finds a status-obsessed, intellectually bankrupt sexual romper room. Will she hold to her ideals or be dragged down into the beer-soaked mud? ???I Am Charlotte Simmons isn't like Wolfe's other novels. For one thing, he sticks largely to one setting, the Dupont campus--he's not doing his city-hopping, class-transcending billion-footed-beast act, which is impressive but gave his earlier books a certain overstuffed lumpiness. Charlotte Simmons adheres more to the Aristotelian unities--time, place and action--and thus hangs together more neatly. It's a much more personal novel than the earlier ones. Not unlike Wolfe, Charlotte is a permanent outsider, a lonely observer. Wolfe's books are usually more about setting than character, but Charlotte's delicately drawn highs and lows give the book an unexpectedly tender heart. "I went through a bout of depression myself," he says, "and that's why I felt I knew exactly how she would feel. As I look back on it, there's a lot of me in Charlotte." ???No one can read Charlotte Simmons without picking nits. There was a time when Wolfe was a pioneer, reporting back to straight America from the exotic island of radical youth culture in books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, but nowadays American culture and youth culture are basically the same thing, and it's Wolfe who looks a little behind the times. He leans heavily on catchphrases from such movies as Swingers ("You're money, baby") to give his dialogue a contemporary vibe. There are missteps: What self- respecting black hoopster would say of a Caucasian opponent, however stalwart, "That white boy's got heart"? And are college kids really still into 90210 and Animal House? They certainly don't have PlayStation3s, as such a machine does not, at press time, exist. Sometimes Wolfe has the air of a benevolent, fastidious Martian, as when he expends several sentences explaining the nature and function of what we humans call a StairMaster. ???But these nits, once picked, should be discarded and forgotten. What remains is a rich, wise, absorbing and irresistible novel. Wolfe does things with words--exhilarating, intoxicating, impossible things--that no other writer can do. Take this example, from the second page of the book, in which frat boy Hoyt stares at himself in the mirror, dead drunk: "A gale was blowing in his head. He liked it. He bared his teeth. He had never seen them quite this way before. So even! So white! They vibrated from perfection. And his square jaw ... that chin with the perfect cleft in it ... his thick, thatchy light brown hair ... those brilliant hazel eyes ... his! Right there in the mirror--him!" To read it is to feel both the dizzy joy of intoxication and the impending hangover, not through anything Wolfe tells us but from the altered, manic rhythms of the prose alone. ???Wolfe does not thunder in I Am Charlotte Simmons. He allows us to be as shocked or as blase as we want to be about the anonymous campus couplings he describes. "In my mind, it's just what's there," he says. "I must say, I pride myself on the fact that I don't think anybody can find a political agenda, a moral agenda. I insist that I am objective." Up to a point, that is--he'll bend the truth for the sake of a good line. "I had a groupie at the end deliver what I thought was a quite cogent remark," he recalls. "'Every girl wants to f___ a star. Every girl.' My daughter said, 'Nobody talks like that, Dad.'" This time his grin is a little lupine. "But I left it in." ???I Am Charlotte Simmons will get attention for the smutty scenes, of which there are a generous but judicious number (he considered and then omitted a scene involving what he nicely terms, in his courtly Virginia accent, a "gang bang"). But Wolfe's interest is not prurient. His real subject is the nature of identity, of the individual soul (Charlotte's in particular), and whether or not it can survive uncorrupted in the acid storm of sex and alcohol and power and peer pressure into which we ritually plunge our young in the name of higher education. The answer he arrives at is not simple. Some get their comeuppance in Charlotte Simmons, and some are redeemed, but Charlotte's fate is a surprise, and not everybody will find it a pleasant one. Wolfe may be getting old, but he 's not getting soft. ???A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS ???For every era, there's a Tom Wolfe book that grabs its essence and splatters it on the page. Here's a decade-by-decade history lesson, Wolfe-style ???'60s ???THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST ???Take the ultimate psychedelic road trip on Ken Kesey's magic bus ???'70s ???THE RIGHT STUFF ???Wolfe's inside look at test pilots and NASA astronauts is also a celebration of American optimism ???'80s ???THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES ???The quintessential warts-and-all portrait of New York City in the decade of greed ???'90s ???A MAN IN FULL ???Irrational exuberance overtakes a high-flying Atlanta real estate magnate. Bad things follow ???"I WENT TO FRATERNITY PARTIES. I WAS SO OLD, AND I ALWAYS WORE A NECKTIE--I MUST HAVE SEEMED SOMEWHAT ODD TO THEM. " ???--TOM WOLFE -------------- Time Out November 17, 2004 THE CAT IN THE HAT; INTERVIEW Tom Wolfe By Gaby Wood ??? The research for his third novel, 'I Am Charlotte Simmons', took dandy provocateur Tom Wolfe on a tour of America's college campuses.What did he find? Lots of sex and not nearly enough hats. ??? I'm the last of the great hat wearers, ' says Tom Wolfe as he takes my coat. I have just entered the novelist's sumptuously decorated apartment on Manhattan 's Upper East Side, a place where almost every wall has some image of a hat on it. ' I remember when you used to go to the races and everyone was wearing hats. Nowit's either baseball caps worn backwards, or nothing!' Today Wolfe is wearing what, presumably, he always wears around the house: a signature cream-coloured suit, with a wide, almost corset-like waistband built into the trousers, over a high-necked, cream and brown striped shirt and dark brown tie. Fanning out of his breast pocket is a cream silk hankie bordered with infinitesimal brown piping. His shoes, custom made to look like they have spats sewn into them, are cream and brown, as are his breathtakingly delicate socks silk, with tiny embroidered polka dots. ??? He ushers me into the lounge. Late afternoon sunlight streams in through white slatted shutters and on to a grand piano. There is a lavish, leisurely feel to it all, a metropolitan home with an overtone of Old South gentility. ??? Wolfe's long-awaited third novel, 'I Am Charlotte Simmons', is like 'American Pie' meets Zola's 'L'Assomoir'. ??? Charlotte, a wide-eyed, small-town virgin from the South, arrives at the fictional university of Dupont, and finds that academia is the least of her worries when there are co-ed dorms, promiscuous roommates, beefy basketball players and frat boys to deal with. Wolfe describes the sex as if he's addressing a convention of surgeons: there are references to the 'ilial crest' and 'pectoral sheath', to 'otorhinolaryngological caverns'. Why did such a distinguished chronicler of the times a man now in his mid-seventies want toturn his attention to undergraduates? ??? 'When I was still working on "A Man in Full", ' Wolfe explains, 'which took me forever, I was so discouraged by that book that I said, "I'm going to drop it." I'd been hearing stories about college life, and nobody was writing about it.' He didn't drop the book, but when it was finished he started going across the country, visiting campuses 'starting at Stanford and working my way east'. ??? He would hang around for a couple of weeks at a time, going to parties and getting a feel for the language. ??? He felt, inevitably, old and 'stupendously overdressed'. 'For the most part theyreally didn't know what to make of me. At the fraternity parties I'm sure they found it very odd that someone my age was there at all, and they knew I was too old to be from the Drug Enforcement Administration. But I always wear a necktie,so it would have been ridiculous for me to try to fit in.' Aside from the six years he devoted to working on 'Charlotte Simmons', Wolfe spent almost a decade at university himself first at Washington and Lee, and then as a doctoral student at Yale in the mid-'50s. The biggest difference between then and now, hesays, is sexual. 'Nobody in anybody's administration is going to say, "Don't do it." They'll say, "Don't harass a girl" if you're a male, and they'll say, "Use condoms", but that's quite different from saying, "You shouldn't be doing this! And you girls you shouldn't just give them your body just because they want it!" And I found this puts a pressure on all undergraduates. At a university with 5,500 students, like Princeton, that's 5,500 beds that anyone can go to.' Wolfe's two children Alexandra and Thomas were both at university while he was conducting his research and read and commented on the manuscript. Though Wolfe concedes he is a 'very old-fashioned' parent, he insists he's not easily shocked as a reporter. 'When I'm trying to report on something, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, I really cease caring about what people are doing. When "The Bonfire of the Vanities" came out and people started saying, "What a bleak picture of New York", I was totally surprised. Because to me these were, in the literal sense of the word, awesome people they created awe and wonder.' Reviews of Wolfe's novel are divided some wonder why no one had thought of this subject sooner, others can't see what's new. There is the question of what an old man is doing in a young girl's skin, and the question of quite how different this scene is from what went on in the '60s, a decade of which Wolfe himself gave many seminal accounts. 'Well, you know, so much began in the '60s, ' he sighs when I ask as if to say, self-parodically perhaps, it's a shame they ever happened. ??? Wolfe has made a professional point of being an outsider. ??? The son of an agronomist, he grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and became a liberalas an undergraduate, because the politics at his university were very conservative. 'Then I got to Yale and everybody was on the left, and I couldn't stand all this lockstep thinking.' When he'd finished his PhD, he got a job on aMassachusetts newspaper, then on the New York Herald Tribune , where he wrote such a scathing attack on the New Yorker magazine that even JD Salinger, the notoriously reclusive author of 'Catcher in the Rye', came out of hiding to condemn it. During the newspaper strike of 1962, he took on a job for Esquire magazine a piece about stock car racing that was to become 'The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby'. Legend has it that, about to miss his deadline, he sent in 49 pages of breathless notes; the editor had planned to getanother writer to put them into shape, but when he saw them he ran them as they were, and 'the New Journalism' was born. It was a genre in which Wolfe famously coined the terms 'radical chic' and 'the Me decade', and successfully offended the artistic, literary and political establishments. ??? Wolfe says now that 'at first the piece was just an exercise, but I will confessthat by the time I'd gotten about ten pages into it I thought: This really isn'tso bad, and by the end I was even beginning to think in a literary way about it'. ??? It was also on this early assignment that he realised undercover reporting was not for him. 'I quickly found out it was madness, because if you're trying to fit in, you can't ask certain very basic questions, ' he explains. 'People were always using this term, the "overhead cam". I had no idea what an overhead cam was, and if you're pretending to fit in, you can't ask. So now I use the man from Mars approach: I don't know a thing about what you're doing, but I'm reallyinterested. For me, that seems to work.' Hence the cream suits. In case you thought he had ever got truly down and dirty with the counterculture, Wolfe tells a story about helping author and psychedelic pioneer Ken Kesey to move a sculpture. The sculpture was covered in wet paint, and Wolfe got some of it on his jacket. He went 'berserk', grabbing a bottle of turpentine and pouring it over his shoulder. ??? Kesey said, 'If you mess around with this shit, some of it's going to rub off onyou.' But how much of it really has? Wolfe recommends to me, in passing, the work of a neurologist he likes a man famous, he says, for standing in a bullring wearing a white smock. Much is always made of Wolfe's dandyism, but is his dress sense something other than that, a way of indicating that he is an observer, a social scientist? Is the cream suit the flbneur's equivalent of a lab coat? ??? You might wonder why the man who gave non-fiction an energy fiction had long lost would want to write novels at all. ??? Wolfe says he was sensitive to the insinuation that 'New Journalism was just a complicated form of writer's block'. ??? Something of a late bloomer (he was 32 when he wrote his first article, 48 when he married his wife, Sheila Berger), Wolfe was in his fifties by the time he thought: 'I didn't want to end my career and look back and say, gee I wonder what would have happened if ' 'Bonfire of the Vanities' came out in 1987, and sold millions of copies. 'A Man in Full' took 11 years to write, and did likewise. And now there is 'Charlotte Simmons'. ??? He still thinks the novel is dying, a thesis he has embraced, much to the rage of the men he calls his 'three stooges' Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving since he wrote an essay on the subject in 1989. Though thanks to younger realist writers, he says, things are looking up. Wolfe particularly admires Richard Price (author of 'Clockers') and Jonathan Franzen ('The Corrections'), and thinks the thriller writer Carl Hiaasen has great literary potential. ??? 'No one, ' he once said, 'has ever been injured in a literary fistfight in New York.' Perhaps this was because, by the time he and the three heavyweights came to blows, the worst, for Wolfe, had already passed. In 1996, he underwent a quintuple heart bypass operation. There followed a period of intense activity ( 'hypomania', he now sees), then a spell of depression. Never one to faff about with Freud, Wolfe had some drugs prescribed and was soon able to finish his book. ??? 'Psychoanalysis, ' he informs me, 'was put out of business by Lithium, a very simple dr it's not even a drug at all, it's an element!' ??? On the way out, Wolfe shows me his study. His desk looks all Louis Quinze on thesurface, but is in fact more madcap than that. Wolfe, who still uses a typewriter, has nevertheless designed a whole electrical system to ensure no wires are visible anywhere. His electric pencil sharpener, his ship's clock, histape recorder and his radio (taken from an old Cadillac) are all built in and within arm's reach. Books are neatly stacked; papers are arranged in cream-coloured files and labelled in red calligraphy. ??? All over one wall are drawings referring to or depicting him. There is a New Yorker cartoon ('I'm afraid Tom Wolfe and I have differing views of New York, ' a wealthy woman says to her shopping companion while hailing a cab), a David Levine caricature from the New York Review of Books , and Wolfe's favourite, a mention in an original Marvel comic strip featuring Dr Strange ('Tom! Tom Wolfe! ' Dr Strange cries out. 'I haven't seen you since you were just a Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby!') all of them testaments to hiseccentricity and fame. I ask him how he feels about mortality. 'I don't think much of it, ' he laughs. 'Immortality now that would be good stuff.' 'I Am Charlotte Simmons' is out now, published by Cape. See John O'Connell's review inBooks, p77. ??? TOM WOLFE WHAT YOU NEED TO READ ??? 'The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby' (1965) ??? Wolfe's first collection. 'There Goes (Varoom!Varoom! ) That Kandy Kolored (Thphhhhhh! ) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh! ) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmm . . . . )' is the only essay you'll ever need to read about customised stock cars. ??? 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' (1968) ??? In which Wolfe embraces the fugitive world of scholar, athlete and novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, who trekked across the US in a multicoloured buswreaking psychedelic havoc. ??? The title refers to their beverage of choice: KoolAid laced with LSD. ??? 'Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers' (1970) ??? 'Radical Chic', which gave the world the expression, describes a gathering of hip young things at Leonard Bernstein's Park Avenue duplex in honour of the militant Black Panther Party. ??? The limits of liberalism is also the subject of 'MauMauing '. ??? 'The Right Stuff' (1979) ??? The US space programme, rapturously mythologised. The selection of the Mercury astronauts in 1959 divided the flying community. Wolfe puts you right there , sothat you know how it feels to be sitting in a tin can, far above the world. ??? 'From Bauhaus to Our House' (1981) ??? Hilarious rant about modern architecture, specifically its failure to evoke the might of America's economic power: 'Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicatingmachine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse.' ??? 'A Man In Full' (1998) ??? Long-awaited second novel that melds broadcanvas portraiture with set-pieces like the quail hunt at hero Charlie Croker's 29,000-acre plantation. Indifferently received by critics but there's nothing more compelling than a failed masterpiece. ??? AND ONE TO AVOID ??? 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' (1987) ??? Having decided that all modern novels were rubbish, Wolfe had a bash at writing one himself in full-on Dickensian social realist mode. The result is a yuppy morality tale that, although technically accomplished, hasn't dated well. ??? John O'Connell ---------- Slate Magazine November 17, 2004, Wednesday Correction Appended I Am Charlotte Simmons by Virginia Heffernan and Stephen Metcalf ???The Three Hopeless Flaws of I Am Charlotte Simmons By 11/17/2004 12:56:18 PM ???Virginia! We meet again! There is so much to say about Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and the university life this new novel purports to depict, that I'll skip all introductory coughing and dive right in. I Am Charlotte Simmons is a sprawling anatomy of undergraduate life that centers on four main characters: the implausibly naive character of the book's title, and the three male students who, with varying intentions, attempt to woo her: Hoyt Thorpe, a smirking, born-on-third-base frat boy in the George Bush mold; Jojo Johansenn, a hulking power forward for the school's NCAA championship basketball team; and Adam Gellin, a vengeful nerd who writes for the school newspaper. This is an eminently foolish book, by an old man for whom the life of the young has become a grotesque but tantalizing rumor. It is overdrawn, overlong, underconsidered, and filled with at least one forehead-slapping ay caramba per page. (That adds up to 676, by the way. This is the predictable doorstop, perfectly timed for seasonal gifting.) At one point I wrote in its margins, The stupidity here may actually be boundless. And yet... and yet... I kinda liked I Am Charlotte Simmons, ripe for the pyre as it is. I'm glad we have three days here, to help discover how this unsacred monster, with its raft of insecurities and no social graces to speak of, holds some inexplicable power to... well, not charm, exactly. Transfix? ???Going in, there's one thing you can say about Tom Wolfe: At least he's no worse than Tom Wolfe. About Wolfe's preposterous claims regarding the novel as a genre, I'll have more to say in the next couple of days. But his disdain for the overly literary is a real boon to his reviewers. The prose rates a perfect 10 for ease of use; and so, long as this book is, you glide right through it without a hitch. Wolfe will occasionally flash the Nabokovian smile "the shrubbery at Wolfe's made-up Dupont University is euonymus, its cafeteria bathroom emits an egestive funk "but mostly he writes in a fat novel, book-of-the-month style, totally uninfected by modernity (much less post-modernity), and readily adaptable to its every soft-core need: Instead his tongue veered off to the side and worked its way down the gulley from her illial crest down to where her panties began. And finally "and most important "in its unrelenting drive to leave nothing unsaid, I Am Charlotte Simmons relieves its reader of all the burdens of the imagination: He amounted to a male low in the masculine pecking order, Wolfe describes an athletic department tutor, who is angry, deserves to be angry, is dying to show anger, but doesn't dare do so in the face of two alpha males, both of them physically intimidating as well as famous on the Dupont campus. ???OK, even in praising it, I can't hide my overwhelming dislike for this novel "it's put me in an egestive funk "so time to lay out its most obvious deficiencies. Three related and unaccountable choices inform the structure and substance of I Am Charlotte Simmons. The first is the wholly incredible nature of Wolfe's Dupont University. Wolfe is unequivocal: Dupont is an institution mentionable in the same breath only with Harvard. And yet, in Wolfe's depiction, it's more like a land grant school crossed with the Thunderdome. The jock subculture exists nearly everywhere (I went to Wesleyan, of cafeteria pot-smoking and Womynist House fame, and I'm here to tell you: Jock subculture is everywhere) but Wolfe portrays it as the single, utterly dominant fact of campus life and virtually the sole medium for sorting out the status pecking order of the young. Hopeless Structural Flaw No. 1, then, is that Wolfe has somehow run together Harvard with N.C. State, thus producing a complete chimera. ???By his own telling out on the promotion circuit, to research I Am Charlotte Simmons Wolfe toured several American campuses, talking to undergraduates about their experiences. This leads to Hopeless Structural Flaw No. 2. For on his journey through the groves of academe, Wolfe appears to have collected every bit of sexual folklore, no matter how hand-me-down, and bought into it hook, line, and sinker. Dupont is a place where women on a nightly basis cake on makeup and crawl, in an abject drunken stupor, up to lacrosse players, begging them for psychic validation in the form of brutally commitment-free sex. For the credulous Wolfe, even Ivy League college life seems to be one endless cloacal flow, filled only with beer bongs, body-sculpting, and animal rutting. ???And this leads, finally, to Hopeless Structural Flaw No. 3. By imagining college life as so debased, Wolfe must then imagine his heroine as correspondingly pure. Charlotte Simmons is a little mountain girl, a modern-day Walton, who has known in her life only hard study, dutiful but dirt poor parents, and the simple mountain ways of North Carolina. (And the novel hasn't seen such a tediously guarded virginity since Richardson's Pamela.) Well, that's it for starters, Virginia. We'll be revisiting each of these as we go, I suspect. I'll finish with a question and one last observation. First the question: What did you make of all the abs, delts, pecs, and various slabs of muscle, loving descriptions of which are larded "excuse the mixed metaphor "into virtually every chapter? ???And here is the observation: Dutiful Tom Wolfe, the little naiad in his white suit and his notebook, trucking off to university after university to do his research. Compare this to the genesis of the greatest academic satire ever written, the category killer known as Lucky Jim. In 1948, Philip Larkin's old college chum Kingsley Amis visited him at the University College at Leicester, where the young Larkin had recently been appointed librarian. As Amis recalled his visit to the Senior Common Room years later, [I] looked around a couple of times and said to myself: 'Christ, somebody ought to do something with this.' Not that it was awful "well, only a bit; it was strange, and sort of developed, a whole mode of existence no one had got onto, like the SS in 1940, say. I [decided I] would do something with it. That was it: a turn of the head in the Common Room; a few sniggering letters to and from Larkin. But between their four eyes they managed to nail the enterprise, and for all time. But of course, as Wolfe would remind us, it was six eyes: Larkin was a myopic, bespectacled, spectral geek, a weakling who devoted a lifetime to his own self-pity. And besides, what do you think that pays, librarian? ???Steve ???The Wolfe in Rut By 11/17/2004 3:51:23 PM ???Hi, Stephen! Steve-O! Steve-man! The Night of the Skull Fuck! Hillbilly Beaver! Huh! ???Damn, I am already violating my vow not to channel the enchanting voice of Wolfe's frat guys or any of his bozo characters. But you gotta love those particular bonebrains (hey, hey, U.Va.) and also this book is date-raping me. ???I agree there's much to say. In regular Slate pundity sentences, even. But do we have to be the ones to say it? My first response to finishing the book has actually been to savor the silence, since I'm worn out, having been shouted down by that loudmouth Wolfe and his twerpy T.A.s "Jojo, Hoyt, Adam, and yes Charlotte, our Maiden No More. Can't you and I, fresh from the 676-page exhortation to "what? "face facts?, now relish a quiet duller world, the one between Wolfe productions, free of ruttingruttingrutting and fake Ebonics and typographical stunts like::::::STATIC::::: and the grinding of the mons pubis? ???And, with that, my second response: to get to the task of exchanging glances with everyone who's lugging this unmistakable $28.95 hardcover around that says, OK, hi, what is it with 'mons pubis' and 'cleft in the rear declivity' and 'winking navels'? Why does Wolfe introduce these wack expressions as though they 're fresh wit and he hasn't used them a half-dozen times on the facing page? ???I am trying to come up with a glance that can convey this. ???Finally, my third response is to go to you, Steve, and concede first that, all right, the shouting is style, but what about those glitches? This book is made of glitches! Strange mistakes that speak of cognitive irregularities in the maker, to say nothing of an absent editor. I'm not complaining so much as brooding. How do they happen? ???Consider: ???Charlotte looked at the pair with a sinking heart. Crissy and Nicole. On top of everything else, they were both "ey girls. All the cool girls at Dupont, the ones who were with it, were "ey girls "Beverly, Courtney, Wheatley, Kingsley, Tinsley, Avery, and now Crissy. Of course, there was Nicole...and Erica...but thinking of Erica made her sink still farther " ???What in hell? I'm sure you see, but I'll spell it out: First, neither Crissy or Nicole are -ey girls, if "ey girls have names that end in ey. Second, Nicole is Nicole, so why is she an exception to a list that includes Nicole? ???I guess this could seem like a trivial thing, and maybe it's manly to just slop out your prose and leave small-minded fault-finding to the typing pool. But, when they recur, slips like this one "which are now common in literary fiction in our post-book-editor world "addle the critical mind, since they suggest very badly wrought urns. It's especially stupefying when evidence of carelessness capsizes one of Wolfe's pedantic passages, as above; just as he's coining phrases and codifying distinctions most aggressively, he falls off the dais "and we can't trust him. If I had more stamina for deconstruction, I'd try in fact to prove that this passage is the very heart of the matter, the proof that Wolfe's social taxonomies, which are this book's sine qua non, are lazy lies. Moreover, this other me would argue that the text's mischief is to disclose, over and over, the fraudulence of those taxonomies. ???But why bother, really? Shouts, lies, mistakes "who cares? I Am Charlotte Simmons is, as you say, marvelously easy sledding; it's thoroughly disarming, a breeze to read, even thrilling. Yeah, there's a devil's deal in it, but once you make that deal "stop counting the gaffes, stop tracing out The stupidity here may actually be boundless in the margins "this novel's got the enzyme that makes you crave it. Don't you think? It's really working the whole Tom Wolfe soothsayer thing, present in the Geertz-like thick descriptions of things like moving in to a freshman dorm; parents' fearful interaction with your roommate and her parents; the boring and sexual atmosphere of a dormitory Common Room late at night; uncomfortable hours spent with bland, unlikable freshman friends; the fudging of facts and tone involved in letters home; the drudgery and ecstasy of fraternity parties; the appearance of a shared hotel bathroom on a college road trip ???Wolfe reminds me of John Edward of Crossing Over. From a few data points "derived in this case from his fact-finding college tour "he supplies connective material and nuance until he seems, as I live and breathe, to be talking to the dead. You may know just how he does this "gets a page of Cosmo Girl or the liner notes to a Ben Harper CD and spins it into what seems like a narrative miracle amid novels by Iowa-trained senior citizens who never leave their Tidewater farmhouses. But even as I fought to keep my head clear I found myself thinking, on the brink of tears, How does he know this about my college life? It was just like this! (True, I don't really know how John Edward does it, either.) ???I also admire the way some of Wolfe's warhorse effects undergird the nouveau speech act he's evidently interested in here: the Affirmation. I'm not sure, in other words, that "as you say "postmodernism, or its tricks, have passed Wolfe by. When he gets into free-indirect discourse, which is pervasive "later I may remember this as a book narrated by Charlotte Simmons, but of course it's in the third person, with Wolfe visiting several consciousnesses very closely "Wolfe leans on a telling locution. He'll write, But he, Jojo, Jojo Johannsen, of whom they all chanted 'go go, Jojo,' could not be seen doing this! or But he, Hoyt, was the chevalier! or He, Adam, Destiny's Adam Gellin, promised himself that vengeance was his! Wolfe doubles and triples the names "pronoun and proper noun and epithet and etc. "reminding us with his boozy, emphatic, redundant loops that so much of what passes for mental life is just the repetition of one's name. Virginia, OK, you can do this. Or, rather, I am Charlotte Simmons. I like this title. ???I'm sounding awfully close, I realize, to Samuel Richardson's female groupies, who raved that he knew their lady-hearts better than they themselves did. Who knows who, of the aged monster novelists "Bellow, Roth, Updike, whoever "will win, in the end, in the final final Rapture? (Someone has to, though; is that an article of faith with you, too?) For now I'm with Wolfe. ???Wahoowa, ???Virginia ???P.S.: Let's admit you also went to U.Va. As I did. And also "your question. This is a dialogue. The traps, lats, delts "yes, there are many references to them. Personal trainers of America should pay Wolfe for his description of Charlotte's very clinical way to arousal: running her fingers over his wonderful abs and lingering in the crevices between the units. But what doyoumean by calling attention to Wolfe's salaciousness about the college guys? The cover's got I Am Charlotte Simmons in curly letters right over Tom Wolfe's initials. Seems like drag to me. I take it for a big, gay book. Not you? ???Tom Wolfe's Complicity in the Culture of Machismo By 11/18/2004 12:38:12 PM ???Virginia! Ginny! G and T! I was hoping you'd bring up (Wahooo-Wah) our time together at UVA, where you were an undergrad, I a grad student, and both of us were in thrall to the great Richard Rorty. (Did you note the complete absence of the campus maitrepenseur in Wolfe's supposed taxonomy? Wolfe must truly hate intellectuals. His one humanities professor here is a quivering under-mensch named Quat.) I started out saying I kinda liked this book, then proceeded to offer it up to the poleax, so let me revise and extend my remarks. First of all, all of us, hipster, doofus, hipster-doofus, we're all going to converge on one personality type in the end, the incredulous fuddy-duddy for whom the young appear as savages. And so yes, Heff, I think this is a drag show, in which Wolfe dresses up as the improbably spotless Charlotte, the better to make his own censorious way through Gomorrah; and in doing so, he speaks for the Active Liver in all of us. Second, I agree, he gets something dismayingly right here. By presenting a vision so loveless and unchastened by adult perspective, I Am Charlotte Simmons brings you back, uncannily, to what it feels like to be young: overwhelmed, self-pitying, somehow both painfully anonymous and sticking out like a sore thumb. The question I still can't puzzle out is: Are these genuine virtues, or only more flaws in what amounts to an egregious mistake of a novel? Or, put another way: Isn't it Wolfe here who is being shallow? ???It strikes me there are three possible defenses of I Am Charlotte Simmons. The first we can dispense with quickly enough: It is not funny, therefore it is not a satire. The second is that it is a fair piece of reportage from the front lines. And yet Wolfe, whose eye for social distinctions is purported "by Wolfe, at least "to be so keen, gets so much so baldly wrong. You would not believe how important sports are here! Charlotte writes home to her parents. Wrong! Charlotte went to a rural high school, where sports stars are treated as demigods. Her parents would readily understand the mentality. Wolfe has Charlotte's roommate, Beverly, a skeletal boarding school graduate and a four-alarm bitch, be conversant in pop culture, while Walton-mountain Charlotte is a near pop culture illiterate. Wrong! The principal medium of assimilation in America now is television, which is universal among the young. No one doesn't plug in and master its basic argot "with one possible exception: the children of the very privileged, who get tucked away in Groton for four years, to develop some silly argot of their own. (I know: true confession "I'm married to a Charlotte Simmons and was sent to prep school.) Also, Wolfe has virtually zero comprehension of the mechanics of the reverse snobbery now so common in the ranks of the upper meritocracy, going so far as to claim Charlotte envies Beverly for being wellborn, a locution straight out of Thackeray. ???OK, I'm reaching for the poleax again. I'll set it aside and admit that once, while at UVA, a frat boy exiting Daddy's sports car turned to me and said, What are you looking at, whereupon I promptly shrank into my cardigan. I sympathize with a certain horror, and a certain fascination, for the culture of machismo, and increasingly machisma, among the young. But what struck me about this 'roided up book, so imposingly large without being dense or powerful, was how complicit in this culture Wolfe makes himself. I was reminded of a passage in Balzac, one of the social realists Wolfe makes such a great show of admiring, where he describes a certain Celestin Crevel. Crevel suffers from retrospective envy, Balzac tells us and then adds: No one knows how much obvious bad taste this retrospective envy accounts for; and we cannot tell how many wildly foolish actions are due to the secret rivalries that drive men to mirror the type that they have set up as an ideal, to consume their energies in making themselves a moonshine reflection of someone else. ???Now, we know exactly how Balzac feels about this silly Crevel, whose weak personality has been left to forever wriggle upon his nail. You will say: But Wolfe is a modern novelist, whose own attitude can't be so plainly injected into the narrative. But Wolfe everywhere injects himself into his narrative. When weakling Adam demands that Charlotte snap out of her depression, she abruptly stopped crying and stared up at Adam with her mouth slightly open and her tearful eyes shining with respect bordering oddly on pleasure, as women sometimes do when a man claims the high ground and rebukes them. Later, in a similar situation: [T]here was also, unbeknownst to either of them consciously, a woman's thrill! "that's the word for it! "her delicious thrill! "when a man expands his chest and drapes it with the sash of righteousness and takescommand upon the Heights of Abraham. Here, Heffster, I think we can start to make sense of all the abs, pecs, delts, lats. For everywhere in this book, Wolfe combines his powerful distaste for the decadence he has encountered, with an enormous respect for the animal quest for sexual dominance, which he believes is the transcendental fact of human existence. This is why the book is so strangely incoherent, while being so strangely compelling: Wolfe has found among the young habits he finds genuinely repulsive, but they are attached to an honest, almost Nietzschean, acknowledgment of the inner workings of status. Wolfe may be appalled by booze, crunking, and bling bling, but he has an awed (and entirely sexist and entirely homoerotic) respect for the animal powers of young men. ???Heffster "in my big, gay heart, I know Wolfe cannot prevail in his quest for the laurel, against Bellow, Roth, Updike. Tomorrow I will unveil my pet theory! In the meantime: You think he will?? I can't wait to hear you spin this one! ???Soul and the American Imagination By 11/18/2004 4:09:16 PM ???Steve! Ma tre Steve! The Stevedore! " ???On reading that you're married to a Charlotte Simmons, something perhaps ludicrous occurred to me: Do you think it's possible that Charlotte has a shot at joining the real top sorority, the literary answer to the University of Virginia's Thursday Club, that triple-elite girls' drinking club comprised of sorority all-stars from the top three, Kappa, Theta, and Tri-Delt? You know the analog clique I mean "the one with Scarlett O'Hara, Becky Sharp, and Blanche Dubois? ???Is Charlotte, in other words, a character hearty enough to survive being abstracted from her natural habitat, Wolfe's indifferent prose, and turned into a figure in movies, metaphors, television, conversational idiom "exploitation in other media? (That which every virgin fears and seeks?) ???I ask not out of concern for the Charlotte Simmons movie (Scarlett Johansson? Lindsay Lohan?), but because somewhere, maybe 10 years ago, I came across a winning essay arguing that Henry James' characters' shortcoming is that they cannot break out of his symbolic order and live freely in our imaginations; they 're like helpless preemies and unviable without James' thick prose to keep them breathing (and even then, they're hyperventilating). It's true you rarely think, That guy is such a Lambert Strether. The argument was further made "as I recall it "that something about Margaret Mitchell's visual, anticerebral style was bracing to her characters, toughening them up, and allowing them to form real edges. Thus they could be lifted out. And resold. But what is good for characters "the repetition of their names, the physical descriptions, the tedious shorings up of what each one means (male low on the masculine pecking order, etc.) "may not be good for an author's reputation. James gets to be first-rate because his characters are subordinated to his style. Wolfe gets pushed around by critics because he lets his characters take center stage, and thus seems weak. ???I love it, and you're right, that entropy will work on the cafeteria tables, too "that old age often just is the convergence of cool people and losers, brought together in mutual bewilderment over where the time has gone. Getting the most out of life, as I see it, may require resistance to this dangerous cool-mixing, and for that reason I will now confess that some part of me looks forward to starting all over again, with cliques and status and infighting, at an old folks' home one day I hope to go down loftily snubbing someone for the wrong jeans or at least being snubbed. ???But it's time to admit that we, we with our unsullied and merely mimetic relationship to the stuff of this embarrassing and likable novel, are not the only ones talking about it. The reviewers are out in force, and most of them are wrong. A recent Times op-ed about I Am Charlotte Simmons makes much of Charlotte 's moral abandonment at a university where, among other affronts, Professor Victor Ransome Starling (the sublime neuroscience dude, with the Nobel Prize; is he not our ma tre penseur?) can use the word soul only in quotation marks. ???I disagree with the many bad reviews the book has gotten, because I consider this book a glorious beating, but at this defense of it I really gnash my teeth. Granting that the Starling soul moment is significant in Wolfe's novel "and it isn't, since what's actually significant about Starling is that he's religious, anti-atheist, and sympathetic even to Charlotte's wholesale critique of Darwin; Starling also dwells on Darwin's piety as well as his own faith in the self, which at my much more conservative college I was taught was a construct, Q.E.D. "I wonder where the moral utopia is in which soul is used straight. Sports writing? Jewel songs? As you and I know from graduate school, intellectuals perpetually rediscover the soul "a recent MLA panel on the subject was packed "and, furthermore, chastise themselves for their detachment from it. This reformation is, in fact, among everyone's favorites, in the academy and out: it 's like a musical in which the lovers are witty at the top, and then come to Believe in Love and cast off those mean, defensive quotation marks. ???That moral operation, the stripping of quotation marks, which is regularly foisted on us, is mighty pretty "but it's shallow, and it's meant only to be repeated and repeated. Who wants to hear the story after the damn musical? Or, to bring it back around, the denuded soul is very cute "but who wants it? Are the neocon men of letters, the ones who keep foisting the soul on us, prepared, for real, to entertain real questions about the soul "about immortal life and beatitude and purgatory and how we recognize our friends in the hereafter and what happens to the body and are we points of light or whatever? ???No. That stuff is creepy. Let's face it: No one wants to hear a Charlotte Simmons yammer on for one minute after she's remembered Jesus died for our sins; they just want to see her get the irony raped out of her. ???Superficially, in fact, the soul issue reminds me of Wolfe's annoying and commonplace tic, when rendering dialect, of phoneticizing haphazardly. Take everybuddy, which one of Charlotte's dad's Sparta cronies says, near the beginning of the book. Why spell it that way? Everybody says everybuddy! In fact, everybuddy is spelled everybody. Likewise, children of America, no matter what the neo-soulful people try to tell you, nobody uses soul without some kind of quotation marks. (Even if they're there to reprove you for even thinking quotation marks.) Not even in good, wholesome places like Sparta or the exurbs or the places where they know that Kerry was faking his faith. Soul takes quotation marks! Get it right! ???Whew,Virginia ???For Wolfe, Life Is All About Status By 11/19/2004 5:16:45 PM ???Heffenator, ???It pains me to bring my half of this dialogue to a close; it's been such a pleasure. I love your distinction between the stuff we sense that Scarlett O 'Hara and Becky Sharp are made of and the stuff "the indifferent literary prose "that made them. But methinks you may have lighted a Candle in the Wind here: Poor Charlotte will likely never break free of her creator. I see her holy innocence, but where is her unholy desire? She has none of the vinegar (or melancholy) it takes to become even a schlock icon. As to Henry James, he made it a fair fight only once, with Isabel Archer; she battles for her dignity against James' ulterior, and not so ulterior, purposes as much as against Gilbert Osmond, so I'd place her near your trio, if not exactly among them. (As for literary antecedents for Charlotte, the final one I come up with is the Lady from Milton's Comus: thou unblemish't form of Chastity. Zzzzzzz.) And by the by, that'll be me, Virginia, wearing the crappy jeans in the Phase II cafeteria of the Sunset Park Leisure Care Facility "so watch it. ???In all sincerity, here is what I like about Wolfe and this goofy novel. Too often we extrapolate a set of qualities common to the people who still read literary fiction, then hold them as expectations when reading fiction itself. As a result, a lot of awful work "overwritten, overfelt, mincing, and oppressively fine "gets lazily tabbed literature. By being so unapologetically middlebrow, Tom Wolfe isn't middlebrow. (He's may not be great, but at least he's not giving usShopgirl.) Were it left at that, one could respectfully keep one's Ginsu sheathed. But Wolfe has never been content to leave it at that. The best piece on how jealously Wolfe argues for his own pre-eminence is still Jim Windolf's, and I can't pretend to improve on it. But in promoting this latest novel, Wolfe has been repeating his old saw, about how every human consideration is finally a status consideration; and he has picked up a high-profile defender in David Brooks. Now, it's Brooks' job, as the Likable Conservative, to put a friendly face on the indefensible; and in this column he almost succeeds in transferring responsibility for Wolfe's awful novel onto its reviewers. So it's worth explaining why, in addition to being sprawling and fun, I Am Charlotte Simmons is also hateful and small, and in precisely those ways that will deprive Wolfe of the literary reputation he so craves. ???Wolfe chose the contemporary American university as the setting for I Am Charlotte Simmons, but the roiling Orgasmatron he lays before the reader will be familiar to precisely no one. What is a real university in the actual 21st century actually like? It's a research institution; an intergenerational transfer station for high culture; a talent sorting mechanism, and thus a gateway to the professions; and a (give or take) four-year holding pen for the children of the bourgeoisie. Of these, Wolfe chose to highlight the last, add some elements of the first, and suppress to near-invisibility two and three. In sum, Wolfe punched up to phantasmagorical heights everything about a university related to status, crudely understood, while burying everything about a university that has to do with prestige. Why? As Wolfe sees it, status is real: It's rooted in biology and the primitive quest for sexual privilege. Prestige, meanwhile, is artificial, a conspiracy of the overrefined whose only real power is the power to shame and exclude. Wolfe has devoted entire swaths of his career to pointing out how the world of prestige is fraudulent: that modern art is a scam, that The New Yorker is the product of tiny mummies, and that the literary novel has become weak, pale, tabescent. ???Those who would praise Wolfe for being horrified by the bestial reversion of the young fail to see how much of a relief this reversion is to Wolfe. After all, it takes a mammoth effort of willful suppression to depict, over the course of nearly 700 pages, life at a prestigious university as one entirely devoid of warmth, friendship, love, belonging, self-mastery, or meaningful accomplishment "or, for that matter, pleasure of any kind detached from the brute mastery of others. What terrifies Wolfe most, then, isn't debauchery; it's cultural snobbery of the sort that routinely assigns Tom Wolfe to the second or third tier of literary talents. This has become so pathological with Wolfe that he seems to perceive any social arrangement that allows for self-refinement or aesthetic contemplation not merely as a fraud but as an offense against human nature. (Don't believe me? Read I Am Charlotte Simmons, in which there are two kinds of men: cowards and overlords.) The temptation in American life is always to give in to this bleak idea, of an endless death struggle for status, because the basis for American life is Hobbesian individualism. But the basis for a university, and any culture in which meaningful value judgments are still possible, isn't Hobbesian; it's Lawrentian: Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Surely that purpose can't be driving an Escalade or living at 820 Fifth Ave. ???Wolfe, though, in his own person is self-refuting. He himself, in his need for the laurel, for lasting critical esteem, proves that people's desires are wildly variable and idiosyncratic. He has no end to money and status, and yet his craving for something more has proven incorrigible. What an interesting character for a novel! Pity: If only he had learned to navel-gaze a little better. As it is, his work is news that won't stay news. ???An utter delight, Virginia. Be well!Steve ???I [Heart] Charlotte By 11/19/2004 10:41:49 PM ???Steve, ???I know you hear me, but the headline writers, as well as the charmers at the Fray, seem to misunderstand me, and now's my only chance to set the record straight ???So here goes: I like this novel. I like it now, having read it, having talked about it, and having read about it. And I'll keep on liking it. I'll never stop liking it. The people who like it are right. The people who dislike it are wrong. To which I am obliged to add: You are wrong. ???Charlotte is not an allegorical figment out of Comus. She's a vain, redneck distance-runner with a kindly and despotic mountain mother and a jalopy Kaypro computer that her father and brothers fixed up for her because she's also an intellectual, and intellectuals need computers. Have you ever seen a Kaypro? I remember light gray-blue casing, the false impression of portability, and a strange shape; it was as though you had to look down a tunnel, as if into a stereopticon, to see the green figures on the deep-space black background. Any undergraduate at a Harvard-like university who is writing papers now on a Kaypro, especially one rigged by her kinfolk, has a story to tell. That's a story we'd do well "and here I'll risk the David Brooks line, or the Tom Wolfe one "to listen to. ???(Glimpse a Kaypro here.) ???Charlotte is not Chastity. She loses her virginity at 18, which sounds fairly average to me "not devastating either way "and she falls apart, while she does, not because she then embodies Sullied Chastity, but for the worthwhile reasons that college girls usually fall apart: because a guy isn't calling her and because she's let down her mother. ???Dupont University is not a Gomorrah. It is, rather, a place of learning, with "it must be said "intriguing course offerings. (Wolfe heroically rejects the long tradition of tedious David Lodge-style parodic course titles, creating instead Nineteenth-Century Poetry: The Courtly, the Pastoral, and the Symbolist and The Renaissance and the Rise of Nationalism, with which he makes a point worth acknowledging: Wolfe still believes in college.) ???Dupont does not "miracle! "conform to the popular and now 20-year-old clich of a university of passionless PC slackers who are morally dead because sex is no longer the terrifying centerpiece of existence, the way it was for Allan Bloom and Philip Roth and the other men who came of age before early puberty and coeducation and the ultimately very peaceable disbanding of the American branch of the cult of female virginity. Wolfe came of age back then, too, and he's no doubt been amused and even appalled to hear his twentysomething daughter's accounts "the book is dedicated to his children* "of how times have changed. ???But, unlike those other big daddies, Wolfe evidently really listened to those girls when he invented Dupont, wresting from them and his other sources details about bulimic roommates, cell phone use on campus, computer centers, eye makeup, Diesel jeans, new college cuisine, the Kaypro ???Something about the idea of Tom Wolfe doing all that research is endearing; it constitutes the sweetness of the book. Though scorned for being middlebrow, Wolfe is among America's few monster novelists to have gotten a Ph.D. (in American Studies at Yale), which, if it doesn't give him professore status, as it might in Italy, at least it means he deputized himself to greater minds before officially putting pen to paper. ???Why do I find this book so monumentally moving, like a paper by an ingenious and strange undergraduate? Put it this way: Wolfe invented a rapper named Doctor Dis. Doctor Dis! And then he wrote songs for him! ???Let's imagine this. Having listened to Nas or Jay-Z on the kids' recommendation, Tom Wolfe had a daughter help him make out the lyrics. Then he sat down at his own desk, blank page and rhyming dictionary before him, and "forgoing yet another chance to write to his strengths (none of his old subjects are shoehorned into this book, which is also commendable) "he tapped out the meter to a rap. And produced a cop-killing anthem with enjammed rhymes and internal rhymes! ???Is Jojo's transformation not credible? Are Hoyt's and Jojo's and Beverly's overwrought family stories abandoned? Do a half-dozen first-act guns not go off? Are paragraphs here sloppily composed? Are some of the coinages silly? Is the melodrama melodrama? Are there one thousand departures from verisimilitude? ???Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But there are also 1,001 times where the truth is rendered conscientiously, with bravado and lightness. And I did laugh reading this book, and I read it greedily and happily, and my eyes were opened, and I remember the characters. ???I read your entries greedily and happily, too, however! I like your style and being right isn't everything. This has been truly high times. ???Yours,Virginia CORRECTION: An earlier version of this piece misstated that Wolfe has two daughters. He, in fact, has a son and a daughter. Return to the corrected sentence. ----------- People November 29, 2004 Old School:At 73, Tom Wolfe goes back to college. The result? Call it Keg Party of the Vanities by Kyle Smith ???The man who gave us The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities and even popularized the phrase "good ol' boy" rarely wears anything but a dazzling tailor-made white suit. But that changed when author Tom Wolfe fell into a deep depression a few months after his 1996 heart-bypass surgery. "It is so hard to get across to anyone who has never been depressed what it's like," Wolfe says. "You feel that you yourself are worthless. I would start dressing in the drabbest clothes. [I thought], 'You don't deserve all these trick clothes. You don't deserve to act charming.'" So what did he wear in his darkest hour? "I have a couple of brown suits that I consider subdued. Of course these clothes were all custom-made. My wife probably didn't even notice." ???Now Wolfe, 73, is back to his usual resplendence and his customary place atop bestseller lists with his latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, an alternately hilarious and hair-raising look at a prestigious fictional college where everyone majors in sex and booze. "Isn't that amazing?" says his friend Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone publisher who has been printing his work for more than 30 years. "I mean, this guy's in his 70s, right? And he's just produced one of the most authentic works about young people ever written. This is what it is like." But don't take Wenner's word for it. Says Dave Fleming, 26, who met Wolfe when Fleming was a frat brother at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill--one of more than a dozen campuses Wolfe visited--and chaperoned him around the party scene: "He nailed it pretty good." How does he do it? "There's a lot of mojo in that white suit," Wenner theorizes. "There's something about it that makes you feel good and welcome him in. I mean, how kooky can you get?" ???Kooky or not, Wolfe rarely reveals much of himself, but I Am Charlotte Simmons may be his most personal work yet. The title character, a brilliant but poor girl from the mountains of North Carolina who becomes a social outcast at college, spirals into a depression that Wolfe describes as much like his own. "The thing that's so true is the only time she's at peace with herself is when she's riding the bus," he says. "Because there's nothing she can do about her troubles on the bus, there's no one to confront her." When Wolfe battled depression for four months eight years ago, he says, "I was only happy in transit." (Medication helped set him on his feet.) But Wolfe says he also poured some of his other traits into Charlotte. "I shouldn't tell you this about myself, but she's first of all an egotist of a sort you wouldn't necessarily notice," he says. "The big question at the end of the book is, did she really want to have a life of the mind or did she simply want to be a star?" Adds the man who tried out as a pitcher with the then-New York Giants in 1952: "The only thing that saved me from a very poor career as a professional baseball player is the fact that I wasn't good enough." ???He passed along both his athletic genes and his writerly ones. Ensconced in Manhattan with his wife, Sheila, 61, a graphic design consultant for Harper's magazine, Wolfe has a son, Tommy, 19, a sophomore member of Trinity College's champion squash team, and a daughter, Alexandra, 24, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Neither of them helped with the book, though, except to correct some of his slang. If the drunken campus bedhopping he writes about may alarm parents, Wolfe doesn't worry about his own kids. "Maybe I'm kidding myself," he says, "but I really do trust them 100 percent." ???They might think twice before according him the same privilege. While doing his research, Wolfe was once forced to flee a frat party at the University of Michigan at 3 a.m.: "All the lights came on and an officer of the fraternity came rushing through saying, 'Everybody out! They're coming!' I suddenly had a picture of a guy 70 years old running out to escape the law. I never did find out what they were frightened about." ???Writing about youth is bound to win Wolfe new fans, although some will be buying the wrong books. At one sorority party, remembers another former UNC student, Frances Hankins, 25, "this boy went up to him and started talking about Look Homeward, Angel, thinking it was Thomas Wolfe"-- who did indeed write that classic but died in 1938. More important is Wolfe's ability to inspire. "The thing that I got out of Tom is to look into things and try to find the truth," says Fleming, the former fraternity brother. "That's what gets you excited about life." ???By Kyle Smith ??"I suddenly had a picture of a guy 70 years old running out to escape the law." --------------- Bonfire knight http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5051821-99930,00.html The Observer profile America's foremost satirist is sallying forth once more to slay the dragon of his nation's social schizophrenia and hypocrisies. Expect the trumpets to blow, and the swords to be sharpened Tim Adams Sunday October 31, 2004 New novels by Tom Wolfe are not merely published; rather, they arrive in town like stretch limos at the heart of a traffic-stopping motorcade, klaxons blaring, heralded by outriders on Harleys in reflective shades, their embargoed content already the subject of speculation, adulation and protest. The million-plus copies of his latest, third, full-length work of fiction, I Am Charlotte Simmons, will scream into print worldwide with just such a gridlocking fanfare in a fortnight's time. From the two clues to its concerns so far - chapters excerpted in Rolling Stone magazine and Men's Journal - it appears to be business as usual for America's satiriser-in-chief. Wolfe wants to locate his nation's most pumped-up pulse at any given moment, and strap his stylistic tourniquet on to feel its pressure. He works in decades. Following his inspired journalistic chronicles of Sixties Acid Tests, and his coining of Seventies Me Culture, his novels have attempted to put their exclamatory imprimatur on successive eras. What Bonfire of the Vanities did for the Eighties and Wall Street, A Man in Full attempted for the corrupt corporate billionaires of the Nineties Enron-economy. I am Charlotte Simmons takes this zeitgeist-roadshow to the mythical Dupont university in California, breeding ground for the masters of the twenty-first century universe. Wolfe has never lost his hunger for the new new thing. The dapper hack who hung out with California's elite surfers to write The Pump House Gang, almost 40 years ago, still at 73 wants to know exactly what fuels young America. Thus we will see him inveigling his unmissable authorial presence into fraternity houses and sorority parties to come back with the news from the front. You could see this novel simply as the author fulfilling an old promise. Wolfe spent nearly all of his twenties doing a doctorate in American studies at Yale. At the time, academia did not seem to offer enough of real life for him, and he took a job as a reporter in Springfield, Massachusetts. Though he never really stopped doing American studies, he told himself that one day he would go back to college to work, but never has until now. Wolfe's real subject has always been class, that great taboo of egalitarian America, what he once called its statuspheres. His interest is in elites, the glamour and sordidness and comedy of power. This has been a lifelong obsession. At the age of nine he embarked on a biography of Napoleon and a life of Mozart written as a comic strip. 'The reason I liked them was because they were - like me - both small,' he admitted, looking back. I once asked Ken Kesey, hero of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, what it was like to have Tom Wolfe write you into myth. 'What you have to understand,' Kesey said, 'is that Tom Wolfe was never really writing about me, his writing has always mostly been concerned with itself.' Rarely can a writer's style have so enjoyed the red carpet as Wolfe's. Each of his sentences looks like a seductive cheerleader for its author. And he is not shy about revealing his motivation. 'If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before they were not noticed, now they are.' Such statements are guaranteed to enrage the higher-minded of Wolfe's peers. One of the things that will no doubt accompany his new novel is another incendiary round in the literary firestorm that followed the publication of the first two. No one else can wind up their fellow Great American Novelists with such ease. For John Updike, writing in the New Yorker, Wolfe's A Man in Full 'was not even literature in a modest aspirant form'. Norman Mailer, meanwhile, in an even more comprehensive kicking, compared reading Wolfe to being 'seduced by a 300lb woman. Once she gets on top it's all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated'. (Mailer left the reader in no doubt that he was among those gasping for breath.) John Irving was more succinct, saying Wolfe simply 'could not fucking write'. Wolfe responded to these attacks in kind by saying that his critics - The Three Stooges he called them - were envious because they had 'wasted their careers by not engaging in the life around them'. He pointed also to an initial American print run of 1.2 million copies for A Man in Full, a figure they could dream of (and just stopped short of mentioning his $7.5m advance). One of the things Wolfe believes annoys his critics most is that he has never wanted to be one of them. Despite a lavish uptown apartment in Manhattan and his summers in the Hamptons, and his wife, a Jewish New Yorker, who was once art director of Harper's magazine, Wolfe still prides himself on being an outsider in what he calls Cultureberg. His father was an agronomist in the Shenandoah mountains. His grandfather was a Confederate officer in the Civil War. Wolfe never wanted to lose any of his southernness. He made sure he would not be seduced by literary New York early on in his career in an essay viciously satirising its bible, William Shawn's New Yorker magazine, as a home for the living dead. His famous white suit has been one shorthand way of asserting this southern separateness. He uses his uniform as a goad, and it works. When Wolfe's first book came out, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, this cultural Mason-Dixon line was already beginning to be drawn. Writing in the New York Review of Books the eminent conservative critic Dwight Macdonald derided Wolfe's work as 'para-journalism'. The main charge the critic laid against Wolfe then, in 1965, was that of transience. 'I don't think Wolfe will be read with pleasure or at all years from now, and perhaps not even next year... the subjects will prove of ephemeral interest and the style will not wear well because its eccentricities, while novel, are monotonous; those italics, dots, exclamation points, and expressions like Santa Barranza!... they will not last.' That they did last, that Wolfe's first-person style has been the single most influential voice in all journalism since, had a lot to do with the fact that he was among the first to realise that the clues to modern culture were not necessarily to be found in its politics but in its fashions, in its transience. In his subsequent fascination with the surface of things, in his love-hate for celebrity and the products of American dreams, the scourge of modern art has proved to have had more in common than he would acknowledge with Andy Warhol, that other dandy outsider in the big city. Like Warhol, though a stylistic radical, Wolfe has always been very much a conservative by temperament. 'You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes,' he says. As a boy in Richmond, Virginia, he would kneel by his bedside each night, close his eyes, place his hands together and solemnly thank the Lord for making him an American. He has never forgotten that. While most liberal readers might have seen Bonfire of the Vanities as a vicious satire on the excesses of the Wall Street bull markets, to Wolfe himself it seems the comedy was more complicated. 'My original idea was to say, "Look at these people! Look at the way they live! Look at what they do! Isn't it just amazing!"' He could have savage fun observing the greed unleashed by Reaganomics, the great haemorrhaging of cash, but he still believed Reagan to be 'one of our greatest Presidents ever'. Wolfe squares that contradiction by being kind of American right winger who enjoys the priapic power of capitalism, and who prefers to laugh at effects than to examine causes. His writing borrows the energy of the individuals shaped by the extremes of those forces (it is no coincidence that his most telling and pyrotechnic book, The Right Stuff, was about the astronauts at Nasa, vicariously rocket-fuelled). By the time he set about to writing novels, this desire to incorporate all of America's energy in his books became overwhelming. In 1995, almost eight years into his work on A Man in Full, he described how every day he watched the events which his book wanted to include overtaking him. As he did not use a computer, each rewrite meant retyping everything. He looked a little like a character in a very American fable, desperately trying to stay one step ahead of his own satire. The effort of this very nearly did for him. In 1996 Wolfe had a heart attack at the gym and a quintuple by-pass, brought on, he believes, by the hubris of staring at a blank page each day and trying to make it reflect America. One of the effects of this brush with death, Wolfe said, was to break the thread he had always felt to his youth. It made him feel vulnerable, pervious, but he responded not with doubt but with redoubled ambition. And for this alone, as even Norman Mailer has conceded, 'one has to applaud his moxie'. As a result, the style that once looked like a wonderful cocksure show of plumage these days reads more like a rage against the dying of the light. Like Anthony Burgess, pressed into frantic action by a realisation of mortality, Wolfe, eight years on from heart surgery, seems only to want to go faster. The 750 pages of A Man in Full will thus be followed by the 680 pages of I am Charlotte Simmons. If his preview chapters about college jocks are anything to go by, his writing has rarely been more charged, more Wolfeian. Like the musculature of the basketball stars it describes, it is 'steroidal, ripped', all the time showboating with similes, hotdogging with vernacular, slam-dunking exclamations. If sentences could be on something then Wolfe's would never have been out of the mandatory doping lab. There is, however, no Viagra for prose. So you marvel that he is still keeping it up. Thomas Kennerly Wolfe DoB: 2 March 1931 Education: Washington and Lee University; Yale University (PhD, 1957) Publications: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby; The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; The Right Stuff; Bonfire of the Vanities; A Man in Full ... From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:40:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:40:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Scientist: 'Zero intelligence' trading closely mimics stock market Message-ID: 'Zero intelligence' trading closely mimics stock market http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6948&print=true * 11:59 01 February 2005 * Katharine Davis A model that assumes stock market traders have zero intelligence has been found to mimic the behaviour of the London Stock Exchange very closely. However, the surprising result does not mean traders are actually just buying and selling at random, say researchers. Instead, it suggests that the movement of markets depend less on the strategic behaviour of traders and more on the structure and constraints of the trading system itself. The research, led by J Doyne Farmer and his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, US, say the finding could be used to identify ways to lower volatility in the stock markets and reduce transaction costs, both of which would benefit small investors and perhaps bigger investors too. A spokesperson for the London Stock Exchange says: "It's an interesting bit of work that mirrors things we're looking at ourselves." Most models of financial markets start with the assumption that traders act rationally and have access to all the information they need. The models are then tweaked to take into account that these assumptions are not always entirely true. But Farmer and his colleagues took a different approach. "We begin with random agents," he says. "The model was idealised, but nonetheless we still thought it might match some of the properties of real markets." Buying and selling In the model, agents with zero intelligence place random orders to buy and sell stocks at a given price. If an order to sell is lower than the highest buy price in the system, the transaction will take place and the order will be removed - a market order. If the sell order is higher than the highest buy price, it will stay in the system until a matching buy order is found - a limit order. For example, if the highest order to buy a stock is $10, limit orders to sell will be above $10 and market orders to sell will be below $10. The team used the model to examine two important characteristics of financial markets. These were the spread - the price difference between the best buy and sell limit orders - and the price diffusion rate - a standard measure of risk that looks at how quickly the price changes and by how much. The model was tested against London Stock Exchange data on 11 real stocks collected over 21 months - 6 million buy and sell orders. It predicted 96% of the spread variance and 76% of the variance in the price diffusion rate. The model also showed that increasing the number of market orders increased price volatility because there are then fewer limit orders to match up with each other. Incentives and charges The observation could be useful in the real financial markets. "If it is considered socially desirable to lower volatility, this can be done by giving incentives for people who place limit orders, and charging the people who place market orders," Farmer says. Some amount of volatility is important, because prices should reflect any new information, but many observers believe there is more volatility than there should be. "On one day the prices of US stock dropped 20% on no apparent news," says Farmer. "High volatility makes people jittery and sours the investment climate." It also creates a high spread, which can make it more expensive to trade in shares. The London Stock Exchange already has a charging structure in place that encourages limit orders. "Limit orders are a good way for smaller investors to trade on the order book," says a spokesperson. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0409157102) Related Articles * [12]Virtual brokers forecast real stocks * 25 September 2004 * [13]It's the economy, stupid * 10 April 2004 * [14]Will physics crack the market? * 07 December 2002 Weblinks * [15]J Doyne Farmer, Santa Fe Institute * [16]London Stock Exchange * [17]Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences References 12. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18324662.100 13. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18224425.200 14. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17623721.100 15. http://www.santafe.edu/~jdf/ 16. http://www.londonstockexchange.com/en-gb/ 17. http://www.pnas.org/ From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:41:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:41:36 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Waiter You Stiffed Has Not Forgotten Message-ID: The New York Times > Dining & Wine > The Waiter You Stiffed Has Not Forgotten http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/dining/02wait.html 5.2.2 By JULIA MOSKIN WHAT evil lurks in the hearts of waiters? Now you can find out. But can you stomach the results? An anonymous New York waiter wrote online recently: "In my fantasy, I become Darth Vader the next time a customer asks about the wines by the glass, then says, 'Merlot! Waiter, haven't you seen the movie "Sideways"?' Then I will slice off his head with my light saber." Grievances, including friction between kitchen and dining room staff, rapacious management and near-universal bitterness over tipping, are being revealed with gusto on the Internet by restaurant staff members. As a customer, to read Web sites like [1]www.bitterwaitress.com, [2]www.waiterrant.blogspot.com and [3]www.webfoodpros.com is to wonder nervously, "Could they be talking about me?" Each month, [4]www.stainedapron.com publishes a new extreme example of customer obnoxiousness. (One forum is titled "Keep Your Brats at Home!") On [5]bitterwaitress.com, the most popular page is an annotated database of people who give bad tips (defined on the site as "any gratuity under 17 percent for service which one's peers would judge as adequate or better"). Anyone can add a name to the database, along with the location, restaurant, amount of the check, amount of the tip and any details, most of which cannot be printed in a family newspaper. (A disclaimer reads: "We are not responsible for submissions. Uh-uh, no way, not in the least.") There are almost 700 entries. "That stuff is childish," said Timothy Banning, a California chef who often posts to [6]www.ontherail.com, a San Francisco-based site for chefs. "And it makes the industry look bad." But most servers say that letting off steam helps them do the job. "It's so important for us to have a place to vent," said Becky Donohue, who waits on tables at Mickey Mantle's in Midtown and writes occasional posts at [7]www.girlcomic.net. "It's amazing that more waiters don't kill people," she said. Many in the industry protest that the rage-filled, often incoherent blogs and posts don't represent the feelings of most restaurant staff members, And so far only a small slice of the industry is active online. "Unlike a lot of people, chefs and waiters don't have computer access at work, or enough time to fool around on the Net," said Bryce Lindholm, a Seattle chef and manager who participates in a Yahoo discussion group for restaurant employees. But the result of these forums, say Mr. Banning, Mr. Lindholm and others, is that the symbolic wall between the kitchen and the dining room - the wall that prevents customers from knowing what is done and said by waiters and cooks - is coming down. And how do they loathe us, the customers? Now we can count the ways. "I don't think civilians really have any idea how the staff really feels: namely, that they just can't wait to turn the table, get their tip and see the back of you," Mr. Lindholm said. "Let's be honest." Referring to restaurant customers as civilians is common, and indicative of the siege mentality that longtime cooks and severs tend to adopt. "I'd say waiting tables is one of the most stressful jobs you can have, short of being a firefighter or an inner-city police officer," said Bruce Griffin Henderson, a singer-songwriter who did 10 years as a waiter in New York. "You have no control over anything, but you are responsible for everything. You are always being squeezed by three immutable forces: the customer, the kitchen and the management." But recent interviews revealed some fresh irritants for the more than eight million Americans who worked in restaurants in 2002 (the most recent year for which figures are available according to the United States Department of Labor). Waiters must now enforce bans on smoking, drinking by minors and cellphone use, and are enduring an influx of Euro-rich tourists who, restaurant staff members say, often pretend not to understand American tipping practices. Chefs say they are being driven mad by an ever-changing spectrum of diets, allergies and food issues. Gillian Clark, the chef at Colorado Kitchen in Washington, contributed thousands of words to a forum at [8]www.washingtonpost.com on the subject of customers who demand changes to the menu. "I explain to them that they are in my restaurant," she wrote, "and they must have the flounder the way I make it." Ms. Clark is relatively tolerant of customers with genuine health problems, but many bloggers reserve their most towering rages for customers with real or imagined dietary restrictions. Last year a server at a Sizzler steakhouse in Norco, Calif., was arrested after a fight with Atkins-dieting customers over whether vegetables could be substituted for potatoes. Participants in online forums reacted with understanding, though the consensus was that Jonathan Voeltner, the server, had gone too far in following the customers and covering their house with maple syrup, flour and instant mashed potatoes. "Use the forum, dude!" one poster urged. "Blow off the steam here." According to [9]www.waitersworld.com, one Washington restaurant customer recently insisted that the restaurant's $10 minimum should be waived for him, because gastric bypass surgery had rendered him unable to swallow more than a few mouthfuls at one sitting. "So why are you in a restaurant?" wrote one cook. "WHY WHY WHY?" These writers are immoderate in their rages, but they do not discriminate. They harbor contempt for tourists, New Yorkers, Southerners, Jews, Christians, women, men, blacks, whites, American Indians. Fat people. Thin people. "My greatest dream is to keep a party of doctors waiting for 45 minutes," Mr. Lindholm said. "They are arrogant as customers, and besides, they keep me waiting in their offices. Let them wait in my restaurant." Serious complaints about sexism, racism, drug use, hazing and management are common, but the servers' greatest source of rage is, of course, tipping. "It's the only job where your hourly wage is totally dependent on how random people feel about you," Ms. Donohue said. "How many times have you gotten bad service at Kinko's? Do you get to dock their pay?" The vengefulness of the posts, and the recurrence of anecdotes that involve adding foreign fluids to customers' food, from breast milk to laxatives, is enough to turn anyone who dares to enter a restaurant into a nervous, toadying wreck. Jesse Elizondo, a waiter who has worked in New York restaurants for 10 years, says that's because customers generally forget how vulnerable they are to the good will of servers. "I can never understand why anyone would be even the slightest bit rude to someone who is about to touch your food," he said. Mr. Elizondo said he discovered the forums after a bad night at work on Restaurant Row, when he went home and typed "waiter" and "revenge" into an Internet search engine. He is amazed by the challenges that customers bring into the dining room, he said, adding: "The cellphones are a big problem for us. And you wouldn't believe how many people think they can bring their own liquor, or keep their big plastic water bottle on the table. I try to assume that people just don't know any better, but sometimes it's impossible, especially with the Europeans who act so sophisticated when it's time to order the wine but so ignorant when it's time to tip the waiter." Online venting has become a vigorous art form for many servers, especially those who are waiting on tables to finance careers as writers or performers. "Where else can you observe human nature at its worst, night after night?" Ms. Donohue, a comedian, said. "The whole system seems to invite bad behavior." Rima Maamari worked her way through college at a Toronto steakhouse, and said that she never intended to write about waitressing when she joined a blogging circle for writers. But, she said, "everyone was so interested in reading about the stuff going on behind a waiter's poker face" that her reports from the front became her only subject. "People feel very strongly about this stuff, and not only waiters," she said. "I got a lot of bitter e-mails from people about how they shouldn't have to tip for bad service." One customer, an ex-waiter, wrote on www.bitterwaitress.com, "You people should QUIT WHINING or get another job." Aline Steiner, a customer who was working online at the East Village cafe Teany last week, said she had visited some of these sites, including [10]www.shamelessrestaurants.com, a controversial New York-based site where employees post anonymously with complaints about their employers. "I think that as long as it's anonymous, there is no validity, and no harm done," she said. "But if they really want things to change, all of these issues are going to have to come out somehow. People want to be aware of how their vegetables are grown, how their chickens are killed. They should be aware of how restaurants work." From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:42:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:42:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Not Just for Emergencies Anymore Message-ID: The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Not Just for Emergencies Anymore http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/03/technology/circuits/03elde.html 5.2.3 By JEFFREY SELINGO LONG after cellphones became an annoyance in movie theaters and restaurants, the incessant ringing turned up at an unexpected place: the Holiday Park Senior Center in Wheaton, Md., near Washington. It started about a year ago, when musical performances and lectures began to be interrupted regularly. The problem got so bad that the 600 people who come daily for various programs had to be reminded to turn off their phones. "Some doctor would be talking about a disease and a cellphone would start ringing," said Phil Smakula, a supervisor for the county's programs for the elderly and the center's former director. "Most of the time they weren't exactly urgent calls. They were making plans to go to the movies or have dinner with a neighbor." The cellphone, once viewed by older people solely as a device for use in emergencies, is becoming an everyday convenience. Encouraged by inexpensive calling plans, older Americans are using cellphones to call their grandchildren at college, or to set up a bridge game at their retirement community. "I resisted getting a cellphone for quite a while," said Millie Salwen, 78, who bought one two years ago when she lived in Manhattan and found it increasingly difficult to find a pay phone near Bryant Park, where she worked as a volunteer. "Now, I can't live without it." After a move to Lasell Village, a retirement community near Boston, Ms. Salwen continues to use the cellphone a few times a week. "It doesn't intimidate me anymore," she said. Half of Americans ages 65 to 74 own mobile phones, according to the Yankee Group, a technology research firm, as do 30 percent of those 75 to 84. Four years ago, the firm estimates, only 15 percent of people over 65 were wireless customers. And older users are increasingly attracted to cellphones for general use, not merely safety, the firm says. The increase in cellphone use among older Americans is coming despite, not because of, the wireless industry. Carriers make little effort to appeal to older customers, directing most of their marketing efforts to younger people who are more likely to use (and pay for) extra features like text messaging and voice mail. Indeed, older consumers often complain that all those features - accessible on ever-smaller phones with tiny keys - leave them confused. AARP, the advocacy and lobbying group for older Americans, says cellphone service is the benefit most requested by its 35 million members. In response to complaints about poor service and hard-to-use phones, the organization is testing a program that will provide members with discounted calling plans and handsets from several carriers as well as materials about how to operate the devices. Linda Barrabee, a senior wireless analyst for the Yankee Group, said no carrier had taken the lead in marketing its services to older Americans, even though older customers represent one of the last remaining segments of the population where there is potential for subscriber growth. Nearly 80 percent of people 19 to 65 already own a cellphone. In some ways, Ms. Larrabee said, older people are the more attractive customers, because they tend to be loyal to brands, use fewer minutes and require less time with customer service. None of the cellphone carriers make public their subscriber base by age group. But Mary Nell Westbrook, a spokeswoman for [1]Sprint PCS, called the elderly market "a very narrow segment." The company does not aim its advertising at older people, she said, because they tend to become customers through family calling plans, which come with several handsets and a bundle of free minutes for one price. [2]Sprint, Ms. Westbrook added, "targets youth and baby boomers, who are obvious users." [3]Verizon officials, too, say older people are mainly customers through family plans. Sometimes that "family" is simply a group of seniors. For example, Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon, said that his 67-year-old mother is on a family plan with a 71-year-old friend. Most older people with mobile phones still carry them mainly for security purposes. Some have handsets, given away by local police departments, that work only to call 911. Others, like Thelma Leskowitz, have restricted calling plans that charge for every minute used. Mrs. Leskowitz, 79, who lives in Framingham, Mass., said she makes calls more frequently these days than when her son bought her the cellphone five years ago. "I never used it when I first got it," she said. Now, although she does not describe herself as an everyday user, she makes a call if she needs "to reach someone quickly," even if she's in the car, where she normally leaves her phone. "But I pull over," she quickly added. "I do not drive and talk." Mrs. Leskowitz said she would probably use her phone more often if she could find a cheap calling plan and better understand how the phone works. She recalled accidentally hanging up on her daughter-in-law once because she pressed the wrong button. "They're not the easiest things to figure out," she said. Plenty of other older customers agree. Myrtle Clark, 67, of New Braunfels, Tex., said that when she got her [4]Nokia phone a year ago the instruction manual included directions for several different models. "It wasn't helpful," Ms. Clark said. "It took me a day just to figure out what model I bought." Even frequent users say a mobile phone's keypad and screen are too small for older people, especially those who have poor eyesight or arthritis. Many older cellphone owners often learn only enough about the phone to make and receive calls, and rarely, if ever, use features like the phone book or text messaging. And do not even get them started on voice mail. Flossie Berger, 77, of Longboat Key, Fla., said she gave up on checking her voice mail soon after she got her mobile phone two years ago. "I would always forget the numbers to dial, and then I'd forget my password," she said. "Now people know not to leave a message." When Mrs. Berger visited New York recently, her granddaughter used her phone's calculator to figure out the tip at a restaurant. "She said I should learn how to use that, but I have no interest," Mrs. Berger said. "To me, it's just a phone." But to manufacturers and carriers, the handset has become much more than a phone. The trend now is to pack as many features as possible into a device that is getting smaller. In turn, the phones are becoming more complicated to use. Patricia Moore, a noted industrial designer and gerontologist, describes the design of cellphones as abysmal. For one thing, she said, every one works differently. To illustrate her point, when Dr. Moore gives a presentation she often asks her audience to turn on their cellphones and pass them to a neighboring person to make a call. "They have this frozen moment," she said. "They are looking for a prompt that is familiar to them, not one that is familiar to the manufacturer." Technology message boards at AARP's Web site ([5]www.aarp.org) and other sites for seniors are filled with complaints about cellphone service and the devices themselves. Many users want to know why manufacturers have not copied handsets sold in Asia that are easier to see and hear. (For example, the NS 1000, a basic cellphone with large keys manufactured by LG Electronics, is only available in Korea.) Such phones, though, are not likely to show up soon in the United States. Curtis Wick, director of the test and technical support engineering group for LG USA, said manufacturers in Asia usually sell handsets that are more advanced than those in the United States because users there were willing to sacrifice quality for the latest technology, and often bought their handsets directly from the manufacturer. By comparison, Mr. Wick said, American consumers want "all the bugs worked out first" and purchase their phones through carriers, who dictate the features they want in the handsets. "We don't get a lot of requests to make products that are easier for the elderly to use," he said. Eventually, Ms. Barrabee of the Yankee Group said, manufacturers will have to start paying attention to this demographic as today's baby boomers move into retirement. "They will have the same issues that seniors have now, and they will demand changes as longtime customers," she said. But it is unclear whether cellphone use among older people would become more widespread if a special handset were offered. Like some younger users, many older cellphone customers blame the technology for the loss of civility in public life. "People speak on these things everywhere and anywhere as if they're in a private phone booth," Mrs. Leskowitz said. "I cannot bear these public conversations." Carrying a cellphone regularly can also require a change in habits. When Mrs. Berger first got her cellphone, she often left it at home. "Little good it would do me, sitting at home, if I had an emergency," she said. But she has become used to bringing it with her. "I'm hooked on it," she said. "It makes me feel young." From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:43:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:43:44 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Regimens: Cause, Effect and Vegetables Message-ID: Vital Signs: Regimens: Cause, Effect and Vegetables NYT January 11, 2005 By JOHN O'NEIL Many large-scale epidemiological studies have found that vegetarians are less likely than meat eaters to have high blood pressure. But moving from that observation to proof of cause and effect can be difficult, because the findings may reflect an unknown third factor - for example, a tendency of vegetarians to do other healthy things as well. An article in the January issue of the journal Nutrition Reviews examined a number of studies that found ways around that difficulty, in some cases by comparing two groups who led similar lives except for diet. One set of researchers, for instance, turned to monks. Trappists are strict vegetarians, and Benedictines are not, and blood pressure, they found, was lower in Trappist monasteries. Other researchers compared Seventh-day Adventists, who avoid alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and meat, with Mormons, who shun those substances except meat. The researchers found that fewer Adventists had hypertension and that the gap widened with age. Other researchers have tried to settle the question experimentally, by assigning meat-eating subjects to vegetarian or omnivorous diets, according to the new article, whose lead author was Dr. Susan E. Berkow of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. One such study, of people with normal blood pressure, found that six weeks without meat led to an average drop of 5 points in systolic pressure, the upper number, and a 2-or-3-point drop in diastolic pressure. In a yearlong study of mild hypertension, the blood pressure of people on a vegetarian diet dropped compared with those still eating meat, even though three-quarters of the vegetarian group stopped taking medication for high blood pressure. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/health/11regi.html From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:44:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:44:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Pixelmatic (au): Will life be worth living in 2000 AD? Message-ID: http://www.pixelmatic.com.au/2000/ Will life be worth living in 2000 AD? July 22, 1961, Weekend Magazine What sort of life will you be living 39 years from now? Scientists have looked into the future and they can tell you. It looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom. You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 miles an hour and you will think nothing of taking a fortnight's holiday in outer space. Your house will probably have air walls, and a floating roof, adjustable to the angle of the sun. Doors will open automatically, and clothing will be put away by remote control. The heating and cooling systems will be built into the furniture and rugs. You'll have a home control room - an electronics centre, where messages will be recorded when you're away from home. This will play back when you return, and also give you up-to-the minute world news, and transcribe your latest mail. You'll have wall-to-wall global TV, an indoor swimming pool, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV. Press a button and you can change the d?cor of a room. The status symbol of the year 2000 will be the home computer help, which will help mother tend the children, cook the meals and issue reminders of appointments. Cooking will be in solar ovens with microwave controls. Garbage will be refrigerated, and pressed into fertiliser pellets. Food won't be very different from 1961, but there will be a few new dishes - instant bread, sugar made from sawdust, foodless foods (minus nutritional properties), juice powders and synthetic tea and cocoa. Energy will come in tablet form. At work, Dad will operate on a 24 hour week. The office will be air-conditioned with stimulating scents and extra oxygen - to give a physical and psychological lift. Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile. There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators. Machines will "talk" to each other. It will be the age of press-button transportation. Rocket belts will increase a man's stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways. There will be moving plastic-covered pavements, individual hoppicopters, and 200 m.p.h. monorail trains operating in all large cities. The family car will be soundless, vibrationless and self-propelled thermostatically. The engine will be smaller than a typewriter. Cars will travel overland on an 18 inch air cushion. Railways will have one central dispatcher, who will control a whole nation's traffic. Jet trains will be guided by electronic brains. In commercial transportation, there will be travel at 1000 m.p.h. at a penny a mile. Hypersonic passenger planes, using solid fuels, will reach any part of the world in an hour. By the year 2020, five per cent of the world's population will have emigrated into space. Many will have visited the moon and beyond. Our children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines. They will get pills to make them learn faster. We shall be healthier, too. There will be no common colds, cancer, tooth decay or mental illness. Medically induced growth of amputated limbs will be possible. Rejuvenation will be in the middle stages of research, and people will live, healthily, to 85 or 100. There's a lot more besides to make H.G. Wells and George Orwell sound like they're getting left behind. And this isn't science fiction. It's science fact - futuristic ideas, conceived by imaginative young men, whose crazy-sounding schemes have got the nod from the scientists. It's the way they think the world will live in the next century - if there's any world left! From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:45:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:45:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Chess Players Give 'Check' a New Meaning Message-ID: Chess Players Give 'Check' a New Meaning NYT January 13, 2005 By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN JAY BONIN, an international chess master who lives in New York, is one of the busiest players in the country. He takes part in face-to-face tournament matches every week and also regularly participates in games of speed chess at chessclub.com, the Internet Chess Club. He estimated that he has played more than 20,000 games online in the last three or four years. Mr. Bonin is much more active than most elite players, but he is doing what most serious players have long thought is necessary: playing frequently to stay in peak form. Now, however, because of the widespread availability of databases of games and the growing strength of chess software, such activity may actually be making it easier to beat him. Mr. Bonin said that he recently lost a tournament game to a weaker player who had not competed in years, but who had sprung a surprise move on him in one of Mr. Bonin's favorite openings. "The line he played reeked of preparation," he said. The problem for elite players is that while practice is important, so too is study and preparation - knowing the best moves and knowing what opponents like to play. There are many ways to play a chess game, particularly in the opening sequences, and some players may have studied the first 15 or 20 moves of their favorite openings, like the Kings Indian defense, the Ruy Lopez or hundreds of others that are known by shorthand names. Game databases, many of which are online, give players information about what opening strategies their opponents use. And rapidly improving chess computer programs can analyze games and make suggestions about what to play. In many cases, electronic game collections are replacing books as chess players' primary source of information. Using computers and databases during tournament matches is not allowed, and most players say that cheating is rare. But using such systems to help prepare has become ubiquitous. Gregory Shahade, an international master, said he has used databases, partly because everyone else does, too. Mr. Shahade said that he did not think that he had ever lost a game because an opponent prepared a special opening, but that he felt computers and databases have made chess more predictable and probably less fun. "It seems there is less creativity now," he said. Garry Kasparov, a former world champion and still the world's top ranked player, agreed that electronic aids may have stifled creativity, at least in the openings. It certainly has made things more difficult for the more innovative players. Before people started using databases, a player who came up with a new move in an opening might be able to use it several times before enough people found out about it to start preparing for it. Now innovations are known almost as soon as they are played. "The profit maybe is very small," Mr. Kasparov said. "You can only use it one game." Mr. Kasparov himself may be most responsible for the widespread adoption of electronic aids by chess players. Andr? Schulz, editor of Chessbase (chessbase.com), an online database and news site based in Hamburg, Germany, said that Mr. Kasparov met one of the company's founders, Matthias Wullenweber, in 1985, when Mr. Kasparov was preparing for his second world championship match against Anatoly Karpov. With suggestions from Mr. Kasparov, Mr. Wullenweber created a program that would allow someone to search a database of games based on different specifications, like player names, positions and opening names. Mr. Kasparov was enthusiastic about the resulting program and when Mr. Wullenweber started selling it, Mr. Kasparov gave it an endorsement sure to catch the attention of other players. "It's the greatest development for chess since the invention of the printing press," Mr. Kasparov said. Chessbase.com, which now has more than three million games, is updated every week. Mr. Schulz said that many of the new games are supplied by tournament directors who collect them from the players. Most of the games are in the public domain, so there is no cost to acquire them. The games are entered using notation that has a designation for each piece and each square. Many games are from elite players - including some played hundreds of years ago - but there are also a great many games from average players. That way, Mr. Schulz said, it is possible to look up games played by your next opponent. Mr. Schulz, who is about master strength, plays in a league in Hamburg and knew who his likely opponent was going to be in a match Monday. Although his opponent was ranked lower than him, Mr. Schulz found some of his opponent's games to see what he usually plays. Their game ended in a draw. Mr. Schulz said that in this match and others, having access to archived games was useful. "I have a better feeling now than if I come to the board cold," he said, adding that he was not worried that opponents probably prepare for him in the same way. Not all players are so unconcerned. For the last three years, Mr. Shahade has organized a tournament, the New York Masters, every Tuesday night at the Marshall Chess Club in the West Village in Lower Manhattan. One game from each round can be seen live on the Internet Chess Club. Mr. Shahade said one prominent player, whom he did not identify, had complained because he did not want people seeing what he plays. The Internet Chess Club, which is based in Pittsburgh, archives all of the games from top players who play at the site, which is one reason so many people know what Mr. Bonin plays. Hal Bogner, a consultant to the site, said players can preserve anonymity if they log on as a guest. Although no one knows how often that happens, Nigel Short, a British grandmaster, wrote in an article several years ago that he was certain that a guest he played at the site was the former world champion Bobby Fischer. While databases have changed preparation, chess programs may be changing how people play. Alexander Shabalov, 37, a grandmaster, said he had noticed that players ages 15 to 25 play differently than older players because they have spent so much time going up against computers. Because computers are so good at tactics, younger players are more tactical, Mr. Shabalov said, and more willing to take risks. "They will take a pawn or a piece if they don't see the refutation," Mr. Shabalov said. "When I was younger, I assumed that stronger opponents knew what they were doing and I wouldn't do that. The computers make them bolder. They defend better." Not all strong players believe that electronic aids are equalizers. Jaan Ehlvest, 42, an Estonian grandmaster, said that better players are more able to take advantage of the abundant information provided by computers and databases because they have the expertise to identify the ideas that are worth pursuing. For lesser players, he said, computers can actually slow development because they cannnot separate the good ideas from the bad. Mr. Ehlvest added that in any case he did not believe that computers made people better than they otherwise would be. Instead, they can help them reach their potential sooner. "Now you see 14-year-old grandmasters because they accumulate information much faster than in my day," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/technology/circuits/13ches.html From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:46:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:46:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: When Dinosaurs Ruled, a Mammal Ate (a Little) One Message-ID: When Dinosaurs Ruled, a Mammal Ate (a Little) One NYT January 13, 2005 By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD [You may already have heard about this.] In the time of dinosaurs, mammals were the meek that had yet to inherit the earth. They were small creatures, many no bigger than mice, and essentially nocturnal, feeding mainly on insects and cowering in holes and underbrush from the terrible tread of the reptilian lords of the land. Two newly discovered fossils show that this lowly image of early mammals, long the reigning view of science, did not do them justice. A few of these animals were as large as a dog and spunky enough to devour dinosaurs, at least juvenile dinosaurs. The 130-million-year-old fossils, announced yesterday by Chinese paleontologists, challenge conventional thinking and lead to a new and more diverse perception of mammal life in the Mesozoic era, 280 million to 65 million years ago. In interviews and a report being published today in the journal Nature, the researchers described finding the skull and most of the bones of what they say is the largest mammal known to live in the age of dinosaurs. The animal's skull was half again the length of the next largest mammal of the period. The entire body probably weighed 30 pounds and stretched more than three feet, longer than a good-size basset hound's. >From the same fossil beds in northern China, the paleontologists also uncovered the remains of a related species about 15 inches long, the size of an opossum, and made a striking observation. The mammal's last meal had been a juvenile dinosaur. Its limbs, fingers and teeth were lodged within the mammal's rib cage where its stomach had been. The dog-size animal has been named Repenomamus giganticus. The smaller one is a specimen of Repenomamus robustus. "Our discoveries," the scientists wrote in the journal report, "constitute the first direct evidence that some of these mammals were carnivorous and fed on small vertebrates, including young dinosaurs, and also show that Mesozoic mammals had a much greater range of body sizes than previously known." The scientists further concluded that "Mesozoic mammals occupied diverse niches and that some large mammals probably competed with dinosaurs for food and territory." Dr. Anne Weil, a paleontologist at Duke University who was not involved in the research, agreed that the fossils were a fascinating discovery and certain to shake up the field of early mammal studies. In an accompanying article in Nature, Dr. Weil said, "These latest finds should trigger another avalanche of questions and speculation." She and other paleontologists said several recent discoveries had yielded clues suggesting that some species were at least as large as robustus and might have been as large as giganticus. But the new fossil skeletons are more complete and definitive, they said. Dr. Jin Meng, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and a member of the discovery team, said that any Mesozoic mammal remains were rare and that these were "giving us a drastically new picture" of many of the animals of the age of dinosaurs. Standing in the museum laboratory with the carefully cleaned bones of the mammal that ate the little dinosaur, Dr. Meng said, "Now we have to see how common was the phenomenon of these larger, carnivorous species." But in one respect, he added, the general pattern of Mesozoic life remained unchanged: although other large early specimens may be found, most of the mammals were still small and no match for the dominant reptiles. Primitive mammals presumably had little chance to evolve in stature because the dinosaurs and other reptiles were stronger, lived longer and moved faster than the mammals in the competition for food and favorable habitats. Only with the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago could the mammals begin to assert themselves and flourish in size and diversity, evolving into lions and tigers and bears and, in time, humans who are curious about life when the world was younger. The two skeletons were collected in 2003 by farmers at the abundant fossil deposits in Liaoning Province in China, where many dinosaurs and a sprinkling of their mammalian contemporaries have been uncovered in recent years. The fossils caught the eye of visiting scientists, who bought them and took them to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing for detailed examination. Yaoming Hu, a researcher at the institute and a graduate student the City University of New York, is the lead author of the journal report of the discovery. The co-authors are Dr. Meng, Mr. Hu's dissertation adviser; and Dr. Yuanqing Wang and Chuankui Li, both of the Beijing institute. An artist's rendering of the two species, giganticus and robustus, showed animals with low-slung bodies with short legs and long tails, as suggested by the fossils. They are covered in dark, short-haired fur, for which there is no direct evidence; if the animals were primarily nocturnal, it is assumed that evolution would have favored those with dark fur for concealment. The researchers said giganticus, though it resembled no animal living today and has no living descendants, was somewhat comparable to a Tasmanian devil, a squat, carnivorous marsupial living on the Australian island of Tasmania. Analysis of the giganticus teeth indicated that the specimen was an adult. Its combined head and body was 60 percent longer than that of its robustus cousin. The well-preserved remains of giganticus are at the paleontology institute in Beijing. A full-scale replica is being prepared for a new dinosaur exhibition at the American museum, opening in May. Geological dating of sediments in the fossil beds showed that both species lived at approximately the same time, about 130 million years ago. The animals that were fossilized in the region probably died in volcanic eruptions. The first fossils of robustus were excavated in 2000, when it was recognized as the largest known Mesozoic mammal represented by substantially complete remains. Dr. Wang was one of the discoverers. The specimen was assigned the genus Repenomamus, combining words for reptiles and mammals to reflect the animal's reptile-mammal attributes. The big surprise about the new robustus fossils being reported now was not revealed until researchers had a close look in the Beijing laboratory. Mr. Hu pointed to the skeleton, in the American museum lab, and showed the patch of small bones in the rib cage. They were the tiny limbs, fingers and teeth of a juvenile psittacosaur, a two-legged herbivorous dinosaur common in the Chinese fossil beds. The baby dinosaur, Mr. Hu said, was only five inches long, a third the size of the animal that ate it. An adult psittacosaur was often six feet tall. Judging by the mammal's teeth and jaws, it did not chew its food, but swallowed the dinosaur in chunks. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/science/13mammal.html From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:47:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:47:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Genetic Engineering through Diet Message-ID: Genetic Engineering through Diet http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-14-5 Nutrients that affect genes in the womb may affect children's health later in life, and now researchers are working to learn which foods might do what By Liz Brown Betterhumans Staff 1/14/2005 6:39 PM Eating for two: Researchers are studying embryonic stem cells to learn how nutrients may affect gene activity to influence children's health Everyone knows an expectant mom needs to eat well. But diet could be even more important to a baby's development than previously thought, as nutrients that affect genes in the womb may influence children's health later in life. And now researchers are working to learn which foods might do what. In 2003, American researchers at [8]Duke University in Durham, North Carolina proved that [9]diet could influence coat color and disease susceptibility in unborn mice. However, toying with diets of human mothers and their unborn children is out of the question. So scientists funded by the UK's [10]Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) are testing the phenomenon using human embryonic stem cells. DNA tagging With embryonic stem cells, the researchers, from the [11]University of Nottingham in the UK, observe a process called [12]methylation. Methylation is one way the body controls which genes are activated in certain tissues by tagging DNA with chemical groups called methyl groups. As a baby grows and develops, methylation keeps order in gene activity. What a pregnant woman eats could alter the course of this process. "Specific nutrients in a mother's diet may alter methylation at critical stages of development and change the trajectory of how particular organs in the fetus develop," says [13]Lorraine Young, lead author of the study. "While this may have no impact on normal functioning of the baby, in adulthood lifetime environmental pressures may have more adverse effects and predispose adult disease." This could explain instances where a group of people is exposed to [14]carcinogens but only some develop cancer, while others aren't affected. Studying stem cells To study this phenomenon, Young and colleagues take human embryonic stem cells from five-day-old embryos donated by couples undergoing infertility treatment. The researchers then differentiate the cells into different tissues affected by common adult diseases and observe changes in the methylation process when these tissues are treated with various nutrients such as [15]vitamin B12, [16]amino acids and [17]folic acid. [18]Randy Jirtle, one of the researchers who led the study of methylation in mice at Duke, believes that using human stem cells will provide greater insight into the process. "The epigenome of humans and mice are vastly different so it is very difficult to extrapolate specific findings between species," he says. Jirtle also points to further applications of this technology in tissue repair. "Such studies may also allow for the transdifferentiation of somatic human cells to be used in tissue repair without having to do therapeutic cloning." Far-reaching implications Most importantly though, finding the nutrient mix that's most beneficial for the stem cells could determine what the best conditions would be for children conceived using in vitro fertilization. "We need to do this type of research to optimize the in vitro conditions used for in vitro fertilization because the techniques presently used increase the incidence of developmental disorders resulting from genomic imprinting defects," adds Jirtle. Indeed, the implications of this research could be far-reaching and eventually prevent adult diseases in many people. "If we can identify specific nutrients and critical levels in the diet that may alter fetal development and predispose adult disease, health policies will ultimately be developed which advise women of the safest diets for the healthy future of their unborn children. In the long term, this may reduce the number of adults who contract major diseases," says Young. However, she warns that they are still several years away from gathering enough evidence to lay out specific diet recommendations. In the meantime, pregnant women concerned about their diet should consult their doctor or a registered dietician for advice. References 8. http://www.duke.edu/ 9. http://www.betterhumans.com/News/news.aspx?articleID=2003-08-05-2 10. http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/ 11. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ 12. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylation 13. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/human-development/staff/Young.htm 14. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinogen 15. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12 16. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acids 17. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folic_acid 18. http://www.dukemednews.duke.edu/experts/detail.php?id=298 From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:52:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:52:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] ODNB: Samuel Beckett Message-ID: Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906-1989), author by James Knowlson Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 James Knowlson, 'Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906-1989)', Oxford Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906-1989), author , was born on 13 April 1906 at Cooldrinagh, Kerrymount Avenue, Foxrock, co. Dublin, the second of two children of William Frank Beckett (1871-1933), a quantity surveyor, and his wife, Maria, known as May (1871-1950), daughter of Samuel Roe, a miller of Newbridge in co. Kildare, and his wife, Annie. He was descended from middle-class, solidly protestant, Anglo-Irish stock. William Beckett was an affectionate father and a charming, clubbable, 'absolutely non-intellectual' man, as his son described him (Knowlson, 10), who left his case of Dickens and encyclopaedias unopened. The fiercely independent, strong-willed Beckett had a much more difficult relationship with his protective, equally strong-willed mother, whose 'savage loving' at times overwhelmed him. On the whole he grew up happily in prosperous Foxrock, a village close enough to Dublin for businessmen to commute by train, but rural enough for Beckett to take himself off into the countryside to wander or read alone. He was a fearless, adventurous boy, later an intrepid motorcyclist and an excellent sportsman. Early years and education After attending a small kindergarten school run by Miss Ida and Miss Pauline Elsner in nearby Stillorgan, Beckett went to private schools, first Earlsfort House in Dublin, then Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, co. Fermanagh, where his elder brother, Frank, was already a boarder. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1923 and read French and Italian in the modern European literature course. It is often forgotten that he also studied English literature for two years with the Shakespeare scholar Professor Wilbraham Fitzjohn Trench. In 1927 he obtained a first-class degree with a gold medal, doing outstandingly well in French, under his true mentor at Trinity College, Professor Thomas Brown Rudmose-Brown, who inspired Beckett's love of Ronsard, Sc?ve, Petrarch, and Racine, as well as introducing him to a wide range of modern French poets. Beckett also took Italian classes from a private tutor, Bianca Esposito, who took him through Dante's Divina commedia. Dante's great poem was a constant source of fascination and a great inspiration to him. While he was at Trinity College, he had his first experience of love in the person of a scintillating, brilliant young woman, Ethna MacCarthy, also a pupil of Rudmose-Brown. Although he adored her and she inspired two of his most beautiful poems, 'Alba' and 'Yoke of liberty', she did not reciprocate his love-though they remained friends for the rest of her life. After graduating he taught French for two terms at Campbell College, Belfast, an experience which he disliked intensely. To his parents' horror he then had a serious love affair with his first cousin, Ruth Margaret (Peggy) Sinclair. In November 1928 Beckett took up a post as lecteur d'anglais (teaching assistant in English) in Paris at the distinguished ?cole Normale Sup?rieure in the rue d'Ulm. He became friendly in the capital with the self-exiled Irish writer James Joyce. Beckett was strongly influenced by the force of Joyce's personality, by the range of his culture, and by his total dedication to his art. Joyce's example inspired him to write. But, although aware from an early stage that he needed to discover his own distinctive voice, he found it extremely difficult at first to escape from Joyce's stylistic influence: 'I vow I will get over J. J. ere I die. Yessir', he wrote in 1931 to Samuel Putnam. Early writings While living in Paris Beckett wrote (and saw published) a prize-winning poem about Descartes called Whoroscope (1930). He also published his first two critical essays, one (guided in his reading by Joyce) on early sections of what was to become Finnegans Wake, entitled 'Dante . Bruno. Vico . Joyce' (transition , 1929), the other a brilliant, precocious study of Proust, published in 1931. He returned to Dublin in autumn 1930 to take up a lectureship in French at Trinity College, where he lectured on Racine, Moli?re, the Romantic poets, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Gide, and Bergson. He was, however, pathologically shy and detested the self-exposure that lecturing involved. Always a stern auto-critic, he also regarded this activity as 'teaching others what he did not know himself'. So he resigned his appointment after only four terms and set out instead to become a writer, translator, and literary journalist. After a short stay with Peggy Sinclair's family in Kassel early in 1932, Beckett returned to live in Paris, where, installed for six months in the Trianon Palace Hotel, he wrote the major part of a novel entitled Dream of Fair to Middling Women , begun in Dublin a year earlier. He failed to get the book published at the time, however, and it appeared posthumously in 1992. It is a clever, probably much too clever, linguistic extravaganza, full of reworked literary quotations. But it overturns most of the conventions of traditional fiction and is a remarkable bravura performance for so young a man. Because of a clamp-down on foreigners, Beckett found that he had to leave Paris and, desperately short of money, he returned home via London to a family situation where he found himself in constant conflict with his concerned but dominant mother. Just two months after the death of Peggy Sinclair from tuberculosis, Beckett's father died on 26 June 1933, leaving him feeling guilty and depressed-primarily at having let down his father by resigning from his academic post. He was suffering from panic and a racing heart, which had disturbed him in a milder form ever since his student days; his troubles were diagnosed as likely to be mental in origin, and he was forced to go to England to seek psychological help in London (psychoanalysis was not permitted in Dublin at the time). He underwent psychotherapy for almost two years with Wilfred Rupert Bion at the Tavistock Clinic. During this period, Beckett also read books on psychology and psychoanalysis by Freud, Stekel, Adler, Jones, and Rank. He several times visited the Bethlem Royal Hospital, where an old Portora schoolfriend worked as a doctor. Beckett's own experience of psychotherapy and his enduring interest in schizophrenia, obsessional neuroses, and other forms of mental disturbance had a deep impact on his later prose fiction and plays. Although he had turned his back earlier on an academic career, he remained a scholar at heart, reading widely in the mid-1930s on philosophy, literature, and science; most of his philosophy notes have been preserved. From this date on, his writings had a strong philosophical infrastructure. In 1934 Beckett published More Pricks than Kicks , a collection of ten witty and satirical short stories about an Irish intellectual called Belacqua Shuah, borrowing the name of Belacqua from Dante's indolent figure in the Purgatorio. He had also used the name in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and recycled some of the abandoned Dream material in More Pricks than Kicks. In 1935 he assembled the best of his erudite but highly personal poems into a slim volume entitled Echo's Bones and other Precipitates. He also tried to create a name for himself in literary circles by contributing poems and book reviews to The Spectator, The Bookman, and The Criterion. But both the poems and the reviews tended to be learned and obscure, and he had scant success. During his stay in London for psychotherapy Beckett began a novel, set in London and Dublin, called Murphy . Completed by June 1936, this was turned down by dozens of publishers and was not published until 1938. An intellectual, comic novel of ideas, Murphy is probably one of Beckett's least experimental works. Yet it still deals with some of his most persistent themes: the uneasy relationship of mind and body and the desire to escape from the 'big blooming buzzing confusion' (Beckett, Murphy, 245) of a world of ambition, aspiration, and will, to seek out instead a state of quietistic peace. In 1936-7, dogged by ill health, Beckett toured Nazi Germany, indulging his passionate interest in painting and sculpture. On returning home he became involved in a celebrated court case when he acted as chief witness for his uncle, Harry Sinclair, who had been libelled by Oliver St John Gogarty. While standing up for his uncle's good name, he was publicly humiliated as the 'bawd and blasphemer from Paris'. After a blazing row with his mother he left Ireland to settle down finally in Paris, where on 5 January 1938 he was stabbed by a pimp. When his assailant met Beckett in court, he told him that he did not know why he had done it. Beckett had been in a coma for a few hours and, although the knife had narrowly missed his heart, he was seriously ill for some time. Before and after the stabbing Beckett had a number of affairs. One was with the American art collector and heiress Peggy Guggenheim, who admitted that she was 'entirely obsessed for over a year by the strange creature, Samuel Beckett' (P. Guggenheim, Out of this Century , 1980, 167); they had a turbulent sexual relationship which evolved into a strange friendship. Another was with the Frenchwoman Suzanne Georgette Anna Deschevaux-Dumesnil (1901-1989), an accomplished pianist. He had met Suzanne some ten years before, and when she learned of his stabbing from a newspaper she visited him several times in hospital. They were soon living together at 6 rue des Favorites but did not marry until 1961. Although Beckett described the period just before the outbreak of the Second World War as a 'period of lostness, drifting around, seeing a few friends-a period of apathy and lethargy' (Knowlson, 295), he was evolving specifically as a French writer. In 1938-9 he wrote some poems in French and translated Murphy with the help of a friend, Alfred P?ron, who had been the French lecteur during Beckett's final year as a student. After the fall of France in June 1940 P?ron introduced Beckett, supposedly neutral as an Irishman, to a British-controlled Special Operations Executive (SOE) resistance cell, Gloria SMH. Beckett worked as a liaison officer and translator, receiving and passing on messages from various agents, first to a photographer for microfilming, then to a courier to be taken over the line into the unoccupied zone. But the cell was infiltrated, and in August 1942 its members were betrayed by a French priest, Robert Alesch, who was working for the German Abwehr. Many members of the group were arrested and deported to concentration camps but, forewarned by P?ron's wife, Beckett and Suzanne managed to escape with hours to spare. After spending several weeks on the run, they lived out the rest of the war in the little village of Roussillon in the Vaucluse, where Beckett wrote his extraordinary novel Watt, partly as a stylistic exercise and partly in order to stay sane in a place where he was cut off from most intellectual pursuits. Written in English, it was a daring linguistic experiment and, because of its strange subject matter as well as its manner, was not published until 1953. After the war he was decorated with the medals of the Croix de Guerre and the m?daille de la Reconnaissance Fran?aise. Characteristically, he told nobody about these decorations-not even his closest friends. A frenzy of writing After the war Beckett returned to Ireland to see his mother, but in order to obtain permission to return to France to join Suzanne he volunteered to work as an interpreter and storekeeper at the Irish Red Cross hospital in the Normandy town of St-L?, which had been devastated by allied bombing and shelling after the D-day landings. He returned to Paris to endure the most poverty-stricken years of his life. At this time he engaged in a remarkable 'frenzy of writing' in French, while Suzanne worked at dressmaking and gave music lessons in an attempt to make ends meet. The war had a lasting effect on Beckett's personal philosophy and his writing. Many aspects of his later works were born out of his experiences of uncertainty, disorientation, danger, deprivation, and exile. While visiting his mother in Foxrock he also had a 'revelation' which marked something of a turning point in how he approached his writing: 'Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel' (Graver and Federman, 217). He recognized earlier that he had to divorce himself from Joyce's stylistic influence. Now he realized that he had to follow a radically different path from Joyce, who believed that knowledge was a creative way of understanding and controlling the world. Beckett's 'own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding' (Knowlson, 352). Light, knowledge, understanding, and success were replaced by darkness, impotence, ignorance, and failure. Beckett also realized that he needed to draw on the turmoil and uncertainty of his own inner consciousness rather than on the external, 'real' world; contradictions would be allowed greater freedom; the imagination would be given the scope to construct alternative worlds. To express this vision Beckett rejected some of the techniques that he had followed earlier. Writing in French allowed him to achieve a greater simplicity and objectivity. His prose was no longer full of the densely layered quotations and erudite allusions of his English prose of the 1930s. Beckett's first novel in French, Mercier et Camier was finished in 1946. He regarded it later as an apprentice work and was unwilling to have it published until 1970. It was, however, something of a sourcebook for his later writing and allowed him to experiment with dialogue, preparing him for his excursions into drama. At the beginning of 1947 he wrote his first full-length play in French, Eleutheria -the title being a Greek word for freedom. He was very insistent throughout his life that this should be neither published nor performed, perhaps because it contained certain autobiographical features or had some flaws in its construction. As a result the play was published only after his death. Beckett's financial situation and his health were precarious immediately after the war. But he wrote frenetically and in French. He completed the novel trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (Malone Dies) (1951), and L'innommable (The Unnamable) (1953), on which, with his play En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot ), so much of his reputation as an innovator and a master stylist in French and English rests. For, unusually, Beckett himself translated most of his prose texts and his plays from one language into the other, working in both directions and re-creating the work each time in the other language. The novels and novellas of the post-war years showed how much the revelation in his mother's house had affected his writing. Characters blend into each other; clues followed, as if in a detective novel, lead nowhere; radical uncertainties about the world and the self predominate; philosophical, psychological, literary, or artistic motifs are no longer used allusively but are integrated into the structure of the work. Suzanne carried the original French manuscripts of the novels around a variety of publishers and, after dozens of refusals, a young publisher, J?r?me Lindon, at the ?ditions de Minuit finally accepted them. Waiting for Godot was first written in French between October 1948 and January 1949. Beckett's theatrical imagery for this play is stark and minimalist. Two tramp-clowns, Estragon and Vladimir, wait for someone called Godot to come. They hope that his visit will 'save' them. In the meantime they fill in 'the terrible silence that is waiting to flood into this play like water into a sinking ship' (Beckett) with banter and repeated actions. Two other passers-by (Pozzo and Lucky) arrive to provide a distraction (and display a view of life as a series of purposeless movements). After the visitors have left, a boy messenger comes to inform them that Mr Godot will not come today, but will certainly come tomorrow. The same pattern is repeated with significant variations in the second act: Lucky has become mute; Pozzo has gone blind. But a boy messenger returns to convey the same message about Mr Godot. Such apparent simplicity disguises some profound themes: life's brevity and its pain; the human need for something to confer meaning on a mysterious existence; in its absence, a compensatory need for friendship to protect and sustain, yet fail to satisfy; a Cartesian concern with the uneasy interplay of mind and body; and, above all, a radical uncertainty which characterizes every aspect of the two friends' lives. Man is seen, in Beckett's own words, as a 'non-know-er, a non-can-er'. The French actor-director Roger Blin, again contacted by Suzanne, then by Lindon, eventually managed to raise enough money to put on En attendant Godot at the tiny Th??tre de Babylone in Paris in January 1953. The extraordinary success of this first production in French was responsible for Beckett's rise to worldwide fame, as the play rapidly became an object of intense international interest and controversy. The first production of Beckett's own English translation, directed by Peter Hall, was staged at the Arts Theatre Club in London in August 1955. Kenneth Tynan's and Harold Hobson's reviews made it into an intellectual hit which has since been regarded as having transformed the British stage. Later work With money left to him by his mother Beckett had a small country house built near Ussy-sur-Marne outside Paris. For the first time in his adult life he also found himself comfortably off owing to the success of Waiting for Godot . In 1954 he lost his brother to cancer. He was with Frank until the end in what was one of the most devastating experiences of his life. Soon after this, however, he felt the return of his creative energy and wrote a first draft of Fin de partie (Endgame), a play profoundly marked by his brother's death. It was premiered in French in London on 3 April 1957. In 1956, at the request of the BBC, Beckett wrote a radio play, All that Fall . It drew on memories of his protestant childhood and his later abandoned faith. While writing the play Beckett was plunged into a state of depression, but the play itself is full of wit and vitality. He was further shattered by news that Ethna MacCarthy, married by then to one of his closest friends, A. J. Leventhal, was dying of cancer. But memories of her, combined with a number of related themes-a gnostic contrast of light and dark; the relationship with one's former self; an exploration of similarity and difference in human life-inspired his short play Krapp's Last Tape . At about this time he began a long-term relationship with Barbara Bray, a script editor at the BBC, with whom he remained on very close terms for the rest of his life, while never leaving his wife, Suzanne. He received an honorary degree of DLitt from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1959. Beckett started writing the play Happy Days (1961) in October 1960 and it opened on 1 November 1962. As in all Beckett's plays, philosophical concerns take the form of striking theatrical images. In this play a woman is buried up to her waist in act I and up to her neck in act II: 'a new stage metaphor for the old human condition-burial in a dying earth, exposure under a ruthless sun' (Cohn, The Comic Gamut), as the sands of time literally engulf her. Krapp's Last Tape and Play tend to 'destabilize and disperse' (Lawley) individual identity in plays which are built on a clever use of monologue. Yet we respond first at a human level to the physical, the concrete, and the visual. Only then do we move to the philosophical significance of the images, actions, or words. Beckett felt that, because of its very physical, corporeal nature, theatre inevitably involved compromise. In his post-war prose fiction he was less restricted in exploring his deepest concerns. He was freer to explore and attempt to express being, which for him was chaotic, formless, enigmatic, and mysterious. Language is form and form represents an obstacle to capturing being. Form is a sign of strength, whereas Beckett was seeking what he once referred to as a 'syntax of weakness'. So breaking down the traditional forms of fictional and theatrical structure and language became an essential element in a bold attempt to express such formless being. The novel trilogy, and Comment c'est (How It Is ) (1961) in particular, deal with issues of consciousness and the self. For to talk of the self one must objectify that self, hence create a self which is different from the one doing the observing or the describing. This results in a constantly receding series of observers or storytellers, voices or listeners. On 25 March 1961 Beckett secretly married Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil in Folkestone. He wanted Suzanne to inherit the rights to works whose publication she had tirelessly arranged. But he continued to see Barbara Bray, who had moved to live in Paris. His next play, Play (1964), parodied the conventional responses of a man and two women involved in an emotional triangle. In the mid-1960s Beckett's theatre commitments became very taxing. From that time on he directed his own plays both for the stage and for television. Chiefly he directed at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin and in the studios of S?ddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart, but also in Paris and London. In his own productions he refined his plays in the light of theatrical practicalities, introducing many small cuts and changes to his texts. Beckett's own theatrical notebooks prove that he was an excellent choreographer, with a talent for what he described as 'form in movement'. He also worked in New York on a film, entitled Film (1965), starring Buster Keaton and directed by his American director friend Alan Schneider; and on a play for television, Eh Joe (1967). While receiving treatment for what turned out to be a benign tumour in the roof of his mouth, he wrote a short play in English, Come and Go (1967), in which three women comment on their illnesses or imminent deaths. During this same period Beckett wrote a number of spare, minimalist prose texts in French. Imagination morte imaginez (Imagination Dead Imagine) (1965) is set in a white rotunda in which two figures exist like embryos waiting for birth or extinction. In Le d?peupleur (The Lost Ones) (1971) a larger cylinder is inhabited by 200 people who live out a strictly regulated Dantesque existence. Bing (Ping in English) (1966) features a single figure in a small white cube. These works come very close to being formalist constructs, creating alternative worlds. Yet the texts are powerful as well as enigmatic and, in spite of all appearances, they do draw from and reflect on the 'real' world. What remains of consciousness in a world where all is reduced? How can the imagination persist when it seems already to have died? Such 'residua' are attempts to continue expressing in a world of receding possibilities where one of the major restrictions is an acute awareness of the inadequacy of language to express. Beckett's plays of the 1970s come much closer to basic human concerns: in Not I (1973), a Mouth high in the darkness spews out words in an unstoppable stream-the theatrical equivalent of a Munch-like scream of despair; in Footfalls (1976) we are confronted by an image of distress and loss in the person of May, literally 'revolving it all in her poor mind', as she paces across the stage; in That Time (1976) the discontinuity of self, yet persistence of a basic consciousness, is revealed in a verbal kaleidoscope of images from different periods of the narrator's life. The central visual image, often inspired by particular paintings of the old masters (Giorgione, Rembrandt, Antonello, D?rer), is crucial to the dramatic effect. Yet Beckett combines words and visual images in a highly innovative way, as he explores what is essential to theatre for it still to remain theatre. In the early 1980s Beckett produced for a Beckett conference in Ohio a play called Ohio Impromptu (1981), which, with its two almost identical, gowned figures sitting at a table, resembles a Rembrandt or a Terborch painting. He also wrote the beautiful short play Rockaby (1981), in which a woman dressed in black is rocked backwards and forwards in a chair to the rhythm of her recorded voice. Her recorded words take the form of a poem. From time to time the live figure repeats the line 'Time she stopped' in synchronicity with the recording. Billie Whitelaw, one of Beckett's favourite actresses, played the woman in its first production. Last years In 1980 Company , a highly original prose text, first written in English, was published. Although there are autobiographical reminiscences, especially from Beckett's childhood, it is in no sense a conventional autobiography, for the text revolves around some of his most basic themes: solitude, loneliness, the unreliability of memory, uncertainties to do with both the self and the other. Another woman in black is recalled by the narrator of the prose piece Mal vu mal dit (Ill Seen Ill Said ), written in French and published in 1981. Surrounded by twelve shadowy figures, the woman is drawn to a stone that resembles a white tombstone. Then, this time in English, and partly inspired by Edgar's speech in King Lear, 'The worst is not so long as one can say, This is the worst', he wrote another quite extraordinary prose piece, Worstward Ho (1983), about the will to 'fail better'. Though concerned with the failure of language, it achieves a chilling vibrancy in its stark prose. Stirrings Still (1988) was Beckett's last prose text, although his final piece of writing was a poem, Comment dire (What is the Word) (1989), written after he had regained consciousness in a hospital following a fall. As a young man Beckett was shy, taciturn, and self-absorbed. In later life he became far more genial and was noted for his kindness and his generosity towards others. Although witty, warm, and friendly with close friends, he was never gregarious and hated invasions of his privacy. He refused to be interviewed or to have any part in promoting his books. His physical appearance was very striking: he was 6 feet tall, with a face like an Aztec eagle, piercing blue eyes, large ears, and spiky hair. Beckett's interests were highly intellectual. He read widely in English, French, Italian, and German literature. In his late twenties and early thirties he read a lot of philosophy: the pre-Socratics, Plato, Descartes, and the occasionalists, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant. His interest in the painting of the old masters and in sculpture remained with him throughout his life and he was a friend of many modern painters, in particular Bram and Geer van Velde, Henri Hayden, and Avigdor Arikha. He owned paintings by all these artists. He was a good pianist, who loved Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, and Mozart and attended concerts and recitals with his wife, who was also an excellent pianist. He did not generally like opera, but he did go to see several ballets in the 1930s. Music and painting were probably among the most important influences on Beckett's own writing, and his late work for the stage appears sometimes closer to painting or sculpture than it does to traditional theatre. In his political views Beckett was broadly left-wing and anti-establishment, although not a communist. He felt a natural sympathy for the underdog, the victim, the down-and-out, and the prisoner. He never allowed his art, however, to become part of any political agenda, although he wrote one play, Catastrophe , in 1982 for the Czech dissident writer V?clav Havel, then under house arrest, who later became president of Czechoslovakia. He was a firm supporter of human rights movements throughout the world and a fierce opponent of all forms of censorship and repression. Beckett's health, which had so often been precarious, began to decline seriously in 1986 with the onset of respiratory troubles soon diagnosed as emphysema. In the following year, being deprived of oxygen, he had several falls, and in the summer of 1988, after falling badly, he went to live in a modest nursing home, called Le Tiers Temps (the Third Age). He was taken ill again on 6 December and died in the H?pital St Anne in Paris of respiratory failure on 22 December 1989. After a small private funeral he was buried with his wife, who had died fewer than six months before, in the cemetery of Montparnasse, Paris, on 26 December. Beckett changed the entire face of post-war theatre and also inspired many modern painters and video or installation artists. His prose, too, was immensely influential. He is often described as a pessimist or nihilist, and it would be wrong to understate the sombre nature of his dark vision. Yet such categorizations are wholly inadequate. They ignore the persistent need of the characters in his fiction and his drama to go resolutely, stoically on. They also ignore the humour which is a major feature of what might be called his early and middle periods. Beckett was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1969: 'For his writing which-in new forms for the novel and drama-in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation' (citation). And it is easy to ignore a positive, almost cathartic effect that may be gained from laughing at the worst that life can throw at you or from merely enduring it in a brave, perhaps even an uplifting way. JAMES KNOWLSON Sources personal knowledge (2004) ? private information (2004) [heirs, family, and friends] ? L. Harvey, notes of interviews, 1960?69, Dartmouth College, Baker Library ? J. Knowlson, Damned to fame: the life of Samuel Beckett (1996) ? S. Beckett, More pricks than kicks (1934) ? S. Beckett, Murphy (1938) ? S. Beckett, Molloy, Malone dies, The unnamable (1959) ? S. Beckett, Collected shorter plays (1984) ? S. Beckett, Collected shorter prose, 1945-1980 (1988) ? citation for the Nobel prize for literature, 1969, Nobel Foundation ? R. Federman and J. Fletcher, Samuel Beckett: his works and his critics (1970) ? L. Graver and R. Federman, Samuel Beckett: the critical heritage (1979) ? J. Knowlson and J. Pilling, Frescoes of the skull: the recent prose and drama of Samuel Beckett (1979) ? R. Cohn, The comic gamut (1962) ? R. Cohn, Just play: Beckett's theater (1980) ? P. Chabert, ed., Revue d'Esth?tique (1986) [special Beckett issue] ? L. E. Harvey, Samuel Beckett: poet and critic (1970) ? H. Kenner, Samuel Beckett: a critical study (1968) ? C. Lake, ed., No symbols where none intended (1984) ? P. Lawley, 'From Krapp's last tape to Play', The Cambridge companion to Beckett, ed. J. Pilling (1994) ? C. Locatelli, Unwording the world: Samuel Beckett's prose texts after the Nobel prize (1990) ? J. Pilling, Beckett before 'Godot': the formative years, 1929-1946 (1997) ? P. J. Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett: language for being in Samuel Beckett's fiction (1990) ? E. Brater, Beyond minimalism: Beckett's late style in the theater (1987) ? S. E. Gontarski, The intent of undoing in Samuel Beckett's dramatic texts (1985) Archives BBC WAC ? Boston College, Massachusetts, John J. Burns Library ? Harvard U., Houghton L., corresp., literary MSS, and papers ? Indiana University, Bloomington, Lilly Library ? Institut des M?moires de l'?dition Contemporaine, Paris ? Princeton University Library, New Jersey ? Syracuse University, New York ? TCD, ephemeral material ? U. Reading L., letters and literary MSS; further papers ? Washington University, St Louis, Missouri, letters, literary MSS and papers | Harvard U., Houghton L., letters to Miss Willard ? TCD, letters to Bettina Jonic ? TCD, letters to Thomas MacGreevy ? TCD, corresp. with Alan Simpson relating to the Pike Theatre productions of his plays ? TCD, corresp. with Percy Arland Ussher ? TCD, letters to Herbert Martin Oliver White ? University of British Columbia, corresp. with Laure Riese Likenesses P. Joyce, photograph, 1949, NPG ? photographs, 1950-1986, Hult. Arch. ? H. Hayden, pen-and-ink drawing, 1957 (Samuel Beckett), priv. coll. ? H. Cartier-Bresson, photograph, 1964, NPG [see illus.] ? A. Arikha, brush and India ink on paper, 1967 (Samuel Beckett leaning), priv. coll. ? pen-and-ink drawing, 1967, priv. coll. ? portrait, 1969, priv. coll. ? brush and sumi ink drawing, 1970, Centre Pompidou, Paris ? etching, 1971, priv. coll. ? graphite drawing, 1971, NPG ? portrait, 1971, priv. coll. ? silverpoint drawing, 1971, priv. coll. ? silverpoint drawing, 1975, priv. coll. ? J. Brown, photograph, 1976, NPG ? graphite drawing, 1976, priv. coll. ? J. Baner, photograph, 1978, NPG ? L. le Brocquy, oils, 1979 ? T. Philips, lithograph, 1984, priv. coll. ? T. Philips, lithograph, 1984, NPG ? B. O'Toole, pastel drawing, 1989, U. Reading L., department of archives and manuscripts ? L. le Brocquy, oils, 1992 ? M. Abbott, pastel drawing, 2000, U. Reading L., department of archives and manuscripts ? S. O'Sullivan, charcoal drawing (Portrait of Samuel Beckett), priv. coll. From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:55:22 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:55:22 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Should a Mentor Be a Friend? Message-ID: Should a Mentor Be a Friend? The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.21 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i20/20c00201.htm FIRST PERSON A tenured professor fears that he is too emotionally invested in his relationship with a young colleague By FRANK MIDLER I am trying very hard not to screw up a relationship that feels like the most substantial and professionally important of my career to this point. That relationship also feels like one of the most satisfying personal connections I have made in the past several years, and I find myself not knowing how to be a mentor and a friend at the same time. The literature on serving as a mentor to junior colleagues is extensive, and departments and universities use a number of official means to encourage professional guidance for new faculty members. Official programs can help, but even when done well, they aren't enough. And so new assistant professors, searching for the key to professional success, often make informal appeals to slightly older colleagues. Or newcomers turn to the distance-education form of mentoring, consulting columns like this one and Web sources on academic careers. And of course, the new faculty member can always turn to his or her dissertation director for advice, but those of us who have experienced the natural, if disappointing, postgraduate lapse of intimacy with our advisers know that it's not a good idea to go to that well too often. Having recently received tenure -- and having participated on a search committee in my department last year -- I am in a good position to be a mentor for at least one of my new junior colleagues. I am professionally secure, still ambitious, and still myself interested in negotiating our various institutional structures. And since my own experience as a new assistant professor benefited more than I can say from the guidance of two recently tenured colleagues, I have felt all along that helping new faculty members adjust to the campus and to the larger pressures of academic life was a duty that came along with tenure. My career as teacher, scholar, and administrator is a direct result of the care that my two mentors took to introduce me to faculty life. Their efforts ranged from the formal (introducing me to important colleagues and administrators, putting me in touch with relevant librarians, reading my scholarly work, observing my teaching, providing advice on publication venues, writing letters of recommendation for fellowships) to the informal (mostly involving long conversations facilitated by substances like coffee, beer, and tobacco). I have moved on to another job, but my two mentors are now cherished friends and professional collaborators. I miss their daily presence in my life. I wouldn't be successful -- I wouldn't even be tenured -- without the time, care, and love they offered me, and I'm proud to think of myself as their prot?g? even if they would (probably) pooh-pooh the extent of their contribution. Wishing to emulate my own mentors, I have become a mentor, but I find myself stumbling badly and I fear that I won't be able to help my new colleague. I have no sinister motives, but unfortunately our relationship has been complicated by the friendly affection I feel for her. Wanting her to like me as a friend, I find myself violating the structure of a good mentoring relationship. Instead of presenting a consistent, strong, and confident manner, I find myself lapsing into confession and gossip -- two of the fatal Cleopatras of any professional relationship. My new colleague is fresh out of graduate school. We had chosen Karen over a number of highly experienced and well-published assistant professors at other institutions. We weren't the only ones interested in her, and I attribute some of her decision to accept our offer to a flurry of e-mail messages I sent to her last spring explaining some of the great things for junior faculty members at our university and extolling the high quality of life in Midwestern college towns. At the same time, I committed myself to spending the time and energy to help her gain full access to the resources of our university. Even though our fields are not identical, they're close enough for us to talk about scholarship. I resolved to do for my new colleague what my own mentors had done for me. Although I knew my time this year would be threatened by administrative duties, I would be on the campus daily and therefore would be available to provide advice and listen to concerns. A kink emerged in my grand scheme when I took an immediate liking to Karen and her husband, Bill. They had been here a mere two weeks when my wife and I decided they would be our best friends in town. Even when our conversation focused on professional issues, it felt fully personal. And when our families got together, I forgot that there was anything institutional about our relationship. I desperately wanted Karen and Bill to like us as much as we liked them, and at the same time I felt a pit growing in my stomach as I contemplated a time -- three or four years down the line, maybe -- when the two East Coasters would ride early scholarly success to another university, probably in a "blue" state. Trying not to think too deeply about it, I went on a charm offensive. Unfortunately, my self-perceived "charm" became immediately "offensive." I told Karen all about myself. And the more I felt myself overreaching, the more I pulled out everything in my arsenal: Within a month, my new colleague knew more about me than any colleague should be obliged to know. Even worse, I told her what I think -- what I really think -- about many of our colleagues in the department. I answered her e-mail messages immediately, ignoring more important communications from students and editors, and I practically brimmed over with enthusiasm when she ducked her head into my office. I'm sure that some of my efforts have been useful: Karen hasn't hesitated to ask me about how our institution works, and I have been able to steer her toward reliable administrators as well as inform her of the written and unwritten rules of teaching here. But I turned our relationship upside down, too. Karen and Bill have a son a year older than ours, and I began to go to her for child-rearing advice, putting myself in the role of prot?g? to her parental mentor. My wife looked on with sympathy, registering the disappointment on my face when I would learn that Karen and Bill were spending Friday night with some of her fellow first-year assistant professors and their partners rather than with us. I think you get the picture: I was pathetic. I knew all along that my behavior was wrong. The prot?g? owes the mentor nothing in a personal sense. Furthermore, it is crucial for the life of a department that all new faculty members develop independent lives in town and across campus. I didn't really mean to interfere, but my own insecurities -- and perhaps my envy of her youth, her fresh intelligence, and the long, unpredictably open future she will have as scholar and teacher -- drove me to butt in when I should have made myself back off. A few weeks ago, I took them a small housewarming gift. Karen and Bill met us in the doorway. "We wanted to talk to both of you," Bill said, going on to deliver a bombshell. When I got home, I said to my wife, "Karen and Bill wanted to talk to us. They have some news. Guess." "They're leaving!" she said, in a horrified tone. I had been hoping that would be my wife's response, since it revealed I was not the only one besotted with our new friends. "Nope," I said, "Karen's pregnant." The joy I feel for my new colleague is a bit too much. I really do believe this is a good time in her career for her to have a second child, as she'll be able to spend a solid stretch of years doing the work required to get tenure without further interruption and with a steady (if action-packed) home situation. I also feel good that I can help her negotiate our university's byzantine procedures for dealing with parental leave. But it's neither morally right nor psychologically healthy for me to be as emotionally invested in our relationship as I am. I can't help myself! Despite repeated promises to reform my behavior, I continue to provide way too much information, compounding the problem by delivering extensive apologies after dropping especially juicy bits of inappropriate opinion. "It's OK," Karen said to me wearily over lunch last week. "I figure that's just Frank." Becoming a truly good mentor will require me to divest myself of emotion -- or at least to separate friendship from the dispassionate role of a mentor. A good mentor should talk little and listen lots, providing an example of professionalism while dispensing useful information. I'm not sure I could be accused of malpractice, but neither have I done the job properly. Frank Midler is the pseudonym of a newly tenured associate professor at a large Midwestern research university. He writes an occasional column on life as a newly tenured faculty member. For an archive of his previous columns, see [3]http://chronicle.com/jobs/archive/firstperson/midler.htm References 3. http://chronicle.com/jobs/archive/firstperson/midler.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:56:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:56:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Castro Out of Context Message-ID: Castro Out of Context The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.21 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i20/20b01501.htm TELEVISION By LOUIS A. P?REZ JR. No foreign head of state has defied U.S. efforts at regime change longer than Fidel Castro. Since 1959 he has survived an armed invasion, repeated assassination attempts, years of political isolation, and decades of economic sanctions. Forty-six years later, Castro is alive, if not so well, 90 miles away, still in power, still defying the United States. Survival under such circumstances is tantamount to at least one kind of success, and success draws a crowd. Americans have displayed a curious ambivalence toward Castro, not necessarily disagreeing with their government's stance toward Cuba but nonetheless fascinated by the man who has so confounded 10 American presidents. That fascination has transformed Castro into a veritable cottage industry. Castro biographies -- by academics, journalists, and at least one psychiatrist -- have become almost an American literary genre. Then there is Fidel in fiction: an "unauthorized autobiography," a play, and such fantasy titles as Fidel Castro Assassinated and A Bullet for Fidel. In the marketplace, that most remorseless measure of public interest, Castro sells. He has also achieved something of an iconic status in myriad news interviews, documentaries, and docudramas, among them Saul Landau's Fidel (1969) and, with Dan Rather for CBS, Castro, Cuba, and the U.S. (1974). Rather interviewed Castro again in 1996 for CBS's The Last Revolutionary. The cigared one has been featured in Marita Lorenz's film Dear Fidel, Estela Bravo's Fidel, a CNN interview with Ted Turner, a docudrama for Showtime, a 10-part series on Univisi?n featuring Castro's home movies, an Oliver Stone documentary for HBO, and on and on. Never mind his portrayal by Jack Palance, Joe Mantegna, Anthony LaPaglia, and others in overheated comic or melodramatic turns. In 1993 The Miami Herald ranked Castro as the second "most influential" person in South Florida history, preceded only by the Florida tourism developer Henry Flagler. It is fitting, then, that PBS should include Castro within the scope of the American Experience series, although I hope it's not too radical to suggest that he's more integral to the Cuban experience. Castro is a political Rorschach test. All Castro documentaries presume to inform, but they mostly inform on their own sympathetic or hostile political views. It could hardly be otherwise. He is not a man about whom one is likely to be neutral. PBS's Fidel Castro is true to type. It pulls no punches, setting the tone in the first 15 minutes as it describes Castro's youth and university years. He is "the hick" (el guajiro), an outsider, illegitimate, unruly, and disruptive at the school from which he is said to have been expelled; a boy whose "reckless behavior" earned him the name of "the crazy one" (el loco); a "ferocious son" alleged to have threatened to burn his parents' house down; a combination of "genius and juvenile delinquent" who showed "signs of brilliance and then behaved like a hoodlum," influenced by fascist priests, and incapable of empathy for the normal needs of ordinary people. He is implicated in two murders during his university years and characterized by his ex-brother-in-law as a paranoid psychopath who might just as soon throw his wife out of a 10-story window as buy her a mink coat. That perspective, reinforced by interviews with exiles and defectors, shapes the narrative arc of the documentary, which was written, produced, and directed by Cuban-born Adriana Bosch. She draws on the memories of Castro's boyhood friends and estranged family members, allies turned adversaries, former government officials and political prisoners. These are not disinterested voices, of course, but together they serve the film well, bearing witness to disappointment and disaffection. The historical Castro is infinitely more elusive, however. More than half of the program attempts, with only partial success, to explain how the first six decades of the Cuban republic (founded in 1902) set the stage for Castro's political ascent. The documentary chronicles decades of public immorality and official malfeasance, particularly under Gen. Gerardo Machado y Morales and Fulgencio Batista; the deepening popular revulsion with the prevailing order; and the subsequent rebellion and, ultimately, revolution, including student protests and labor strikes in the 1930s and urban warfare and rural insurgency in the 1950s. But the film is loath to concede to Castro anything more than secondary significance in that process. His motives are questioned, his importance minimized. Castro is acknowledged as historical agent but denied historical agency. His role, as presented here, is self-serving and suspect, a function of vanity ("glory and fame" are what the young Fidel is said to have coveted) and opportunism. ("Without money," recalls one interviewee, "his marriage on the rocks, no work, he doesn't know what to do. ... He says 'I have to deliver a blow. I have to make a revolution.'") Castro's stature, we are told, does not result from his bold, practically suicidal 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks to dislodge Batista's dictatorship, but from the "published photographs of the mutilated bodies of Cuba's youth [that] repulsed the nation and made a hero of [him]." The reporter Herbert Matthews and The New York Times "launched the legend of Fidel Castro." The Castro-led rural insurgency was not as important as the urban resistance, the program suggests, for while "Fidel played up his war for an American television audience, a much larger war was being waged in Cuba's cities." One could certainly make a case for any one of those propositions. But to advance all of them on flimsy evidence is to advance a cause. Surely Castro must receive some credit for organizing the 26th of July Movement, for raising money, for directing the insurgency, and for summoning a nation to rise against the U.S.-backed dictator. Once Castro is in power, however, the documentary overcompensates, investing him with full, not to say superhuman, agency, but of a mischievous and malevolent kind, fueled by unrestrained ambition and unimpeded purpose. Nation, government, and people are subsumed into one man; politics and policy are personalized. The Cuban revolution, we are told, was "from the very first moments ... a one-man show." The dominant story line settles into a recurring motif: "Castro would drive two million Cubans into exile"; "Castro fans the flames of Cuban nationalism"; "Castro opened Cuba to foreign investors"; "Castro exported discontent"; "Castro's doctors and teachers were serving as far away as Yemen"; "Castro's troops were fighting in Angola and Ethiopia"; the Cubans in Grenada were "Castro's men"; the Sandinista triumph in Nicaragua was "Castro's victory"; the Sandinistas were "Castro's allies." Those are breathtaking assertions, of course, and must be received with reservation. To attribute reach of that magnitude to Castro alone is unduly facile. It is, more accurately, a measure of the fear and loathing in which Castro is held by his detractors. Worse still, such claims serve to dismiss the efforts of countless numbers of the other men and women who -- with ill will or good intentions -- played an important part in outcomes that are here attributed to one man. Many tens of thousands of men and women, not just Castro, mobilized to defend the island during the Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961. Similarly, the Sandinista triumph over Somoza was a Nicaraguan achievement, not Castro's, one born by the heroic sacrifice and selfless struggle of the Nicaraguan people. The new revolutionary government in 1959 immediately mobilized to do something about historic grievances, especially chronic unemployment and the high cost of living. Reform could not have been undertaken without challenging the historically privileged place the United States occupied in Cuba. The Cuban determination to advance the primacy of national interests led inevitably to confrontation with the United States. It is, of course, no surprise that the United States responded with all the means at its disposal to defend its interests. At that point, Cuban actions, U.S. reactions, and Cuban counteractions become very complex, climaxing in the rupture of U.S.-Cuba relations and the establishment of Cuban-Soviet ties. The film accurately details the island's economic hardships during the 1990s, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, but is silent on the issue of the U.S. response. The documentary fails to mention the Torricelli Act (1992) and the Helms-Burton Act (1996), both of which contributed to making hard times in Cuba even harder. That omission invites the inference that Cubans were operating in a vacuum. U.S. policy has consequences: It is designed to. But those consequences are often not the ones intended or desired. Biography is difficult because it is contingent and contextual, fashioned out of creative engagement with multiple historical realms. Castro is actor but he is also acted upon, shaping history but also shaped by it. A two-hour documentary could at least give a sense of that by alluding to those circumstances. Castro is a member of the second-born generation of the republic, the men and women formed with the knowledge of the obstacles posed by the United States to Cuban self-determination, first from 1898 to 1902 and later in the 1930s. It is impossible to understand the character of the Cuban revolution and Castro's role in it without an awareness of that history. The program's emphasis, in service to its harsh judgment, is the filmmaker's prerogative. There are many versions of Castro. The Estela Bravo documentary, for example, relies on sympathetic first-person reminiscences to advance a very different point of view. Nelson Mandela praises Cuba's contributions to African liberation struggles, the writers Gabriel García M?rquez and Alice Walker reflect on the achievements of the Cuban revolution, and a host of interviewees speak well of the Cuban leader. The PBS program is as much a document of the present as it is a documentary about the past. Precisely because it is so much an artifact of Cuban angst, the film is a moving representation of one historical perspective. It speaks to dashed hopes and broken hearts, of a nation that envisioned the possibility of a better future and mobilized on its behalf, only to be pulled by the ideological undertow of the East-West conflict during the cold war. Castro's vision, as well as his failures, can be explained only by the historical crosscurrents, material circumstances, moral systems, and transaction and transmission of power. So it is not without irony that a documentary that seeks to keep a critical distance from its subject is, in the end, drawn inexorably under that subject's sway. "Ultimately," Bosch explains in a news release, "the film is a cautionary tale. It is the tragic story of a nation who saw a Messiah in just a man." The Cuban people, the film tells us, "turned their good will, their faith, and their judgment to Fidel Castro," and he cast "a spell over" them. The film ends with a solemn lament of the consequences when "an entire nation placed its hopes in just one man." And so it is that the filmmakers also succumb to the spell of Fidel Castro. To attribute to Castro alone -- just one man -- the power to have shaped the destiny of so many people is to elevate him to the level of the gods. He would be pleased. Louis A. P?rez Jr. is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The most recent of his many books about Cuba is On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). His next book, To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press this spring. From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:57:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:57:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: The economics of happiness: Can't buy it? Message-ID: The economics of happiness: Can't buy it? http://www.economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3555887 5.1.14 Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. By Richard Layard. The Penguin Press; 272 pages; $25.95. To be published in Britain by Penguin/Allen Lane in March FOR the past half-century, those lucky enough to have been born in a rich country have had every prospect of growing richer. On average, incomes in Britain, America and Japan, adjusted for inflation, have easily doubled over that time. On top of this come the benefits of longer lives of better quality, thanks to advances in medicine and to a plethora of consumer goodies making living easier and more enjoyable. You might, even, expect folk to be a great deal happier today than in the 1950s. You would be wrong, according to many surveys taken in rich countries. These tend to show that, once a country has lifted itself out of poverty, further rises in income seem not to create a meaningful rise in the proportion of people who count themselves as happy. Since the 1950s, for example, the proportion of Americans who tell pollsters that they are "very happy" has stayed constant at around 30%, while the proportion who say that they are "not very happy" has barely fallen. Explaining this paradox, and offering suggestions for increasing the supply of happiness, is the aim of a new book by Richard Layard, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics and a Labour peer. Lord Layard devotes a good portion of the book to a summary of what is known about how to be happy. Much of it will appear self-evident: cultivate friendships, be involved in a community, try for a good marriage. But his big idea is controversial. It is that a zero-sum game of competition for money and status has gripped rich societies, and that this rat race is a big source of unhappiness. Put simply, one person's pay rise is another person's psychic loss. To make that loss worse, says the author, there are only so many top rungs on the ladder of status--and as a peer of the realm, Lord Layard should know. He is among a growing group of economists who are dissatisfied with the way that the dominant neoclassical school of economics gauges well-being. When they try to divine human desires and happiness, mainstream economists look much more at what people do rather than at what they say. If, perhaps, you choose to work 90-hour weeks and skimp on leisure time, it follows that work is what makes you happy--or at least happier than taking extra time for leisure: otherwise you would not be doing it. Your actions, in other words, are said to reveal your "true" preferences, even if you tell a researcher that you would rather be spending more time with your children (what is known as your "stated" preference). To counter such Panglossian logic, Lord Layard draws upon the findings of behavioural economists, who make use of the insights and techniques of psychologists. These are more inclined to give credence to people's stated desires and feelings. Among many things, the behaviourists have found that it is relative, not absolute wealth, that matters most to people. Mr Layard cites as evidence a study in which Harvard University students claimed to prefer earning $50,000 a year when their peers are on only $25,000 to a world in which they earn $100,000 while their peers get more than double that amount. The survey sample is anything but representative, but you get the point. So, Lord Layard's thinking goes, by spending 90 hours a week in the office, you may be improving your own income, but you are also causing other people to feel less satisfied with theirs. They may be encouraged to work longer themselves just to keep up, taking from the time that gets devoted to family and community. It is, the author argues, something similar to environmental pollution, where one person's action (or a company's) makes others worse off. Fortunately, he notes, economists have already figured out how to deal with such externalities: tax them so that the polluter internalises the cost of his actions. And so, near the top of Lord Layard's list for improving human happiness, comes the following recommendation: much higher rates of income tax to tame the rat race. The author singles out income inequality as a psychic wound uniquely worthy of state intervention. But if raising the level of happiness is to be the chief aim of government policy, as he argues it should, where then is the call to make divorce harder, given the pain that he says broken homes inflict on children? Further, where is his desire to compel the worship of a higher being, also on his list as a source of happiness? Thankfully, both are absent, but he never mentions the obvious reason for why they are: namely, that most people value freedom as a greater good than enforced happiness. The pursuit of happiness, Lord Layard's book will convince most people, is a private matter. From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:58:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:58:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: In thrall to ratdom Message-ID: In thrall to ratdom http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5097600-110738,00.html Robert Sullivan spent a year on the trail of the common rat. But does he have enough content for an entire book, asks Christopher Priest Christopher Priest Saturday January 8, 2005 Rats: A Year with New York's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan 243pp, Granta, ?12 A few years ago the BBC wildlife department broadcast a documentary about the common rat: rattus rattus (black rat) or rattus norvegicus (brown, or Norway rat). The intention was avowedly to study the animal as wildlife, as if rats were the same kind of entity as meerkats or penguins or sea cucumbers or chipmunks. The programme contained the usual breathtaking close-up shots we are now so used to in TV wildlife films: habitat, feeding, mating, reproduction, rearing the young, and so on. The trouble was that this time the programme was about rats. In spite of one's valiant efforts to try to see the rodents as ordinary animals with, so to speak, a point of view, it remained inescapable that a rat's habitat is in drains, cellars and burrows, his food is our leftovers, and he and his mate's reproduction is, well, fast and furious. When you remember their verminous habits with droppings and urine, the obnoxious way they regurgitate stuff they can't digest but eat anyway, such as pieces of your dustbin liner, and their uninvited presence in every street in every town in the country, trying to think of them as a mammal with a rightful place in the evolutionary scheme of things becomes impossible. Miniature hamsters or koalas they are not. Even David Attenborough's commentary contained, as I recall, several audible shudders. Clearly rats represent more to us than their state of being just another animal. In short, they have for humans a symbolic or metaphorical life, a representative existence from which we may draw morals, awful warnings and some particularly hateful, if now over-familiar, terms of abuse. Robert Sullivan obviously shares this ambivalence, as do (interestingly) most of the vermin exterminators he comes across in his researches. Sullivan lives in New York City, a place where legend has it that there is one rat for every human being. Although he makes a good attempt to debunk this myth, it's obvious that the thrill this fear arouses is an unspoken constant in every New Yorker's life. Beneath the streets, in sewers and basements, another kind of city-dweller lives and swarms. In British towns and cities, they say you are never more than 15 feet away from the nearest rat, which actually doesn't bear thinking about if you fear and detest the animals, as most of us do. Sullivan says that he claimed no special interest in rats in the past, but one day stumbled across a painting of some of them by John James Audubon. The inspirational quality of this sent him on a quest to find out more about both Audubon and rats, and in turn this led to a new interest in the ubiquitous rodents. In the modern tradition of American literary journalism, the next stage clearly had to be a book on the subject, and this is it. Sullivan located an alley in lower Manhattan, not so far from Brooklyn Bridge, Wall Street and the World Trade Center. Edens Alley, connecting to Ryders Alley, runs between the backs of several businesses: a Chinese restaurant, a vitamin and health-supplement store, an Irish bar and restaurant, an apartment block with a souvenir shop on the ground floor, a gourmet supermarket, and several more anony mous buildings. When Sullivan first found Edens Alley it was littered with food waste, garbage, the smell of urine and many significant tennis ball-sized holes in the ground, paving stones and walls. There was also a single tree: an ailanthus, the tree of heaven, a deciduous city tree that will take root almost anywhere. Even where the ground is riddled with rat holes. Sullivan began to make regular nocturnal visits to Edens Alley. He took night-vision lenses, a camp stool and a thermos flask. His agenda: "I went to the rat-filled alley to see the life of a rat in the city, to describe its habits and its habitat, to know a little about the place where it makes its home and its relationship to the very nearby people. To know the rat is to know its habitat, and to know the habitat of the rat is to know the city." The symbolic nature of ratdom is therefore intrinsic to his researches, since his interest is clearly not purely ethological. Whatever he observes should contain some kind of meaning for the larger world. We are right to be fearful of rats, because they are verminous. They urinate and defecate in places where we keep food and clothes. They go out when it's dark. They swarm. They gnaw through electric mains cables and gas-pipes, usually with disastrous consequences for themselves, but if they do it beneath your house they put your property and life at risk. As many as a quarter of all fires of unknown origin are thought to be caused by rats. The teeth of a brown rat are stronger, harder, than aluminium, copper, lead and iron. (They also grow prodigiously: a rat's incisors grow five inches every year, so they don't worry too much about chipping and breaking their teeth.) Rats are known carriers of diseases that kill mankind: bubonic plague, famously, but also typhus, rabies, trichinosis, tularaemia and the horrific leptospirosis. They carry bacteria, mites, fleas, lice and ticks. They have sex-lives at which some of us can only marvel. "If you are in New York while you are reading this sentence," Sullivan says, "or even in any other major city... then you are in proximity to two or more rats having sex." Male rats can mate with 20 females in a few hours; the gestation period is just three weeks; the average litter is up to 20 pups. So fear and dislike of rats are rational, and as a result human beings deliberately cause the deaths of rats in their hundreds and thousands. Sullivan, to his credit, overcame much of this to be able to spend his long evenings in Edens Alley, although his investigations fell short of actually clambering down into the drains or underground passages. At intervals in the book, he cuts away from the rats themselves to divert into stories of the lives of various Americans who had some connection with the world of rats. In most cases the connections are tenuous to say the least: an organiser of a rent strike, a leader of sanitation workers, a revolutionary fighter against the British. After the first of these diversions, the reader realises what Sullivan himself presumably realised, that watching rats eat garbage does not, after all, provide enough material for an entire book. His encounters with exterminators, trappers and sanitation men are hardly more enlightening, as without exception they are businesslike rather than inspirational. You can't help feeling that Sullivan has missed experiencing the true rat horror: infestation of one's home. From personal experience I can say that there are few moments more disgusting than when you find the new holes in the floor, the teeth marks in bread, chocolate and cereal boxes, and the penetrating smell of rodent urine. However, this is an interesting book, not without unconscious humour. The self-portrait of Sullivan shivering night after night in his alley, with his camp stool, binoculars and anorak, watching the rats swarming over plastic bags full of uneaten noodles, is at least different. Christopher Priest's The Separation is published by Gollancz. From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 14:59:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 09:59:06 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reason: John Locke Lite: The strange philosophy of a left libertarian Message-ID: John Locke Lite: The strange philosophy of a left libertarian http://www.reason.com/0501/cr.tp.john.shtml 5.1 [dotclear.gif] [6]Tom G. Palmer [7]Libertarianism Without Inequality, by Michael Otsuka, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 180 pages, $39.95 People fight about love and lucre. They also fight about labels. A little tussle is under way right now among academic political theorists over the label libertarian. Advocates of massive redistribution who seek to make every property title subject to expropriation have decided they want to be known as libertarians. Since its hard to appropriate a label outright, theyre willing to share it: They have taken to calling themselves left libertarians, to distinguish themselves from right libertarians. One of them, Philippe van Parijs, uses the term real libertarianism, because he feels real liberty is about doing whatever you want to do, which means you have a right to be comfortably supported by others, even if you are able-bodied but refuse to produce anything and instead spend all your time surfing and hanging out. The central goal of these left libertarians is to show that one can maintain a core commitment to what John Locke termed property in ones personand thus can call oneself a libertarianand yet support a state that is empowered to redistribute property on an ongoing basis in accordance with some formula of fairness or justice. The latest attempt to capture the libertarian label for a radically egalitarian redistributive state is Michael Otsukas Libertarianism Without Inequality, a collection of essays that try to reconcile individual freedom, egalitarian redistribution, and consensual government. (The middle section, which seems to have been added to pad out an otherwise very thin book, attempts to defend some rather implausible claims about criminal justice and the right to self-defense. Since theyre not particularly relevant to the issue of left libertarianism, Ill set them aside.) The work is an attempt to say something interesting by exploring the authors hunches and intuitions. It fails. Otsuka, a reader in philosophy at University College London, was a student of the analytical Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen, who holds forth at Oxford University and to whom Otsuka dedicates the book as his teacher, mentor, comrade, friend. Cohen gained some fame for a series of attacks on Robert Nozicks defense of free market capitalism collected in his book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Inequalitythat simultaneously demonstrated Cohens flair for bizarre examples and his weak grasp of economics and bargaining theory. Otsuka attempts to show that the radically egalitarian redistribution he favors is intuitively plausible if you share his intuitions (which many people will not); that he is entitled to call himself a Lockean after he has reformulated Lockes ideas sufficiently that they have been fully cleansed of the regressive ideological commitments of Lockes (and more recent) times; and that as a Lockean he is committed to fully consensual government, so long as a nonconsensual super-government is around to make sure that nothing bad happens. Otsuka complains that even many of Lockes more moderate or left-leaning interpreters have not yet provided a sufficiently egalitarian reconstruction of his political philosophy. In other words, Locke wouldnt agree with Otsuka, but once Otsuka has cleansed Lockes ideas and made them sufficiently egalitarian, Otsuka can call himself a Lockean. Otsuka seeks to reconcile libertarian self-ownership with what he calls a welfarist specification of the egalitarian proviso. That proviso requires that all the unowned stuff in the world be so divided that each person (take a deep breath) would be able (by producing, consuming, or trading) to better herself to the same degree as you, where betterment is to be measured in terms of welfare understood as the satisfaction of the self-interested preferences that the individual would have after ideal deliberation while thinking clearly with full pertinent information regarding those preferences. Able-bodied persons would get only a little, while the disabled would get more, and those with very expensive tastes and little ability would get the most, since they would need the most to satisfy their preferences. (Of course, somebody would have to measure all those abilities and work out how each persons ideal deliberation would proceed, but solving such problems for every human being should be a pretty easy task for any reasonably qualified college professor.) This scheme is Otsukas response to Lockes proviso governing the appropriation of unowned resources. In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke said an appropriator would have to ensure there was enough, and as good left to meet the objection that appropriation might be any prejudice to any other Man. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick adopts a formulation similar to Lockes, specifying that you may acquire previously unowned resources if and only if you make nobody worse off than she would have been in a state of nature in which no land is privately held. Otsuka asserts that the alternative proviso he proposes is convincing and fair, although he offers no reason that anyone else should find it either convincing or fair. He seems unaware of Lockes arguments for why appropriation of unowned resources meets Lockes proviso. According to Locke, he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind. For the provisions serving to the support of humane life, produced by one acre of enclosed and cultivated land, are (to speak much within compasse) ten times more, than those, which are yielded by an acre of Land, of an equal richnesse, lyeing waste in common. And therefor he, that incloses Land and has a greater plenty of the conveniencys of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to Nature, may truly be said, to give ninety acres to Mankind. The only way to satisfy Lockes proviso is to create exclusive property rights, for the simple reason that people produce more when they can reap the rewards, which ensures that there is more for all and thus that appropriation is not harmful to others. Both Locke and Nozick rely on the historical evidence that property is more conducive to wealth production, which makes everyone better off. It seems never to have occurred to Otsuka that there was a reason they wrote what they wrote; its just a matter of being intuitive, plausible, fair, etc. Why bother with history, evidence, or reasons when you can consult your intuitions and leave it at that? The result of Otsukas appeal to his own intuitions is an assignment of property that would have to be changed every time its value changed (which happens constantly in a dynamic market) and every time the population of the world changed (which happens many times a minute). Also, no property could be inherited, as that would be unfair. Otsuka, like the other left libertarians, fails to distinguish between wealth and value, which are economic concepts, and property, which is a legal concept. Legal institutions can reassign property titles, but if property is constantly, chaotically, and unpredictably reassigned, its not property at all; it has no legal security. If the way we know about changes in wealth and value is through changes in prices, and prices are generated by exchange of secure property titles, then eliminating the security of property would mean there would be no way to know how wealth or value had changed. The solution to the problem of maintaining the kind of equality Otsuka seeks would entail eliminating the very means by which the solution could be reached. The entire enterprise is not merely impractical; it is self-defeating. Libertarianism Without Inequality is a good example of the dead end so much contemporary political philosophy has reached. Rather than being informed by history, jurisprudence, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, or even a close knowledge of classic texts, it posits outlandish examples as the central tests of all theories. Thus Otsuka explains self-ownership and the right to the fruits of our labor by asking us to imagine a highly artificial society of two strangers, each of whom will freeze to death unless clothed. Unfortunately, the only source of material for clothing is human hair, which can be woven into clothing. One of the two is hirsute and capable of weaving, whereas the other is bald and incapable of weaving. Otsuka concludes that to force the hairy one to weave his own hair into (presumably rather uncomfortable) garments for the bald one merely to achieve an egalitarian outcome would be a violation of the hairy ones rights. That kind of philosophizing provides little or no useful guidance in the world in which we live. After affirming that full libertarianism is achieved when you can sell your body hair to other people but the state (or someone) assigns you your property in everything else and adjusts your shares on what, for consistencys sake, would have to be at least a minute-by-minute basis, Otsuka goes on to show that the kind of government he has in mind would be radically voluntary. It would be like Nozick, man! Only better! Otsuka spills a lot of pixels discussing such staples of the theory of political legitimacy as the difference between express consent and tacit consent and whether residence constitutes consent. His approach reads like a parody of libertarianism, according to which people might give their consent to live in radically unequal, feudal, slavish conditions, meaning that libertarianism (as Otsuka understands it) would lead to truly disturbing forms of oppression. But that would be cool, as far as Otsuka is concerned, because they would be chosen. Otsuka brings up exit rights only to dismiss them as uninteresting. He never tries to apply the theory of consent to interesting real-world examples, such as condominium associations, gated communities, and religious cloisters that have rules governing pet size, loud music, religious observances, and so forth. (I consented to governance by my condo association when I bought my condo. People who like large pets would not have consented and so wouldnt live in my condo building. But no one can put me to death if I play my music too loudly or invite my boyfriend over for the night.) None of that for Otsuka. Instead, in Otsukas world, people would freely choose to be governed by feudal lords with powers of life and death over them. After a tedious and unhelpful treatment of consent, Otsuka gives the game away. Remember that all that free choice has to be fair to everyone else, so your property would be constantly readjusted to reflect the claims of others, as demanded by Otsukas proviso. That means there would have to be constant readjustment of property claims among people subject to different governments. There would also have to be some adjudication of conflicts among the governments. Otsuka therefore imagines a fluid confederation of political societies and monities [a monity is a political society of one] that is regulated by an interpolitical governing body. He explains: It would be necessary for this governing body to possess limited powers which encompass the overseeing of the drawing of the boundaries that demarcate these societies and monities and the settling of disputes that might arise among these parties. While the legitimate authority of the governments of the various societies would be based upon consent, the legitimate authority of this governing body would not necessarily be so based. Given the disorder and chaos which would ensue in the absence of such a governing body, all individuals would legitimately be subject to its authorityeven those who do not consent to it. Hence, the ideal of political societies as voluntary associations would need to be underpinned by involuntary governance at the interpolitical level. In other words, Otsuka solves the problems his theory of political legitimacy throws up by positing a nonconsensual government that would rule over the consensual ones. That body would exercise power legitimately because without it there would be disorder and chaos. But legitimacy is supposed to be a solution to the problem of who has the authority to exercise power, a problem that Otsuka simply waves away in a footnote. In that note, Otsuka concedes that, given this interpolitical governing body, what I have just called the governments of what I have just called [political] societies would not retain complete monopolies on the powers to legislate and punish. Therefore, given my definitions at the beginning of this chapter, we do not, strictly speaking, have governments and political societies here. Still, he says, they are close enough to be called that. Libertarianism Without Inequality is kind of like a serious book, but not really close enough to be called that. ------------------------------------- Tom G. Palmer is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.. References 6. http://tomgpalmer.com/ 7. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0199243956/ref=nosim/reasonmagazineA/ From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 15:01:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 10:01:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] In These Times: Ratio Nation Message-ID: Ratio Nation -- In These Times http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1796/ 5.1.3 By Curtis White [14]Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives By Nicols Fox Shearwater Books ? $30.00 [15]Freethinkers : A History of American Secularism By Susan Jacoby Metropolitan Books ? $27.50 While rereading the poetry of William Blake recently, I realized very little had changed between the 18th century and today. Of course, the media would like us to believe that the zeitgeist spins madly, producing "eras" as if they were products being readied for the next marketing season (which is exactly what they are). The media doesn't want you clinging to any antique notion of "who we are" any more than the auto industry wants you to cling to your 1990 Civic. And so we have the Sixties, the Me Generation, Reagan's Yuppies and Gen X. The Cold War, the War Against Terror, the Clash of Civilizations and Globalization. This approach to understanding national identity and history is as dizzying and malevolent as that possessed girl's spinning head in The Exorcist. What no one wants us to imagine is that the fundamentals of identity have not changed dramatically in 250 years. And it could be that even that estimate accelerates the matter. For William Butler Yeats, meaningful historical epochs last 2,000 years. We've only just recently emerged from the second, "Christian," era. For poets like Blake and Yeats, history is a long, grinding affair. Change is almost imperceptible. Reading Blake revealed that however much the details have changed, the big picture is much as it was in 1783 when Blake published his first book of poetry. The three principal ideological elements in Blake's time were the backward-looking forces of Christianity, the Enlightenment advocates of Reason and Experience, and the revolutionary practitioners of the Imagination: In short, Christians, rationalists and poets. Without question, the dominant ideology since 1783 has been the rationalist. For Blake, the "manacles" of industrialization were "mind-forged" by what he called Ratio--the tendency to divide the world from the self, the human from the natural, the inside from the outside and the outside itself into ever finer degrees of manipulable parts. In spite of its domination, Ratio has always felt it necessary to continue its criticism of religion, or "superstition," and obliged to defend itself from the criticisms of its post-Enlightenment sibling, the Imagination. Ratio's debate with these two competing tendencies has been taken up in great detail and energy in two recent books, both of which share at least one virtue: They understand that our problems are essentially the problems that confronted William Blake. Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism is a useful tonic for a moment in which religious fundamentalism seems to own all political leverage. Conservative politicians kowtow to the evangelists, and even the most liberal candidates must carefully nuance their positions so as not to appear insensitive to fundamentalism's primary concerns with "values": orthodox piety, school prayer, abortion and gay marriage. Jacoby's useful response to this slowly evolving national disgrace is to show that the present culture wars over value (our red state/blue state standoff) is not a recent development and is not merely the consequence of a cultural backlash over the aberrant '60s. Our culture war is, rather, a disagreement, an enmity, that is fundamental to our national character. The deistic freethinking and respect for Reason typical of figures like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson was from the very first in conflict with the assumptions of evangelicals. Jacoby reminds us in revealing detail how this tension between the Enlightenment's reverence for Reason and Protestantism's confidence in revelation have played out in national controversies from the abolition movement to the teaching of evolution to women's suffrage and the civil rights movement. On the other hand, Nicols Fox's Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives attacks the smug assumptions of Reason from the perspective of Blake's Imagination. For Fox, too, the present conflicts over the role of reason, science, technology, and the mechanization of the human and natural worlds is an old story, one she tells with great energy and knowledge. For Fox, the digitalization of the world is only the latest version of the problem first confronted by the Luddites: the end of the world of human creativity and the beginning of the world as human machine. Her survey of the opposition provided by the Luddites, Romantic poets like Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, early critics like Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin, and the utopian efforts of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement is fascinating and inspiring. Useful though these two books are for reminding us how little the media's chatter about change really gets to the enduring essentials, there is an interesting paradox in them. The books themselves--their form, their rhetoric, their approach to argument, their assumptions about what they can expect of their readers--are an acknowledgment of the continuing domination of Blake's Ratio. As much as I admire Fox's book, I wouldn't call it a work of the imagination. Fox articulates what's wrong with utilitarianism: It separates "individuals not only from nature but from their own natures--from the creative, imaginative, and spiritual aspects of human existence." And yet my feeling is that Fox's book, and certainly Jacoby's, is finally utilitarian. They are books of popular history and social commentary written by professional journalists. The prose, the approach to structure and argument are very familiar, are industry standard, if you will. Fox admires Ruskin for writing books in which "Divisions between topics are artificial constructs; one thought naturally leads to another, and it may or may not be the topic he began with. The reader must follow and put aside impatience for the pleasure of digression." Well and good, but this is not a description of Fox's book, though it's no fault of her own. If she had written a rambling meditation full of quirky genius and digression, she would have been violating her own disciplinary training and she would probably never have found a publisher. Innocent though Fox may be, I think this irony cuts deep. Her thematic critique of Ratio is in a form that Ratio tolerates because it tends implicitly to confirm its own reign. Unfortunately, the Ruskins of the present are mostly unpublishable if not, as critics like to say, "unreadable." For these critics, digression is "self-indulgent." Works in Ruskin's spirit fail the rationalist test of clarity, of perfect transparence. This test, let it be known, is finally only about ideology. History and criticism written by journalists in a journalistic mode is unwittingly utilitarian in that it, too, seeks "the greatest good for the greatest number." In matters of art and intellect this is only a brush stroke away from "dumbing down." ("There is no audience for this stuff!" say the nice people in marketing. The nice people in editorial then go slinking off full of contrition.) In such subtle yet fatal ways we lend comfort to those we call enemy. Reader Comments What a great piece! Does White not wake every day thanking a divinity of some kind for his wonderful powers of ratiocination? Ah, what a golden intellect! I wish I had more friends like Curtis White. If I did, I would invite them over often to discuss myriad things over good food and wine. Curtis, if you're reading this, will you come over? I'm starving. I await your response, and in the meantime, I look forward to your next article in Harper's Posted by Daniel Luke on January 3, 2005 at 10:03 PM It reminds me one thing, that to be contemporary means to be old-fashoined. Thanks. Posted by Ivan Shevnin on January 7, 2005 at 2:42 PM How great to find Curtis White on this site! One year ago I found "The Middle Mind," a rather controversial book that appeared to me to be one of the key social critiques of our American society. He seems to me to be a mixture of Theodor Adorno and H. L. Mencken, with a bit more poetry added to leaven the prose. WEheter you agree with him or not, he does set fire to our brains. His critiques of American films (Private Ryan in the book) are outstanding and highly recommendable. Also, his critique of critique. There is an article he wrote called Whatever, Dude, that is pricelss (find it on the web). I, for one, equivocate Imagination with Hope, and Hope with the all-pervading Hunger of our existence on this planet, and White supplies that hope by "keeping the conversation going." And paradoxically, he does that by taking very strong positions on all sorts of topics. White is balm for the intelloect and the soul. Posted by Talleyrand on January 9, 2005 at 5:20 PM This article is really fascinating and mostly true. I wonder though if the final point about utilitarian (journalistic) writing is viable. Does writing that has utility and accessibility automatically become "utilitarian" in the ironic way that Mr. White describes? The idea of a division between utilitarian writing and that which is more creative (or artistic?) is itself a product of a relatively modern society under the sway of "Ratio." After all, the earliest writers in ancient cultures did not make such distinctions, and much of their most creative and beautiful work possessed a high level of utility as well. Posted by Eric B on January 10, 2005 at 7:02 AM In the reply section to Curtis White review of Ratio Nation, a reply by Talleyrand(1/9) contained the following statement: "I, for one, equivocate Imagination with Hope" this doesn't make sense to me, nor does it agree with the tone of the rest of the paragraph. I believe it should read: "I,for one,EQUILIBRATE Imagination with Hope" Equivocate means to avoid making an explicit statement. Equilibrate means to bring into equilibrium. Posted by al pedant on January 10, 2005 at 9:27 AM The comments about White suggest raging hormones. Is this a cyber site? Posted by tJp on January 10, 2005 at 9:29 AM Thanks pedant! Not equilibrate either, equate (Middle of the night after a day of heavy work, sorry)... but hope and hunger are related,... tJp.. Not hormones... hunger for someone with a standpoint that goes beyond the traditional leftwing rightwing duality without falling into the gap between the two, where there is no real opinion, and everything is the same, be it Beethoven, or Elvis. That is precisely what White calls the Middle Mind in his book. "What the Middle Mind does best is flatten distinctions," he writes. "It turns culture into mush." White makes us use our brains again, and that is very pleasant. That's what a brain is for. Posted by Talleyrand on January 10, 2005 at 10:41 AM I was astounded by the opening sentences of this article. Our present age is unprecedented, and our reality like nothing ever known to mankind before. The present generation of human beings has developed techniques of human reproduction which may seriously undermine the human condition. The rush to the post- human in the biotechnical realm takes many different forms and forces us to ask what is really essential to our humanity. The power of self- destruction given to mankind today is now being extended to states and groups that are wholly irresponsible. I could go and on with a long list of ` transformations' mankind has gone through in the past century alone which make our situation so unprecedented, difficult and in my opinion, more threatening than challenging. Blake's Industrial nightmares are innocence itself before the kinds of Doom and Disaster we remakers of ourselves and our environment may bring about. Posted by Shalom Freedman on January 12, 2005 at 5:48 AM I think there have always been thos three classes of persons, more or less. Each person or type of person just learns to accomodate themselves to the domnant way of thinking of their time. Unfortunately, there are always fewer poets than there should be..... Posted by a bard on January 12, 2005 at 11:07 AM Author Bio Curtis White is a novelist and social critic. His most recent books are The Middle Mind and America's Magic Mountain. [28]View other articles by this author References 13. http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/member/gateway/ 14. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1559638605/inthesetimes-20/ref=nosim/ 15. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805074422/inthesetimes-20/ref=nosim/ 28. http://www.inthesetimes.com/site?ACT=15&result_path=archives/searchresults&fetch_posts_by=Curtis+White From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 15:02:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 10:02:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Telegraph: (Eco) Joyfully surfing the waves of confusion Message-ID: Joyfully surfing the waves of confusion http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/01/02/boeco02.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/01/02/bomain.html (Filed: 09/01/2005) Joanna Kavenna reviews On Literature by Umberto Eco Umberto Eco has been called an "intellectual bon viveur", who wines and dines his readers with choice titbits from the last few millennia. He is usually charismatic and often conspiratorial. His writings are an elegant patchwork of tales from European literature, allusions to esoteric texts and personal anecdotes. A man of robust intellect and genuine erudition, he is at times charmingly sketchy and seems to have gleaned half his material from the internet. He doesn't quite part the sea of confusion in his writings; he rather surfs the waves, performing spectacular turns to an audience of deconstructionist beach bums and sunbathing postmodernists. This collection of essays presents some of the highs and lows of Eco's writing over the last few decades. Chapter headings include: "The Mists of the Valois", "On Symbolism" and "Les Semaphores sous la Pluie". If those don't set your pulse racing, there's an elegant reading of Dante's Paradiso, a tribute to Borges, some clever talk of James Joyce and a lucid essay on irony. There's a reading of The Communist Manifesto as a work of "genuinely poetic capacity", and a discussion of Oscar Wilde's aphorisms in which he is jovially accused of lacking philosophical depth. There's a fine piece of autobiography in which Eco reveals some of his writing rituals and superstitions. A few familiar themes surface. References to alchemical texts are strewn through the book. Dante is much-praised. Eco allows himself another crack at the question of a perfect language - the subject of previous works such as Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation and The Search for the Perfect Language. Dante's dream, writes Eco, was to restore "an Edenic language that was at the same time both natural and universal... to help the `modern' poet heal the post-Babel wound". Joyce, argues Eco, was also busy with this enterprise, though readers who found that Finnegans Wake gave them a migraine will question Eco's claim that Joyce really wanted to "restore the conditions of a perfect language through his own personal literary invention". This debate about a perfect language leads to a central concern of Eco's writing: the illusory nature of certainty and orthodox truth. In an essay in this collection called "The Power of Falsehood", Eco questions certainty of any kind: "Since in the course of history many have acted in the belief of something that someone else did not believe in, we are obliged to admit that for each of us, in different measure, History has been largely a Theatre of Illusions." After bringing on Columbus, Dante, Erik the Red, Ptolemy, Macrobius, Roger Bacon and the Rosicrucians, Eco concludes plainly enough: "Deep down, the first duty of the Community is to be on the alert in order to be able to rewrite the encyclopaedia every day." Any "truth" may be another illusion of science, or religion, or myth. This is all coherent enough, and perfectly postmodern, but then Eco turns to his own branch of academic theory, semiotics. In "On Style", he argues for semiotic criticism as "the only true form of criticism". "Semiotics," he adds, is "the model for all criticism." He ends by entreating the beleaguered ranks of semioticians "to remain faithful to our origins... without giving in to any blackmail, to humiliate those who are our inferiors". This all jars somewhat with Eco's remarks about truth. Is he saying that all truths are potential untruths apart from the undeniable truth of a semiotic reading? Or is he saying that only a semiotic reading can alert us to the truth which is the impossibility of certain truth? Or is he saying that semiotics is the only true form of criticism because it exposes as untrue all other forms of criticism? It remains unclear. But Eco's unyielding devotion to semiotics seems strange. Irrespective of whether it is a good idea or not, it is a theory that causes even elegant writers such as Eco to start filling their sentences with shabby old forms of convolution, words which once suggested newness but which have been thrown around in academia for ages now: "intertextuality", "metanarrative", "discourse" and, inevitably, "signifier" and "signified". Eco is too stylish, too ecumenical, for such an exclusive commitment to a single theoretical system. He is at his best, I think, when he drops the theory-mongering, when he slips out of the corset of jargon and allows himself to be a good-time intellectual again. It is then that he really sparkles, and this collection supplies plenty of instances of Eco in his most glitzy mode. [34]24 October 2004: Martin Gayford reviews On Beauty ed by Umberto Eco References 34. http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;sessionid=KDRRSKNJ3BPDHQFIQMGCM54AVCBQUJVC?xml=/arts/2004/10/24/boeco24.xml From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Feb 4 20:25:00 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 12:25:00 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Fax du jour Message-ID: <01C50AB4.8BE66390.shovland@mindspring.com> Social Security 2006 Election From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 10:47:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 05:47:00 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WETA-FM Alert Message-ID: This is the first alert I've ever sent out. I realize that the economics of broadcasting is driving the proposed format change from classical (which played no classical music during "rush" hour) to all news, as though another all-news station were needed. I suspect that the licensing regulations distort the economics here. In any case, greater exposure to the Occident's and the world's finest artistic product is sorely needed. Thanks to Antony Ody for bringing this to our attention. I should also thank Allen Mackler, the former scheduling manager of WETA-FM, friend, and record collector, now a booster of Sherlock Holmes scholarship and member of the Baker St. Irregulars, for his regular program on WETA-FM, "Collectors' Hour," of classical 78s, spliced in with his informative as well as witty commentary. I am not sure if any such program survives on this continent today. --Frank ------------------- The NSO Director of Artistic planning has put a letter together protesting WETA's forthcoming format change from classical to all-news. If you agree, please add your name to the bottom and pass it along to anyone else you think would be willing to sign this. Thanks, Jennifer -- Jennifer Faircloth jfaircloth at att.net Please read the letter below and sign and pass on. Thank you. Rosa Lamoreaux -----Original Message----- From: Bader, C [mailto:CUBader at Kennedy-Center.org] Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2005 11:51 AM To: ulibader at verizon.net; info at weta.org Subject: closing of classical radio station WETA, Washington Dear Friends and Colleagues: As some of you may have seen in today's Washington Post, WETA, Washington's radio station for NPR news and classical music is preparing to change program to a news-only station. As much as news is necessary, MUSIC and the ARTS are too. You may consider classical music entertainment or joy, a sophisticated hobby or a science on the side or maybe your profession. Music is history and future, a voice, education and a way of expression, which has survived many hundred years; it is part of our life and an essential part of our society and a pillar of the quality of life in our city, the Nation's Capitol. Would we just watch passively the closing of the National Gallery? Maybe we need to talk more about music but "closing" the classical music radio station in the Nation's Capitol is a tragedy and a catastrophe for the Arts. Please join me in the maybe last attempt to avoid this programming change. Please join me in saving WETA classical radio programming. We need your help urgently. I have written to WETA below and I would like you to sign and send this email on to your friends. Please forward this email to everyone you know who may want to join this cause and have them sign below. IF YOU ARE NUMBER 50), 100), 150), 200), etc , please email this letter to ulibader at verizon.net and to info at weta.org. Thank you very much for your help! ULI BADER Director of Artistic Planning National Symphony Orchestra ------------------- Dear Board of Directors of WETA: I am the Director of Artistic Planning for the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center and I consider the program change of WETA FM to news-only and the cancellation of classical music on your station a tragedy and a catastrophe for music and the arts. We have truly enough news channels and your step is going into the wrong direction. I know about financial restrictions but there must be more creative ways to solve this problem. Closing is not one of them. Where do you send your children to school? Do you consider a fine education essential? Is it important for you or to your children to know who Mozart, Brahms and Mahler is, maybe even Gershwin, Copland, Philip Glass, or John Adams? And how they sound? What about VanGogh, Picasso, Rothko? If so - and I am certain that your answer is yes - who is left providing this information to a wide audience on the radio. We at the National Symphony Orchestra do everything we can to further the understanding of music and we are investigating new ways to improve the situation - our communication to and with our audiences - but closing classical music (?), that is truly the wrong way to go. I am launching a campaign to raise our voice against this step and I hope that you will consider this public voice seriously. With kind regards, C. Ulrich Bader Director of Artistic Planning National Symphony Orchestra John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts cubader at kennedy-center.org ulibader at verizon.net 202-416-8135 1) C. Ulrich Bader, Washington, DC 2) Kim Witman, Vienna VA 3) Martha Woods, Hyattsville, MD 4) Rosa Lamoreaux, Washington, DC 5) 6) 7) 8) 9) 10) 11) C. Ulrich Bader Director of Artistic Planning National Symphony Orchestra John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts PLEASE NOTE THAT THE KENNEDY CENTER HAS A NEW PO BOX ADDRESS. ALSO, PLEASE DO NOT SEND CDs OR OTHER MATERIAL VIA REGULAR MAIL TO THE STREET ADDRESS. THANKS. street address: (for UPS and FedEx mailing only!) 2700 F Street, NW Washington, DC 20566-0001 phone: 202-416-8100 mailing address: (for regular mail only / no packages!) P.O. Box 101510 Arlington, VA 22210 ------------------------- WETA Considers Switch to All-News From Classical By Paul Farhi Washington Post, 5.2.2 WETA-FM, the Arlington public radio station that has been an outpost of classical music programming for more than a generation, is considering scrapping the sounds of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart for an all-news and talk format, people at the station say. Although WETA officials say they have not finalized their plans, the station's management intends to present a proposal to overhaul daily programming to the board of directors next week. The station has called its employees to a mandatory meeting the day after the Feb. 10 board meeting. If the board approves the changes, the classical music heard on WETA since 1970 would be largely replaced by month's end. Station management is considering keeping its Saturday broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, but such staples as its Thursday night New York Philharmonic concerts would end. A programming switch at WETA would be the second for a venerable Washington area radio station this year. Last month the longtime alternative-rock outlet WHFS-FM (99.1) abruptly adopted a Spanish music format. If WETA (90.9) changes format, it would be following other public radio stations around the country that have dropped classical for news. The primary influence has been money: News programming tends to keep public radio listeners tuned in longer, and as a result, attracts more donation pledges. Listener donations typically account for half or more of a public station's annual operating budget. But the drift toward news in public radio has not been without controversy. People in public radio have debated for years whether programming decisions designed to build larger audiences blur the distinction between public and commercial broadcasting. One faction argues that public radio should remain true to its roots and provide important, if less than broadly popular, alternative cultural programming such as jazz, classical, bluegrass and blues music. Another side counters that fiscal pressures, including dwindling government support, makes audience-building a priority. Dan DeVany, WETA's vice president and general manager, said in an interview yesterday that his station faced "a dilemma." With the audience for classical music in decline, he said, "we have to ask ourselves if we are truly fulfilling our public service mission." He declined to provide specific ratings figures, but DeVany noted that WETA's audience is "quite low, lower than it's been in several years. It's a trend we've been witnessing over time. I'm not pleased with where we're at." He added, "I'm not sure we're performing a public service the way we are, given the size of this station and the size of our potential audience." He said financial support for the station has remained steady, "but we're getting money from fewer people." At the same time, he added, "what public radio does well, what defines us," is news programming from National Public Radio. Classical music programming dominates WETA's daytime and evening schedule, but the station has gradually moved toward more news. It received thousands of letters of protest when it dropped its morning classical show in 1999 to begin broadcasts of NPR's "Morning Edition." The protests were driven in part by the fact that WETA was duplicating a program that could already be heard on Washington public station WAMU-FM (88.5). Adding more news and talk would make WETA sound even more like WAMU, which features NPR programming and talk shows hosted by Diane Rehm and Kojo Nnamdi. If WETA drops its classical format, it would leave WGMS-FM (103.3), which airs commercials, as the only station in Washington that plays classical music. Some WETA sources said this week that a move away from classical was signaled in early January, when the station hired a new program director, Maxie C. Jackson III. Jackson, the former acting general manager of public station WEAA-FM in Baltimore, came to WETA with a reputation for developing news and talk programs, particularly shows aimed at African American audiences. He has little background in classical music. Jackson has been a prominent member of the African American Public Radio Consortium, which created the now-defunct "Tavis Smiley Show" and the new "News & Notes With Ed Gordon," both syndicated by NPR. In an interview earlier this week, Jackson said, "I haven't considered anything new. I'm new to the facility and am still in the process of understanding the system around here. So it's a bit early to consider changes. . . . I've told the staff that by no means am I here to turn the ship upside down." Asked about potential changes yesterday, Jackson said, "I'd rather stick with what Dan said. Dan is able to articulate what's happening at the station." From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 10:49:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 05:49:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Theodore Dalrymple: The Frivolity of Evil Message-ID: City Journal Autumn 2004 | The Frivolity of Evil by Theodore Dalrymple http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_oh_to_be.html Oh, to be in E ngland The Frivolity of Evil Theodore Dalrymple When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping. You cannot pay a debt by having caused even greater expense, nor can you pay in advance for a bank robbery by offering to serve a prison sentence before you commit it. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the slate is wiped clean once a prisoner is released from prison, but the debt is not paid off. It would be just as absurd for me to say, on my imminent retirement after 14 years of my hospital and prison work, that I have paid my debt to society. I had the choice to do something more pleasing if I had wished, and I was paid, if not munificently, at least adequately. I chose the disagreeable neighborhood in which I practiced because, medically speaking, the poor are more interesting, at least to me, than the rich: their pathology is more florid, their need for attention greater. Their dilemmas, if cruder, seem to me more compelling, nearer to the fundamentals of human existence. No doubt I also felt my services would be more valuable there: in other words, that I had some kind of duty to perform. Perhaps for that reason, like the prisoner on his release, I feel I have paid my debt to society. Certainly, the work has taken a toll on me, and it is time to do something else. Someone else can do battle with the metastasizing social pathology of Great Britain, while I lead a life aesthetically more pleasing to me. My work has caused me to become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the problem of evil. Why do people commit evil? What conditions allow it to flourish? How is it best prevented and, when necessary, suppressed? Each time I listen to a patient recounting the cruelty to which he or she has been subjected, or has committed (and I have listened to several such patients every day for 14 years), these questions revolve endlessly in my mind. No doubt my previous experiences fostered my preoccupation with this problem. My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and though she spoke very little of her life before she came to Britain, the mere fact that there was much of which she did not speak gave evil a ghostly presence in our household. Later, I spent several years touring the world, often in places where atrocity had recently been, or still was being, committed. In Central America, I witnessed civil war fought between guerrilla groups intent on imposing totalitarian tyranny on their societies, opposed by armies that didn't scruple to resort to massacre. In Equatorial Guinea, the current dictator was the nephew and henchman of the last dictator, who had killed or driven into exile a third of the population, executing every last person who wore glasses or possessed a page of printed matter for being a disaffected or potentially disaffected intellectual. In Liberia, I visited a church in which more than 600 people had taken refuge and been slaughtered, possibly by the president himself (soon to be videotaped being tortured to death). The outlines of the bodies were still visible on the dried blood on the floor, and the long mound of the mass grave began only a few yards from the entrance. In North Korea I saw the acme of tyranny, millions of people in terrorized, abject obeisance to a personality cult whose object, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, made the Sun King look like the personification of modesty. Still, all these were political evils, which my own country had entirely escaped. I optimistically supposed that, in the absence of the worst political deformations, widespread evil was impossible. I soon discovered my error. Of course, nothing that I was to see in a British slum approached the scale or depth of what I had witnessed elsewhere. Beating a woman from motives of jealousy, locking her in a closet, breaking her arms deliberately, terrible though it may be, is not the same, by a long way, as mass murder. More than enough of the constitutional, traditional, institutional, and social restraints on large-scale political evil still existed in Britain to prevent anything like what I had witnessed elsewhere. Yet the scale of a man's evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them. Some evil geniuses, of course, devote their lives to increasing that scope as widely as possible, but no such character has yet arisen in Britain, and most evildoers merely make the most of their opportunities. They do what they can get away with. In any case, the extent of the evil that I found, though far more modest than the disasters of modern history, is nonetheless impressive. From the vantage point of one six-bedded hospital ward, I have met at least 5,000 perpetrators of the kind of violence I have just described and 5,000 victims of it: nearly 1 percent of the population of my city--or a higher percentage, if one considers the age-specificity of the behavior. And when you take the life histories of these people, as I have, you soon realize that their existence is as saturated with arbitrary violence as that of the inhabitants of many a dictatorship. Instead of one dictator, though, there are thousands, each the absolute ruler of his own little sphere, his power circumscribed by the proximity of another such as he. Violent conflict, not confined to the home and hearth, spills out onto the streets. Moreover, I discovered that British cities such as my own even had torture chambers: run not by the government, as in dictatorships, but by those representatives of slum enterprise, the drug dealers. Young men and women in debt to drug dealers are kidnapped, taken to the torture chambers, tied to beds, and beaten or whipped. Of compunction there is none--only a residual fear of the consequences of going too far. Perhaps the most alarming feature of this low-level but endemic evil, the one that brings it close to the conception of original sin, is that it is unforced and spontaneous. No one requires people to commit it. In the worst dictatorships, some of the evil ordinary men and women do they do out of fear of not committing it. There, goodness requires heroism. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, for example, a man who failed to report a political joke to the authorities was himself guilty of an offense that could lead to deportation or death. But in modern Britain, no such conditions exist: the government does not require citizens to behave as I have described and punish them if they do not. The evil is freely chosen. Not that the government is blameless in the matter--far from it. Intellectuals propounded the idea that man should be freed from the shackles of social convention and self-control, and the government, without any demand from below, enacted laws that promoted unrestrained behavior and created a welfare system that protected people from some of its economic consequences. When the barriers to evil are brought down, it flourishes; and never again will I be tempted to believe in the fundamental goodness of man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature. Of course, my personal experience is just that--personal experience. Admittedly, I have looked out at the social world of my city and my country from a peculiar and possibly unrepresentative vantage point, from a prison and from a hospital ward where practically all the patients have tried to kill themselves, or at least made suicidal gestures. But it is not small or slight personal experience, and each of my thousands, even scores of thousands, of cases has given me a window into the world in which that person lives. And when my mother asks me whether I am not in danger of letting my personal experience embitter me or cause me to look at the world through bile-colored spectacles, I ask her why she thinks that she, in common with all old people in Britain today, feels the need to be indoors by sundown or face the consequences, and why this should be the case in a country that within living memory was law-abiding and safe? Did she not herself tell me that, as a young woman during the blackouts in the Blitz, she felt perfectly safe, at least from the depredations of her fellow citizens, walking home in the pitch dark, and that it never occurred to her that she might be the victim of a crime, whereas nowadays she has only to put her nose out of her door at dusk for her to think of nothing else? Is it not true that her purse has been stolen twice in the last two years, in broad daylight, and is it not true that statistics--however manipulated by governments to put the best possible gloss upon them--bear out the accuracy of the conclusions that I have drawn from my personal experience? In 1921, the year of my mother's birth, there was one crime recorded for every 370 inhabitants of England and Wales; 80 years later, it was one for every ten inhabitants. There has been a 12-fold increase since 1941 and an even greater increase in crimes of violence. So while personal experience is hardly a complete guide to social reality, the historical data certainly back up my impressions. A single case can be illuminating, especially when it is statistically banal--in other words, not at all exceptional. Yesterday, for example, a 21-year-old woman consulted me, claiming to be depressed. She had swallowed an overdose of her antidepressants and then called an ambulance. There is something to be said here about the word "depression," which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is willfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is the disavowal of his own power and responsibility. The patient's notion that he is ill stands in the way of his understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than enlightening. My patient already had had three children by three different men, by no means unusual among my patients, or indeed in the country as a whole. The father of her first child had been violent, and she had left him; the second died in an accident while driving a stolen car; the third, with whom she had been living, had demanded that she should leave his apartment because, a week after their child was born, he decided that he no longer wished to live with her. (The discovery of incompatibility a week after the birth of a child is now so common as to be statistically normal.) She had nowhere to go, no one to fall back on, and the hospital was a temporary sanctuary from her woes. She hoped that we would fix her up with some accommodation. She could not return to her mother, because of conflict with her "stepfather," or her mother's latest boyfriend, who, in fact, was only nine years older than she and seven years younger than her mother. This compression of the generations is also now a common pattern and is seldom a recipe for happiness. (It goes without saying that her own father had disappeared at her birth, and she had never seen him since.) The latest boyfriend in this kind of m?nage either wants the daughter around to abuse her sexually or else wants her out of the house as being a nuisance and an unnecessary expense. This boyfriend wanted her out of the house, and set about creating an atmosphere certain to make her leave as soon as possible. The father of her first child had, of course, recognized her vulnerability. A girl of 16 living on her own is easy prey. He beat her from the first, being drunken, possessive, and jealous, as well as flagrantly unfaithful. She thought that a child would make him more responsible--sober him up and calm him down. It had the reverse effect. She left him. The father of her second child was a career criminal, already imprisoned several times. A drug addict who took whatever drugs he could get, he died under the influence. She had known all about his past before she had his child. The father of her third child was much older than she. It was he who suggested that they have a child--in fact he demanded it as a condition of staying with her. He had five children already by three different women, none of whom he supported in any way whatever. The conditions for the perpetuation of evil were now complete. She was a young woman who would not want to remain alone, without a man, for very long; but with three children already, she would attract precisely the kind of man, like the father of her first child--of whom there are now many--looking for vulnerable, exploitable women. More than likely, at least one of them (for there would undoubtedly be a succession of them) would abuse her children sexually, physically, or both. She was, of course, a victim of her mother's behavior at a time when she had little control over her destiny. Her mother had thought that her own sexual liaison was more important than the welfare of her child, a common way of thinking in today's welfare Britain. That same day, for example, I was consulted by a young woman whose mother's consort had raped her many times between the ages of eight and 15, with her mother's full knowledge. Her mother had allowed this solely so that her relationship with her consort might continue. It could happen that my patient will one day do the same thing. My patient was not just a victim of her mother, however: she had knowingly borne children of men of whom no good could be expected. She knew perfectly well the consequences and the meaning of what she was doing, as her reaction to something that I said to her--and say to hundreds of women patients in a similar situation--proved: next time you are thinking of going out with a man, bring him to me for my inspection, and I'll tell you if you can go out with him. This never fails to make the most wretched, the most "depressed" of women smile broadly or laugh heartily. They know exactly what I mean, and I need not spell it out further. They know that I mean that most of the men they have chosen have their evil written all over them, sometimes quite literally in the form of tattoos, saying "FUCK OFF" or "MAD DOG." And they understand that if I can spot the evil instantly, because they know what I would look for, so can they--and therefore they are in large part responsible for their own downfall at the hands of evil men. Moreover, they are aware that I believe that it is both foolish and wicked to have children by men without having considered even for a second or a fraction of a second whether the men have any qualities that might make them good fathers. Mistakes are possible, of course: a man may turn out not to be as expected. But not even to consider the question is to act as irresponsibly as it is possible for a human being to act. It is knowingly to increase the sum of evil in the world, and sooner or later the summation of small evils leads to the triumph of evil itself. My patient did not start out with the intention of abetting, much less of committing, evil. And yet her refusal to take seriously and act upon the signs that she saw and the knowledge that she had was not the consequence of blindness and ignorance. It was utterly willful. She knew from her own experience, and that of many people around her, that her choices, based on the pleasure or the desire of the moment, would lead to the misery and suffering not only of herself, but--especially--of her own children. This truly is not so much the banality as the frivolity of evil: the elevation of passing pleasure for oneself over the long-term misery of others to whom one owes a duty. What better phrase than the frivolity of evil describes the conduct of a mother who turns her own 14-year-old child out of doors because her latest boyfriend does not want him or her in the house? And what better phrase describes the attitude of those intellectuals who see in this conduct nothing but an extension of human freedom and choice, another thread in life's rich tapestry? The men in these situations also know perfectly well the meaning and consequences of what they are doing. The same day that I saw the patient I have just described, a man aged 25 came into our ward, in need of an operation to remove foil-wrapped packets of cocaine that he had swallowed in order to evade being caught by the police in possession of them. (Had a packet burst, he would have died immediately.) As it happened, he had just left his latest girlfriend--one week after she had given birth to their child. They weren't getting along, he said; he needed his space. Of the child, he thought not for an instant. I asked him whether he had any other children. "Four," he replied. "How many mothers?" "Three." "Do you see any of your children?" He shook his head. It is supposedly the duty of the doctor not to pass judgment on how his patients have elected to live, but I think I may have raised my eyebrows slightly. At any rate, the patient caught a whiff of my disapproval. "I know," he said. "I know. Don't tell me." These words were a complete confession of guilt. I have had hundreds of conversations with men who have abandoned their children in this fashion, and they all know perfectly well what the consequences are for the mother and, more important, for the children. They all know that they are condemning their children to lives of brutality, poverty, abuse, and hopelessness. They tell me so themselves. And yet they do it over and over again, to such an extent that I should guess that nearly a quarter of British children are now brought up this way. The result is a rising tide of neglect, cruelty, sadism, and joyous malignity that staggers and appalls me. I am more horrified after 14 years than the day I started. Where does this evil come from? There is obviously something flawed in the heart of man that he should wish to behave in this depraved fashion--the legacy of original sin, to speak metaphorically. But if, not so long ago, such conduct was much less widespread than it is now (in a time of much lesser prosperity, be it remembered by those who think that poverty explains everything), then something more is needed to explain it. A necessary, though not sufficient, condition is the welfare state, which makes it possible, and sometimes advantageous, to behave like this. Just as the IMF is the bank of last resort, encouraging commercial banks to make unwise loans to countries that they know the IMF will bail out, so the state is the parent of last resort--or, more often than not, of first resort. The state, guided by the apparently generous and humane philosophy that no child, whatever its origins, should suffer deprivation, gives assistance to any child, or rather the mother of any child, once it has come into being. In matters of public housing, it is actually advantageous for a mother to put herself at a disadvantage, to be a single mother, without support from the fathers of the children and dependent on the state for income. She is then a priority; she won't pay local taxes, rent, or utility bills. As for the men, the state absolves them of all responsibility for their children. The state is now father to the child. The biological father is therefore free to use whatever income he has as pocket money, for entertainment and little treats. He is thereby reduced to the status of a child, though a spoiled child with the physical capabilities of a man: petulant, demanding, querulous, self-centered, and violent if he doesn't get his own way. The violence escalates and becomes a habit. A spoiled brat becomes an evil tyrant. But if the welfare state is a necessary condition for the spread of evil, it is not sufficient. After all, the British welfare state is neither the most extensive nor the most generous in the world, and yet our rates of social pathology--public drunkenness, drug-taking, teenage pregnancy, venereal disease, hooliganism, criminality--are the highest in the world. Something more was necessary to produce this result. Here we enter the realm of culture and ideas. For it is necessary not only to believe that it is economically feasible to behave in the irresponsible and egotistical fashion that I have described, but also to believe that it is morally permissible to do so. And this idea has been peddled by the intellectual elite in Britain for many years, more assiduously than anywhere else, to the extent that it is now taken for granted. There has been a long march not only through the institutions but through the minds of the young. When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as "nonjudgmental." For them, the highest form of morality is amorality. There has been an unholy alliance between those on the Left, who believe that man is endowed with rights but no duties, and libertarians on the Right, who believe that consumer choice is the answer to all social questions, an idea eagerly adopted by the Left in precisely those areas where it does not apply. Thus people have a right to bring forth children any way they like, and the children, of course, have the right not to be deprived of anything, at least anything material. How men and women associate and have children is merely a matter of consumer choice, of no more moral consequence than the choice between dark and milk chocolate, and the state must not discriminate among different forms of association and child rearing, even if such non-discrimination has the same effect as British and French neutrality during the Spanish Civil War. The consequences to the children and to society do not enter into the matter: for in any case it is the function of the state to ameliorate by redistributive taxation the material effects of individual irresponsibility, and to ameliorate the emotional, educational, and spiritual effects by an army of social workers, psychologists, educators, counselors, and the like, who have themselves come to form a powerful vested interest of dependence on the government. So while my patients know in their hearts that what they are doing is wrong, and worse than wrong, they are encouraged nevertheless to do it by the strong belief that they have the right to do it, because everything is merely a matter of choice. Almost no one in Britain ever publicly challenges this belief. Nor has any politician the courage to demand a withdrawal of the public subsidy that allows the intensifying evil I have seen over the past 14 years--violence, rape, intimidation, cruelty, drug addiction, neglect--to flourish so exuberantly. With 40 percent of children in Britain born out of wedlock, and the proportion still rising, and with divorce the norm rather than the exception, there soon will be no electoral constituency for reversal. It is already deemed to be electoral suicide to advocate it by those who, in their hearts, know that such a reversal is necessary. I am not sure they are right. They lack courage. My only cause for optimism during the past 14 years has been the fact that my patients, with a few exceptions, can be brought to see the truth of what I say: that they are not depressed; they are unhappy--and they are unhappy because they have chosen to live in a way that they ought not to live, and in which it is impossible to be happy. Without exception, they say that they would not want their children to live as they have lived. But the social, economic, and ideological pressures--and, above all, the parental example--make it likely that their children's choices will be as bad as theirs. Ultimately, the moral cowardice of the intellectual and political elites is responsible for the continuing social disaster that has overtaken Britain, a disaster whose full social and economic consequences have yet to be seen. A sharp economic downturn would expose how far the policies of successive governments, all in the direction of libertinism, have atomized British society, so that all social solidarity within families and communities, so protective in times of hardship, has been destroyed. The elites cannot even acknowledge what has happened, however obvious it is, for to do so would be to admit their past responsibility for it, and that would make them feel bad. Better that millions should live in wretchedness and squalor than that they should feel bad about themselves--another aspect of the frivolity of evil. Moreover, if members of the elite acknowledged the social disaster brought about by their ideological libertinism, they might feel called upon to place restraints upon their own behavior, for you cannot long demand of others what you balk at doing yourself. There are pleasures, no doubt, to be had in crying in the wilderness, in being a man who thinks he has seen further and more keenly than others, but they grow fewer with time. The wilderness has lost its charms for me. I'm leaving--I hope for good. From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 10:50:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 05:50:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Physics Today: God's Rays Physics Today Message-ID: Articles - God's Rays Physics Today - Physics Today January 2005 http://www.physicstoday.org/servlet/PrintPT http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-58/iss-1/p32.html Published: January 2005 The physicist's quest for understanding is not the only way to raise the level of our existence and give our lives meaning. [1]Bryce DeWitt Editor's Note: Bryce DeWitt wrote this personal essay for Physics Today before he died on 23 September 2004. With it, Physics Today begins its celebration of the World Year of Physics 2005. A vacant lot sprinkled with puncture vines spread westward, and the Sun was setting over the coast ranges. It must have been near the end of school for I was already walking barefoot, something that my father, the local country doctor, looked on with disfavor. There were clouds in the west, left over from a late spring rain, and the sun was sending shafts of golden rays earthward. "God's rays," said my companion, aged six, and we kneeled in obeisance until they disappeared. Beauty we took for granted, and we responded accordingly. Our vacant lot was in a small village on the east side of the San Joaquin valley [in central California]. The puncture vines were hazards to bare feet, as they were to our bicycle tires, and we had to give attention to both as we crossed over. In 1930 there were many vacant lots. This one was close to where we parted ways, he to his home down the street and I to my maternal grandparents' farm down a country road. Even though my grandparents were terribly pious, it was always a treat for me to visit them at the farm. Before sitting down to supper, we had to kneel, with our elbows on the chair seat, and listen to Grandfather give a long prayer. This was repeated after supper. In addition, Grandfather read a chapter or two from the King James Bible. He was working his way straight through the volume, chapter by chapter, book by book. (He had already gone through it twice before, although how he made it through the book of Numbers, I have never understood.) I remember absorbing nothing from these readings. What I got came from Grandmother, who plied me lovingly with Bible stories: The young Samuel and Eli, the high priest. The sword of the Lord and of Gideon. Daniel, Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego (the original wholesome-food cranks). Moses and Pharaoh's daughter. . . . Grandmother also sang to me many religious hymns. What I got of Protestantism I got mainly from her. And I got it in a particularly evangelical form. Grandfather was a failure as a farmer. For example, the farm had no electricity, and to my delight, we had to use coal-oil lamps inside. What he had always wanted to be was an astronomer. He built amateur telescopes, the lens of one of which is in the Harvard College Observatory to this day. His family was too poor to send him to university. But his heart was in science. Naturally Grandmother hounded him to his deathbed, trying to make him give up believing in Darwinian evolution. In later years she and I too had our arguments. For example, according to her the world was made in 4004 BC. Counting forward 6000 years from that date and taking into account the fact that there was no year 0, that would bring us to 1997 AD, sometime in the summer according to Grandmother. Armageddon would then begin and would last for 3? years. In 2001 AD, the "Son of man" would come "in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory," and the seventh millennium would be the great one. Grandmother always said that although she would be dead by then, I should live to see it. I confessed that it would be delightful to see such a phenomenon in the sky (I was already planning to become a physicist), but I pointed out to her that Jesus said, "Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven." She would merely hang her head a bit. It is amazing to me that when I tell this story today, I get quite a few responses to the effect that Grandmother just had her dates wrong. How depressing. After the evening Bible reading, I was sent to bed with a big old alarm clock having a luminous dial. I loved to hold its face close to mine in the dark and watch the scintillations produced every time a radium nucleus decayed. It was better than a Teddy bear. A few years later I was old enough (around 10) to go to Daily Vacation Bible School. It was organized by two energetic ministers in town, and even though it occurred during the summer vacation I was happy to go to it because it was fun, and it only lasted for about three weeks. It was held in the junior high school building, which had facilities such as a woodworking shop, a basketball court, and a baseball diamond. But the most exciting facility for me was the auditorium, where we had competitions. These were of two sorts. First, the student body was divided into teams, and once a week each team was asked to recite aloud the Bible verses they had memorized during the preceding week. Points were given for the number of verses memorized. Only the number mattered, not their length, so we quickly discovered where the shortest verses in the Bible were to be found. The second competition involved speed. The two ministers had somehow acquired a supply of Bibles, which they passed out to the youngsters. One of them would call out a verse--for example Proverbs 4:7--and the first youngster to locate it and read it out was the winner. Since the Bibles were from a cheap edition and had no page tabs to help in the search, we had to learn the names of all the books in the Bible--in proper order. As a result we effortlessly acquired a command of all those great lines in the Bible that, up until the middle of the 20th century, could be assumed by English authors to be part of a common European cultural heritage. Nowadays, when I am reading a 19th- or early 20th-century novel, I find myself wondering how many readers catch the biblical allusions. Since Shakespeare is still taught in our schools, I imagine that his lines do not go unnoticed. But what a pity it is to have lost the ability to make use of such great lines as * Gird up now thy loins like a man. * Where wast thou . . . when the morning stars sang together? * Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength. * The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. * Comfort ye, comfort ye my people. * They that wait upon the Lord . . . shall mount up with wings as eagles. * We hanged our harps upon the willows. * Cast thy bread upon the waters. * Their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. * Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? * For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. * For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. * Though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And on and on. Amateur theologians I have never felt a conflict between my sensitivity to the King James Bible and my beliefs as a physicist. I am a theoretical physicist, and it is common knowledge that theoretical physicists often start out as amateur theologians. They want to understand the whole of reality, and they begin by studying cosmology--the obvious starting point. Nowhere does a physicist's religious or philosophical preferences (one should really say prejudices) show up more clearly than in his approach to cosmology. In the early days of the so-called steady-state theory of the universe, everyone knew (though no one ever said so in print) that the model was motivated by antireligious sentiment. When evidence for the Big Bang began to accumulate, the steady-state theory nearly collapsed (a mutilated version of it has been kept alive) and the Vatican became ecstatic. Independent of the early history of the universe, there remains the question of its topology. Some cosmologists are convinced that the total volume of the universe must be finite, others that it must be infinite--in both cases without a shred of physical evidence. Usually these beliefs stem from a feeling that the structure of the universe should be describable in a neat compact form. Once again I can only say, "How depressing." Albert Einstein said, "The Lord God is subtle but He is not malicious." I like to turn this around by saying, "The Lord God is not malicious, but He is subtle." I have never believed that reality could turn out to be fixed by an unimaginative initial condition. Fortunately, some cosmologists have lately begun to consider models in which the "initial conditions" are aleatoric and hence far from simple. They even envisage infinite numbers of simultaneous universes, as well as possible behaviors before the Big Bang. For some reason, however, all their proposals ignore one of the most obvious. At the time of Isaac Newton, the formalism of classical mechanics (laws of motion, gravitational forces, and the like) was regarded as providing a direct representation of reality. The formalism of quantum mechanics, on the other hand, has almost never been regarded as providing a direct representation of reality. Physicists seem to be scared by it. Those few who do envisage a direct connection between formalism and reality are, for some reason, more often from Europe than America. The Europeans are braver than the Americans, because if one accepts the view that formalism and reality are isomorphic, then in the quantum theory one is obliged to accept a stupendous number of simultaneous realities, namely, all the possible outcomes of quantum measurements as well as all the possible "classical" worlds that emerge spontaneously from the wavefunction of the universe through the phenomenon of decoherence. The notion of a wavefunction for the whole universe is not ridiculous. Cosmologists who worry about quantum effects in the early universe (for example, in galaxy formation) use it all the time. Among those who deal with such heady intellectual problems, use of the word "God" is not uncommon. It is used in some of the popularizations that physicists have written, which attempt to convey to the general reader some of the glory of physics, particularly cosmology. I am occasionally tempted to try writing such a book myself, but I know that it would be terribly one-sided. I know some physics, but there is much more to "reality" than physics, and of that I am largely ignorant. So I wind up instead writing a physics treatise for specialists! The trouble with writing a popularization is that one has to be absolutely honest. There is a photograph taken from one of the early interplanetary probes, looking back toward Earth. Earth appears as a tiny blue sphere surrounded by an immensity of blackness. It is a photograph that makes tears flow. There is no sharper visual statement of the loneliness of our planet. Earth is an insignificant speck in a vast and overwhelmingly hostile universe. There is nothing to suggest that human beings have a special role to play in this universe. Steven Weinberg is absolutely right when he says, "The more the universe is comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."^1 Lifting human life So where does that leave the amateur theologian, the young and eager theoretical physicist? Weinberg says, "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." It surely does that. But are there no other bright spots? For not everyone is a theoretical physicist. Many years ago I had a postdoctoral assistant named Heinz Pagels, a very nice young man and very bright. Unfortunately he died in a mountain accident before he could display his full potential. He left a wife, Elaine, whom I have met only once, years ago, but who has meant a lot to me through her writings. She is a religious historian specializing in the first three centuries of the Christian era and in particular in the so-called Gnostic Gospels, several manuscripts of which were discovered in a cave in Egypt in the middle of the 20th century. The period before 300 AD is a very difficult one to write about; the evidence is so fragmentary. The historian has to present every scrap of speculation about this period that has been put forward by dozens of other historians, and then answer those with whom she disagrees. Nevertheless, after all preliminaries have been cleared away, one message comes through loud and clear. Many Jesus cults arose around the Mediterranean basin in those years. Some believed that Jesus was divine, others that he was just a man. Some had their own gospels, with stories and sayings of Jesus. Some had their own bishops--intellectual types who couldn't resist trying to propose frameworks for belief. But the cults themselves typically arose among the lowest social strata (slaves, beggars, convicts) who were coming into contact, for the first time, with a "religion" very different from those they already knew about. This new religion touched such a deep chord in them that many were willing to oppose the authorities on its behalf even if that opposition meant death. And all these developments took place before Constantine co-opted the political power inherent in the new religion by setting up the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. What was the new element in this new religion that had such an overwhelming impact? In a word, love. That is the key word, for believers and nonbelievers alike, that raises our existence above the level of farce. And it needs no religious framework whatever to exert its power. ____________________________ Bryce DeWitt was the Jane and Roland Blumberg Professor Emeritus in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of numerous books, most recently The Global Approach to Quantum Field Theory (Oxford U. Press, 2003). ____________________________ Reference 1. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe, Basic Books, New York (1977). From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 10:52:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 05:52:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Jim Holt: Measure for Measure: The strange science of Francis Galton. Message-ID: Jim Holt: Measure for Measure: The strange science of Francis Galton. The New Yorker: The Critics: Books http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/ January 17, 2005 | [13]home Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31 Posted 2005-01-17 In the eighteen-eighties, residents of cities across Britain might have noticed an aged, bald, bewhiskered gentleman sedulously eying every girl he passed on the street while manipulating something in his pocket. What they were seeing was not lechery in action but science. Concealed in the man's pocket was a device he called a "pricker," which consisted of a needle mounted on a thimble and a cross-shaped piece of paper. By pricking holes in different parts of the paper, he could surreptitiously record his rating of a female passerby's appearance, on a scale ranging from attractive to repellent. After many months of wielding his pricker and tallying the results, he drew a "beauty map" of the British Isles. London proved the epicenter of beauty, Aberdeen of its opposite. Such research was entirely congenial to Francis Galton, a man who took as his motto "Whenever you can, count." Galton was one of the great Victorian innovators. He explored unknown regions of Africa. He pioneered the fields of weather forecasting and fingerprinting. He discovered statistical rules that revolutionized the methodology of science. Yet today he is most often remembered for an achievement that puts him in a decidedly sinister light: he was the father of eugenics, the science, or pseudoscience, of "improving" the human race by selective breeding. A new biography, "Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton" (Bloomsbury; $24.95), casts the man's sinister aspect right in the title. The author, Martin Brookes, is a former evolutionary biologist who worked at University College London's Galton Laboratory (which, before a sanitizing name change in 1965, was the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics). Brookes is clearly impressed by the exuberance of Galton's curiosity and the range of his achievement. Still, he cannot help finding Galton a little dotty, a man gripped by an obsession with counting and measuring that made him "one of the Victorian era's chief exponents of the scientific folly." If Brookes is right, Galton was led astray not merely by Victorian prejudice but by a failure to understand the very statistical ideas that he had conceived. Born in 1822 into a wealthy and distinguished Quaker family--his maternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, a revered physician and botanist who wrote poetry about the sex lives of plants--Galton enjoyed a pampered upbringing. As a child, he revelled in his own precocity: "I am four years old and can read any English book. I can say all the Latin Substantives and Adjectives and active verbs besides 52 lines of Latin poetry. I can cast up any sum in addition and multiply by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10. I can also say the pence table. I read French a little and I know the Clock." When Galton was sixteen, his father decided that he should pursue a medical career, as his grandfather had. He was sent to train in a hospital, but was put off by the screams of unanesthetized patients on the operating table. Seeking guidance from his cousin Charles Darwin, who had just returned from his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, Galton was advised to "read Mathematics like a house on fire." So he enrolled at Cambridge, where, despite his invention of a "gumption-reviver machine" that dripped water on his head, he promptly suffered a breakdown from overwork. This pattern of frantic intellectual activity followed by nervous collapse continued throughout Galton's life. His need to earn a living, though, ended when he was twenty-two, with the death of his father. Now in possession of a handsome inheritance, he took up a life of sporting hedonism. In 1845, he went on a hippo-shooting expedition down the Nile, then trekked by camel across the Nubian Desert. He taught himself Arabic and apparently caught a venereal disease from a prostitute--which, his biographer speculates, may account for a noticeable cooling in the young man's ardor for women. The world still contained vast uncharted areas, and exploring them seemed an apt vocation to this rich Victorian bachelor. In 1850, Galton sailed to southern Africa and ventured into parts of the interior never before seen by a white man. Before setting out, he purchased a theatrical crown in Drury Lane which he planned to place "on the head of the greatest or most distant potentate I should meet with." The story of his thousand-mile journey through the bush is grippingly told in this biography. Improvising survival tactics as he went along, he contended with searing heat, scarce water, tribal warfare, marauding lions, shattered axles, dodgy guides, and native helpers whose conflicting dietary superstitions made it impossible to settle on a commonly agreeable meal from the caravan's mobile larder of sheep and oxen. He became adept in the use of the sextant, at one point using it to measure from afar the curves of an especially buxom native woman--"Venus among Hottentots." The climax of the journey was his encounter with King Nangoro, a tribal ruler locally reputed to be "the fattest man in the world." Nangoro was fascinated by the Englishman's white skin and straight hair, and moderately pleased when the tacky stage crown was placed on his head. But when the King dispatched his niece, smeared in butter and red ochre, to his guest's tent to serve as a wife for the night, Galton, wearing his one clean suit of white linen, found the naked princess "as capable of leaving a mark on anything she touched as a well-inked printer's roller . . . so I had her ejected with scant ceremony." Galton's feats made him famous: on his return to England, the thirty-year-old explorer was celebrated in the newspapers and awarded a gold medal by the Royal Geographical Society. After writing a best-selling book on how to survive in the African bush, he decided that he had had enough of the adventurer's life. He married a rather plain woman from an intellectually illustrious family, with whom he never succeeded in having children, and settled down in South Kensington to a life of scientific dilettantism. His true m?tier, he had always felt, was measurement. In pursuit of it, he conducted elaborate experiments in the science of tea-making, deriving equations for brewing the perfect cup. Eventually, his interest hit on something that was actually important: the weather. Meteorology could barely be called a science in those days; the forecasting efforts of the British government's first chief weatherman met with such ridicule that he ended up slitting his throat. Taking the initiative, Galton solicited reports of conditions all over Europe and then created the prototype of the modern weather map. He also discovered a weather pattern that he called the "anti-cyclone"--better known today as the high-pressure system. Galton might have puttered along for the rest of his life as a minor gentleman scientist had it not been for a dramatic event: the publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," in 1859. Reading his cousin's book, Galton was filled with a sense of clarity and purpose. One thing in it struck him with special force: to illustrate how natural selection shaped species, Darwin cited the breeding of domesticated plants and animals by farmers to produce better strains. Perhaps, Galton concluded, human evolution could be guided in the same way. But where Darwin had thought mainly about the evolution of physical features, like wings and eyes, Galton applied the same hereditary logic to mental attributes, like talent and virtue."If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvements of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!" he wrote in an 1864 magazine article, his opening eugenics salvo. It was two decades later that he coined the word "eugenics," from the Greek for "wellborn." Galton also originated the phrase "nature versus nurture," which still reverberates in debates today. (It was probably suggested by Shakespeare's "The Tempest," in which Prospero laments that his slave Caliban is "A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick.") At Cambridge, Galton had noticed that the top students had relatives who had also excelled there; surely, he reasoned, such family success was not a matter of chance. His hunch was strengthened during his travels, which gave him a vivid sense of what he called "the mental peculiarities of different races." Galton made an honest effort to justify his belief in nature over nurture with hard evidence. In his 1869 book "Hereditary Genius," he assembled long lists of "eminent" men--judges, poets, scientists, even oarsmen and wrestlers--to show that excellence ran in families. To counter the objection that social advantages rather than biology might be behind this, he used the adopted sons of Popes as a kind of control group. His case elicited skeptical reviews, but it impressed Darwin. "You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense," he wrote to Galton, "for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work." Yet Galton's labors had hardly begun. If his eugenic utopia was to be a practical possibility, he needed to know more about how heredity worked. His belief in eugenics thus led him to try to discover the laws of inheritance. And that, in turn, led him to statistics. Statistics at that time was a dreary welter of population numbers, trade figures, and the like. It was devoid of mathematical interest, save for a single concept: the bell curve. The bell curve was first observed when eighteenth-century astronomers noticed that the errors in their measurements of the positions of planets and other heavenly bodies tended to cluster symmetrically around the true value. A graph of the errors had the shape of a bell. In the early nineteenth century, a Belgian astronomer named Adolph Quetelet observed that this "law of error" also applied to many human phenomena. Gathering information on the chest sizes of more than five thousand Scottish soldiers, for example, Quetelet found that the data traced a bell-shaped curve centered on the average chest size, about forty inches. As a matter of mathematics, the bell curve is guaranteed to arise whenever some variable (like human height) is determined by lots of little causes (like genes, health, and diet) operating more or less independently. For Quetelet, the bell curve represented accidental deviations from an ideal he called l'homme moyen--the average man. When Galton stumbled upon Quetelet's work, however, he exultantly saw the bell curve in a new light: what it described was not accidents to be overlooked but differences that revealed the variability on which evolution depended. His quest for the laws that governed how these differences were transmitted from one generation to the next led to what Brookes justly calls "two of Galton's greatest gifts to science": regression and correlation. Although Galton was more interested in the inheritance of mental abilities, he knew that they would be hard to measure. So he focussed on physical traits, like height. The only rule of heredity known at the time was the vague "Like begets like." Tall parents tend to have tall children, while short parents tend to have short children. But individual cases were unpredictable. Hoping to find some larger pattern, in 1884 Galton set up an "anthropometric laboratory" in London. Drawn by his fame, thousands of people streamed in and submitted to measurement of their height, weight, reaction time, pulling strength, color perception, and so on. Among the visitors was William Gladstone, the Prime Minister. "Mr. Gladstone was amusingly insistent about the size of his head . . . but after all it was not so very large in circumference," noted Galton, who took pride in his own massive bald dome. After obtaining height data from two hundred and five pairs of parents and nine hundred and twenty-eight of their adult children, Galton plotted the points on a graph, with the parents' heights represented on one axis and the children's on the other. He then pencilled a straight line though the cloud of points to capture the trend it represented. The slope of this line turned out to be two-thirds. What this meant was that exceptionally tall (or short) parents had children who, on average, were only two-thirds as exceptional as they were. In other words, when it came to height children tended to be less exceptional than their parents. The same, he had noticed years earlier, seemed to be true in the case of "eminence": the children of J. S. Bach, for example, may have been more musically distinguished than average, but they were less distinguished than their father. Galton called this phenomenon "regression toward mediocrity." Regression analysis furnished a way of predicting one thing (a child's height) from another (its parents') when the two things were fuzzily related. Galton went on to develop a measure of the strength of such fuzzy relationships, one that could be applied even when the things related were different in kind--like rainfall and crop yield. He called this more general technique "correlation." The result was a major conceptual breakthrough. Until then, science had pretty much been limited to deterministic laws of cause and effect--which are hard to find in the biological world, where multiple causes often blend together in a messy way. Thanks to Galton, statistical laws gained respectability in science. His discovery of regression toward mediocrity--or regression to the mean, as it is now called--has resonated even more widely. Yet, as straightforward as it seems, the idea has been a snare even for the sophisticated. The common misconception is that it implies convergence over time. If very tall parents tend to have somewhat shorter children, and very short parents tend to have somewhat taller children, doesn't that mean that eventually everyone should be the same height? No, because regression works backward as well as forward in time: very tall children tend to have somewhat shorter parents, and very short children tend to have somewhat taller parents. The key to understanding this seeming paradox is that regression to the mean arises when enduring factors (which might be called "skill") mix causally with transient factors (which might be called "luck"). Take the case of sports, where regression to the mean is often mistaken for choking or slumping. Major-league baseball players who managed to bat better than .300 last season did so through a combination of skill and luck. Some of them are truly great players who had a so-so year, but the majority are merely good players who had a lucky year. There is no reason that the latter group should be equally lucky this year; that is why around eighty per cent of them will see their batting average decline. To mistake regression for a real force that causes talent or quality to dissipate over time, as so many have, is to commit what has been called "Galton's fallacy." In 1933, a Northwestern University professor named Horace Secrist produced a book-length example of the fallacy in "The Triumph of Mediocrity in Business," in which he argued that, since highly profitable firms tend to become less profitable, and highly unprofitable ones tend to become less unprofitable, all firms will soon be mediocre. A few decades ago, the Israeli Air Force came to the conclusion that blame must be more effective than praise in motivating pilots, since poorly performing pilots who were criticized subsequently made better landings, whereas high performers who were praised made worse ones. (It is a sobering thought that we might generally tend to overrate censure and underrate praise because of the regression fallacy.) More recently, an editorialist for the Times erroneously argued that the regression effect alone would insure that racial differences in I.Q. would disappear over time. Did Galton himself commit Galton's fallacy? Brookes insists that he did. "Galton completely misread his results on regression," he argues, and wrongly believed that human heights tended "to become more average with each generation." Even worse, Brookes claims, Galton's muddleheadedness about regression led him to reject the Darwinian view of evolution, and to adopt a more extreme and unsavory version of eugenics. Suppose regression really did act as a sort of gravity, always pulling individuals back toward the average. Then it would seem to follow that evolution could not take place through a gradual series of small changes, as Darwin envisaged. It would require large, discontinuous changes that are somehow immune from regression to the mean. Such leaps, Galton thought, would result in the appearance of strikingly novel organisms, or "sports of nature," that would shift the entire bell curve of ability. And if eugenics was to have any chance of success, it would have to work the same way as evolution. In other words, these sports of nature would have to be enlisted to create a new breed. Only then could regression be overcome and progress be made. In telling this story, Brookes makes his subject out to be more confused than he actually was. It took Galton nearly two decades to work out the subtleties of regression, an achievement that, according to Stephen M. Stigler, a statistician at the University of Chicago, "should rank with the greatest individual events in the history of science--at a level with William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood and with Isaac Newton's of the separation of light." By 1889, when Galton published his most influential book, "Natural Inheritance," his grasp of it was nearly complete. He knew that regression had nothing special to do with life or heredity. He knew that it was independent of the passage of time. Regression to the mean held even between brothers, he observed; exceptionally tall men tend to have brothers who are somewhat less tall. In fact, as Galton was able to show by a neat geometric argument, regression is a matter of pure mathematics, not an empirical force. Lest there be any doubt, he disguised the case of hereditary height as a problem in mechanics and sent it to a mathematician at Cambridge, who, to Galton's delight, confirmed his finding. Even as he laid the foundations for the statistical study of human heredity, Galton continued to pursue many other intellectual interests, some important, some merely eccentric. He invented a pair of submarine spectacles that permitted him to read while submerged in his bath, and stirred up controversy by using statistics to investigate the efficacy of prayer. (Petitions to God, he concluded, were powerless to protect people from sickness.) Prompted by a near-approach of the planet Mars to Earth, he devised a celestial signalling system to permit communication with Martians. More usefully, he put the nascent practice of fingerprinting on a rigorous basis by classifying patterns and proving that no two fingerprints were exactly the same--a great step forward for Victorian police work. Galton remained restlessly active through the turn of the century. In 1900, eugenics received a big boost in prestige when Gregor Mendel's work on heredity in peas came to light. Suddenly, hereditary determinism was the scientific fashion. Although Galton was now plagued by deafness and asthma (which he treated by smoking hashish), he gave a major address on eugenics in 1904. "What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly," he declared. An international eugenics movement was springing up, and Galton was hailed as its hero. In 1909, he was honored with a knighthood. Two years later, at the age of eighty-eight, he died. In his long career, Galton didn't come close to proving the central axiom of eugenics: that, when it comes to talent and virtue, nature dominates nurture. Yet he never doubted its truth, and many scientists came to share his conviction. Darwin himself, in "The Descent of Man," wrote, "We now know, through the admirable labours of Mr. Galton, that genius . . . tends to be inherited." Given this axiom, there are two ways of putting eugenics into practice: "positive" eugenics, which means getting superior people to breed more; and "negative" eugenics, which means getting inferior ones to breed less. For the most part, Galton was a positive eugenicist. He stressed the importance of early marriage and high fertility among the genetic ?lite, fantasizing about lavish state-funded weddings in Westminster Abbey with the Queen giving away the bride as an incentive. Always hostile to religion, he railed against the Catholic Church for imposing celibacy on some of its most gifted representatives over the centuries. He hoped that spreading the insights of eugenics would make the gifted aware of their responsibility to procreate for the good of the human race. But Galton did not believe that eugenics could be entirely an affair of moral suasion. Worried by evidence that the poor in industrial Britain were breeding disproportionately, he urged that charity be redirected from them and toward the "desirables." To prevent "the free propagation of the stock of those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism," he urged "stern compulsion," which might take the form of marriage restrictions or even sterilization. Galton's proposals were benign compared with those of famous contemporaries who rallied to his cause. H. G. Wells, for instance, declared, "It is in the sterilisation of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies." Although Galton was a conservative, his creed caught on with progressive figures like Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. In the United States, New York disciples founded the Galton Society, which met regularly at the American Museum of Natural History, and popularizers helped the rest of the country become eugenics-minded. "How long are we Americans to be so careful for the pedigree of our pigs and chickens and cattle--and then leave the ancestry of our children to chance or to `blind' sentiment?" asked a placard at an exposition in Philadelphia. Four years before Galton's death, the Indiana legislature passed the first state sterilization law, "to prevent the procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists." Most of the other states soon followed. In all, there were some sixty thousand court-ordered sterilizations of Americans who were judged to be eugenically unfit. It was in Germany that eugenics took its most horrific form. Galton's creed had aimed at the uplift of humanity as a whole; although he shared the prejudices that were common in the Victorian era, the concept of race did not play much of a role in his theorizing. German eugenics, by contrast, quickly morphed into Rassenhygiene--race hygiene. Under Hitler, nearly four hundred thousand people with putatively hereditary conditions like feeblemindedness, alcoholism, and schizophrenia were forcibly sterilized. In time, many were simply murdered. The Nazi experiment provoked a revulsion against eugenics that effectively ended the movement. Geneticists dismissed eugenics as a pseudoscience, both for its exaggeration of the extent to which intelligence and personality were fixed by heredity and for its na?vet? about the complex and mysterious ways in which many genes could interact to determine human traits. In 1966, the British geneticist Lionel Penrose observed that "our knowledge of human genes and their action is still so slight that it is presumptuous and foolish to lay down positive principles for human breeding." Since then, science has learned much more about the human genome, and advances in biotechnology have granted us a say in the genetic makeup of our offspring. Prenatal testing, for example, can warn parents that their unborn child has a genetic condition like Down syndrome or Tay-Sachs disease, presenting them with the agonizing option of aborting it. The technique of "embryo selection" affords still greater control. Several embryos are created in vitro from the sperm and the eggs of the parents; these embryos are genetically tested, and the one with the best characteristics is implanted in the mother's womb. Both of these techniques can be subsumed under "negative" eugenics, since the genes screened against are those associated with diseases or, potentially, with other conditions that the parents might regard as undesirable, such as low I.Q., obesity, same-sex preference, or baldness. There is a more radical eugenic possibility on the horizon, one beyond anything Galton envisaged. It would involve shaping the heredity of our descendants by tinkering directly with the genetic material in the cells from which they germinate. This technique, called "germline therapy," has already been used with several species of mammals, and its proponents argue that it is only a matter of time before human beings can avail themselves of it. The usual justification for germline therapy is its potential for eliminating genetic disorders and diseases. Yet it also has the potential to be used for "enhancement." If, for example, researchers identified genes linked with intelligence or athletic ability, germline therapy could give parents the option of souping up their children in these respects. Galtonian eugenics was wrong because it was based on faulty science and carried out by coercion. But Galton's goal, to breed the barbarism out of humanity, was not immoral. The new eugenics, by contrast, is based on a relatively sound (if still largely incomplete) science, and is not coercive; decisions about the genetic endowment of children would be left up to their parents. It is the goal of the new eugenics that is morally cloudy. If its technologies are used to shape the genetic endowment of children according to the desires--and financial means--of their parents, the outcome could be a "GenRich" class of people who are smarter, healthier, and handsomer than the underclass of "Naturals." The ideal of individual enhancement, rather than species uplift, is in stark contrast to the Galtonian vision. "The improvement of our stock seems to me one of the highest objects that we can reasonably attempt," Galton declared in his 1904 address on the aims of eugenics. "We are ignorant of the ultimate destinies of humanity, but feel perfectly sure that it is as noble a work to raise its level . . . as it would be disgraceful to abase it." Martin Brookes may be right to dismiss this as a "blathering sermon," but it possesses a certain rectitude when set beside the new eugenicists' talk of a "posthuman" future of designer babies. Galton, at least, had the excuse of historical innocence. From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 10:54:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 05:54:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Slate: Navel Gazing - Why even feminists are obsessed with fat. By Laura Kipnis Message-ID: Navel Gazing - Why even feminists are obsessed with fat. By Laura Kipnis http://slate.msn.com/id/2111753 Posted Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2005, at 5:35 AM PT America's obsession with fat is increasingly colonizing the cultural imagination, and not just on sadistic reality-TV diet shows like The Biggest Loser. There's also been a lot of fat on the New York stage lately. Neil LaBute's devastating new play, Fat Pig, offers thwarted love between a fat woman and a thin man with really mean friends; in The Good Body, Eve Ensler's one-woman show, the audience is treated to the self-loathing feminist equivalent of a money shot: Ensler yanks her blouse up and waistband down, and there in all its naked shame is her dirty little secret, a small pot belly. Ensler and LaBute couldn't be more different in sensibility, except that for both, fat spells abjection. For anyone in quest of another angle, a new collection of essays, [22]Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession, edited by Don Kulick and Anne Meneley, takes on the same terrain from a cross-cultural perspective, providing a welcome departure from both fat-as-sideshow or Ensler-style navel gazing. Can you be a fat female and also an object of desire? This is the question posed in different ways by both new plays. It's no surprise that for LaBute's characters, the answer is a brutal "No." But Ensler, a self-declared radical feminist, works herself into intellectual knots trying to come to terms with her own bodily obsessions. (For her, it's more about feeling fat than being fat.) The therapeutic mode doesn't make for gripping theater; here it also makes for a lot of wheel-spinning, particularly because there's a hard truth that Ensler can't bring herself to acknowledge about women's situations today, including her own: There's simply an irreconcilable contradiction between feminism and femininity, two largely incompatible strategies women have adopted over the years to try to level the playing field with men. The reason they're incompatible is simple. Femininity is a system that tries to secure advantages for women, primarily by enhancing their sexual attractiveness to men. It also shores up masculinity through displays of feminine helplessness or deference. But femininity depends on a sense of female inadequacy to perpetuate itself. Completely successful femininity can never be entirely attained, which is precisely why women engage in so much laboring, agonizing, and self-loathing, because whatever you do, there's always that straggly inch-long chin hair or pot belly or just the inexorable march of time. (Even the dewiest ing?nue is a Norma Desmond waiting to happen.) Feminism, on the other hand, is dedicated to abolishing the myth of female inadequacy. It strives to smash beauty norms, it demands female equality in all spheres, it rejects sexual market value as the measure of female worth. Or that was the plan. Yet for all feminism's social achievements, what it never managed to accomplish was the eradication of the heterosexual beauty culture, meaning the time-consuming and expensive potions and procedures--the pedicures, highlights, wax jobs on sensitive areas, "aesthetic surgery," and so on. For some reason, the majority of women simply would not give up the pursuit of beautification, even those armed with feminist theory. (And even those clearly destined to fail.) Why is this women's continuing plight? (Even minus financial imperatives, as women increasingly achieve economic independence from men.) Ensler trots out the usual suspects: unrealistic media images, capitalism, mothers. She also spent six years globe-trotting to 40 countries to interview other women on the subject. Lo and behold, everywhere she went, she found foreign counterparts of herself, women who loathe some part of their bodies. Much of the play consists of Ensler impersonating this Olympic village of self-abnegating women. One problem with this brand of global feminism is how closely it resembles narcissism on a global scale: Women everywhere mirror me. Instead, Ensler should have interviewed a few anthropologists since according to Kulick and Meneley's Fat, bodily attributes like pot bellies actually have entirely different cross-cultural meanings. Fat connotes very different things in different cultures or in subcultures like fat activism, gay male chubby-chasers, and hip hop. Fat may be a worldwide phenomenon--and increasingly so--but not everyone is neurotic about it, or they're not neurotic in the same way. Take the chapter by anthropologist [25]Rebecca Popenoe, based on her fieldwork among desert Arabs in Niger. This is a society with no media influences or beauty industries, where women strive to be as fat as possible. Girls are force-fed to achieve this ideal; stretch marks are regarded as beautiful. Yet somehow this beauty norm doesn't create the same sense of anguish that afflicts Western women striving for thinness, leading Popenoe to suggest that it's the Western obsession with individualism and achievement that bears the blame--not media images, not a top-down backlash against feminism, as Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth has it. In Niger, failing to achieve the prevailing beauty standard isn't a personal failure; it just means someone has bewitched you, or you have a thin constitution. But reading Popenoe won't reassure anyone seeking an exit route from female body anxieties. Where the Nigerois fatties and the dieting-obsessed Ensler find common ground is that all are striving for sexual attractiveness in the context of heterosexuality. The Nigerois women fatten themselves to be more desirable to Nigerois men. Women here may pant, "I'm doing it for myself" while strapped to their treadmills, but the fact is that the beauty culture is a heterosexual institution, and to the extent that women participate in its rituals, they, too, are propping up a heterosexual society and its norms. The problem for a feminist is that historically speaking such norms have worked out far less advantageously for women than for men. The disadvantages can take rather subtle forms, though, as The Good Body itself unwittingly demonstrates, once a recurring character known as "My Partner" is introduced. As described by Ensler--rather reverently--this is the perfect man. He cooks, he adores her stomach, and he's so enlightened that when they get in a fight while on vacation (she accuses him of calling her fat), he tells her he can't compete with her stomach and leaves. In other words, the Partner's dramatic function is to articulate the feminist position--which he does far more adequately than Ensler herself, turning The Good Body into a feminist play that somehow props up the most traditional of sexual positions: man on top. If even feminist theater ends up reinforcing masculine prowess, perhaps it's because heterosexuality requires asymmetry between the sexes. Heterosexuality always was the Achilles heel of feminism because the asymmetries involved usually took the form of adequacy for one sex, inadequacy for the other. And so things seem to remain: You may hear a lot of tough talk about empowerment and independence in women's culture today, except you hear it from women shopping for baby-doll outfits or getting Brazilian bikini waxes and double-D cup breast implants. ("I'm doing it for myself.") Of course, masculinity has always been afflicted with its own bodily anxieties; it just compensates for them differently (or overcompensates). Check out Viagra sales if in doubt. Or those penis-extender spam ads. Only feminism-for-dummies defines body pathologies as a female franchise alone, especially since that just buttresses the illusion of masculine invulnerability all over again--traditional femininity via the back door. Will femininity continue to beat down the feminist challenge? It's been remarkably tenacious to date. Or will women keep trying to reconcile the two through conflicted enterprises such as empowerment plastic surgery and bestowing men with feminist prowess? If only internal gymnastics burned calories! Then we could all achieve flatter stomachs with far fewer hours at the gym. Laura Kipnis is a professor of media studies at Northwestern. Her last book was [26]Against Love: A Polemic. Remarks from the Fray: Using two solipsistic New York plays to help define the modern attitude toward fat women cannot be a helpful tool. For one thing "solipsistic New York play" is an oxymoron. For another, it's just too small a slice of our culture. What people feel and believe about each other, especially in male/female relationships, is far more complex and subtle than the kind of intellectual Kabuki of LaBute and Ensler. Worse, though is to stumble into this conclusion: There's simply an irreconcilable contradiction between feminism and femininity, two largely incompatible strategies women have adopted over the years to try to level the playing field with men. Well, no, there's not. Read some Gloria Steinem or Naomi Wolfe. The author's definition of femininity doesn't work with the author's definition of feminism. The rest of us needn't fall into that neurotic trap. You can too wear lipstick and be taken seriously in what you do. Just like men can wear ties, their own nonsensical cultural symbol of oppression. In fact the author herself attempts to demolish the entire existence of femininity by pointing out that people grow old. Well, yeah, they do. But that doesn't mean a woman (or a man, for that matter) can't still be feminine. The author conflates femininity with youth, beauty and artifice, when none are necessary components. Neither, I would argue, is weakness. Kipnis defines femininity in relationship to men. However there are millions of lesbians who would find that ridiculous. Heck, so would Van Morrison, who noted decades ago that all the girls go out/dressed up for each other. Kipnis's definition of feminism is equally shrill and monochromatic. If power means you must reject the notion of working to attract the opposite sex, what are all those middle aged male execs doing in my gym? And is Kipnis saying that fat women aren't feminine? Or that you have to be fat to be a feminist? Ensler, and Kipnis obsess on the body weight, the externals, without truly understanding the meaning of attraction. It's the person, ladies, not the meat wrapping... --Isonomist-- I take exception to the assertion that femininity and feminism are mutually exclusive. While Kipnis' summary of feminism as an attempt to level the playing field between men and women is accurate, saying that femininity is its opposite--a system of power and control that works by maximizing gender differences--is too simplistic. Femininity has never been solely about women's helplessness and need for men. It is a sexist mindset that causes society to speak of traditionally "feminine" attributes pejoratively. What is inherently bad about nurturing, being more emotional, being peaceful and gentle, and other such traits except for their association with women? Our society values "masculine" traits such as aggressiveness and strength not because these are inherently better, but because it still values men more. Imagine a society of only heterosexual women (don't worry about propagation for the moment). Sure, some of the flirtatious behaviors might be gone, the feigned helplessness and eye-batting flattery...but that isn't femininity. A lot of the women in this society would still be gentle, loving, peaceful, etc (and, just as now, some would also be ambitious and competitive). The thing that Kipnis doesn't allow for is that women can be soft AND strong at the same time. We are not the caricatures movies like Spanglish and the Stepford Wives make us out to be. The smart ones among us know you can be equal to a man without becoming a man, and that sometimes gender roles can be separate AND equal. --Dandelioness I find myself inclined to agree with the more radical version of Kipnis' argument that femininity as norm is at odds with feminism as a political agenda. Part of the reason for this inclination on my part has to do with the fact that feminism today is often attacked in the name of returning to traditional sex/gender beliefs that never lost their dominance in the first place. People sometimes suggest that they are sympathetic to feminism but don't want to be extremist about it. They defend this hesitancy on the grounds of being reasonable, but often what really motivates their anxiety is not reasonableness but rather a need to protect ideals to which their desires (and ultimately their security) is wed. If it needs to be said, this can describe men and women. There is, however, a single nagging question that I have about Kipnis's piece: is it femininity per se that is the problem, or is it a masculinist culture in which femininity is persistently linked to weakness. Kipnis's argument seems to place too much of the blame on women, even on feminist women. Is it possible though to imagine a femininity that is independent of male privilege? Kipnis I suspect would say that the question is moot, because femininity has always only existed as inferiority. On a broad cultural level absolutely, but on a private level? What then of lesbian desire for the feminine? Is this only perversion? --rontiveros References 22. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=Yf7Zi6v9J8&isbn=1585423866&itm=1 25. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415280966/ref=lpr_g_1/104-6711922-4547130?v=glance&s=books 26. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375421890/qid=1063512445/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/102-6498786-7148962 From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 10:57:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 05:57:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: (Tom Wolfe) 'The liberal elite hasn't got a clue' Message-ID: 'The liberal elite hasn't got a clue' As a member of the Manhattan intelligentsia, novelist Tom Wolfe seems a lonely defender of George Bush's conservative values. But, he tells Ed Vulliamy, he's bewildered by a sex-mad society and tired of being lectured to at dinner parties. So is he voting for Dubya tomorrow? He's not quite telling Ed Vulliamy Monday November 01 2004 The Guardian Tom Wolfe casts his gaze across America at this election time, with eyes that change mood in a nanosecond, with a flicker. For the most part, they exude an amused elegance befitting the hallmark white suit and dandy-ish two-tone brogues. But then the look suddenly changes, to become scalpel-sharp, mischievous, seizing upon some detail. It is a metamorphosis which begins to explain, perhaps, how this softly-spoken, immaculately-mannered gentleman journalist from the South can write with such voracity about the grime and sediment which inhabits American society and the human soul. Certainly the view is stirring from the place to which he retreats to write, and where we meet: his outrageously beautiful Manhattan apartment taking up the 14th floor of a block on the Upper East Side, with sweeping views over a Central Park drenched in autumnal sunshine. A grand piano sits in the corner, painted in what Wolfe calls "cocktail lounge navy blue". Shelves are stacked with books on 19th-century, modern and Dutch art. In what he calls his office, next to the sitting room, is a huge, handsome and ornate bureau on which sits handwriting instruments and two panama hats. >From this desk, and the pen of arguably America's greatest current writer >- author of the 1987 epic Bonfire of the Vanities and much more besides - >there now comes a third major novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, to be >published next week, on the other side of election day. Wolfe set out, >for the first time, to write the book on a computer, but gave up in >favour of his usual typewriter. "Then I jammed my finger badly," he says, >"and took up pen and paper. This may turn out to be the last book ever >written that way." A new Tom Wolfe novel is always a literary event: where will he go next? The answer this time is an elite, imaginary Ivy League university, Dupont College, for a book about libido off the leash, and about the cult of what Wolfe calls "the bad comedy" of college sports - athletes taken on by centres of academic excellence for their bodies, not their brains. The novel - researched, as usual, down to the last expletive - concerns a young world speaking "fuck patois", loaded with creatine and cocaine, numbed by PlayStation 3, and charged by alcohol, the "vile spleen" of rap and, above all, ubiquitous sex between the heirs and heiresses to privilege in America. Most intriguingly, in this week of all weeks in American history, the book affords a gateway towards explaining Wolfe's boldly delivered, tantalising, remark: "I have sympathy with what George Bush is trying to do, although obviously the excursion [into Iraq] is not going well." Four years ago, Wolfe wrote an essay to mark the millennium called Hooking Up, about what he called "feverish emphasis on sex and sexiness". In a way, the new novel is a literary fruition of the essay. The excess and decadence at Dupont College are seen through the eyes of his heroine, Charlotte Simmons, who arrives a diligent virgin from the hills of North Carolina, on a full scholarship. She is initially intimidated and appalled, but eventually conquers her fear to partake, indeed to star, in the jock beanfeast. "I personally would be shocked out of my pants if I was at college now," confides Wolfe, who spent four years trawling the campuses for raw material. The book, he says, is "about sex as it interacts with social status. And I have tried to make the sex un-erotic. I will have failed if anyone gets the least bit excited. So much of modern sex is un-erotic, if erotic means flight of fancy or romantic build-up. Sex now is so easy to consummate - it is a pressure that affects everybody, girls more than boys, I think." As he notes, the America which votes tomorrow is a country riven over morality like never before. On the flip side of the culture of ubiquitous sex is that of puritan Christianity, as harnessed in no small part by Bush. "Yes, there is this puritanism," says Wolfe, "and I suppose we are talking here about what you might call the religious right. But I don't think these people are left or right, they are just religious, and if you are religious, you observe certain strictures on sexual activity - you are against the mainstream, morally speaking. And I do have sympathy with them, yes, though I am not religious. I am simply in awe of it all; the openness of sex. In the 60s they talked about a sexual revolution, but it has become a sexual carnival." No writer has chronicled the full American curve over four decades quite like Wolfe. He has been at this, unswervingly, since 1965, when he published a curio about pop culture called The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. His breakthrough came in 1968 with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his chronicle of Ken Kesey's LSD-gobbling Merry Pranksters. "If I have been judged to be right wing," he says, "I think this is because of the things I have mocked. It started with Radical Chic [published in 1970, about a fundraising party for the Black Panthers organised by Leonard Bernstein]. I was denounced because people thought I had jeopardised all progressive causes. But my impulse was not political, it was simply the absurdity of the occasion. Then I wrote The Painted Word, about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one. Then came The Right Stuff [his account of America's first astronauts], after which my relative enthusiasm for Nasa was another sign of perfidy." He is "proud", he says, "that I do not think any political motivation can be detected in my long books. My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie. You can call it honesty, or you can call it ego, but there it is. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer." In his manifesto of 1973 on The New Journalism, Wolfe advocated a "journalistic or perhaps documentary novel". He re-invoked the idea four years ago by way of retort to a fusillade of criticism - an exchange which scandalised New York society - levelled against his last novel, A Man In Full, from no less than Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving. The new book is in itself a counter to that outburst. Wolfe's lambent success in documenting ambition, drunkenness, sloth and meanness in his own country has taken him from his native Virginia to New York which he wrote about in Bonfire of the Vanities, pitching the super-rich "Masters of the Universe" in high finance against the real world of the Bronx. But even as the author of the quintessential New York novel, Wolfe feels estranged in the city, as he surveys America during the final days of the election campaign. Estranged not from the subjects of his scrutiny, the "Masters of the Universe", but rather from the liberal elite. "Here is an example of the situation in America," he says: "Tina Brown wrote in her column that she was at a dinner where a group of media heavyweights were discussing, during dessert, what they could do to stop Bush. Then a waiter announces that he is from the suburbs, and will vote for Bush. And ... Tina's reaction is: 'How can we persuade these people not to vote for Bush?' I draw the opposite lesson: that Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States. You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election. I have never come across a candidate who is so reviled. Reagan was sniggered it, but this is personal, real hatred. "Indeed, I was at a similar dinner, listening to the same conversation, and said: 'If all else fails, you can vote for Bush.' People looked at me as if I had just said: 'Oh, I forgot to tell you, I am a child molester.' I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind." Where does it come from, this endorsement of the most conservative administration within living memory? Of this president who champions the right and the rich, who has taken America into the mire of war, and seeks re-election tomorrow? Wolfe's eyes resume the expression of detached Southern elegance. "I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment. Support for Bush is about resentment in the so-called 'red states' - a confusing term to Guardian readers, I agree - which here means, literally, middle America. I come from one of those states myself, Virginia. It's the same resentment, indeed, as that against your own newspaper when it sent emails targeting individuals in an American county." Wolfe laughs as he chastises. "No one cares to have outsiders or foreigners butting into their affairs. I'm sure that even many of those Iraqis who were cheering the fall of Saddam now object to our being there. As I said, I do not think the excursion is going well." And John Kerry? "He is a man no one should worry about, because he has no beliefs at all. He is not going to introduce some manic radical plan, because he is poll-driven, and it is therefore impossible to know where or for what he stands." As far as Wolfe is concerned, "the great changes in America came with the second world war, since which time I have not seen much shift in what Americans fundamentally believe. Apart from the fact that as recently as the 1970s, Nelson Rockefeller shocked people by leaving his wife of 30 years, while now celebrities routinely have children outside marriage, the mayor of New York leaves his wife for his lover and no one blinks. But a large number of people have remained religious, and it is a divided country - do not forget that Al Gore nearly won the last election. The country is split right along party lines." And there has been a complete climate change in the nation which elected Bill Clinton twice, to that which may confer the same honour on George Bush tomorrow. This, says Wolfe, began not with the election of Bush, but on the morning of September 11 2001. None of us who were in New York that day will ever forget it, and Wolfe is no exception. "I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television, before long there was this procession of people of all kinds, walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd; there was no sound. "That day told us that here was a different kind of enemy. I honestly think that America and the Bush administration felt that something extreme had to be done. But I do not think that the Americans have become a warlike people; it is rare in American history to set about empire-building - acquiring territory and slaves. I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire. And while the invasion of Afghanistan was something that had to be done, I am stunned that Iraq was invaded." Wolfe is by no means afraid to offend the political right - "I'm gratified if you find me to be hard on them too," he says. He also anticipates that "conservatives will not like this new novel because I refuse to take the impact of political correctness seriously - I think PC has probably had a good effect because it is now bad manners to use racial epithets." So what is it about his liberal neighbours and fellow diners in his adoptive New York that Wolfe cannot abide? "I cannot stand the lock-step among everyone in my particular world. They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not one of them." Parting cordially, it seems strange that such an effervescent maverick, such a jester at the court of all power - all vanity, indeed - should so wholeheartedly endorse the power machine behind George Bush. And so an obvious thought occurs: perhaps Wolfe is jester at the court of New York too. Would he really be happier away from New York, out on the plains, in the "red states" where everyone at dinner parties votes for Bush? Wolfe's eyes revert to that mischievous glint, and he allows himself a smile. "I do think," he admits, apparently speaking for himself, his country and his president, "that if you are not having a fight with somebody, then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning." From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 10:58:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 05:58:45 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Deaf Patients Sue Laurel Regional Hospital Message-ID: Deaf patients sue Laurel Regional 01/13/05 By Steve Eifler http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_v2.cfm?pnpid=810&show=emailnews&newsid=602973 Seven deaf patients are suing Laurel Regional Hospital, claiming that it failed to provide them effective means of communication in critical medical situations. The Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and the law firm of Sutherland, Asbill and Brennan LLP filed the civil rights lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court. The plaintiffs say they were denied qualified sign language interpreter services, despite their requests for such, according to a statement issued by Sutherland, Asbill and Brennan. The plaintiffs allege that they were instead provided with inadequate video interpreting, cryptic notes or, most often, no communication at all, the statement said. Laurel Regional spokeswoman Tracey Veihmeyer said she was not able to comment on the lawsuit. The suit alleges that the plaintiffs were unable to provide informed consent to treatment, were denied the opportunity to participate in their treatment and were denied the full benefit of the health-care services provided by Laurel Regional, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other laws, according to the statement. Elaine Gardner, director of the Washington Lawyers' Committee Disability Rights Project, said deaf patients should receive the same level of effective communication provided for hearing patients. "The ADA is clear: deaf patients have the right to understand, and be understood by, their medical providers," she said in a written statement. According to the lawsuit, one of the seven plaintiffs, Elizabeth Gillespie of Laurel, went to Laurel Regional's emergency room on Nov. 1, 2003 to receive treatment for severe abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, among other symptoms. Gillespie was required to wait hours, denied numerous requests for an in-person interpreter, and was prepared for medical tests in a manner that was humiliating, including having a male attendant snap her bra as a means of communicating with her that it needed to be removed, the suit alleges. Plaintiffs in the suit also include Laurel residents David Irvine (Gillespie's husband), Cary Barbin, Kathryn Hale and Xiomara Porras. The sixth plaintiff is Brian Leffler, formerly of Laurel and now of Virginia. The seventh plaintiff is Erin Whitney, formerly of College Park and now of California. Under the ADA, discrimination includes the failure to provide auxiliary aids and services. The term "auxiliary aids and services" under the ADA includes "qualified interpreters" who make "aurally delivered materials available to individuals with hearing impairments," according to Sutherland, Asbill and Brennan. The lawsuit says Laurel Regional used video-remote interpreting for communication, wherein a translator assists through video-conferencing technology. "This is not an indictment of video interpreting," Lewis Wiener, a litigation partner with Sutherland, said in a written statement. "Rather, the question is whether, based on the facts, Laurel Hospital's use of video remote interpreting and its refusal to provide these individuals with in-person interpreters meets the requirements of the ADA," Wiener said in the statement. "In this case it clearly did not. Laurel Hospital's failure to provide effective communication has directly injured and continues to injure the plaintiffs." Wiener has offered his legal services to the plaintiffs without charge. The suit seeks an order requiring the hospital to provide deaf individuals with effective means of communication, including qualified sign-language interpreters and close-captioned televisions. The suit also seeks compensatory and punitive damages and attorneys fees and costs. E-mail Steve Eifler at seifler at patuxent.com. From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 10:59:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 05:59:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] BH: Confirmed: Hallucinogen Fights Addiction Message-ID: Confirmed: Hallucinogen Fights Addiction http://www.betterhumans.com/Print/index.aspx?ArticleID=2005-01-18-6 Ibogaine reduces alcohol consumption and increases addiction-fighting brain protein Betterhumans Staff 1/18/2005 7:40 PM Breaking the cycle: The hallucinogen ibogaine activates a brain protein that blocks increased alcohol craving and consumption following periods of abstinence A hallucinogen advocated as a potent anti-addiction drug has received support from research showing that it can block alcohol cravings in rodents by boosting an addiction-fighting brain protein. The drug, [8]ibogaine, is derived from a West African shrub called [9]Tabernanthe iboga. For years it has attracted attention for its ability to reverse withdrawal symptoms and cravings for alcohol and other addictive substances. Used outside the US to treat addiction, it is not approved in the country by the [10]Food and Drug Administration. Side-effects such as hallucinations, which made it a popular recreational drug in the 1960s, have impeded clinical studies of its addiction-fighting capabilities. American researchers at the [11]University of California, San Francisco have now shown in mice and rats that the drug reduces alcohol consumption, and that it does so by increasing levels of the brain protein glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF). The researchers have also shown that GDNF alone decreases alcohol consumption. "By identifying the brain protein that ibogaine regulates to reduce alcohol consumption in rats, we have established a link between GDNF and reversal of addiction--knowledge of a molecular mechanism that should allow development of a new class of drugs to treat addiction without ibogaine's side-effects," says study coauthor [12]Dorit Ron. New treatments possible For their research, Ron and colleagues first gave rats alcohol until they became daily drinkers. They then withdrew alcohol for two weeks, which is known to greatly increase drinking when alcohol becomes available again. Administering ibogaine, however, significantly reduced the heightened craving and consumption. The drug was given by injection or directly into the brain. Rats receiving it drank less and were less likely to fall off the wagon and revert to their previous drinking habits. "The discovery that Ibogaine reduced binge drinking after a period of abstinence was an exciting finding for us because this is the type of behavior in alcoholics for which very few effective drugs exist," says study coauthor [13]Patricia Janak. The researchers also confirmed in a cell model that ibogaine stimulated GDNF activity. They then confirmed that this was responsible for the drug's anti-addiction effects by using a GDNF inhibitor in the rats. This blocked ibogaine's ability to decrease alcohol craving. "If we can alter the GDNF pathway, we may well have a new treatment against alcohol and drug addiction without the unwanted side-effects of Ibogaine," says Ron. References 8. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iboga 10. http://www.fda.gov/ 11. http://www.ucsf.edu/ 12. http://www.ucsf.edu/pibs/faculty/ron.html 13. http://www.ucsf.edu/pibs/faculty/janak.html 14. http://www.jneurosci.org/ From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 11:00:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 06:00:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] David Steigerwald: Our New Cultural Determinism Message-ID: David Steigerwald: Our New Cultural Determinism Society, 2005.1-2 First, the summary from the Chronicle of Higher Education (5.1.24): The developed world has become infatuated with the idea of culture as the framework for understanding everything, says David Steigerwald, an associate professor of history at Ohio State University at Marion. "Culture has become to our time what religion was to the early modern period and science to the Enlightenment," he writes. We now have cultural politics, cultural citizenship, culture wars, and corporate cultures, he says. Fly fishermen and Elvis fans have their own cultures, as do drug addicts and people in recovery from addiction. "We have oversold culture," he contends. "We have come to see it as far too powerful a thing. Stretching culture to encompass everything, using it as shorthand for complicated social developments, we have made the term meaningless, the fate of all overused words." And focusing too much on culture can be dangerous, he argues, because it draws attention away from real sources of power, like wealth and the state. "Had Mao labored under the cultural determinism of our time," he writes, "he would have said that power comes out of his ideas about the barrel of a gun." -------------------------- Sometime in the last quarter century, without much notice or fanfare, the developed world slipped from the Age of Materialism into the Age of Culture. For at least 150 years, individual behavior, public motivations, the whole infrastructure of the human enterprise was understood, widely and basically, to be rooted in material interests. Today, however, culture is the framework for understanding what moves the world. Culture has become to our time what religion was to the early modern period and science to the Enlightenment. Economic Man of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has abdicated in favor of Cultural Person, and the new regime has replaced class consciousness with culture consciousness. The philosophical materialism that underpinned a century of Marxism and evolved into economic determinism has given way to a cultural determinism every bit as dogmatic as the old hardcore communism. In the United States, if not throughout the developed world, this cultural determinism has trickled down from the intellectuals and now assumes the position of common sense. Culture is the new catch-all, the court of first and last appeal, the basis of public policy, the obligatory note, the place we all reside. It is astonishing to contemplate the breadth and frequency of the appeal to culture. It hardly takes a ready ear or wide reading to turn up instances of culture's invocation. We're told that American politics runs on the intensity of the "culture wars," because the legislative and electoral life of the nation is consumed in "cultural politics." Washington is awash in lobbyist money, yet the foot soldiers of the culture wars are oblivious, concerned only with asserting their "cultural identities." No wonder pundits and dispassionate scholars alike have taken to analyzing something they call "political culture." If current affairs of state have come to be regarded as essentially cultural matters, so to have the great streams of history. The rise of western power, according to the military historian Victor Davis Hanson, was a matter not of political strength, technological genius, or economic dynamism but of the "2,500-year tradition," running back to the Greeks, of soldier democrats. This cultural tradition, he announces, "explains not only why Western forces have overcome great odds to defeat their adversaries but also their uncanny ability to project power well beyond the shores of Europe and America. Numbers, location, food, health, weather, religion-the usual factors that govern the success or failure of wars-have ultimately done little to impede Western armies, whose larger culture has allowed them to trump man and nature alike." Hanson might sound a bit too much like a cheerleader for western imperialism, but even the sharpest and wisest critics of the spread of western power emphasized the culture in imperialism. It was as if they wanted to claim that Joseph Conrad, not British weapons, had oppressed Africa; the concept of "orientialism," not the French shackling of workers to rubber trees, presumably subjugated Vietnam. In an intellectual climate where imperialism is understood more as a function of the culture of nation-states than of the political dynamics of nation-building, citizenship itself is reconceived as "cultural citizenship." Even so staid a discipline as diplomatic history now appeals to culture, lest it fall into irrelevance. That high-school and college students are now more likely to read Chinua Achebe than Joseph Conrad must mean, by this reasoning, that imperialism is done for. But then how to explain its reappearance in the Bush administration's unabashed enthusiasm for conquest and domination? Presumably Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and Mr. Wolfowitz are all products of a "cowboy culture," as is often suggested. Or perhaps they are products of "the culture of national security," which according to Peter J. Katzenstein leads some foreign-policy "actors [to] respond to cultural factors" as much as, and sometimes more let stand than material interests-apparently it's not about the oil after all. Nor is this cultural determinism a bizarre quality of the intellectuals-an element in "the culture of academia," I'm tempted to say. It has seeped out far and wide. Health-care workers now are instructed to heed the cultures of their patients. Thus Madeleine Leininger exhorts her readers to surrender the "lofty contempt for people whose culture is different or seems strange" through "transcultural nursing." Nursing "can no longer be...an activity based solely upon knowledge of man's physical and emotional needs." Our multicultural environment means that "understanding the culture of an individual seeking health care is just as important...as is knowledge of the physiological and psychological aspects of an individual's illness." Nurses cannot be mere caretakers to the ill; they have to be anthropologists as well. Healthy living itself constitutes a culture, according to the professionals, a helpful thing to understand when, for instance, treating drug addicts. Drug addiction, according to one expert, is "a way of life, a means of organizing one's daily existence, and a way of viewing people and events in the outside world." Addiction, in short, is a culture by anthropological definition. Successful treatment begins with identifying how deeply "enmeshed" the addict is in this culture and then moving them into the "culture of recovery." What once would have been considered human idiosyncrasy, a quirky habit, an off-beat hobby, or just plain weirdness nowadays all lay claim to institutionalization as "cultures"-not, mind you, as cultural ephemera but as cultures in and of themselves. Fly fishing is no longer a peaceful pastime; its advocates insist that it is a culture in its own right. No doubt church bingo, city-park chess playing, and flea-market shoppers all deserve similar elevation. The cultural-studies scholar Erika Doss recently revealed her discovery of the not-so-lost world of "Elvis Culture," whose inhabitants regard Elvis Presley with all the reverence of a god; they make pilgrimages to Graceland and create shrines to him in their home. The faithful battle the bad corporate types who scurry to control Elvis' image, knowing that they can rely on the "mystery and wonder" that is The Eternal Elvis to help them frustrate the efforts to vulgarize his memory. If Elvis fans can have a culture of their own, there is no reason why bureaucracies or corporations cannot. Whenever a major merger is announced, the stock analysts ponder the mix of "corporate cultures" as if arranging a marriage. Since Tom Peters invoked the term to explain why some firms succeed and some fail, it has been taken as a matter of course among organizational theorists that corporations have cultures. Corporations "have personalities too, just like individuals," intones the author of a standard collegiate text on organizational behavior. It is legitimate to speak of corporate cultures, according to another, because individual firms have their distinct artifacts, symbols, values, and rituals; corporate cultures "are shared, communicated through symbols, and passed down from generation to generation of employers." Once its culture is institutionalized, the corporation "acquires immortality," because it presumably lives beyond its founders. Just look at McDonald's, "the definitive example of a powerful and successful organizational culture. ... It's not by chance that a McDonald's meal tastes pretty much the same everywhere." When the Federal Bureau of Investigation came under fire for a rash of near-scandals in Spring 2001, Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, who chaired a subcommittee that oversaw the FBI, chalked the problems of mismanagement and investigative sloppiness up to the Bureau's "cowboy culture." Grassley's comments conjured up images of John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart. But Grassley had in mind "a kind of a culture that puts image, public relations, and headlines ahead of the fundamentals of the FBI." Presumably this "cowboy culture" is different from the "cowboy culture" of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. But then it is good to know that cultural diversity thrives even among cowpokes and buckaroos. We have oversold culture. We have come to see it as far too powerful a thing. Stretching culture to encompass everything, using it as shorthand for complicated social developments, we have made the term meaningless, the fate of all overused words. The fundamental assumptions of our time notwithstanding, culture is not the most powerful realm in human affairs. Wealth and the capacity to exploit labor remain the fuel of economic change; to these fall the privilege of setting the material conditions of most people. Class conflict still revolves around the struggle over just how powerful those forces are in daily life. The state remains the seat of coercion and still enjoys the monopoly on police powers. It still largely retains the focus of public loyalties, even in those developed nations where patriotism long has been considered vulgar. The state still sends out the military to push its way against its enemies. To say that values and ideologies, which are legitimately understood as cultural creations, are convoluted with the economic and political realms is not incorrect, but it abstracts power by investing it at a remove from its basic sources. Had Mao labored under the cultural determinism of our time, he would have said that power comes out of his ideas about the barrel of the gun. It hardly needs to be said that the diversity movement and its ideological companion, multiculturalism, are both creations of and contributors to the inflation of culture. So too is cultural populism, a less well-de-fined but nonetheless still influential sensibility. According to this line of thought, which now provides the basic assumptions of cultural history and American Studies and supplies the foundational theories of Cultural Studies, individuals engage in a constant process of culture making in a series of negotiations, compromises, and subversions with the dominant culture that surrounds them. The magic of "cultural agency" assumes that individuals receive the cultural dictates of the powers that be but turn them to their own interests. Cultural populism has its origins in two indirectly related sources: the urban sociology of Americans such as Herbert Gans, and the New Left Marxism of Stuart Hall and his colleagues in the Birmingham School. These two sources share the conclusion that culture is made through the engagement of the individual with the world around them. Both Gans and Hall took as their nemeses the critics of mass culture, particularly Dwight Macdonald, who held sway in Anglo-America in the 1950s. To the cultural populists, the mass-culture critics were utterly wrong to think that mass-produced entertainment turned consumers into "morons," to paraphrase Herbert Marcuse. Snobs like Macdonald were denounced as disappointed ex-Marxists who had expected the working class to share the same tastes as the intellectuals but who, having discovered that the steel worker liked Jackie Gleason instead of Tolstoy, launched their condescending barbs with all the venom of jilted lovers. Working-class people, according to the populist line, were critical consumers who deflected the stupefaction of Hollywood or television and made meaning of their engagement and gave shape to their own distinct world in the bargain. Once such claims were made on behalf of the working class, they could be made as well about any group; so it wasn't long before ethnic and racial minorities, gays, women, teenagers, the "sub-alterns"-whatever group any given writer wanted to champion-were similarly credited with this cultural agency and celebrated for having created a culture of their own in spite of the conformist pressures of the system. Now deeply embedded in cultural studies of all sorts, populism rests on several tenuous claims. It assumes that consumption, rather than production, creates culture. As Herbert Gans wrote in his 1974 primer Popular Culture and High Culture, "the critics of mass culture are creator-oriented" while the new line of thought would be "user-oriented." Gans's dry sociology has gotten hipped-up in Cultural Studies scholars such as Andrew Ross, who has ridiculed mass-culture theory as "a one-sided and inadequate account not only of the contradictory power and significance of popular culture for its users and consumers, but also of the complex process by which popular culture actually creates political and social identities, by rearticulating desires that have deep resonance in people's daily lives." Ross's language is revealing-and typical-enough: "popular culture" apparently has little to do with creation; it is to be "used and consumed." If there is creative energy to be found, it goes not toward painstaking craftsmanship but in choosing which of the presumably various "identities" resonates most deeply with the consumers' "desires." In this fashion, cultural populism reduces culture to consumer choice. Almost invariably, cultural populists think of themselves as radicals and cast the process of cultural agency as subversive. They seem willing to concede that consumption cannot be revolutionary and content themselves with the complacent conviction that by "rearticulating desires" individuals stymie the imposition of prescribed gender roles, bourgeois values, and mainstream expectations of various sorts. In the logic of John Fiske, an ?migr? from the Birmingham School, because "money is power in capitalism, then buying, particularly if the act is voluntary, is an empowering moment for those whom the economic system otherwise subordinates." Rather than tearing down the system as a whole, the cultural populists believe that the autonomous consumption of mass-produced commodities, regardless of their quality, undermines the capacity of the ruling class to impose aesthetic standards on society as a whole and therefore frustrates class domination. The populists abhor taste, in other words; they do not oppose consumer capitalism. They want things both ways. They need to believe that they are radical intellectuals, and yet they like what capitalism sells. To swing this they need a sufficiently flexible concept, so they reach for culture. In their hands, reducing culture to consumer choice is the gimmick that permits the comforting illusion of political struggle in the service of being comfortable. A similar point can be made about the diversity movement. Over the last decade particularly, this broad movement insinuated itself into practically every public institution and private organization in the United States. It is safe to say that no large organization today is without a "diversity plan." These plans, like the movement that has pushed them, seek to widen access to the nation's institutional life for members of minority groups. Fifty years ago, such an admirable undertaking was known as racial integration. Having absorbed the contemporary vanity that culture is what you want it to be, diversity advocates insist that bureaucratic inclusion does not necessitate cultural assimilation. The very pretense of cultural diversity assumes that a person who has roots in a minority group can enter the full thrust of a bureaucratized world without sacrificing those roots. Much as the cultural populists mangle the culture concept so that they can be radical and comfortable at the same time, so the diversity movement, and its close partner, multiculturalism, permit the delusion that a person can lead a life regulated within all the fixed parameters of bureaucratic institutions and still retain their distinctiveness. Just as the populists turn a willfully blind eye toward the economic system that generates a mind-numbing array of homogenized plastic goods, so multiculturalists ignore the well-known capacity of bureaucracies to rule by standardization and the creation of uniform, homogenized experience. Culture, in its debased form, allows them too to have it both ways. The hard question is why, when the end is basic justice, advocates of racial integration need to hide themselves in the obscurity of misconceived conceptions of culture. The answer closest to hand is that multiculturalism is an argument for the expansion of bureaucracy, which is of course in the self-interest of bureaucrats. In his illuminating book The Diversity Machine, for example, Frederick Lynch notes that the University of Michigan's diversity plan gave birth to more than a hundred different programs. Once you accept the proposition that cultural diversity and racial diversity are the same things and that cultural diversity is a public good because it insures a rich experience for all then there is no reason to end diversity programs. Given the eagerness of university and corporate bureaucrats to take up the cause of diversity, or when one takes note of the explosion of diversity consultants who made a cottage industry of workshops that browbeat white employees, it is hard not to think that diversity and bureaucratic expansion are brothers under the skin. But the matter runs deeper. Just as the cultural populists accept the economic structure of contemporary society while lampooning aesthetic standards as hidebound class domination, so multiculturalists reject the assimilation ideal even as their purpose is to join the mainstream. Though they strain for access to the institutional mainstream of contemporary life, they claim, as does Elsie Cross, the matron of diversity consultants, that the "dominant group" within American corporations, presumably white men, "has set up and maintains the system that discriminates and is the gatekeeper of access to power and equal opportunity for people. Subordinated groups don't want to be invited into or perpetuate the system, they want to change it so they can be equal partners." The underlying assumption beneath multiculturalism as a wing of social thought and the diversity movement as its concrete public expression is that culture is a permanent feature of groups, which in turn mostly cohere by virtue of race and ethnicity. While many thoughtful people who can fairly be called multiculturalists-Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the historian David Hollinger, to name two obvious examples-deplore the tendency to see culture as eternally fixed around one's origins, the overriding tendency is to assume, as another prominent diversity consultant, University of Michigan's Taylor Cox, writes in Creating the Multicultural Organization in 2001, "that differences of social-cultural identity such as gender, national origin, race and work specialization represent real differences in culture." Culture, presumably, is unchanging, and the upshot therefore is that no amount of bureaucratic inclusion, no amount of immersion in the mainstream structures of contemporary daily life shakes off the hold of ancestors. In cultural populism, then, we have a conception of culture that is as varied and flexible as individual choice, and in multiculturalism culture becomes ineradicable. These conceptions are not mutually exclusive antagonists. They are perfect complements. Advocates of both lines of thought believe that culture is the creature of the ruling class, that social, political, and economic power are all feeble unless culture is shaped to justify class rule. The populists insist that aesthetic standards are bourgeois weapons used to mark the boundaries between classes and to define the proper from the vulgar. Assimilation, in multiculturalists' hands, is cultural imperialism. It is the process, as political scientist Iris Young maintains, by which "culturally imperialist groups project their own values, experience, and perspective as normative and universal" and in so doing leave "the members of [oppressed] groups...imprisoned in their bodies." To ignore good taste or to reject assimilation, therefore, are forms of resistance to class domination. There is a certain grain of historical truth in these convictions. A hundred years ago, the industrial-era bourgeoisie did seize on culture. Among them, culture took on snob value; the boundaries of accepted taste dictated behavior and marked off the properly refined from the barbarians of the lower classes. And those lower classes were often non-Anglo and non-white. So the demands for assimilation, the old melting-pot ideal, reflected the bourgeoise's hatred for ways of life different from its own, and of course it simply ruled out of society those who wouldn't or couldn't melt, most obviously African-Americans. But what makes for accurate history does not necessarily make for accurate contemporary analysis. Today, culture is irrelevant to social status. Economic and political elites no longer need to make cultural demands of the lower classes, in part because all they need of those lower classes is to have them buy the mass-pro-duced goods that make the whole world turn these days. Far from insisting on the adoption of class-bound standards of taste or defining subordinate groups out of society entirely, today's rulers strive to pull everyone in as consumers; everyone constitutes a niche market to be flattered by appeals to contrived distinctions. No one can look across the vast wasteland of mass-pro-duced entertainment otherwise known as "popular culture" and seriously claim that there is a bourgeois agenda for imposing standards of taste. And this is not because the manufacturers of entertainment believe the lower classes to be irredeemably vulgar and therefore cater to their bad taste. Rather it is because things of beauty, objects that deserve aesthetic admiration, cannot be mass-produced; standards of taste only get in the way of business. The same principle applies to assimilation. It is in the direct interests of the entertainment industries not to insist on a homogenized social type, because doing so would limit their reach into all possible consumer markets. If anything it is in their interests to flatter the sense of group differences and keep them alive, precisely because doing so adds to the persuasive appeal of their niche marketing. It is almost as though the cultural populists and multiculturalists, far from being radical opponents of the status quo, are in deep collusion with it. When you put them together, you have a collection of people who want it both ways: They want unobstructed access to all the goodies that the present economic and political structure offers-the plastic gadgets, the suburban houses, the gas-guzzling cars, the cable tv, the junk food, the junk music, the junk entertainment, the safe jobs in bureaucratic settings-and they still want to believe that they can either whip up their own cultural safe zones or wrap themselves in the increasingly remote cocoon of their ancestors, wishing away the all-too-obvious deracination through the sheer insistence that they keep living "their culture" even as they work for IBM or the University of Michigan. It is as though the concrete reality of our lives no longer constitutes culture. It is as though we ignore the fundamental ways we go about arranging our human relationships, engage with the natural world, or contemplate eternity. The concept of culture we now swath ourselves in is a cheap balm. It is no real cure for the fundamental ills that beset us, no antidote for the very real emptiness of a consumer society that expects us to secure our place in the larger human endeavor according to what we buy today. Culture, as both the populists and the multiculturalists have it, has become an enormous, generation wide exercise in excusing away our complacency in the on-going debasement of a decent human existence. SUGGESTED FURTHER READING Conklin, Wendy Conklin. 2001. "Clarifying the Work of Integration: An Interview with Elsie Y. Cross," The Diversity Factor, 9 (Winter). Hanson, Victor Davis. 2001. Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. New York: Doubleday. Katzenstein, Peter J., ed. 1996. The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Leininger, Madeleine. 1967. "The Culture Concept and Its Relevance to Nursing." Reprinted in Leininger, ed., Transcultural Nursing: Concepts, Theories, and Practices (New York, 1978), 109-11. Ross, Andrew. 1989. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. David Steigerwald is associate professor of history and director of the history major at Ohio State University's Marion campus. This essay is drawn from Culture's Vanities: The Paradox of Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World (Rowman & Littlefield). From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 11:01:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 06:01:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy: new bepress journal Message-ID: -----Original Message----- From: Aaron S. Edlin [mailto:mm-9312-984059 at bepress.com] Sent: 2005 January 19, Wednesday 19:00 Subject: Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy: new bepress journal The Berkeley Electronic Press, in conjunction with editors Walter Isard, Cornell University, and Johan Moyersoen, University of Oxford, is pleased to announce publication of Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy (PEPS), located at http://www.bepress.com/peps/ . To view any of the articles in this peer-reviewed journal, simply click on the links below. Additional PEPS details follow at bottom of message. Walter Isard and Jiyoun An (2004) "A Hierarchical Decision-Making Model for Progress in Reducing Three Evils: Terrorism, Poverty and Environmental Degradation", Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy: Vol. 10: No. 3, Article 1. http://www.bepress.com/peps/vol10/iss3/1 Lisa J. Carlson and Raymond Dacey (2004) "Sequential Decision Analysis of the Traditional Deterrence Game", Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy: Vol. 10: No. 3, Article 2. http://www.bepress.com/peps/vol10/iss3/2 Urs Luterbacher (2004) "Conflict and Irrevocable Decisions", Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy: Vol. 10: No. 3, Article 3. http://www.bepress.com/peps/vol10/iss3/3 Paul S. Han (2004) "Report on Critical Dimensions and Problems of the North Korean Situation (1996-2004)", Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy: Vol. 10: No. 3, Article 4. http://www.bepress.com/peps/vol10/iss3/4 __________________________ ABOUT PEACE ECONOMICS, PEACE SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy (PEPS) aims to foster the exchange of ideas and promote research focusing on peace analysis and utilizing tools, methods, and theoretical frameworks specifically designed for peace science, as well as concepts, procedures, and other analytical techniques of the various social and natural sciences, law, engineering, and other disciplines and professions. The journal accepts rigorous, non-technical papers especially in research methods in peace science, but also regular papers dealing with all aspects of the peace science field, from pure abstract theory to practical applied research. As a guide to topics: Arms Control and International Security, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Studies, Behavioral Studies, Conflict Analysis and Management, Cooperation, Alliances and Games, Crises and War Studies, Critical Economic Aspects of the Global Crises, Deterrence Theory, Empirical and Historical Studies on the Causes of War, Game/Prospect and Related Theory, Harmony and Conflict, Hierarchy Theory, Long-Run Aspects of the Behavior of International Systems, Mathematical Approaches to Conflict Management, Mathematical Models of Arms Races and Wars, Peace Science Methodology and Theory, Sanctions Theory, and World Models. For more details, or to submit your next paper, visit http://www.bepress.com/peps/ . PEPS was previously published by Cornell University. All back issues are available at the bepress site. From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 11:05:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 06:05:52 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wikipedia: Surveillance Message-ID: Surveillance - Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance Surveillance is a process of close monitoring of [3]behaviour. [4]"Sur-Veillance" is French for to "watch from above". Note the all seeing "eye-in-the-sky" in this London Transport poster [5]Enlarge "Sur-Veillance" is French for to "watch from above". Note the all seeing "eye-in-the-sky" in this London Transport poster Although the word surveillance literally means (in French) "to watch from above" (i.e. a God's-eye view looking down from on-high) the term is often used for all forms of observation, not just visual observation. However, the all-seeing eye-in-the-sky is still an icon of surveillance in general. It is commonly used to describe observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment or other [6]technological means, for example: * [7]eavesdropping * [8]telephone tapping * [9]directional microphones * [10]communications interception * [11]covert listening devices or 'bugs' * [12]Minox subminiature cameras * [13]closed-circuit television * [14]electronic tagging * military [15]reconnaissance * [16]Reconnaissance aircraft, e.g. [17]Lockheed U-2 * [18]Reconnaissance satellites * [19]"trusted" computing devices * Internet and [20]computer surveillance However, surveillance also includes simple, relatively low-technology methods such as [21]postal interception, watching from nearby buildings with binoculars or similar and visiting properties in disguise. The term can also be used to describe the monitoring of [22]diseases by [23]epidemiologists. Contents [24]1 Surveillance, counter-surveillance, inverse surveillance, and sousveillance [25]2 Impact of surveillance [26]3 Telephones and mobile telephones [27]4 Postal services [28]5 Surveillance devices - 'bugs' [29]6 Computer Surveillance [30]7 Photography [31]8 Closed circuit TV [32]9 Documentation trails [33]10 Data profiling [34]11 Identities [35]12 Human operatives and social engineering [36]13 Personal counter-surveillance [37]14 Natural surveillance [38]15 See also [39]16 References [40]17 External links [[41]edit] Surveillance, counter-surveillance, inverse surveillance, and sousveillance [42]"Eye-in-the-sky" surveillance dome camera mounted atop a tall steel pole. [43]Enlarge "Eye-in-the-sky" surveillance dome camera mounted atop a tall steel pole. Surveillance is the art of watching over the activities of persons or groups from a position of higher authority. Surveillance may be covert (without their knowledge) or overt (perhaps with frequent reminders such as "we are watching over you"). Surveillance has been an intrinsic part of human history. [44]Sun Tzu's [45]The Art of War, written 2,500 years ago, discusses how spies should be used against a person's enemies. But modern electronic and computer technology have given surveillance a whole new means of operation. Surveillance can be automated using computers, and people leave extensive records that describe their activities. Counter surveillance is the practice of avoiding surveillance or making it difficult. Before computer networks, counter surveillance involved avoiding agents and communicating secretly. With recent development of the Internet and computer databases counter surveillance has grown. Now counter surveillance involves everything from knowing how to delete a file on a computer to avoiding becoming the target of direct advertising agencies. Inverse surveillance is the practice of reversalism on surveillance, e.g. citizens photographing police, shoppers photographing shopkeepers, and passengers photographing cab drivers who usually have surveillance cameras in their cabs. A well-known example is George Haliday's recording of the Rodney King beating. [46]Inverse surveillance attempts to subvert the Panoptic gaze of surveillance, and often attempts to subvert the secrecy of surveillance through making the inverse surveillance recordings widely available (in contrast to the usually secret surveillance tapes). Sousveillance (French for "to watch from below") further includes the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity, in addition to [47]inverse surveillance. Recent [48]sousveillance workshops such as Microsoft's [49]Continuous Archival and Recording of Personal Experience (http://research.microsoft.com/CARPE2004/) are evidence of a growing sousveillance industry including Microsoft (wearable cameras), Nokia, Hewlett Packard ("Casual Capture") and many others. [[50]edit] Impact of surveillance [51]Image:Moving-camera.gif The greatest impact of computer-enabled surveillance is the large number of organisations involved in surveillance operations: * The state and security services still have the most powerful surveillance systems, because they are enabled under the law. But today levels of state surveillance have increased, and using computers they are now able to draw together many different information sources to produce profiles of persons or groups in society. * Many large corporations now use various form of 'passive' surveillance. This is primarily a means of monitoring the activities of staff and for controlling [52]public relations. But some large corporations actively use various forms of surveillance to monitor the activities of [53]activists and campaign groups who may impact their operations. * Many companies trade in information lawfully, buying and selling it from other companies or local government agencies who collect it. This data is usually bought by companies who wish to use it for [54]marketing or [55]advertising purposes. * Personal information is obtained by many small groups and individuals. Some of this is for harmless purposes, but increasingly sensitive personal information is being obtained for criminal purposes, such as [56]credit card and other types of [57]fraud. For those who are peacefully working to change society, surveillance presents a problem. Particularly after the [58]September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, many states now view [59]political dissent as a problem, and have introduced new laws to strengthen their surveillance powers. Many states have also redefined their legal definition of terrorism to not only include violent acts, but also types of direct action [60]protest. Even where groups have [61]no involvement in violence, states and corporations may try to use information obtained about groups or individuals to discredit their work. As the scope of surveillance increases, it is important that groups and individuals manage their exposure to different types of surveillance to limit the damage it can do to them, or their work. Modern surveillance cannot be totally avoided. If the state uses all of their resources to investigate a person's activities, they will be able to do so. However, non-state groups may employ surveillance techniques against an organisation, and some precautions can reduce their success. Some states are also legally limited in how extensively they can conduct general surveillance of people they have no particular reason to suspect. Note: In all the forms of surveillance mentioned below, the issue of patterns is important. Although in isolation a single piece of communications data seems useless, when collected together with the communications data of other people it can disclose a lot of information about organisational relationships, work patterns, contacts and personal habits. The collection and processing of communications data is largely automated using computers. See also: [62]traffic analysis [[63]edit] Telephones and mobile telephones The official and unofficial tapping of telephone lines is widespread. The contracts or licenses by which the state controls telephone companies means that they must provide access for tapping lines to the security services and the police. For mobile phones the major threat is the collection of communications data. This data not only includes information about the time and duration of the call, but also the geographical location where the call was made from and to whom. This data can be determined generally because the geographic communications cell that the call was made in is stored with the details of the call. But it is also possible to get greater resolution of a persons location by combining information from a number of cells surrounding the persons location. Mobile phones are, in surveillance terms, a major liability. This liability will only increase as the new third-generation (3G) phones are introduced. This is because the base stations will be located closer together. See the article [64]telephone tapping for more details. [[65]edit] Postal services As more people use faxes and email the significance of the postal system is decreasing (this may not be the case in all countries, certainly the case with international communications, but probably not local). But interception of post is still very important to the security services. There is no easy way to know your post is being read. The machines used to sort and stamp letters often rip up items anyway, so damage is no certain indicator that your post is being read. The simplest counter-measure to stop your post being opened is to put sticky tape along each edge and the seams of the envelope, and then sign the tape with an indelible marker. That prevents all but the most expert tampering. People used to send floppy disks via the post. Today these files can go easily by email. But [66]CDs and [67]DVDs of data are still regularly sent by post. To ensure that this data is not open to reading by anyone, even if its just wrongly delivered, you should encrypt the data. [[68]edit] Surveillance devices - 'bugs' Surveillance devices or 'bugs' are not really a communications medium, but they are a device that requires a communications channel. The idea of a 'bug' usually involves a radio transmitter, but there are many other options for carrying a signal; you can send radio frequencies through the main wiring of a building and pick them up outside, you can pick up the transmissions from a cordless phones, and you can pick up the data from poorly configured wireless computer networks or tune in to the radio emissions of a computer monitor. Bugs come in all shapes and sizes. The original purpose of bugs was to relay sound. Today the miniaturisation of electronics has progressed so far then even TV pictures can be broadcast via bugs that incorporate miniature video cameras (something made popular recently during TV coverage sports events, etc.). The cost of these devices has dramatically fallen. See the article on [69]bugging for more details. [[70]edit] Computer Surveillance At the very basic level, computers are a surveillance target because you confide your secrets into them. Anyone who can and access or remove your computer can retrieve your information. If someone is able to install software on your system they can turn your computer into a surveillance device. Computers can be tapped by a number of methods, ranging from the installation of physical bugs, to the installation of surveillance software or remote interception of the radio transmissions generated by the normal operation of computers. See the article [71]computer surveillance for more details. [[72]edit] Photography Photography is becoming more valuable as a means of surveillance. In recent years there has been a significant expansion in the level of stills and video photography carried out at public demonstrations in many countries. At the same time there have been advances in closed circuit television (CCTV) technology and computer image processing that enable digital images taken from cameras to be matched with images stored in a database. Photographs have long been collected as a form of evidence. But as protest and civil disobedience become an ever greater liability to governments and corporations, images are gathered not only as evidence for prosecution, but also as a source of intelligence information. The collection of photographs and video also has another important function - it scares people. [[73]edit] Closed circuit TV Closed circuit TV (CCTV) - where the picture is viewed or recorded, but not broadcast - initially developed as a means of security for banks. Today it has developed to the point where it is simple and inexpensive enough to be used in home security systems, and for everyday surveillance. The widespread use of CCTV by the police and governments has developed over the last 10 years. In the UK, cities and towns across the country have installed large numbers of cameras linked to police authorities. The justification for the growth of CCTV in towns is that it deters crime - although there is still no clear evidence that CCTV reduces crime. The recent growth of CCTV in housing areas also raises serious issues about the extent to which CCTV is being used as a social control measure rather than simply a deterrent to crime. The development of CCTV in public areas, linked to computer databases of people's pictures and identity, presents a serious risk to civil liberties. Potentially you will not be able to meet anonymously in a public place. You will not be able to drive or walk anonymously around a city. Demonstrations or assemblies in public places could be affected as the state would be able to collate lists of those leading them, taking part, or even just talking with protesters in the street. See the article [74]CCTV for more details. [[75]edit] Documentation trails Modern society creates huge amounts of data. Every time you use a bank machine, pay by credit card, use a phone card or make a call from home you clock up electronic records of transactions. In the past these would have been called 'paper trails'. But today many of these records are electronic. This information, if obtained by the state, or obtained through unofficial channels (sorting your rubbish/bribing those in charge of keeping the information) can also describe how you live and work. One of the greatest freedoms we have is to buy a book, or a newspaper, or to donate money to a cause, and do so with complete anonymity. When transactions are electronic, that anonymity is lost. Marketing and credit reporting agencies rival the state intelligence services for their collection of dossiers. Today a whole web of information is collected by marketing companies in order to sell you things, or determine how companies should run their marketing strategies. The details from a whole range of transactions, from credit agreements to the electoral register, are all purchased by market research companies to provide information on the habits of the public as potential customers. [[76]edit] Data profiling Most of the information described above is generalised - it identifies trends from large quantities of data, and the role of the individual in that is very minor. Data profiling on the other hand is a process whereby someone seeks to get as much information about you as possible - personally - in order to assemble a picture of your specific life and habits. Data profiling is very important in intelligence operations and has many applications - from deciding whether a person is vulnerable to bribery, through to conducting profiling of suspects to decide where they can be apprehended. The state has powers to do this by issuing orders that banks, credit companies or even your employer supply data to them. But even corporations and [77]private investigators can assemble this information if they are well connected. Much personal information is not very well protected, because small amounts of information is not considered sensitive. But once this information is brought together it can describe in detail the actions, habits and preferences of the individual. Historically, much information has been protected by practical obscurity, the difficulty of aggregating or analyzing a large number of data points. This has lead to unexpected results as birth records, property tax rolls, and other records are brought online, where they can be easily collated by computer. [[78]edit] Identities There are instances when we wish to hide our identity - to remain anonymous - for a whole range of reasons. To eliminate this will be a serious erosion of our civil liberties. This is possible as we move towards the development of 'electronic identities. There are two aspects to this: * the development of systems of credentials - where you carry a card or a document; and * the development of [79]biometrics - where you are recognised from your 'unique' biological characteristics. The development of identity systems is being pushed on two fronts: * The banking industry, who wish to find a more fool-proof system of verifying financial transactions than the possession of a plastic card or the use of a signature; * Law enforcement, who want a way of identifying individuals easily, even if they have no reason (i.e. evidence) to do so. (See [80]Stop and Search [81][1] (http://www.met.police.uk/stopandsearch/), [82][2] (http://www.blink.org.uk/pdescription.asp?key=1726&grp =55&cat=205)) One of the simplest forms of identification is the carrying of credentials. Some countries have an identity card system to aid identification. Other documents, such as drivers licenses, library cards, bankers or credit cards are also used to verify identity. The problem with identity based on credentials is that the individual must carry them, and be identifiable, or face a legal penalty. This problem is compounded if the form of the identify card is 'machine-readable' (could you explain more) In this case it may create a document trail as it is used to verify transactions. As a means of combating the problem of people carrying or falsifying credentials, researchers are increasingly looking at biometrics - measuring biological or physical characteristics - as a way to determine identity. One of the oldest forms of biometrics is fingerprints. Every finger of every person (identical twins included) has a unique pattern, and these have been used for many years to help identify suspects in police enquiries. A finger/thumb print can be reduced to a brief numeric description, and such systems are being used in banks and secure areas to verify identity. A more recent development is DNA fingerprinting, which looks at some of the major markers in the body's DNA to produce a match. However, the match produced is less accurate than ordinary fingerprints because it only identifies people to a certain probability of matching. Further, identical twins have identical DNA, and so are indistinguishable by this method. Handwriting - primarily your signature - has been used for many years to determine identity. However other characteristics of the individual can also be used to check identity. Voice analysis has been used for some as a means to prove identity - but it is not suited to portable use because of the problems of storing a range of voice prints. But perhaps the two most viable portable systems, because identities can be reduced to a series of numeric data points rather than a detailed image or sound, are: * Iris recognition. Some banks are now using this method of security. The human iris has an almost unique pattern that can be reduced to a simple series of numeric descriptions. The iris reader matches the pattern of the iris to one stored and verifies the match. * Facial recognition. The configuration of the facial features can be used to accurately identify one individual from another. Again, the configuration can be reduced to a short numeric description. By combining some form of personal identifying feature, with a system of verification it is possible to do everything from buying food to travelling abroad. The important issue is how this information is managed in order to reduce the likelihood of tracking. If you were to combine a particular biometric system with new smart card technology to store the description, that system would be immune from tracking (unless the transaction produced a document/electronic trial). But if the identifying features are stored centrally, and a whole range of systems have access to those descriptions, it is possible that other uses could be made of the data; for example, using high resolution CCTV images with a databases of facial identities in order to identify people at random. [[83]edit] Human operatives and social engineering The most invasive form of surveillance is the use of human operatives. This takes two forms: * The use of operatives to infiltrate an organisation; and * The use of social engineering techniques to obtain information. In groups dealing with issues that are directly contrary to government policy the issue of infiltration often arises. Also, where groups oppose large corporations, infiltration by agents of the corporation is also feared. As well as operatives, the police and security services may put pressure on certain members of an organisation to disclose the information they hold on other members. Running operatives is very expensive, and for the state the information recovered from operatives can be obtained from less problematic forms of surveillance. If discovered, it can also be a public relations disaster for the government or corporation involved. For these reasons, the use of operatives to infiltrate organisations is not as widespread as many believe. But infiltration is still very likely from other organisations who are motivated to discover and monitor the work of campaign groups. This may be for political or economic motivations. There are also many informal links between large corporations and police or security services, and the trading of information about groups and activists is part of this relationship. It is not possible to guard against the infiltration of an organisation without damaging the viability or effectiveness of the organisation. Worrying too much about infiltration within the organisation can breed mistrust and bad working relationships within an organisation. Rather like other forms of surveillance, the professional infiltration of operatives into and organisation is difficult to guard against. Another more likely scenario, especially when dealing with the media or corporate public relations, is social engineering. Social engineering is where someone phones you, interviews you, or just talks to you in the street and tries to make you believe they are someone else, or someone with an innocuous interest in you. But their real interest is to obtain some specific information that they believe you possess. You should develop clear procedures for handling enquiries about your work. For example, one day you get a phone call saying "hi, I'd really like to come on your demonstration against Company X, when is it?", or, "I'm calling for john, he's lost the password for the computer can you give it to me?". You have to guard against the disclosure of information in this way: Unless you have an extremely good reason to, you should never give any security-related information over the phone, and via the Internet you should encrypt security information. Social engineering is easily identified by asking a series a questions to see if a person is aware of facts or future plans that they should not have awareness of. Journalists for well known media organisation can be verified by phoning the editor of that organisation, but freelance or independent journalists should be treated with care - they could be working for anyone. There is of course a balance to be struck here. You need to be able to allow people a certain amount of access to your campaigns. But you also need to preserve the integrity of the groups of people most closely involved in the campaigns work. How you arrive at this balance is your own, difficult, problem to resolve. But however it is resolved, it must be agreed between all those involved in a particular issue in order that you have a consistent policy with all those involved. [[84]edit] Personal counter-surveillance Counter-surveillance is reliant on good information security planning. Protecting information is the first stage of counter-surveillance. But counter surveillance must also be seen as a balancing of opposing objectives. If you are very good at restricting all information, that state or corporations will have problems monitoring you. However, you are also likely to become more isolated and secretive in the process. Therefore, like information security, counter surveillance requires an effort to protect those activities or information that are sensitive, whilst giving less emphasis to those activities that can be open to all. Information security is primarily based on protecting equipment with security procedures and barriers. Personal counter-surveillance is based on much the same process, but instead you provide security and barriers around your own personal habits. As humans we are creatures of habit. If we exhibit very predictable habits, this makes monitoring of our activities easier. But if on certain occasions we break our habits, it can also give away the fact that we are doing something at that time which is not part of our everyday work. The best way to begin thinking about avoiding surveillance is to think about breaking the regular patterns in your life. This masks regular activity, so making it harder to practice routine surveillance. But it also masks the times when you may undertake activities out of the ordinary. Breaking regular patterns does not mean going to bed at different times, or working different hours everyday. Instead it requires that any activities you wish to avoid being the subject of surveillance are integrated into the other events in your life - but not to the extent that they become predictable. If you change the route you take to work or to shop on a random basis, you make it more difficult to monitor your movements. If you build irregular appointments into activities that might involve surveillance, it creates a background 'noise' in the pattern of your activities that masks any change in your habits. Securing the information on your computer will help your overall security. If you have a portable computer you are presented with a whole new problem because you move that system outside of your ordinary systems of security and access barriers. Therefore special care should be taken with portable computers: * The system should be secured with a [85]BIOS password to prevent booting; * Use encryption of the hard disk, where possible, to prevent access to the contents of the hard disk if it is removed from the machine; * Ensure that your portable computer has different passwords than those used on your static equipment. Securing your information is fairly easy. But the main issue you will have to deal with when considering personal surveillance is how to carry out meetings, and networking with people, when you need to discuss sensitive issues. Primarily, when dealing with sensitive information, avoid generating any kind of documentation or opportunities for surveillance. Think about implementing the following as part of your work: * Travel - + If you are travelling to a sensitive meeting take a different route going there and coming back, and if possible do not use the same bus or station when going to or leaving the location you are travelling to. This lessens the likelihood that your destination will be identified. + If travelling on sensitive business, try to use [86]public transport. Using you own private cars will provide a traceable identity. + To avoid the CCTV systems in public places move with the crowd; don't rush, don't cut corners, and don't look around for CCTV cameras. + If you can build in other events/appointments as part of your journey, that will help provide an alternate motive for travelling to that area of a town or city. + Facial recognition systems work primarily on the configuration of facial features. To work they need to get a good view of the face. Looking at a slight angle towards the ground, and wearing a hat with a brim, helps fool the system. + If you travel using public transport, [87]roaming tickets are preferable to tickets for a specific journey - they give you more flexibility over the route, and they are more difficult to associate a route travelled with a particular ticket purchase. + If you have the time available and you can obtain a roaming ticket, build in some extra time to your journey and change trains to make it hard to piece together your journey from CCTV and surveillance sources. + If travelling in a town, avoid moving through the major shopping areas, or 'controlled environments' such as shopping centres. These have the highest level of CCTV coverage. + Always assume that public transport vehicles have CCTV installed - travelling during peak hours will help mask your presence. + To make following you in person or via CCTV more difficult do not wear distinctive clothes or carry distinctive objects - blend in. + Darkness aids anonymity, but is not a foolproof solution to the latest CCTV cameras which can see in the dark. * Mobile phones - + If in doubt, turn it off. + If travelling to a sensitive location, in an urban area do not use your phone within two or three miles of the location, or in rural areas do not use it within ten or fifteen miles of the location. This will prevent the creation of a trail that associates you with that location on that day. + If the location you are going to is nowhere near a route you regularly travel, turn off your phone before you start your journey there. + If you desperately need to mask your location, let someone else carry your phone around for the day - but this is only realistic if you take all precautions to prevent generating other document trails whilst you are moving around. * Payments - + If you are travelling to a sensitive location, don't pay by credit/debit card or take money from a cash machine. + If you need to spend cash when travelling to/working around a sensitive location, do not spend the notes taken directly from the cash machine (their sequential numbers may be logged). Keep a supply of notes received as change elsewhere and use those. + If you need to buy something when travelling to/working around a sensitive location, do not give any loyalty cards or personalised money off tokens as part of your purchases - they are traceable. * Communications - + If you need to make a sensitive phone call that must not be directly associated with you, do so from a public phone box. But beware, if you are associated with the person at the other end of the call, and the content of their calls (rather than just the data) is being monitored, your location at that date and time will be discovered. + If using public phone boxes, try to use them randomly across an area rather than the ones that are closest to you. Also, try to avoid phone boxes on direct transport routes to your home or place of work. + If you wish to send something sensitive through the post, wear gloves to prevent creating fingerprints when producing/packing the item, do not lick the envelope or stamps to prevent creating a DNA sample, and post it in a different location to where you normally post your letters (the further the better) using stamps bought on a different day. + If you need to send a sensitive fax, use a copy shop/bureau which has a self-service desk. + If you desperately need to keep in communication, buy a [88]pay-as-you-go mobile phone and only use it for a day or two whilst you are engaged in sensitive work. * Online - + Maintain a number of alternate personas on the Internet that give you access to web mail and other services should you ever need to use them. + If you need to use the Internet, use a [89]cybercafe, but make sure that you do not access your own Internet services from the cybercafe - use an alternate persona. + If you need to view material that you do not wish to be associated with as part of the server logs of your Internet service provider, use a cybercafe. + If you use cybercafes as part of your communications, try not to use the same one. + If you have a laptop computer, and you wish to mask your location, let someone you trust use it online whilst you are away on sensitive work. * Meetings - + When organising a private meeting, if you cannot send details to all involved in ways that will not be intercepted always try to agree on meeting in one location near to the meeting place. You can then direct people to the correct location as they arrive. By keeping the location of a private meeting limited, you lessen the likelihood of the location being surveilled. + If meeting in the home or building of another person or organisation do not make a phone call from their phone to a number that is identified with you, or from a public phone box near to that building. + If the people going to a private meeting are likely to have mobile phones, ask them to turn them off before travelling to the meeting place (if all the mobile phones of a groups of people are in the same cell at the same time on the same day, it can be assumed that you have had a meeting). + If you require a private meeting place, do not keep using the same one. Alternate it as much as possible. Also, if you meet in a public place, pick somewhere with a high level of background noise, and with as many obstacles or partitions around the point where you meet, to prevent your conversations being overheard. + If you must pay for something whilst having a meeting, use cash. Or, if you cannot, get one person to pay. In this way you will not generate paper trails linking you together. + Meeting in public spaces, streets, in parks, or on public transport is not a good idea - many of these areas are surveilled by CCTV. But bars, cafes and restaurants tend not have their CCTV systems linked to a central control room, and what CCTV systems are installed are concentrated around the till. All forms of technical counter surveillance is achieved through the use or implementation of Technical Surveillance Counter Measures or [90]TSCM. These measures apply equally for the worried individual as to the diligent corporation. Corporate Espionage is on the increase, and because of this it is an ever increasing threat in day to day life and business. [[91]edit] Natural surveillance Natural surveillance is a term used in "Crime Prevention Through Environmental Practices"([92]CPTED) and "Defensible Space" models for crime prevention. These models rely on the ability to influence offender decisions preceding [93]criminal acts. [94]Research into criminal behavior demonstrates that the decision to offend or not to offend is more influenced by cues to the perceived risk of being caught than by cues to reward or ease of entry. Consistent with this research CPTED based strategies emphasise enhancing the perceived risk of detection and apprehension. Natural surveillance limits the opportunity for crime by taking steps to increase the perception that people can be seen. Natural surveillance occurs by designing the placement of physical features, activities and people in such a way as to maximize visibility and foster positive social interaction. Potential offenders feel increased scrutiny and limitations on their escape routes. Natural surveillance is typically free of cost however its effectiveness to deter crime varies with the individual offender. Jane Jacobs, North American editor, urban activist, [95]urban planning critic, and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities ([96]1961), formulated the natural surveillance strategy based on her work in New York's Greenwich Village. Natural surveillance is naturally occurring. As people are moving around an area, they will be able to observe what is going on around them, provided the area is open and well lit. Supporting a diversity of uses within a [97]public space is highly effective. Other ways to promote natural surveillance include low landscaping, [98]street lights, street designs that encourage pedestrian use, removing hiding and lurking places, and placing high risk targets, such as expensive or display items, in plain view of legitimate users, such as near a receptionist or sales clerk. Included in the design are features that maximize visibility of people, parking areas and building entrances: doors and [99]windows that look out on to streets and parking areas, see-through barriers (glass brick walls, picket fences), [100]pedestrian-friendly [101]sidewalks and streets, and front porches. Designing nighttime lighting is particularly important: uniform high intensity "carpet" [102]lighting of large areas is discouraged, especially where lights glare into (and discourage) observers eyes. In its place is feature lighting that draws the observer's focus to access control points and potential hiding areas. Area lighting is still used, but light sources are typically placed lower to the ground, at a higher density, and with lower intensity and more controlled glare than the lighting it is designed to replace. Any [103]architectural design that enhances the chance that a potential offender will be, or might be, seen is a form of natural surveillance. Often, it is not just the fact that the offender might be seen that matters. It is that the offender "thinks" they will be seen that can help deter the opportunity for [104]crime. [[105]edit] See also * [106]ECHELON, * [107]Espionage, * [108]Information Awareness Office * [109]Inverse surveillance * [110]Mass surveillance * [111]RFID * [112]Surveillance aircraft * [113]Secure computing * [114]Sousveillance * [115]The Transparent Society * [116]Treaty on Open Skies * [117]TSCM [[118]edit] References * [119]David Brin (1998), The Transparent Society New York: Addison-Wesley: [120]ISBN 0-201-32802-X * [121]Simson Garfinkel, Database Nation; The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. [122]ISBN 0-596-00105-3 * Jacobs, Jane ([123]1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities New York: Random House. [124]ISBN 0-679-60047-7 [[125]edit] External links * Much of the text of this article is taken from [126]"Living Under Surveillance" (http://secdocs.net/manual/lp-sec/scb7.html) written by Paul Mobbs for the Association for Progressive Communications, which is licensed under the [127]GFDL, and hence can be used in Wikipedia * [128]David Brin's web site (http://www.kithrup.com/brin/tschp1.html) * [129]Surveillance & Society (http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/) Free academic e-journal on surveillance. Includes resources * [130]International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance (http://wearcam.org/iwis/). * This page was last modified 00:24, 10 Jan 2005. 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http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=6 71. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_surveillance 72. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=7 73. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=8 74. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_TV 75. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=9 76. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=10 77. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_investigator 78. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=11 79. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometrics 80. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stop_and_Search&action=edit 81. http://www.met.police.uk/stopandsearch/ 82. http://www.blink.org.uk/pdescription.asp?key=1726&grp=55&cat=205 83. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=12 84. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=13 85. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS 86. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_transport 87. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roaming_ticket&action=edit 88. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pay-as-you-go&action=edit 89. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybercafe 90. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSCM 91. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=14 92. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPTED 93. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal 94. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research 95. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning 96. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961 97. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_space 98. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_lights 99. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window 100. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian 101. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidewalks 102. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighting 103. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architectural 104. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime 105. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=15 106. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON 107. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage 108. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office 109. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_surveillance 110. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance 111. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID 112. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_aircraft 113. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_computing 114. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance 115. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society 116. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies 117. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSCM 118. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=16 119. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brin 120. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Booksources&isbn=020132802X 121. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Simson_Garfinkel&action=edit 122. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Booksources&isbn=0596001053 123. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961 124. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Booksources&isbn=0679600477 125. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surveillance&action=edit§ion=17 126. http://secdocs.net/manual/lp-sec/scb7.html 127. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License 128. http://www.kithrup.com/brin/tschp1.html 129. http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ 130. http://wearcam.org/iwis/ From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 11:09:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 06:09:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Roosevelt Asks Power to Reform Courts, Increasing the Supreme Bench to 15 Judges; Congress Startled, But Expected to Approve Message-ID: Roosevelt Asks Power to Reform Courts, Increasing the Supreme Bench to 15 Judges; Congress Startled, But Expected to Approve http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0205.html This event took place on February 5, 1937, and was reported in the The New York Times the following day. Roosevelt Asks Power to Reform Courts, Increasing the Supreme Bench to 15 Judges; Congress Startled, But Expected to Approve _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Surprise Message _________________________________________________________________ Asks Authority to Name New Justices if Old Do Not Quit at 70 _________________________________________________________________ SEES NEED OF 'NEW BLOOD' _________________________________________________________________ Constitutional Amendment and Statutory Judiciary Curb Would Be Side-Stepped _________________________________________________________________ LOWER COURTS AFFECTED _________________________________________________________________ Bench Would Be Expanded, Appeals Speeded and Defense Assured in Injunctions _________________________________________________________________ By Arthur Krock Special to The New York Times RELATED HEADLINES Bill is Introduced: Robinson and Bankhead Act for Passage by Senate and House: Majority for Proposal: But Most Conservative Democrats Are Silent and Republicans Are Hostile: Speculation on Justices: Those Mentioned for New Places Include J. M. Landis, Richberg and Frankfurter President's Message Aim to Pack Court, Declares Hoover: Roosevelt Move Transcends Any Partisanship Question, Ex-President Holds: Widely Criticized Here: 'Shameful Day' in Our History, Colby Asserts -- Justice Black Hails 'Greatest Advance' Stocks Drop Fast on Court Message: Sweeping Declines Stop a Rise, Making Market the Year's Second Largest: Brief Rallies Are Futile: List Closes Only Slightly Above Day's Lows -- Some Bankers Say Effect Will Be Mitigated. Supreme Court Keeps Up With Its Work, Say Aides Six on High Bench Eligible to Retire: They and Six Justices of the Circuit Courts Could Come Under Roosevelt Plan: 13 Other Jurists Listed: These Members of the Lower Courts Also Have Reached 70, With 10 Years of Service OTHER HEADLINES Progress Is Made in Motors Parley; Eviction Deferred: Working on Terms: Subcommittee Begins Study of Specific Issues in Strike: Will Report This Morning: Pressure From Roosevelt is Credited With Averting Complete Collapse: Murphy Blocks Ousters: Halts Arrest of Union Men After Court Issues Eviction Writs at Flint: Great Grandmother, 72, Joins Picket Line in Flint $100,000 Cafe Shut by Racket Bombs, Owner Testifies: Stench Missiles Used for Ten Months After He Refused to Pay $3,000, He Says: Four Others Tell Ills: Restaurant Manager Describes Threats to His Children and $2,000 Demand Friars Face Trial As Spanish Rebels: 'People's Court' Will Assemble Monday for Case Against 60 Escorial Guardians: 1,500 Others Are Indicted: Speedy Hearings Are Planned for Prisoners Who Fill the Jails in Madrid West Virginian Saved After 8 Days in Mine; Had No Food, Forced to Drink Sulphur Water W ashington, Feb. 5 -- The President suddenly, at noon today, cut through the tangle of proposals made by his Congressional leaders to "bring legislative and judicial action into closer harmony" with a broadaxe message to Congress recommending the passage of statutes to effect drastic Federal court reforms. The message- prepared in a small group and with deepest secrecy -- was accompanied by a letter from the Attorney General and by a bill drawn at the Department of Justice, which would permit an increase in the membership of the Supreme Court from nine to a maximum of fifteen if judges reaching the age of 70 declined to retire; add a total of not more than fifty judges to all classes of the Federal courts; send appeals from lower court decisions on constitutional questions, direct to the Supreme Court, and require that government attorneys be heard before any lower-court injunction issue against the enforcement of any act of Congress. Avoiding both the devices of constitutional amendment and statutory limitation of Supreme Court powers, which were favored by his usual spokesmen in Congress, the President endorsed an ingenious plan which will on passage give him the power to name six new justices of the Supreme Court. Power Left to the President Under the provisions of the bill drawn by the Department of Justice form Congress, if the six now sitting justices who are more than 70 years of age to not resign, the President is empowered to name a new member for each justice in that category. These are the Chief Justice and Justices Brandeis, Van Devanter, Butler, McReynolds and Sutherland. Thus, after the passage of the bill, which is generally expected, the court will number anywhere from nine to fifteen justices. Although the message - an unusually long one for the President- was a general criticism of the effects upon government and private litigants of overburdened courts and superannuated judges, and stressed a general plea to Congress to make provision of a "a constant and systematic addition of younger blood" to "vitalize the courts," Congress instantly recognized its outstanding feature and purpose. Although the message outlined basic defects in the administration of justice in the United States, and contained many reforms to which no exception will be taken, Congress quickly sensed that the President had hurdled the present majority of the Supreme Court on his way to the goal he outlined in his opening message of the session. This, as he stated it, is to find "means to adapt our legal forms and our judicial interpretation to the actual present needs of the largest progressive democracy in the modern world." Variety of Emotions Aroused That passage was the one which had brought the most cheers from the floors of Congress when the President uttered it. To achieve its aim was the object of all the proposed amendments and statutes which have heaped high in the Congressional hoppers since the opening of the session. When members of the Senate and the House became aware of the ingenious but effective manner in which the President planned to attain his objective without touching the Constitution or the powers of the court, they were torn by a variety of emotions. Senator Robinson, the majority leader in his branch, said the message was "in no sense a violent innovation" and that it would be "substantially favored." Speaker Bankhead said the proposal was based on "a sound principle of judicial reform." Senator Pope remarked that the President had "neatly finessed the Supreme Court," which, so far as the majority is concerned, is correct. Conservative Democrats, however, especially those in the Senate, gagged at the proposals affecting the Supreme Court. Many of them maintained prudent silence, waiting to see how the cat of public opinion will jump. But Senator Burke attacked a plan to "pack the court," and Senator Byrd said curtly that "orderly means" to amend the Constitution were provided in that instrument. There will be real opposition on the Democratic side, there seems to be no doubt that the Attorney General's bill, which was quickly referred to committees in the two branches, will be moved steadily to passage. Republicans Sharply Critical The Republicans were at first stunned; then they burst into violent criticism directed at the Supreme Court extensions. They accused the President of trying to wreck the judiciary. Senator Vandenberg said angrily that behind the "fine words" a fell intent was evident. Representative Snell said that the administration, "having already destroyed the economic stability of the country, apparently will not be content until it destroys the judicial stability." Senator Borah viewed much of the proposal with grave alarm. But these were few in contrast with the long lines of approving Democrats. The President's plan had a dramatic setting and one he obviously enjoyed to the full. Last night at a White House reception he teasingly said to several guests - newspaper men among them - that "there will be big news tomorrow" and laughingly rejected pleas to indicate what the news would be. The staff at the executive offices was assembled at 6:30 o'clock this morning to perform the requisite clerical labor. The Cabinet, with the Vice President, was summoned for 10 o'clock and held in session for an hour while the President read his message and the letter and bill prepared by the Attorney General. It is understood that the Cabinet expressed approval of the plan and admiration for the ingenuity of its process. Warm with gratulation, the President was then ready for his regular Friday audience with the newspaper correspondents. To them also he read all the documents and at one point in the reading - before the fact was obvious- looked up and said, "this applies equally to the Supreme Court." The thoughts of many of those who watched and heard him instantly reverted to a press conference after the unanimous nullification of the NRA by the Supreme Court. Then the President was in a different mood. Then he was frustrated and angry and spoke of "horse-and-buggy" decisions in the machine age. Today he was calm and confident, plainly reflecting his conviction that, since the Republicans made his future Supreme Court appointments and issue in the last campaign, he had a huge popular mandate for what he was doing to change conditions in a court where the New Deal has sustained nine major legal defeats. The President's message can be briefly summarized as follows: In line with recent recommendations to reorganize the government's administrative machinery, this plan is to permit the judiciary to function in tune with modern conditions. The President, alone being directed by the Constitution to advise Congress on the state of the Union, is carrying out that direction herewith, and is further animated by the fact that Congress is empowered by the Constitution to see that the Federal judiciary functions properly. That judiciary once more finds itself without sufficient personnel, although its quarters have been improved. It required over a hundred years to excuse the Supreme Court justices from "riding circuit." Congress has often changed the numbers and duties of judges; the Supreme Court's number has been altered five times. Today there are not enough judges to meet the needs of litigants. Additional judges are required, since court delay results in injustice. Lawsuits have been made a luxury available to the few, and unjust settlements have thereby been compelled. The Supreme Court is deeply burdened and in the last fiscal year it declined to hear 87 percent of the pleas presented by private litigants. Sheer necessity to keep up with its work forced that. The question of "aged or infirm judges," while delicate, must be met. Twenty-five lower court Federal judges, over 70 and eligible to retire on full pay, have not done so. "They seem to be tenacious of the appearance of adequacy" (a sly quotation from Charles Evans Hughes's book on the Supreme Court). This situation induced Attorneys General McReynolds and Gregory to propose, during the Wilson administrations, that when a circuit or district judge failed to retire at 70 an additional judge should be appointed in his court. The law of 1919, passed to cover this, merely authorized such an appointment on a Presidential finding that the judge over 70 was inefficient. No President should be asked to make such a finding. A judge's task calls for the use of full energies; modern complexities require a constant infusion of new blood in courts as everywhere else. To superannuated men facts become blurred, or they have lost the disposition to dig for them. This is recognized elsewhere in the government. It is therefore recommended that provision be made for additional judges in all courts, "without exception," where judges are sitting beyond the retirement age. It was not intended to create a "static judiciary." Suggests a Federal Court "Proctor" To relieve congestion in the lower courts, Congress should empower the Chief Justice of the United States to appoint a "proctor" to watch all the courts and calendars in the Federal system. On his information the Chief Justice should be authorized to send in judges where needed. A bill is attached to afford general relief. The method it proposes is not costly, and limits the number of new judges. No question of constitutional law is raised, and no compulsory retirement is proposed, since there are and have been many judges beyond 70 whose services represent great value to the government. However, the bill extends the voluntary retirement and pay provisions of lower court judges to the justices of the Supreme Court, for whom there now is no retirement provision. [There is, however, a law which provides that after ten years of service on the Supreme Court bench, and after reaching the age of 70, justices may resign and receive full pay for the remainder of their lives.] Conflicting decisions in lower courts call for remedial action. These have brought the entire administration of justice dangerously near to disrepute. Rights accorded to citizens in one Federal court district are denied to citizens in others. It takes from a year to three years before the Supreme Court can settle the conflicts, which robs the law of "its most indispensable element, equality." The conflicts and delays also produce uncertainty- for the government, and for private litigants- over too long periods. Finally, injunctions are too freely granted, sometimes without notice to the government. By postponing in various ways the effective dates of acts of Congress, the judiciary is assuming an additional function and is becoming more and more a "scattered, loosely organized and slowly operating third house of Congress." This state of affairs has come gradually. Calls for Notice Before Trial Other recommendations- that no constitutional cause be tried and judged in a lower court without ample notice to the Attorney General so that he may defend the law. That lower court decisions in constitutional cases shall go at once to the Supreme Court and take precedence there. These, with the provisions of the attached bill, will eliminate congestion, make the judiciary less static and more elastic, assist the Supreme Court and help to make litigants more nearly equal before the law. "If these measures achieve their aim," the President concluded, "we may be relieved of the necessity of considering any fundamental changes in the powers of the courts or the Constitution of our government - changes which involve consequences so far-reaching as to cause uncertainty as to the wisdom of such a course." Cumming's Letter the Background The Attorney General's letter furnished the background for the President's argument and recommendations and presented statistics of the law's delay. The bill, prepared in advance for Congress in true 1933 style, is divided into five sections and makes the provisions heretofore recounted. While all of the legislative and executive personnel of the government and the press gallery buzzed all day with discussion of the President 's imitation of Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot, the justices of the Supreme Court in public at any rate, maintained complete and dignified silence. It was noted that once more the magic number six finds favor in the President's mind. He used to talk of cutting the Cabinet down from ten to six. Then he approved the Brownlow committee's recommendation of six executives assistants "with a passion for anonymity." Today it is the Supreme Court which is to be increased by six if the bill passes, and the justices now over 70 years of age are all alive and refuse to resign. It was also noted that the President announced his plan a few days before arguments on the Wagner act begin in the Supreme Court and in a week when a judicial order- in Flint, Mich.- has been disregarded both by government and by the private parties to the controversy which produced this writ. From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 15:20:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 10:20:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Global Culture War Pits Protectionists Against Free Traders Message-ID: The New York Times > Arts > Essay: A Global Culture War Pits Protectionists Against Free Traders http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/arts/05ridi.html 5.2.5 A Global Culture War Pits Protectionists Against Free Traders By ALAN RIDING PARIS, Feb. 4 - The idea of promoting cultural diversity around the world seems reasonable enough. It recognizes that everyone profits from the free flow of ideas, words and images. It encourages preservation of, say, indigenous traditions and minority languages. It treats the cultures of rich and poor countries as equal. And most topically, it offers an antidote to cultural homogeneity. Try turning this seemingly straightforward idea into an international treaty, though, and things soon become complicated. Since October 2003, Unesco's 190 members have been working on what is provisionally called the Convention on the Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expression. It is intended to be approved by consensus this fall, but don't count on it. There is still no agreement on its final name. But that is a minor issue compared with more fundamental differences. Led by France and Canada, a majority of countries are asserting the right of governments to safeguard, promote and even protect their cultures from outside competition. Opposing them, a smaller group led by the United States argues that cultural diversity can best flourish in the freedom of the globalized economy. A bid to break the deadlock is now under way at the Paris headquarters of Unesco, where delegates and experts are wrestling with hundreds of proposed amendments to the first draft. Yet the more they advance toward concrete definitions, some delegates say, the less likely they are to reach consensus. The reason is simple: Behind the idealistic screen of cultural diversity, weighty economic and political issues are at stake. The story began with the last global trade liberalization around a decade ago when France obtained what became known as the cultural exception, which effectively authorized the protection of culture. Now, France and Canada want to go further: by enshrining cultural diversity in a legally binding Unesco convention, they hope to shield culture from the free-trade rules of the Geneva-based World Trade Organization. Why France and Canada? Both view cultural independence as an essential part of their political identity. They have also long resisted the imperial reach of American popular culture, notably Hollywood, by using fiscal incentives, taxes, subsidies and quotas to protect their movie, music, publishing and other cultural industries. And under the kind of convention they favor, they would continue doing so without the risk of being challenged. So is this another example of anti-Americanism at work? The Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood's main lobby, has long complained about the protection of the French film industry. But because of that help, France has Europe's only thriving movie industry: Hollywood accounts for about 65 percent of the French box office, compared with 90 percent elsewhere in Europe. Now Denmark, Germany, Britain and Spain are also looking to help their film businesses. Certainly, as the world's largest exporter of movies, television programs and other audio-visual products, the United States believes it will suffer from further restrictions on cultural exchanges. When the United States ended a 19-year boycott of Unesco in late 2003, however, plans for a convention were already advanced. Rather than announcing its return to the organization by being obstructionist, it decided to defend its position in negotiations. The first draft of the convention, presented by 15 cultural experts last summer, tried to please everyone by endorsing "the free flow of ideas by word and image" and by noting that cultural goods and services "must not be treated as ordinary merchandise or consumer goods." The battle was then joined in November when governments presented their responses, many of which are now proposed amendments to the draft. The American response was unambiguous. While supporting the principle of cultural diversity, it warned that "controlling cultural or artistic expressions is not consistent with respect for human rights or the free flow of information." It further noted, "Mounting trade barriers, including efforts to prevent the free flow of investment and knowledge, is not a valid way to promote cultural liberty or diversity since such measures reduce choices." Louise V. Oliver, the United States Ambassador to Unesco, explained: "We support 'protect' as in nurture, not 'protect' as in barriers. That said, 'protect' remains a highly loaded concept in this cultural diversity context and, for that reason, remains a sensitive issue. If the convention promotes cultural diversity, we are in favor. We're not in favor of anything that prevents the free and open exchange of cultures." Supporters of the convention focused instead on the word "freedom," arguing that freedom of choice means availability of choice, which in turn requires active promotion - and protection - of cultural diversity. Canada suggested that the red-flag word "globalization" be described as a "challenge" rather than as a "threat." But it firmly reasserted its right to preserve and promote any cultural activity that it defined as domestic. The French position was backed by the European Commission, which negotiates on behalf of the 25-nation European Union on trade matters. Just as it supported the "cultural exception" a decade ago, the commission endorsed the view that trade disputes involving culture should in future be ruled by the Unesco convention, not the W.T.O. The battle lines are becoming clearer. France and Canada have the support of China and African countries as well as much of Latin America, although Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela want freedom to export their popular television soap operas. Support for the American free trade view comes from other countries with commercial interests to defend: Japan because of its animated-movie industry and India because of Bollywood, its film powerhouse. But inevitably, the spotlight is on the United States. "The American objective is to have no convention," a Latin American diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, "but if there is flexibility, it will have no choice but to accept it." French officials are less sanguine. They say that, by using amendments to forestall an agreement in the fall, Washington hopes that the entire debate will become muddied next year by negotiations in the next global trade round. "I expect the usual American approach," said Garry Neil, executive director of the International Network for Cultural Diversity, an Ottawa-based nongovernmental lobby. "They'll take a hard line, weaken the text as much as possible and then not sign it." Certainly, if the United States finds the final draft unacceptable, it can break the consensus tradition and demand a vote. And even if approved by consensus, the United States Senate would probably not ratify it. Does this matter? Probably not to France, Canada and a few other cultural nationalists. As long as a convention is adopted and goes into effect, they will claim ample authority to protect their culture. But a more interesting question is whether such a convention will help sustain cultural diversity in countries too poor to do so themselves. That, after all, was one of the proclaimed purposes of this entire exercise. At the moment, it risks being forgotten. From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 15:21:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 10:21:26 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Ernst Mayr, Pioneer in Tracing Geography's Role in the Origin of Species, Dies at 100 Message-ID: The New York Times > Obituaries > Ernst Mayr, Pioneer in Tracing Geography's Role in the Origin of Species, Dies at 100 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/obituaries/05mayr.html 5.2.5 By CAROL KAESUK YOON Dr. Ernst Mayr, the leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century, died on Thursday in Bedford, Mass. He was 100. Dr. Mayr's death, in a retirement community where he had lived since 1997, was announced by his family and Harvard, whose faculty he joined in 1953. He was known as an architect of the evolutionary or modern synthesis, an intellectual watershed when modern evolutionary biology was born. The synthesis, which was described by Dr. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard as "one of the half-dozen major scientific achievements in our century," reconciled Darwin's theories of evolution with new findings in laboratory genetics and in fieldwork on animal populations and diversity. One of Dr. Mayr's most significant contributions was his persuasive argument for the role of geography in the origin of new species, an idea that has won virtually universal acceptance among evolutionary theorists. He also established a philosophy of biology and founded the field of the history of biology. "He was the Darwin of the 20th century, the defender of the faith," said Dr. Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, a historian of science at the University of Florida. In a career spanning nine decades, Dr. Mayr, a professor emeritus of zoology at Harvard, exerted a broad and powerful influence over the field of evolutionary biology. His most recent book, "What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline" (Cambridge University Press), was published in August, one month after his 100th birthday. Prolific, opinionated, provocative and dynamic, Dr. Mayr had been a major figure and intellectual leader since the 1940's. Setting much of the conceptual agenda for the field, he put the focus just where Charles Darwin first placed it, on the question of how new species originate. Though Dr. Mayr will be best remembered as a synthesizer and promoter of evolutionary ideas, he was also an accomplished ornithologist. In fact, it was with the sighting of a pair of unusual birds that Dr. Mayr's long career in biology began in 1923 at age 19. Dr. Mayr was born in Kempten, Germany, in 1904. While still a boy, he was instructed in natural history by his father, Otto, a judge. He quickly became a skilled birdwatcher and naturalist. Intending to become a medical doctor like others in his family, Dr. Mayr was about to leave for medical school when he spotted a pair of red-crested pochards, a species of duck that had not been seen in Europe for 77 years. Though he took detailed notes, he could not get anyone to believe his sighting. Finally, he met Dr. Erwin Stresemann, then the leading German ornithologist, who was at the Berlin Zoological Museum and who recognized his talents and invited him to work at the museum during school holidays. After two years of medical studies at the University of Greifswald (chosen because it was in the most interesting German region for birdwatching), Dr. Mayr, like Darwin before him, opted for natural history. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Berlin in just 16 months. Dr. Mayr went on to fulfill what he called "the greatest ambition of my youth," heading off to the tropics. In the South Pacific, principally New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, Dr. Mayr collected more than 3,000 birds from 1928 to 1930. (He had to live off the land, and every bird, after being skinned for study, went into the pot. As a result, he is said to have eaten more birds of paradise than any other modern biologist.) The South Seas experience, he once said, "had an impact on my thinking that cannot be exaggerated." For it was his detailed observations of the differences among geographically isolated populations that contributed to his conviction that geography played a crucial role in the origin of species. Though Darwin titled his book "The Origin of Species," little in the book, in fact, addresses the question of how new species arise. Dr. Mayr determined that when populations of a single species are separated from one another, they slowly accumulate differences until they can no longer interbreed. Dr. Mayr called this allopatric speciation and detailed his arguments in his seminal book "Systematics and the Origin of Species," published in 1942. Today allopatric speciation ("allo," from the Greek for "other," and "patric," from the Greek for "fatherland") is accepted as the most common way in which new species arise. "Organic diversity had at last received a convincing explanation," Dr. Jerry A. Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, wrote of Dr. Mayr's arguments. Dr. Coyne called the book "one of the greatest achievements of evolutionary biology." Similarly, the most commonly held view of what constitutes a species remains the one that Dr. Mayr promoted more than 50 years ago, known as the biological species concept. First explicitly defined by Dr. Theodosius Dobzhansky, it states that populations that can successfully interbreed are the same species and those that cannot are different species. While numerous other species concepts have been proposed and debated, this one continues to reign supreme. Dr. Mayr's focus on species, both their nature and their origins, appears to have derived from his experiences in the South Pacific. When he went to New Guinea, Dr. Mayr once explained in an interview with Omni magazine, there was a popular school of thinking known as the nominalist school of philosophy that held that species did not, in reality, exist. They were merely arbitrary categories, little more than names. "But I discovered that the very same aggregations or groupings of individuals that the trained zoologist called separate species were called species by the New Guinea natives," Dr. Mayr said. "I collected 137 species of birds. The natives had 136 names for these birds - they confused only two of them. The coincidence of what Western scientists called species and what the natives called species was so total that I realized the species was a very real thing in nature." Dr. Mayr eventually became a living symbol of the beginnings of the modern field of evolution, one of the last survivors of the handful of biologists, including Dr. Dobzhansky and Dr. George Gaylord Simpson, known as the architects of the evolutionary or modern synthesis. In the evolutionary synthesis, neo-Darwinism took its place as today's dominant theory of evolution. Taking place between the 1920's and 50's, the synthesis is recognized as a period of conceptual unification, a time of "mutual education," as Dr. Mayr once described it. Laboratory geneticists, studying mutations and population genetics, began merging their views of evolution with those of field scientists like Dr. Mayr who studied the diversity and origins of different species. New findings, in genetics as well as other fields, were reconciled with Darwin's theories of evolution. Competing theories, including Lamarckism (the idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited), were tossed aside, producing a much more unified view of evolution at work. Over his remarkably productive career, Dr. Mayr wrote or edited 20 books and wrote more than 600 journal articles. After his official retirement in 1975, he published more than 200 of the articles, more than many scientists do in their entire careers. He received awards including the National Medal of Science, the Balzan Prize and the International Prize. He once noted that Nobel Prizes were not given in evolutionary biology, saying, "Darwin wouldn't have won it either." Dr. Mayr was an ardent promoter of the academic discipline of evolutionary biology, and perhaps its most energetic organizer, playing a critical role in founding the Society for the Study of Evolution in 1946, and serving as the first editor of its journal, Evolution, still the leading journal in the field. Meanwhile, his birds were never forgotten. As a collector, ornithologist and curator, first at the University of Berlin, then the American Museum of Natural History in the 1930's and 1940's, and finally at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, Dr. Mayr made his mark. By the time he turned 90, in 1994, he had named more than 24 valid bird species, more than any other living ornithologist had at the time. He had named more than 400 subspecies and several new genuses of birds as well. Dr. Mayr also took a serious interest in organisms other than birds, publishing work on species delineations in plants, hybrids formed by snail species, courtship behavior in fruit flies and the evolution of human blood groups. Dr. Mayr may have taken the greatest pride in his theory of what he called peripatric speciation and genetic revolutions, an idea he called "perhaps the most original theory I have ever proposed." It was also his least successful. According to this controversial theory, new species can be produced when very small populations are cut off from the rest of the species. Unlike the more general theory of allopatric speciation, holding that isolated populations slowly accumulate differences until they can no longer interbreed, peripatric speciation posits that extremely small populations, isolated in unusual habitats, undergo what Dr. Mayr termed a "genetic revolution." Undergoing drastic changes in their genome, populations evolve quickly to become new species. Some scientists have said that this theory is unlikely, unsupported and untestable. Others have defended it as a proposal, saying that while the idea itself may not stand the test of time, it remains significant as one of the first explicit theoretical models of speciation and its genetic consequences. Dr. Gould also credited Dr. Mayr with sowing the seeds for the "flowering of modern macroevolutionary theory." While microevolutionary theory seeks to explain how species adapt to particular environments or how evolution among populations can give rise to new species, macroevolution theory encompasses a much bigger picture, examining how some species survive better than others and how likely or unlikely they are to give rise to other species. It was Dr. Mayr's concept of the species and its role in the evolutionary process, Dr. Gould said, that laid the foundations for many of the theories being tested by macroevolutionists today. In addition to his several lifetimes' worth of work in evolution, Dr. Mayr also fathered an entirely new field of study, creating almost singlehandedly the field of history and philosophy of biology as a distinct discipline, apart from the history of physics and chemistry, Dr. Smocovitis of the University of Florida said. As with modern evolutionary biology, Dr. Mayr nurtured the new discipline as organizer, mover and shaker. His own contributions include the defining book "The Growth of Biological Thought" (1982), as well as books on the philosophy of biology, Darwin and the evolutionary synthesis. Dr. Mayr is survived by two daughters, Christa Menzel of Simsbury, Conn., and Susanne Harrison of Bedford; five grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren. His wife, Margarete Simon, died in 1990. Dr. Mayr, a strong believer in the Hegelian dialectic as a way of advancing understanding, was known for his definitive proclamations, which often inspired as many heated rebuttals as nods of vigorous agreement. With so long to consider the great pageant of the history of life, he seemed to have taken on every subject of interest in evolutionary biology, and his views are an unavoidable point at which to begin nearly any argument of substance. At the time of his 90th birthday, in 1994, when Dr. Mayr was as active and engaged in the field as ever, Dr. Douglas J. Futuyma, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University, wrote, "No one will agree with all his positions, analyses, and opinions." But he added, "Anyone who has failed to read Mayr can hardly claim to be educated in evolutionary biology." From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 15:22:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 10:22:44 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: (Tom Wolfe) The Old College Try Message-ID: The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Essay: The Old College Try http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/books/review/06DONADIO.html 5.2.6 By RACHEL DONADIO Tom Wolfe's latest best seller, ''I Am Charlotte Simmons,'' has been written off by critics from The Times Literary Supplement to USA Today. It's about a whip-smart ingenue from an Appalachian town called Sparta who wins a scholarship to prestigious Dupont University, where she contends with alcohol, sex and coed bathrooms, and loses her innocence in more ways than one. The novel's other types -- Wolfe doesn't have characters as much as ''big, vivid blots of typology,'' as the critic James Wood has written -- include Charlotte's snobby, anorexic prep-school roommate; a dumb white basketball player with glimmerings of intellectual curiosity and a Dupont-bought S.U.V.; a nerdy Jewish intellectual who aspires to a Rhodes scholarship and writes term papers for athletes; and a handsome, vicious, corrupt frat boy. There's also an aging progressive ''antiathlete'' professor who wears ill-fitting sweaters, and a Nobel laureate neuroscientist who's done research on cats in heat and is impressed by a paper Charlotte writes refuting Darwin. Reviewers have complained that ''I Am Charlotte Simmons'' fails as a novel, since Wolfe never breaks free of the bonds of reportage to soar to the imaginative heights good fiction demands; that at 676 pages it's too long; and that, come on, college students aren't as debauched and lost as all that, are they? Or are they? To get a sense of that, it's worth exploring how ''I Am Charlotte Simmons'' has been received at colleges, where it is selling briskly. The novel is at No. 8 on the Chronicle of Higher Education's campus best-seller list -- below Jon Stewart's ''America,'' ''The Bush Survival Guide,'' ''The Polar Express'' and ''He's Just Not That Into You.'' Even some negative student reviews -- and there are many, including some by readers at Harvard, Duke, the University of Michigan and the University of Oklahoma -- have acknowledged a poignant accuracy in Wolfe's portrayal of contemporary campus life. ''It's sort of amazing what this 74-year-old dandy has managed to pick up,'' Eve Fairbanks, a Yale senior, writes in a rigorous essay in the forthcoming Yale Review of Books, an undergraduate publication. Fairbanks says she was ''fully prepared'' to hate the book, but ultimately she and her friends found it ''pretty dead-on.'' For the most part, both on campus and off, the reviews have fallen along ideological lines, with conservatives relishing Wolfe's apocalyptic vision of moral decay and liberals decrying it. In a rave in the conservative weekly National Review, John Derbyshire wrote that under Dupont's ''cruel, oppressive cult of coolness, all point and purpose drains out of life, and a dull, solipsistic hedonism takes over.'' In Wolfe's ''depressing'' picture, he observed, ''the soul is of no importance or interest to these kids because their elders believe it does not exist.'' In panning the book in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Elaine Showalter, a professor emerita at Princeton and a feminist scholar, called the book ''bitchy, status-seeking and dissecting'' and lamented that Wolfe ''totally misses the feminist revolution.'' Her pronouncement that ''it takes a writer as snobbish, superficial and insecure as Tom Wolfe (who got his own undergraduate degree from Washington and Lee University, where he played baseball) to write such puerile rubbish'' generated a few letters to the editor from readers who noted the irony of Showalter's dismissing Wolfe on those grounds while accusing him of snobbery. Likewise, ''I Am Charlotte Simmons'' is most popular with undergraduates who view it through a conservative lens. In The Chronicle, a daily newspaper at Duke (which is said to be a model for Dupont), Matt Gillum wrote, ''Judging from the hack reviews it inspired, Dr. Wolfe appears to have pinched the nipple of truth way too hard and got the liberals squealing.'' The book ''successfully defines the intellectual and moral free fall of 21st-century academia,'' Benjamin Peisch wrote in The Bowdoin Orient, a weekly newspaper at Bowdoin College with no obvious political orientation. ''Best of all, he skewers modern academia. Intellectual conversation has been smothered by rampant debauchery and political correctness. Wild parties dominate the entire campus. Athletes are given a free pass for four years. Professors are handcuffed by campus politics.'' In The Michigan Review, a conservative magazine at the University of Michigan, Matt Mulder wrote that ''I Am Charlotte Simmons'' foreshadows a revolution in which ''we, the few, the young and the proudly conservative, have an opportunity to plant the seeds for student revolution.'' He said the book unearths ''what many of us have experienced for quite some time -- college life is characterized by an obsession with sex, political correctness and moral absence.'' Others think Wolfe missed the mark. ''If Wolfe were to accurately depict college life, he would have to start from a radically different premise,'' an editorial in The Columbia Daily Spectator remarked. ''The same kids who can seem so fixated on status or sex actually have professional and intellectual goals.'' In her review, Fairbanks says she was ''chastened'' by the way ''Wolfe considers college not as a pollutant that infects perfectly good people, but as a key player in the greater tragedy of human vanity.'' With ''I Am Charlotte Simmons,'' ''we see Wolfe's real worldview, and it is bleak,'' she writes. ''In the face of Wolfe's black, black vision, what can we do but throw our own hands up in defeat? You got us, Tom. You got us good. . . . The parties, the alcohol, the vomit, our sheeplike adaptation to it all. Should we move to Sparta, instead?'' Indeed, what is Wolfe recommending exactly? Avoid college? Become an evangelical, the tradition in which Charlotte was raised and then essentially abandons? That does seem to be an increasingly popular route. In a recent book, ''God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America'' (St. Martin's), Naomi Schaefer Riley reports that the number of students enrolled in a consortium of more than 100 Christian liberal arts colleges rose 60 percent between 1990 and 2002, while enrollment in secular colleges remained essentially flat. The schools Riley researched -- including the Mormon Brigham Young University, the fundamentalist Bob Jones University and the Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva University -- don't look at all like Dupont. There is little drinking, and students are expected to marry before having sex. Surely contemporary America offers a third way between, as it were, the missionary calling and the missionary position. If so, ''I Am Charlotte Simmons'' doesn't exactly offer one. In its obsession with innocence and experience, with rural na?vete and cosmopolitan moral pollution, with the clash between romantic idealism and the indignities of reality, the book is in many ways Wolfe's answer to ''Madame Bovary,'' which Charlotte is reading in a French class she later drops, after discovering it's aimed at athletes who, much to her horror, are reading the novel in translation. In the end, Charlotte falls for the guy who has all along been identified with Charles Bovary, the tragic heroine's husband. ''Madame Bovary, c'est moi,'' Flaubert famously remarked. Is Wolfe saying, ''I am Charlotte Simmons''? Perhaps one key to Wolfe's bleak vision lies on the page in which he dedicates the book ''to my two collegians,'' his college-age daughter and son, and thanks them for vetting it for undergraduate patois and dorkiness. It's a charming dedication, and apparently heartfelt. Indeed, one gets the sense that coursing through this book is the fear and sadness of a father who has sent his children off into the world, into the brutal state of nature that is American campus life. This seems to resonate. ''I've heard more friends of mine lament the effect it's had on their parents,'' Fairbanks, the Yale senior, remarked in an e-mail message about the book. ''They complain that their parents now call and anxiously ask about how the frat party they went to last night was, which of their female roommates are anorexic and which of the male ones are sex offenders, and whether they like the newest release by 'Doctor Dis,' who they believe is a real rapper. . . . In this way, the book is a bit dangerous. I know my own mother's reading group, all moms of people my age, refuses to read the book because they 'don't want to know.' '' Rachel Donadio is an editor and writer at the Book Review. From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 15:26:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 10:26:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: Chronicle: Political Islam: Global Warning Message-ID: The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Chronicle: Political Islam: Global Warning http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/books/review/06FELDMAN.html 5.2.6 By NOAH FELDMAN GLOBALIZED ISLAM: The Search for a New Ummah. By Olivier Roy. Columbia University, $29.50. THE WAR FOR MUSLIM MINDS: Islam and the West. By Gilles Kepel. Harvard University, $23.95. UNHOLY ALLIANCE: Radical Islam and the American Left. By David Horowitz. Regnery, $27.95. AT THE HEART OF TERROR: Islam, Jihadists, and America's War on Terrorism. By Monte Palmer and Princess Palmer. Rowman & Littlefield, $24.95. PAKISTAN'S DRIFT INTO EXTREMISM: Allah, the Army, and America's War on Terror. By Hassan Abbas. M. E. Sharpe, cloth, $69.95; paper, $25.95. The globalization of Islam is nothing new. The Prophet Muhammad himself confronted Jews, Christians and pagans in his Arabian milieu -- and within a couple of generations, Islam, spread by conquest and conversion alike, came into fruitful contact with the legacies of Persian, Greek and Roman civilizations. Nevertheless, since 9/11, the pace of the engagement between global Islam and other, mostly Western, forces and ideas has quickened, and the stakes have grown. The latest round of books on Islam and the West attempts to make sense of this most recent and intense episode of global interaction and conflict. Mostly, these books reveal a powerful undercurrent of concern -- ripening into panic -- about the unintended consequences of civilizational encounters played out in an environment of violence. They offer diagnoses, but few prescriptions. In an influential pre-9/11 book, ''The Failure of Political Islam,'' Olivier Roy, a French student of contemporary Islam, argued that utopian Islamic revolutions in Muslim countries failed during the 1980's and 90's. Now, in ''Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah,'' he pushes the point farther, suggesting that the important events in the world of Islam are taking place not in the regions we ordinarily think of as Islamic but in Europe. As Exhibit A, Roy points to today's global terrorists, who, he says, are overwhelmingly likely to have studied and lived in Europe (or occasionally the United States) and to have embraced radical Islamic ideas there, not in the Muslim countries where they were born. Indeed, he traces contemporary Islamic terrorism itself to the European terror of the Baader-Meinhof gang and other leftist movements of the 1960's and 70's. Global Islamic terror, for Roy, is not only born of the interaction between Islam and the West, but also reflects the aspiration of displaced Muslims living in Europe to create a transnational Islamic identity, forged in revolution. Roy is right to focus on the ways that both the techniques and ideologies of terror have crossed borders and grafted themselves onto an Islam that, in the past, was largely unfamiliar with them. (He points out, for instance, that suicide bombing was popularized not by Muslims, but by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and adopted by Al Qaeda only after it had been borrowed, to devastating effect, by Palestinian radicals as part of their intifada.) It is also true that the small number of Muslim terrorists who have committed acts of terror in Europe or the United States includes several who were radicalized in Europe. (As Roy notes, however, this was not true of the 15 Saudis who were the muscle, not the pilots, on 9/11.) Roy's Eurocentric focus and his impulse to link Islamic terror to Marxist-inspired radicalism obscure the extent to which satellite television and the Internet have spread Western ideas into the Islamic world. Utopian violence may arguably be on the decline in most majority Muslim countries (although Saudi Arabia is a notable exception, and the Iraqi insurgency includes its share of jihadis); but ideas from free speech to text messaging to brand-name consumerism are affecting the daily lives of larger and larger numbers of non-Western people, who remain fully comfortable with their own national as well as religious identities. Surely the future of global Islam is to be found where most Muslims live, and where today's ideologies of both radical and moderate Islamism are developed, even if they are adopted by ?migr?s abroad. If the United States seems missing from Roy's story at times, Gilles Kepel puts America's reaction to 9/11 front and center in ''The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West.'' Kepel's central thesis can be summed up simply: the United States is losing the war, and badly. Instead of encouraging resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Bush administration has played directly into Al Qaeda's hands by invading Iraq. It failed to recognize that the war would further inflame the Muslim world, convincing more Muslims than ever before that the United States was their enemy. Now, Kepel says, Europe will inherit the whirlwind, in the form of growing Islamic extremism and terrorist acts like the Madrid bombings. Kepel and Roy are frequently mentioned in the same breath -- because of their French nationality and their tendency to publish books at the same time -- but their approaches are starkly different. Kepel, one senses, is addressing an American audience, in order to show us the error of our ways through an outsider's critical evaluation. One chapter is devoted to an analysis of the neoconservatives, and another of comparable length to what he considers ''the calamity of nation-building in Iraq.'' But Kepel is best when on familiar ground, as when he analyzes the growing skill of European Muslim leaders like the controversial Tariq Ramadan, who defend religious freedom while demanding special recognition for their religious community as a distinct group within Europe. Kepel barely suppresses his frustration with this two-sided political strategy, or with the French government's willingness to play along by recognizing quasi-official clerical spokesmen for Muslims in France. Forbidding Muslim girls to wear headscarves in French schools while simultaneously trying to control French Muslims through officially recognized Islamic organizations gets matters exactly backward, as most Americans will easily see. Our constitutional combination of freedom to practice one's religion, coupled with the strong separation of church and state, has worked far better in accommodating religious diversity than anything Europe has yet dreamed up. The United States may be alienating Muslims worldwide with its foreign policy; but at home a new generation of Muslim-Americans is demonstrating the ability to criticize American policy while maintaining steadfast loyalty to the democratic values they share with other American citizens from different backgrounds. It would be nice if the extremes of the American right and left showed some of the same measured ability to argue against mistaken American policies without impugning the integrity of the other side; but perhaps this is asking too much of ideologues caught up in the past. David Horowitz is one such relic of traditional left-right struggles (and like many of the toughest grapplers, he has been on both sides). In ''Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,'' this leftist-turned-conservative provocateur aims to discredit his old allies by arguing that the left is in bed with Osama bin Laden because of their shared anti-Americanism. He writes that ''self-described progressives'' have formed ''inexplicable alliances . . . with Arab fascists and Islamic fanatics in their war against America and the West.'' Horowitz's book would be little more than a tiresome exercise in quote-gathering and guilt by association were it not for the fact, noted by Roy, that the Islamic extremists have indeed drunk from the well of old-fashioned Marxist anti-Americanism. Militant Islamists do in fact share some common themes and language with homegrown radicals, especially in their condemnations of American imperialism. What is interesting about this is not that it demonstrates some alliance between the old (once the new) left and Islamic terror, but that it shows how ideas lose their provenance as they travel across time. The worldwide critics of American empire today are no more likely to think of themselves as Marxists than the antiwar critics of the 1960's thought of themselves as belonging to the American anti-imperialist movements of 1900 or 1790. A more sensible and productive set of proposals for understanding Muslim extremism comes to us from two Americans who have considerable experience in the Middle East. An academic and a World Bank consultant respectively, Monte Palmer and Princess Palmer are particularly good at describing the Lebanese and Palestinian jihad movements. In ''At the Heart of Terror: Islam, Jihadists, and America's War on Terrorism,'' they analyze jihadi strategies with a nuanced common sense all too hard to come by in the sometimes sensationalist literature on the topic. They provide, for example, a detailed chapter on Israeli counterterrorism efforts that identifies both its successes (large numbers of suicide bombings thwarted) and its shortcomings (no significant reduction in Palestinians prepared to undertake terrorist acts). These authors pose an increasingly tough question for United States policy: Will we, can we ''accept rule by Islamic parties dedicated to the establishment of an Islamic state''? In Lebanon, for example, Hezbollah has made itself into a political party without abandoning its violent stance toward Israel or its willingness to use terror; in Palestine, Hamas may well follow a similar course. The Palmers call such groups ''radical-moderates.'' Unlike the Shiite Islamic democrats poised to take power in Iraq, or Turkey's thoroughly Islamic-democratic Justice and Development Party, Hezbollah has been prepared to pursue simultaneous strategies of violence and political participation. The Palmers opt for engagement with Hezbollah -- not because they trust them, but on the realist grounds that ''efforts to eliminate them will only increase terrorism and push the United States into a war with Islam.'' In fact, it may be possible to negotiate with the radical-moderates on the condition that they abandon any active involvement in terror. This approach would require us to distinguish true Islamic democrats, who reject violence as a mechanism of political change, from fellow travelers like Moktada al-Sadr, who haunt the edges of participatory politics. But, as the Palmers note, Muslim support for jihad against enemies perceived as oppressing Muslims is ubiquitous, even among moderate-moderates. Even more specific is an engaging, quirky book on terrorism's largest growth market: Pakistan. Hassan Abbas, the author of ''Pakistan's Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America's War on Terror,'' served in the Pakistani police in the still-wild North-West Frontier Province, and did stints in the governments of both Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf. He therefore has an insider's angle on the story of the gradual infiltration of Islamic ideology into the government over the last several decades. What's most significant about this book, however, is its insight into the Pakistan military's perspective on the country's politics and history. Each time we are introduced to a new character from the military, we hear the opinion of the officer class. And every officer has a precisely calibrated reputation: this one a drunkard, this one an honorable man, this one a brave soldier with a weakness for women. Increasingly, after the ruling general, Zia ul-Haq, died in an airplane crash in 1988, the newly promoted senior officers had reputations as Islamist sympathizers or activists. These reputations matter crucially for questions ranging from promotion to coup d'etat. For Abbas, the Pakistani Army is political Pakistan itself. The picture that emerges from the details of Pakistan's military politics is one of the transformation of a traditional, British-trained and British-inflected professional army into a more complex institution that both permeates politics and, in turn, falls under the influence of political movements like Islamism. This, too, is an instance of globalization -- the kind that comes after the empire has folded itself up and gone home. Noah Feldman, a professor at the New York University School of Law and fellow of the New America Foundation, is the author of ''What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building.'' From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 15:30:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 10:30:50 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'God's Politics': The Religious Left Message-ID: The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'God's Politics': The Religious Left http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/books/review/06LIZZA.html 5.2.6 [First chapter appended.] By RYAN LIZZA GOD'S POLITICS: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. by Jim Wallis. 384 pp. HarperSanFrancisco. $24.95. FROM abolition to woman suffrage to civil rights, the leaders of America's most successful liberal crusades have turned to the Bible to justify their causes. But the history of the religious left seems to stop in 1968, the endpoint of Martin Luther King's movement as well as the starting point of a decades-long trend by which Democrats have become the secular party and Republicans the religious party. After three bruising national elections that can at least partly be explained by the party's failure to connect with religious voters, Democrats are suddenly rediscovering their past. Their prophet is Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian who has become almost synonymous with the religious left, a sort of Pat Robertson for liberals. Through Sojourners, the political magazine he edits, six previous books and countless columns and speaking appearances, he has become the leading voice urging Democrats to embrace a politics rooted in the Bible. In ''God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It,'' Wallis has a simple message for Democrats: rather than challenging the right's piety, challenge the right's theology. ''Conventional wisdom suggests that the antidote to religious fundamentalism is more secularism,'' he says. ''But that is a very big mistake. The best response to bad religion is better religion, not secularism.'' Many liberals admonish President Bush for his use of religious language. Wallis is one of the few on the left to question the accuracy of Bush's biblical allusions, which he maintains ''are too often either taken out of context or, worse yet, employed in ways quite different from their original meaning.'' And instead of attacking conservatives for bringing religion into the public square, Wallis attacks conservatives for reducing the Christian policy agenda to abortion and gay marriage. After all, the Bible has far more to say about poverty, economics and war than it does about the right's two favorite wedge issues. Wallis's politics are hardly ideal for all Democrats. The party has a religion problem and a national security problem. Wallis's instincts on terrorism -- despite his useful rejoinder to the moral relativism of those on the left who refuse to believe Al Qaeda is a greater threat to the world than American foreign policy -- are dovish, when the Democrats' trouble is that they aren't seen as hawkish enough. On social policy, he advises the party to de-emphasize abortion rights and gay marriage, show more tolerance toward those opposed to abortion and reach out to religious voters who are not on the right but are concerned about the general coarseness of American culture. On economics, he makes a biblically based argument for a more populist and anticorporate agenda. At a minimum, any Democrat running for election in a red state should read this book. And to liberals wary of any prescription that includes more religion in politics, and to those worried that his evangelical Christianity is not ecumenical, Wallis makes an important point rarely heard on the religious right. ''We bring faith into the public square when our moral convictions demand it,'' he writes. ''But to influence a democratic society, you must win the public debate about why the policies you advocate are better for the common good. That's the democratic discipline religion has to be under when it brings its faith to the public square.'' It is a reminder that Martin Luther King may have had a Bible in one hand, but he had the Constitution in the other. Ryan Lizza is a senior editor at The New Republic. ------------- First Chapter: 'God's Politics' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/books/chapters/0206-1st-wallis.html By JIM WALLIS Take Back the Faith Co-opted by the Right, Dismissed by the Left Many of us feel that our faith has been stolen, and it's time to take it back. In particular, an enormous public misrepresentation of Christianity has taken place. And because of an almost uniform media misperception, many people around the world now think Christian faith stands for political commitments that are almost the opposite of its true meaning. How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war, and only pro-American? What has happened here? And how do we get back to a historic, biblical, and genuinely evangelical faith rescued from its contemporary distortions? That rescue operation is even more crucial today, in the face of a deepening social crisis that cries out for more prophetic religion. Of course, nobody can steal your personal faith; that's between you and God. The problem is in the political arena, where strident voices claim to represent Christians when they clearly don't speak for most of us. It's time to take back our faith in the public square, especially in a time when a more authentic social witness is desperately needed. The religious and political Right gets the public meaning of religion mostly wrong - preferring to focus only on sexual and cultural issues while ignoring the weightier matters of justice. And the secular Left doesn't seem to get the meaning and promise of faith for politics at all-mistakenly dismissing spirituality as irrelevant to social change. I actually happen to be conservative on issues of personal responsibility, the sacredness of human life, the reality of evil in our world, and the critical importance of individual character, parenting, and strong "family values." But the popular presentations of religion in our time (especially in the media) almost completely ignore the biblical vision of social justice and, even worse, dismiss such concerns as merely "left wing." It is indeed time to take back our faith. Take back our faith from whom? To be honest, the confusion comes from many sources. From religious right-wingers who claim to know God's political views on every issue, then ignore the subjects that God seems to care the most about. From pedophile priests and cover-up bishops who destroy lives and shame the church. From television preachers whose extravagant lifestyles and crass fund-raising tactics embarrass more Christians than they know. From liberal secularists who want to banish faith from public life and deny spiritual values to the soul of politics. And even from liberal theologians whose cultural conformity and creedal modernity serve to erode the foundations of historic biblical faith. From New Age philosophers who want to make Jesus into a nonthreatening spiritual guru. And from politicians who love to say how religious they are but utterly fail to apply the values of faith to their public leadership and political policies. It's time to reassert and reclaim the gospel faith - especially in our public life. When we do, we discover that faith challenges the powers that be to do justice for the poor, instead of preaching a "prosperity gospel" and supporting politicians who further enrich the wealthy We remember that faith hates violence and tries to reduce it and exerts a fundamental presumption against war, instead of justifying it in God's name. We see that faith creates community from racial, class, and gender divisions and prefers international community over nationalist religion, and we see that "God bless America" is found nowhere in the Bible. And we are reminded that faith regards matters such as the sacredness of life and family bonds as so important that they should never be used as ideological symbols or mere political pawns in partisan warfare. The media like to say, "Oh, then you must be the religious Left?" No, not at all, and the very question is the problem. Just because a religious Right has fashioned itself for political power in one utterly predictable ideological guise does not mean that those who question this political seduction must be their opposite political counterpart. The best public contribution of religion is precisely not to be ideologically predictable or a loyal partisan. To always raise the moral issues of human rights, for example, will challenge both left and right-wing governments that put power above principles. Religious action is rooted in a much deeper place than "rights" - that place being the image of God in every human being. Similarly, when the poor are defended on moral or religious grounds, it is certainly not "class warfare," as the rich often charge, but rather a direct response to the overwhelming focus on the poor in the Scriptures, which claim they are regularly neglected, exploited, and oppressed by wealthy elites, political rulers, and indifferent affluent populations. Those Scriptures don't simply endorse the social programs of the liberals or the conservatives, but they make it clear that poverty is indeed a religious issue, and the failure of political leaders to help uplift the poor will be judged a moral failing. It is precisely because religion takes the problem of evil so seriously that it must always be suspicious of too much concentrated power - politically and economically - either in totalitarian regimes or in huge multinational corporations that now have more wealth and power than many governments. It is indeed our theology of evil that makes us strong proponents of both political and economic democracy - not because people are so good, but because they often are not and need clear safeguards and strong systems of checks and balances to avoid the dangerous accumulations of power and wealth. It's why we doubt the goodness of all superpowers and the righteousness of empires in any era, especially when their claims of inspiration and success invoke theology and the name of God. Given the human tendencies of military and political power for self-delusion and deception, is it any wonder that hardly a religious body in the world regards the ethics of unilateral and preemptive war as "just"? (Continues...) From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 15:41:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 10:41:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: Test tube suits Message-ID: Test tube suits Weekly book reviews and literary analysis from the Times Literary Supplement http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2109742&window_type=print Michele Pridmore-Brown 17 December 2004 REPRODUCTION AND RESPONSIBILITY. The regulation of new biotechnologies. By Leon Kass, editor. 254pp. Washington, DC: President's Council on Bioethics. $45. - 0 7567 4166 1 In the United States, the assisted fertility industry is largely market driven; the robust confluence of supply, demand and very rapid innovation makes for a thriving $4 billion-a-year business. The invisible hand of the market has rendered the embryo so fruitful that most in vitro babies have been born in the past four to five years, and at least 400,000 embryos are currently on ice. The proportion of deliveries per embryo transferred is around 25 per cent, which suggests that in vitro fertilization is more efficient than natural conception. One could argue, however, that the scientists whose innovations power the freewheeling American fertility market are a bit like the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who explained to the Americans from whom he was trying to get a job after the Second World War: "I send (the rockets) up, where they come down is not my business". Up to now, it has not been clear who is in charge of the long-term landing in the American fertility industry. The public does ask questions - but only when an embryo gets implanted in the wrong womb; or an inordinate number of triplets are born in a given region; or a sixty-year-old gives birth to cartoon fanfare; or contractual parents and gamete donors go to war in the courts; or other culturally jarring practices occur. After all, there is nothing like an ostensibly healthy baby to normalize a procedure and lull nay-sayers - and nothing like a live miracle gone awry to temporarily remind the public of the error rates, and of the moral values at stake. The fact is that, in America, no federal regulation of assisted reproductive practices and services exists - in contrast to the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and most nations in the European Union. There is, for instance, nothing even remotely close to the UK's Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority. In part, this is because health care is itself privatized, geared to customer privacy and autonomy. But other reasons also account for why America has a harder time with regulation. For one thing, Americans are averse to government regulation in general; and they are committed to free enterprise and consumer sovereignty. Add to this mix the typical consumer in the infertility industry: a hard-working thirty-or forty-something professional who desperately wants her own child, preferably with her own rapidly senescent eggs, and who feels entitled to make reproductive decisions free of government intrusion. And then consider that creating viable embryos via IVF necessarily also entails creating a slew of spare embryos, "potential lives", that will never see the light of day - a boon for embryo researchers hoping to cure diseases but criminal from the point of view of pro-lifers. In short, regulation is hardly a winning cause for any American politician to take on. The bipartisan members of the President's Council on Bioethics, however, have rolled up their sleeves and done just that. In many ways, Reproduction and Responsibility is a watershed document. The Council has taken an issue that has so far been too hot to touch in the American context, and treated it not ideologically but pragmatically. The report examines in straightforward prose the abstruse details of biotechnology and public policy, and it makes the subject seem terribly urgent. According to the report, we have reached a dangerous intersection between three areas of scientific study and medical practice: reproductive technologies, embryo research and genetic testing. While each contributes tremendously to health, happiness and knowledge,certain cherished universal values, such as the health and safety of children, might be "imperiled" by the rapidity of progress. The report is not about legislating morality or deciding who should or should not receive IVF treatment. Rather, it is about managing the potential crises with eyes open. The report should be useful to policy makers and eventually to historians of technology and policy; but its greatest importance lies in the fact that it sets a precedent in the US for sustained scrutiny. It may also be useful beyond US borders because it so clearheadedly sets out the dilemmas - and competing interests at stake - in a field that, more than any other, is likely to have seismic consequences on twenty-first-century mores, and on how we think about kinship and the "making" of children. Throughout history, children have been born for reasons other than their own. The report implies, however, that precisely the intentionality of IVF-mediated procreation (and notably its proximity to manufacture) thrusts their interests on the table, so to speak. Indeed, just by virtue of an aspiring parent selecting certain gametes over others on the open market, or of a scientist selecting certain embryos (for gender, for "quality", for the absence or presence of certain genetic markers, to save a sibling), the intentionality of the procreative act is undeniably exacerbated. In other words, we can no longer ascribe the outcome of sperm-meets-egg, at least the lab-mediated variety, solely to fate or nature, or to divine providence. Responsibility therefore accrues to parents as well as to scientists and clinicians. The problem is that the science of IVF is often a process of trial and error. Thus far, success is marked by one thing: a live birth, presumably a win-win-win situation for fertility specialists, parents and embryo. Yet we now know that the children created may be harmed by the treatment used to conceive or preserve them, as suggested by recent studies showing a link, for instance, between freezing and abnormal gene expression. The laissez-faire approach has left this long-term perspective out of the picture - or arguably has assumed that the interests of future children are the same as those of the women (and scientists) who create them. While staying clear of any kind of pro-life argument, the report intrepidly argues that we have come to a historical juncture in which the interests of all partiesshould be separated. In particular, the interests of future children should be theorized as distinct from those of the women who bear them or contract for their coming into being. This is a politically loaded argument that could anger some feminists, though certainly not all. The report is very careful here. It does not call so much for constraining women's reproductive choices, but rather for systematic knowledge - regarding rates and risks, previous failures and successes, cross-clinic comparisons, etc - that would presumably lead to more informed decision making. The writers dwell on the irony of the fact that in an age of information, little data is available about such an important industry; indeed, the phrase "we lack knowledge" operates as a refrain throughout the text. Data, such as it exists, comes mostly from other countries, such as the UK and Australia. Perhaps no one has cared to know too much about, say, embryo disposal, or the commerce in gametes, or the details about possible risks. Regardless of the reasons, the committee's first policy prescription is a forceful commitment to remedying the situation - by way of federal funding for data collection, for long-term studies of IVF babies and of the women undergoing treatment; it also calls for "transparency" and availability of information to all parties; and it urges that penalties be imposed at the federal level for those doctors, clinics and labs that do not provide data. The second broad recommendation seems fairly obvious. The report urges further self- regulation on the part of professional organizations such as the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), the oversight board of the infertility industry. To its credit, the ASRM has already succeeded in getting its members to reduce the number of embryos transferred into a womb - though certainly not to UK levels. Despite this modest, albeit important success, the report notes a glaring failure. The history of IVF practices suggests a repeated failure to oversee progress "adequately". The rapid pace of innovation means that new techniques are constantly coming up the research pipeline. Older prospective mothers hardly have time to wait patiently for novel procedures or drugs to be tested on animals for safety; and clinics intent on improving their success rates do not have incentives to wait either - quite the contrary. It follows that new techniques move all too quickly from the research lab to clinical practice. Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) is one case in point. Two years after having been discovered by accident in 1992, ICSI was in widespread use; yet it was only in 1995 that the first ICSI procedure on mice was reported on. ICSI trumps nature by injecting a sperm directly into an egg and so removing its barrier against sperm; in short, sperm otherwise incapable of penetrating an egg are creating babies, and lots of them. Since the oldest ICSI baby is only twelve years old (the oldest IVF baby, Louise Brown, is twenty-six), we have no idea what the long-term effects are - though, as with other in vitro practices, recent evidence does point to an increased risk of certain rare disorders. Again, the report does not call for constraining "progress" per se, but rather for safety controls at the professional and federal level, and for systematic oversight. No one is likely to argue with either of the first two recommendations. It is the third and last set of recommendations that may be the most contentious from the point of view of researchers, though welcome for the public at large. The report advocates targeted legislative measures against what it calls certain "boundary-crossing" practices: namely reproductive cloning, the creation of chimeras (human/animal hybrids) and the creation of a child "by means other than the fusion of egg and sperm". These proposed bans are in line with those of several other countries; we do well to remember, however, that IVF babies were themselves once considered boundary-crossing. The term is hardly absolute - especially in an era of rapid change. It may well be that some of the practices now condemned, such as the fusion of two eggs, will be normalized with the appearance of a baby that looks healthy, especially as definitions of the family become more flexible in the US. We can only hope that, if this occurs, oversights will be in place so that any such ground-breaking baby is more than a shot in the dark. The report dismisses outright the threat of "designer babies", a concern of critics of genetic testing, who think it will lead to a race among the affluent to create superbabies with fast-twitch muscles and Einsteinian IQs. This particular threat, according to the report, is not worth addressing because it is so highly improbable given the complexity of gene interactions. This sounds reasonable enough, and one hopes it will calm, at least temporarily, a public worried about a runaway genetics technology. As for research and those 400,000 embryos suspended on ice in the US, the report is circumspect. Scientists are unlikely to be either dismayed or delighted. The report prohibits research on human embryos beyond ten to fourteen days. Notably, it does not condemn research before that time - though it does lapse into poetic language about the "never-before- enacted life" an embryo might lead. The report's refusal to pronounce on the moral status of the early embryo is its greatest strength. This silence allows it to attend to what can be pragmatically managed via policy - and it provides a template for future discussion across party lines. In short, the report adamantly refuses to be shipwrecked by the Roe vs Wade debate (ie, women's right to an abortion) that has, for decades now, troubled American politics. This is heartening, given that the views of the committee members - lawyers, doctors, scientists and various brands of ethicists - span the pro-life to pro-choice gamut. The leader of the committee, Leon Kass, is known for conservative, even occasionally Luddite thinking. Yet he has helped produce a document that does not tidily fit into any ideological camp, certainly not his own. It is he who best sums up the committee's accomplishment: "the report's major contribution is to show how a heterogeneous group of individuals, whose opinions range almost as widely as those of the American people, has agreed on the need to set some limits on some uses of some bio-technologies, in order to protect common values". One could also argue that their consensus demonstrates that creating life via technology is not just the flip-side of terminating life via technology: that in the difference lies the stuff of policy. In other words, creating life is about the future - and about a society that may have to bear the costs if IVF-mediated children in the long run require higher than average health care, or if certain stabilizing values are disconcertingly compromised by, say, unfettered innovation or the excessive commercialization of procreation. We might also do well to consider that, unlike rockets or other manufactured goods, children spawned in the American lab may well grow up to sue their makers. From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 15:43:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 10:43:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] LRC: Darkest Before the Dawn by Mike Rogers Message-ID: Darkest Before the Dawn by Mike Rogers http://www.lewrockwell.com/rogers/rogers121.html "A lie told even ten-thousand times, never becomes the truth." ~ Mikhail Gorbachev Fact: There was no armed insurrection by the Japanese against the U.S. occupation after World War II. Please read that sentence again: There was no armed insurrection by the Japanese against the U.S. occupation after World War II. Thanks, just had to get that off my chest. The American mass media has completely devolved into pure style over substance. It doesn't matter anymore if those who appear on American TV haven't the faintest idea of what they are talking about. What matters is that they look like they know what they are talking about. The claims, half-truths, and lies being made by those in the White House and Pentagon regarding Iraq can be excused - or rather can be expected. Everyone expects the President and his men to lie. Everyone already knows that George W. Bush and friends have a pathological problem with reality. When I see or hear supposed experts on American TV or radio making outrageous claims and lying about Japan that's where I really have a problem. I had always believed - and thought everyone else in the mass media did the same - that the primary duty of all broadcasters was to tell the truth. How na?ve I must have been. The most recent nonsense being spouted by the Prima Donna cast on your TV is the line: "The Iraqi insurgency will get worse before it gets better." This is usually followed by the rationalization - the blatant lie - that "Japan had an insurgency after World War II." There was no insurgency in Japan after World War II. Never happened. When the war ended, for the very first time the Japanese public heard the voice of their living God, Emperor Hirohito went on the radio. He told them: "Bear the unbearable." The Japanese did what Hirohito requested. There were no shootings, no car bombings, no explosions; the Japanese did not rise up against the U.S. occupation and revolt. There was no insurrection. Those who make this claim are either lying or they don't know their history. I suspect a bit of both. I have heard before Rush Limbaugh claiming that Japan and Germany had a post-war insurrection. I do not want to make any claims about Germany - a subject that I am not well versed in - but I do consider myself much more of an expert on Japan than Rush Limbaugh or just about any person on American TV or radio and I can tell you for a fact: No postwar insurrection in Japan. Which is it for Rush Limbaugh? [9]Is he shamelessly lying or is he just ignorant on Japan's history and knows that no one will call him on it? Well, Mr. Limbaugh, I'm calling you on it now. I have even heard Fox TV's Bill O'Reilly make the statement that "Postwar Iraqi is going better than Postwar Japan." With the insinuation that Japan's insurrection was worse than Iraq's. Which is it for Bill O'Reilly? Is he [10]lying again or is he just ignorant on Japan's history and knows that no one will call him on it? Well, Mr. O'Reilly, I'm calling you on it now. Today, for the third time in the last few months, I heard this blatant lie - sans challenge to its validity - being made on CNN as Larry King interviewed a guest during his coverage of the Presidential Inauguration. I'm sorry, I didn't catch the name of the young man who made this absurd assertion, but he was wrong. There was no insurgency in Japan after the war. To claim that there was is out-and-out fabrication. Which is it for CNN? Are they blatantly lying or are they just ignorant on Japan's history and knows that no one will call them? Well, CNN, I'm calling you on it now. I have searched for months through Japanese language documentation and haven't found one single piece of evidence that there ever was any political violence against the U.S. occupation in Japan after World War II. There absolutely was no postwar insurrection in Japan. Here are the facts from [11]USA Today: Iraq: 14-month occupation scheduled to end June 30 [2004]. Iraqis are to hold elections no later than Jan. 31, 2005, and write a constitution by the end of 2005. Occupation troops are attacked daily. There was no formal surrender by the former regime. Japan: Adopted a constitution 15 months after the war ended, and put it into effect in May 1947. There was no postwar insurgency. Japan formally surrendered and was much more badly damaged than Iraq after the war. Germany: Took three years to write a constitution and four years to hold elections. There was almost no postwar insurgency. Also badly damaged after the war and formally surrendered. So the question comes up, and I don't believe it is a minor one, "Will things continue to get worse before they get better?" Judging from the current state of American TV and radio and having to tolerate "experts" continually lying to the American public and not getting taken to task for it, I'd have to say that I agree: [rogers.jpg] "Things are going to get much worse before they get better." January 22, 2005 Mike (in Tokyo) Rogers [[12]send him mail] was born and raised in the USA and moved to Japan in 1984. He has worked as an independent writer, producer, and personality in the mass media for nearly 30 years. [13]Mike (in Tokyo) Rogers Archives References 9. http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/eibessential2/the_occupation_of_germany.guest.html 10. http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/007151.html 11. http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-06-24-iraq-transfer-occupation_x.htm 12. mailto:mikeintokyo2004 at yahoo.com 13. http://www.lewrockwell.com/rogers/rogers-arch.html From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 4 15:06:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 10:06:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Telegraph: (Eco) Beautiful people good, ugly people bad Message-ID: Beautiful people good, ugly people bad http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;sessionid=KDRRSKNJ3BPDHQFIQMGCM54AVCBQUJVC?xml=/arts/2004/10/24/boeco24.xml (Filed: 24/10/2004) Martin Gayford reviews On Beauty ed by Umberto Eco. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," John Keats declared. "That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Or rather, that is what the poet claimed the Grecian Urn said to mankind. No doubt he was right to be cautious. The truth about beauty is a deep and tangled question, and one the writer and novelist Umberto Eco gets into a right old muddle about in this lavish but deeply confusing book. It is described as "a history of a Western idea", but it is also an anthology. Each chapter consists of a series of rather brief remarks by Eco, followed by a series of extracts from texts, printed in small blue letters. Gathered around them are numerous glossy colour illustrations, mainly of paintings and sculptures - though the book claims also to take in "architecture, film, photography, the decorative arts, novels and poems". It is conceived for "a vast and diverse readership". Already one senses trouble. The result reads a little like the entries in that Monty Python competition to summarise Proust in 30 seconds. It is an attempt by a renowned professor of semiotics from Bologna to pr?cis the whole of Western culture in 438 pages, most of them taken up by colour photographs. Not surprisingly, the result is often more of a triumph of compression than clarity. Here he is on the same theme as the Grecian Urn: "Beauty was configured as a synonym for truth, within a deep rethinking of a traditional hendiadys. For Greek thinkers beauty coincided with truth because, in a certain sense, it was truth that produced Beauty; contrariwise, the Romantics held that it was Beauty that produced truth. Beauty does not participate in truth, but is its artifice. Far from shunning reality in the name of a pure Beauty, the Romantics thought in terms of a Beauty that produced greater truth and reality." It's as simple as that. Actually, Eco is quite often perfectly sensible; it's just that one needs to have some prior knowledge of the subject in order to understand him. The early Greeks were inclined to think that beautiful people were good and ugly people bad - still a common point of view, though likely to lead to disillusion. "The most beautiful is the most just," proclaimed the Delphic Oracle. Plato opined that beauty lay in harmony and proportion, and was best discerned by the mind, not the eye. In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, following the philosopher Plotinus and Abbott Suger of St Denis, many were of the opinion that light and colour emanated from the divine. Looking, therefore, at objects such as mosaics flashing in lamp-light, stained-glass windows and jewelled chalices might bring you closer to God. Peering at beautiful bodies, on the other hand, would be more likely to betray you into the clutches of the devil. Eco is at his best on the Middle Ages, on which he has written before. Eco's dash through art history becomes ever more breathless. After the Renaissance, the modern art world began to take shape with its endless metamorphoses of style and fashion. Eco finds himself dealing with melancholy beauty, Mannerist beauty, baroque beauty, the beauty of the ugly, the machine, the magazine, the abstract painting, the sublime - which was originally conceived as something different from beauty altogether, something like the universe or the nightmare containing an element of terror or awe. He includes the horrific beauty of Goya's painting of Saturn devouring one of his children. He wrestles unavailingly with the distinction between a beautiful object and a beautiful picture - which may depict something horrible. By the time he puffs into the 20th century he sounds distinctly weary. I doubt anyone will make much use of the anthology component of this volume (printed in unappetisingly minuscule type). None the less, it contains some enlightening things. It is interesting to discover that, in the 12th century, Hugh of Saint Victor thought "the colour green surpasses all others for Beauty and ravishes the souls of those who look upon it". It is equally useful to know Hugh of Fouilloy's opinions, delivered in a sermon, on female breasts: "Beautiful indeed are breasts that protrude but little and are moderately full... restrained, but not compressed, gently bound so they are not free to jounce about." BOOK INFORMATION Title: On Beauty: a History of a Western Idea Author: ed by Umberto Eco Publisher: 438pp, Secker & Warburg, ?30 ISBN 0436205173 From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 11:04:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 06:04:16 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Enterprise Security Today: FBI Ditches Carnivore, Turns to ISPs Message-ID: Enterprise Security Today (Online Security): NewsFactor Network - Security Products/Services - FBI Ditches Carnivore, Turns to ISPs http://enterprise-security-today.newsfactor.com/secproser/story.xhtml?story_title=FBI-Abandons-Carnivore--Turns-to-ISPs&story_id=29831&category=secproser#story-start By Elizabeth Millard January 19, 2005 10:59AM The Federal Bureau of Investiagtion has stopped using Carnivore, a controversial software program designed to read online communications between suspected spies, criminals and terrorists. The bureau instead is moving toward use of commercial software and ISPs for surveillance. The [44]Federal Bureau of Investigation has abandoned Carnivore, its home-grown Internet surveillance technology, in favor of commercial software, according to bureau oversight reports recently given to Congress. Carnivore, also known as DCS-1000, was first designed in 1998 to help the FBI read online communications between suspected spies, criminals, and terrorists. Although the cost of creating the system has not been disclosed, some estimates have put the price between US$6 million and $15 million. As disclosed in the report to Congress, the FBI actually used Carnivore very rarely. The Electronic Information Privacy Center (EPIC) noted that the agency did not use the system at all during fiscal years 2002 and 2003, preferring instead to partner with Internet Service Providers and use commercial software. Public Private Partnership Although the recent Congressional report does not include the complete history of Carnivore use, the FBI clearly has been moving toward using ISPs in preference to its own custom-built system for some time. "It's likely that most of the Internet traffic intercepted by the FBI has been done with the help of ISPs, and it seems to have been that way for years," Marcia Hofmann, EPIC's staff counsel and director of the open government project, told NewsFactor. Because Carnivore is basically a packet sniffer, finding similar tools in the commercial sector would not be a difficulty. But Hofmann doubts that the agency is doing very much of the surveillance alone with commercial software, without the assistance of ISPs. Hide and Seek The move from Carnivore toward ISPs does not mark a fundamental shift in how the FBI gathers its online information; it is merely getting it from a different source. But it does change the agency's requirements in terms of reporting and accountability, and that worries privacy [45]Latest News about privacy watchdog groups like EPIC. "When there's no requirement to report on what kind of cooperation it's getting from the private sector or what kind of software it's using, it's certainly more difficult to know what the FBI is doing," Hofmann said. When the FBI was using Carnivore, it was required to report on the number and type of Internet wiretaps it initiated. But no such mandate is attached to its work with ISPs. "There's less transparency now," Hofmann added. "And that's a concern." [end-nfn.gif] References 44. http://www.fbi.gov/ From checker at panix.com Sat Feb 5 15:34:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 10:34:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'An End to Suffering': Philosopher King Message-ID: The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'An End to Suffering': Philosopher King http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/books/review/06GOODHEA.html 5.2.6, first chapter appended By ADAM GOODHEART AN END TO SUFFERING: The Buddha in the World. By Pankaj Mishra. 422 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25. ONE night during the time I was reading this book, I had the odd experience of bumping unexpectedly into its author. At the lower Manhattan holiday party of a stylish magazine, I was briefly introduced to an owlish fellow with a Brahminical beard who smiled at me amid the din of a crowded sake bar. You occasionally hear of writers, especially when their books are of long incubation, coming to resemble their subjects, and my fleeting glimpse of Pankaj Mishra seems to offer uncanny proof of the phenomenon. For here, surely, was the young Siddhartha Gautama himself: a scholar-sophisticate, a personality both cosmopolitan and ascetic, at large and at home in the world. Such, at least, is the portrait Mishra draws of the sixth-century B.C. Indian princeling who would become known in his own lifetime as the Buddha, the enlightened one. Born in a small city on the dusty plain at the foot of the Himalayas, he came of age at a historical moment when city states and villages ruled by tribal elders were giving way to centralized kingdoms and empires, a transformation that brought with it chaotic social and cultural upheaval. Individual lives were suddenly subject to the whims of distant rulers; merchants, soldiers and itinerant preachers were all on the move. War and famine swept human truths, along with human lives, before them. The time was ripe, then, for a visionary who could explain -- and perhaps even cure -- some of the pain, frustration and sorrow he saw around him. By the time the Buddha died, at about the age of 80, he had preached to thousands, walked many miles across northern India, counseled kings and founded a civilization that would eclipse the great empires of his day, stretching eventually from Tibet to California. Mishra himself was born in 1969 to a displaced and dispossessed Hindu Brahmin family that had left its village near India's Nepalese border and migrated to the city. He grew up, he says, amid a society not unlike the one the Buddha had addressed two and a half millenniums earlier: one beset with dislocation and upheaval, where ''each person still had to bear in solitude the knowledge that the old props of caste and community were gone and that the awareness of being an individual brought both freedom and pain.'' In 1992, fresh out of the university in Delhi, Mishra moved to a small Himalayan village to continue his education, to read and write and travel among the mountain towns and old colonial outposts. It was then that he began to research and write the book on Buddhism that he has only now completed. (In the interim, he published two other works, a novel and a travelogue.) ''An End to Suffering'' is part biography, part history, part travel book, part philosophic treatise. But perhaps it could best be described as a work of intellectual autobiography. I say ''intellectual'' rather than spiritual, let alone religious. Mishra is not a Buddhist -- he ''couldn't sit still'' long enough to meditate successfully -- and his story is not a narrative of conversion or a road map to inner peace, at least not in the expected sense. It is, rather, the tale of his attempts to delve into the legacy of one of the world's greatest philosophers. The Buddha, as Mishra describes him, was not a prophet -- not a religious figure but a secular one. Indeed, ''he had placed no value on prayer or belief in a deity; he had not spoken of creation, original sin or the last judgment.'' He likewise ignored the question of why sin and evil exist in the world, which has obsessed nearly every major religion. The Buddha's concern was purely practical: to relieve suffering, both material and existential. His precepts weren't couched as revelations from on high, delivered with the crash of thunder; instead they came as small quotidian insights: ''I well remember how once, when I was sitting in the shade of a jambu tree on a path between the fields. . . .'' He was, in many senses, a modern man, maybe even the first modern man, because he put into words the anomie and angst that are the daily companions of billions of modern lives. (Perhaps it's appropriate that northern India, which was the birthplace of some of the world's first cities, should also have been a birthplace of individual identity.) Yet the Buddha also recognized that the only real peace could come from within. Despite the flickering, flamelike nature of the self, he found, at the center of its inconstant, all-consuming dance, something steady and true. Mishra, educated in the Western humanist tradition, first approached Buddhism through the medium of the Western scholars, archaeologists and explorers who ''discovered'' it in the early 19th century. He vividly evokes their slow realization that they were not dealing with a mythological figure -- in the 1820's, ''British scholars at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta still thought that the Buddha had been Egyptian or Ethiopian, or perhaps was another name for the Norse god Woden'' -- but a human being who had lived once upon a time in India, as real as Plato or Aristotle. Likewise, Mishra delights in finding echoes of Buddhist thought -- conscious or otherwise -- in the words of Western writers as disparate as David Hume (''The mind is a kind of theater'') and Oscar Wilde (''In this world there are only two tragedies, one of not getting what one wants, and the other of getting it''). In the final chapters of ''An End to Suffering,'' Mishra leaves his Himalayan village and goes down into the world -- first among the towns and cities of India, plagued with poverty, religious strife and social breakdown, and then to Europe and America. Arriving in London, the first Western city he has ever visited, he is overwhelmed by the sight of commuters pouring wordlessly out of an Underground station, ''looking neither left nor right, as if impelled by a great inner panic.'' Here, it seems, is a society aching for the Buddha's balm; it may be no coincidence that the sage's first lay followers, in the 6th century B.C., were members of India's rising commercial class. But Buddhism, Mishra recognizes, is ''not easily practiced in the modern world,'' where almost everything is ''predicated on the growth and multiplication of desire, exactly the thing that the Buddha had warned against.'' In the United States, particularly, ''as Alexis de Tocqueville had noticed in the early 1830's, individual self-interest was the very basis of the brand-new commercial and industrial society that Europeans had created in the seemingly unlimited spaces of the New World.'' And yet Buddhism has taken root and flowered here. Perhaps, Mishra suggests, it is beginning to play -- though still in a small way -- the role Tocqueville foresaw for religion in America, as a moderating influence on society's worst excesses and strains. Given the scope of its ambitions, ''An End to Suffering'' could easily have become a disorganized ramble. But Mishra's book is in the best tradition of Buddhism, both dispassionate and deeply engaged, complicated and simple, erudite and profoundly humane. Adam Goodheart is the C. V. Starr Scholar at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. ----------- First Chapter: 'An End to Suffering' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/books/chapters/0206-1st-mishra.html By PANKAJ MISHRA The days were shortening with intimations of winter when I returned from the inner Himalayas to Mashobra. When spring came, and the roads cleared, I began to travel to the Spiti and Pin valleys. There, in the lonely cold deserts, speckled wherever the snow melted into streams with green oases of pea and barley fields, and watched over by hilltop monasteries of sun-baked bricks, I saw many more images of the Buddha. I visited Tabo, and found the oldest monastery in the region still full of lamas, as jaunty in their maroon robes as the prayer flags fluttering from electric poles in the treeless expanses. I came to recognize the colourful murals and to understand somewhat the symbolism of the mystical circular diagrams (mandalas) on the wall hangings. I could spot from afar the distinctive shape of the gompas, or Buddhist monasteries; and although I felt excluded by the faith they expressed, about which I knew little then, I came to value them for their solitude and distance from the known world. I was intrigued, too, by the monks, their childlike simplicity, cheerfulness and serenity. I attributed these qualities to the plain and undemanding world the monks lived in, until I found out that some of them had travelled to, and spent time in, Europe and America. One of them had studied in a monastery near Lhasa for about twenty years; I was surprised to know that his subjects had been logic, epistemology, cosmology, psychology and ethics as expounded in Buddhist texts written in India as early as the second century AD. I began to write a travel essay, in which I tried to record my surprise at finding traces of Buddhism in these remote Himalayan valleys. I wrote about the other kind of Indian Buddhists I had met before: they were Dalits, low-caste Hindus, millions of whom had converted to Buddhism since the 1950s in an attempt to escape an oppressively caste-ridden Hinduism. I tried to describe how these politically active Buddhists, who did not appear to take much interest in spiritual matters, differed from the monks in the Himalayan monasteries. The small bookshop on the Mall in Simla was well stocked with books in English on Buddhism - in expectation, the owner told me, of the European and American tourists who came looking for writing on spiritual figures and themes, and often travelled from Simla to the hill town of Dharamshala, the home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community in exile. One of the books I found there was an English translation of the Milindapanha (Questions of King Menander), which I had seen mentioned as a basic text of Buddhist philosophy in an essay by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. King Menander was a Greek who reigned in north-west India, now Pakistan, in the first or second century BC. He is said to be among the rulers of the time who embraced, or was at least familiar with, Buddhism. The book, which was preserved in Ceylon for centuries, consists of Menander's conversations with an elderly Buddhist monk called Nagasena. Their dialogue on the individual self, which drew explicitly upon the Buddha's ideas, had particularly struck Borges. It begins with Menander asking Nagasena his name. Nagasena says that his name is 'only a generally understood term, a practical designation. There is no question of a permanent individual implied in the use of the word.' Menander replies, 'If there is no permanent individuality, who gives you monks your robes and food, lodging and medicines? And who makes use of them? Who lives a life of righteousness, meditation and reaches Nirvana? Who destroys living beings, steals, fornicates, tells lies, or drinks spirits? ... If your fellow monks call you Nagasena, what then is Nagasena? Would you say that your hair is Nagasena? Or your nails, teeth, skin, or other parts of your body, or the outward form, or sensation, or perception, or the psychic constructions, or consciousness? Are any of these Nagasena? Are all these taken together Nagasena? Or, anything other than they?' Nagasena answers no to all of Menander's questions. Menander says, 'Then for all my asking I find no Nagasena. Nagasena is a mere sound! Surely what your reverence has said is false!' Nagasena now takes over the questioning. He asks Menander, 'Your Majesty, how did you come here - on foot, or in a vehicle?' Menander replies, 'In a chariot.' 'Then tell me,' Nagasena asks, 'what is the chariot? Is the pole the chariot?' 'No, your reverence,' Menander replies. 'Or the axles, wheels, frame, reins, yoke, spokes, or goad?' Menander replies that none of these things is the chariot. 'Then all these separate parts taken together are the chariot?' Menander again says no. 'Then is the chariot something other than the separate parts?' 'No, your reverence,' Menander says. 'Then for all my asking, your Majesty,' Nagasena says, 'I can find no chariot. The chariot is a mere sound. What then is the chariot? Surely what your Majesty has said is false! There is no chariot!' Menander protests that what he had said was not false. 'It is on account of all these various components, the pole, axle, wheels and so on, that the vehicle is called a chariot. It's just a generally understood term, a practical designation.' 'Well said, your Majesty!' Nagasena replies. 'You know what the word chariot means! And it's just the same with me. It's on account of the various components of my being that I am known by the generally understood term, the practical designation, Nagasena.' There were many such clear and simple exchanges in the book, illustrating the Buddhist view of individual identity as a construct, a composite of matter, form, perceptions, ideas, instincts and consciousness, but without an unchanging unity or integrity. 'I think, therefore I am,' Descartes had said; and when I first came across these famous words as an undergraduate they expressed all that then seemed holy to me: individuality, the life of the mind. It was comforting to believe that the human mind was capable of acting rationally, logically and freely upon the inert outside world. I was attracted, too, by the idea of the authentic self, which I had picked up from the French existentialist philosophers, who for some reason were very popular in India. These descriptions of the self - as a discrete entity shaped through rational thought and act - helped offset the uncertainties (financial, emotional, sexual) that I lived with then. But the dialogue between the Greek king and the Buddhist monk seemed to refute intellectually the Cartesian I', by implying that one cannot speak of a separate self or mind thinking 'I think' inside the body, inasmuch as this self is nothing but a series of thoughts. It suggested that the `I' was not a stable and autonomous entity and indeed was no more than a convenient label for the provisional relations among its constantly changing physical and mental parts. It also matched better my experience: of finding incoherence where there was supposed to be a self, of being led on by stray thoughts, memories and moods, and thinking that nothing existed beyond that flux. I read other books. I learned quickly that although Buddhism often had the trappings of a formal religion - rituals and superstitions - in the countries where it existed, it was unlike other religions in that it was primarily a rigorous therapy and cure for duhkha, the Sanskrit term denoting pain, frustration and sorrow. The Buddha, which means 'the enlightened one', was not God, or His emissary on earth, but the individual who had managed to liberate himself from ordinary human suffering, and then, out of compassion, had shared his insights with others. He had placed no value on prayer or belief in a deity; he had not spoken of creation, original sin or the last judgement. He had spoken instead of a suffering that was manmade and thus eradicable. He had confined himself to human beings living everyday lives with desire, attachment, pride, jealousy and hatred. He had analysed the workings of these emotions and asserted that they arise from a craving for and an attachment to a self that has no true existence. He had developed analytic and contemplative techniques which helped prove that neither the self nor the phenomenal world are solid, stable and discrete entities, and which attuned the human mind to 'things as they really are': interconnected and in a state of change. The Buddha was, broadly speaking, an empiricist who denied that there are any fixed substances underlying appearances; this is true as much for what one feels to be one's inner self or ego as for the outer world. He claimed that experience, rather than speculative metaphysics, holds the key to wisdom. He assumed that the quality of all human experience depends on the mind and so had been concerned with analysing and transforming the individual mind. To see that one was neither identical with one's thoughts as they arose continuously and discursively in one's mind, generating desire, anxiety, fear and guilt, nor indeed limited by them, was to be aware of the possibility of controlling them and of moving towards a new kind of spiritual and intellectual freedom. Clearly, the Buddha had been more of a trenchant thinker and psychologist than a religious figure. He, and later interpreters of his ideas, had investigated in detail the contents of human consciousness; they had located in it a quality of will which when strengthened through meditation can become an effective barrier against craving and suffering. But, reading the often very abstract and difficult Buddhist treatises on the mind, I often wondered why the Buddha, ostensibly the founder of a religion, had concerned himself with this kind of close and dry analysis of the inner world of experience; why had he not extended his analysis to the external world, tried to establish clear, distinct and certain foundations for knowledge, and founded, like Descartes, a tradition of scientific enquiry? Certainly Buddhism with its rational outlook was immune to the kind of conflict between religion and science that defined modern western philosophy. It seemed that the Buddha had had other priorities and that he had been concerned almost exclusively with the inescapable fact of suffering. But here, too, he seemed to differ radically from the intellectual fathers of the modern world, Rousseau, Hobbes and Marx. For he had presumed to offer a cure for human suffering that did not involve large-scale restructuring of state and society. Mr Sharma, whom I told about my growing interest in the Buddha, couldn't say much about this. He had taken to dropping in more often than before, and he appeared to have loosened up a bit. He told me more about his life. He had grown up in a village near Simla, among apple and pear orchards. He had spent no time at all on the plains; he spoke with something like pride of how his few visits there had proved to be ordeals. When he spoke of the Himalayas as a place of exile and refuge, when he told me about the nearby regions which the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata had visited thousands of years ago, he seemed to be speaking not so much of the myths of the race - the idea of the Indian plains with their relentless heat and dust as a trap - as of his own life. He had never married; family life with its obligations was, he said, not for him. But he seemed not altogether at ease in his self-imposed solitude. I wondered if he sometimes resented it, and wished, like everyone else, that he could have had another, more active and fruitful life, far away from the small place where he had spent, and was now to end, his life. He seemed a bit puzzled by my interest in the Buddha. He said that Dalits, low-caste Hindus, who had converted to Buddhism thinking it to be something opposed to Hinduism, had dragged the Buddha's name through mud. For the Buddha was actually the tenth incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu, and had emerged from the mouth of Brahma, and therefore was part of rather than opposed to the Hindu tradition. I told him that this was more myth than history. The Buddha may have emerged metaphorically from the mouth of Brahma, but the evidence collected by British scholars in the nineteenth century had proved that he had also been a flesh-and-blood being, a figure no less historical than Jesus and the Prophet Mohammed, and, furthermore, that he had lived and died not far from where we were. I also told Mr Sharma that I had been to the Buddha's birthplace in Nepal and seen the iron pillar erected there by Ashoka, the third-century BC Indian emperor. * * * The Buddha's birthplace is called Lumbini, and is just north of the vast Indian plain across which the great rivers of the subcontinent, the Ganges and the Yamuna, flow. The legends of the Buddha speak of it being close to the Himalayan foothills. This gives the place romance: tall mountains and waterfalls and pine forests as the backdrop to the Buddha's luxurious childhood. But when you finally get there - after a long, arduous journey within either India or Nepal - the high mountains to the north are no more than a rumour; at best, an added chill in the winter breezes, and a faint swelling on the horizon on clear spring days. The feeling of being exposed in the vast flat land never leaves you, especially in the summer when, after weeks of blistering heat, whirlwinds of fine dust and dry leaves scatter across the exhausted rice fields and the huddled villages of mud and straw. Occasionally, there are clusters of mango and tamarind trees and ponds: oases of shade and cool, where the physical world regains form and colour. The land that looks so parched grows quickly green after the first rains of the monsoons in late June or early July. Two months of monsoons impose an unruly lushness upon it. But the endless rain wearies; the prickly heat saps energy; and the rivers and streams often burst their banks, turning the earth into obdurate mud. It is only during the months from October to March that the weather stops being punitive. All day long a mellow light falls gently over the busy fields and the villages from a tenderly blue sky. The evenings are short, and the nights often chilly. In 1985, when I visited Lumbini, I was sixteen years old. I had just left home for the first time and was living as a student in Allahabad, one of the emerging urban centres of the Buddha's time and now a decaying old provincial city in the Gangetic plain. I travelled cheaply and very slowly, on trains pulled by steam engines and country buses and, once, on a ferry over a dangerously swollen muddy river, passing through the places that the Buddha as a young scion called Siddhartha had dreamed of visiting. Continues... From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Feb 6 03:02:44 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 19:02:44 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] A superpower on life support Message-ID: <01C50BB5.473C7DE0.shovland@mindspring.com> How many wars can we fight at once? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Christian Rauh [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2005 7:20 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] A superpower on life support Steve, FYI, Brasil has always issued its bonds in US dollars, this year it is issuing 20% of them (at least) in Euros. And private export contracts have been moving to Euros too since the middle of last year. The problem with the Zero Sum game here is that the US will probably stick the gun to the face of its comercial partners before going to the same level of negotiation. As a pre-emptive measure, of course. Christian Steve Hovland wrote: > In recent years the US has been styling itself as > the last remaining superpower, able to dictate > the establishment of a Pax Americana without > significant opposition. > > If you look at our finances, you see a different > picture. > > The USSR crumbled because they could no > longer afford the Cold War game. > > We are about to crumble because we can no > longer pay cash to finance our activities. > > Most of our prosperity is financed by a mountain > of debt that now threatens the economy of the > entire planet. > > In their foolish greed our largest corporations > have exported vast amounts of capital to India > or China, who now have trade surpluses while > we have trade deficits that compound our > budget deficits. This is a zero sum game. > > The day will come when the world recognizes > that we have spent all of the gold that we found > at the end of our continental rainbow a mere > 200 years ago. > > When that day comes they will no longer buy > Dollar bonds, but Euro bonds. Indeed, the last > straw with Saddam Hussein was that he started > to price his oil in Euro's. > > When that day comes we will find that India, > China, Japan, and Europe will be our equal > partners because we won't be in any position > to refuse their demands. > > When that day comes we will no longer be > a psychotic Gulliver stomping on all who dare > to oppose us. We will be one among equals > living in a more benign equilibrium with the > planet. > > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake. - Thomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act _____________________________________________________________________ ???????????????????????????????$o$??????????????????????????????????? _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:49:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:49:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Philosophy Now: Review of The President of Good and Evil by Peter Singer Message-ID: Review of The President of Good and Evil by Peter Singer http://www.philosophynow.org/issue49/49oreilly.htm Scott O'Reilly reviews Peter Singer`s review of George W. Bush`s statements on ethics. Inquiring after the ethics of George W. Bush might seem to many like a Herculean task, and possibly doomed to failure, but worth a try anyway. Peter Singer, one of the world's best-known philosophers, has taken up this daunting challenge in his The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush, and the result is a superbly instructive lesson on the strengths and limits of applying the methods of philosophy to current events. Immanuel Kant once wrote that "out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." The thought is worth bearing in mind as Singer attempts to apply the sharp edge of logic and sound reasoning against the sometimes-twisted reasoning proffered by Bush and his administration. As Plato recognized long ago, philosophers are rarely kings, and kings are rarely philosophers, hence it might be unreasonable from the outset to expect Bush's public utterances and policies to conform to any rational understanding or explanation. Perhaps Bush is simply a political animal, telling voters whatever they want to hear so long as it furthers his acquisition of power. In Bush's case we might call this the `Machiavelli from Mayberry' conjecture - a working assumption that Bush is a cynical operator with the cunning of a fox, and the strength and ferocity of a lion, but who attempts to pass himself off as a meek and humble lamb. Singer rejects this assumption, deciding to take Bush's pronouncements at face value, in effect asking if Bush's words and deeds stand up to philosophical scrutiny. In this, Singer is very much performing the role of a modern day Socrates, asking common sense questions, applying clear reasoning, and using his interlocutors own words as the standard by which they are judged. And like Socrates, Singer makes for a rather formidable gadfly. Singer examines the president's public statements and positions on all the key issues - tax cuts, environmental policy, stem cell research, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - and he repeatedly uncovers glaring contradictions that would appear to undermine not only Bush's credibility, but also the coherence of Bush's stated policy objectives. For instance, he zeroes in on the administration's extraordinarily inconsistent - if not duplicitous - conduct surrounding the march to war against Iraq. As Singer notes, early in the Bush administration key figure such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice went on record saying that Saddam had been disarmed and contained. Within months the administration had flip-flopped, with all the key figures pushing the position that Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that posed an imminent threat requiring a pre-emptive invasion. Singer demonstrates how the Bush administration prematurely pulled out U.N. weapons inspectors from Iraq and then failed to secure a second U.N. Security Council resolution that would explicitly authorize force. Failing to see the U.N. weapons inspection process through meant that the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq failed to meet the criteria for a Just War (according to which the use of force is only a last resort when all other means have failed). But it was also, as Singer points out, a violation of international law, the U.N. Charter, and the U.S. Constitution all at the same time. Ironically, Bush argued that in failing to provide a second resolution authorizing force the U.N was making itself irrelevant, blithely ignoring the fact that it was the Bush administration's unilateral actions that were undermining the U.N. In the end, the U.S. would fail to find Saddam's alleged WMD, but when confronted with this fact Bush reacted by accusing his critics of `historical revisionism.' The shifting rationales, contradictory pronouncements, and legal doubletalk convinced many observers that they had entered some Orwellian alternative universe where a ubiquitous Catch-22 clause is forever trumping the laws of logic and sound reasoning. If no engineer or architect could expect to ignore the principles of geometry and have their work hold up in the real world, how could the Bush administration so consistently disregard the standards of cogency in the pursuit of statecraft? Perhaps the answer is that they couldn't, and that the troubled occupation of Iraq serves as something of a reductio ad absurdumon the Bush administration's `faith-based' foreign policy. Singer takes the Bush administration to task for allowing ideology to trump empiricism and sound reasoning. In a particularly effective passage Singer cites a story by the 19th century English mathematician and philosopher William Clifford, which illustrates the perils of basing ones ethics or actions on belief. Clifford asks us to imagine a shipowner who knows his ship could do with a costly inspection and repairs, but sincerely believes that Providence will see the ship and its passengers through on a difficult voyage. Clifford argues that the shipowner's belief was not acquired "by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts." When the ship sinks its owner's guilt is not absolved by the sincerity of his faith; indeed he is culpable precisely for substituting belief in place of practical measures. Singer's point is hard to miss. Even if Bush was entirely sincere in his belief that Saddam possessed WMD, that in no way excuses a general pattern whereby the Bush administration ignored evidence that might contradict its preconceptions. Singer isn't the only philosopher who finds an ideological style of leadership troubling. Karl Popper argued that political and social progress arises not from adhering to timeless principles, unchallenged assumptions, or sacred scriptures, but from trial and error. This is a tremendously simple but powerful idea. It suggests that political truth isn't something a farsighted, ethically-infallible leader intuits from on high, but rather the hard won achievement of putting ideas and institutions to the test and seeing which ones hold up and serve the common good. Time and again, Singer argues, Bush eschews this trial and error approach, particularly in the case of stem cell research, and by ignoring scientific evidence in the case of Global Warming. Singer examines Bush's ethics from a number of points of view - Utilitarianism, a Judeo-Christian value system, and a Libertarian perspective - and in every case fails to find a consistent framework that would make sense of Bush's moral reasoning. Turning to psychology Singer speculates that Bush's sometimes-rigid adherence to the `letter of the law' (but not its spirit) indicates that the president is stuck at what Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg termed the Conventional Stage of morality, which he describes as, "an orientation toward authority, fixed rules, and the maintenance of social order." Kohlberg describes this as the level of moral development most often associated with 13 year olds. (The idea that the president of the United States has not yet graduated to the Post-conventional level of moral reasoning associated with Kantian-style universal principles is a troubling conjecture, but it might explain a lot). The conclusion Singer finds most plausible regarding George W. Bush's ethics may be the most disturbing. Singer notes that a high number of key Bush administration officials are disciples of a philosopher called Leo Strauss. Strauss, who taught at the University of Chicago until his death in 1973, argued that many of the great ancient philosophers, particularly the Greeks, wrote in a kind of code. Only a select intellectual elite were capable of absorbing the esoteric meaning latent in the texts, while the hoi polloi took everything at face value. The Straussians believe that the masses are simply not equipped to handle the often-grim truths that underlie political and world affairs (remember the old saying: there are two things you never want to see being made, sausages and legislation). But according to Singer the Straussians go even further, suggesting that sometimes the `aristocratic gentlemen' charged with governing a polity lack the sophistication to handle the truth. In such cases the elite advisors must be prepared to mislead not just the masses with noble lies, but also the leader. Singer points out that this might explain why Bush's false assertion that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Niger stayed in his State of the Union address while other agencies like the CIA and the State Department regarded it as untrue. It might also explain why Bush appeared on Polish television telling viewers that the U.S. had discovered mobile weapons labs in Iraq, a story disproven weeks before. However, the idea that Bush could claim in the presence of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that "we gave him [Saddam] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in," strikes Singer as almost too bizarre for belief - Bush had, after all, recalled the inspectors himself before their job was completed. Singer goes so far as to speculate that Bush was intoxicated, on drugs, or perhaps out of his mind when he uttered such obviously preposterous statements. But Singer quickly discounts such explanations, finding it far more plausible that the president may in fact be a patsy or a puppet - with the Machiavellians pulling the strings on the man from Mayberry. Emerson once wrote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Great statesmen often exhibit tremendous contradiction in their personalities and their policies. But what happens when a given leader repeatedly utters statements that contradict their previous statement, as well as reality? A disciple of Machiavelli might argue that this is what leaders are often called to do for the public good. For instance, most of us would probably agree with Winston Churchill that, "occasionally the truth needs a bodyguard of lies." Singer, however, makes a persuasive case that with George W. Bush those supposedly guarding the truth have mugged it instead. If so, it is worth remembering another thought from Churchill: "A democratic people can face any adversity with fortitude, provided they believe their leaders are leveling with them, and not living in a fool's paradise." Scott O'Reilly is a contributor to The Great Thinkers A-Z (2004) and writes a monthly column of political humor for Compass Magazine . The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bushby Peter Singer, 2004 (Dutton, $25/Granta ?8.99 paperback) 1-86207-693-6. This book is at the Philosophy Now [22]Bookstore. References 22. http://www.philosophynow.org/bookstore.htm#1862076936 From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:21:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:21:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Inmate's Rising I.Q. Score Could Mean His Death Message-ID: The New York Times > National > Inmate's Rising I.Q. Score Could Mean His Death http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/national/06atkins.html 5.2.6 By ADAM LIPTAK YORKTOWN, Va., Feb. 3 - Three years ago, in the case of a Virginia man named Daryl R. Atkins, the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to execute the mentally retarded. But Mr. Atkins's recent test scores could eliminate him from that group. His scores have shot up, a defense expert said, thanks to the mental workout his participation in years of litigation gave him. The Supreme Court, which did not decide whether Mr. Atkins was retarded, noted that he scored 59 on an I.Q. test in 1998. The cutoff for retardation in Virginia is 70. A defense expert who retested Mr. Atkins last year found that his I.Q. was 74. In court here on Thursday, prosecutors said their expert's latest test yielded 76. Mr. Atkins, a slight, balding 27-year-old in an orange jumpsuit, sat slumped with his chin on his hand as lawyers argued about whether his intelligence was low enough to spare him from execution. In 1996, he and another man abducted Eric Nesbitt, 21, an airman from Langley Air Force Base, forced him to withdraw money from an A.T.M. and then shot him eight times, killing him. He will be one of the first death row inmates to have a jury trial on the question of whether he is retarded. The jury's decision will determine whether his life will be spared. Mr. Atkins's more recent scores should be discounted, a clinical psychologist who tested him in 1998 and 2004 said, because they are the result of "a forced march towards increased mental stimulation" provided by the case itself. "Oddly enough, because of his constant contact with the many lawyers that worked on his case," the psychologist, Dr. Evan S. Nelson, wrote in a report in November, "Mr. Atkins received more intellectual stimulation in prison than he did during his late adolescence and early adulthood. That included practicing his reading and writing skills, learning about abstract legal concepts and communicating with professionals." In helping put an end to the death penalty for the mentally retarded, then, Mr. Atkins could have ensured his own execution. Prosecutors say that Mr. Atkins has never been retarded and that the recent tests confirm it. "I don't see how a 76 is exculpatory and evidence of mental retardation," Eileen M. Addison, the commonwealth's attorney here, said in court on Thursday. "It needs to be under 70." Ms. Addison has said that Mr. Atkins's crime also proves that he is not retarded. In an interview last year, she said that his ability to load and work a gun, to recognize an A.T.M. card, to direct Mr. Nesbitt to withdraw money and to identify a remote area for the killing all proved that Mr. Atkins is not retarded. "I don't believe the truly mentally retarded commit these kinds of crimes," she said last year. She did not respond to recent messages seeking comment. There are several other reasons that Mr. Atkins's scores may have risen. I.Q. scores are rarely completely stable and can drift, though within a relatively narrow range, typically by five points up or down. Psychologists recognize that practice drives scores higher. And I.Q.'s tend to rise over time, by about three points a decade. Dr. Evans, the defense psychologist, concluded that "Mr. Atkins's 'true' I.Q. is somewhere in the mid- to upper 60's." Dozens of mentally retarded people have been released from death row as a consequence of the Supreme Court's decision, under agreements and judicial findings. Others will face trials like Mr. Atkins's. David M. Gossett, a Washington lawyer who represents a death row inmate in a similar position in Georgia, said incarceration itself may also have a positive effect on the test scores. "Prisons are highly structured and safe environments," Mr. Gossett said. "They're sometimes good environments for the mentally retarded. These people are not vegetables. They can learn. These are people who can get better at taking tests." In old cases and new ones, courts across the country have been struggling to interpret the Supreme Court's decision. Seven states have passed new laws, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. They have adopted essentially the same definition of mental retardation, requiring defendants to prove three things: that their I.Q. is below 70 or 75, that they lack fundamental social and practical skills, and that both conditions existed before they turned 18. Mr. Atkins was never tested as a youth, and so the jury will have to consider how to look back using his test scores as a young adult. The defense bears the burden of proving he is retarded, so the absence of scores from when he was young and the relatively high current test numbers may hurt his case. "I don't know what you have before age 18," Judge Prentis Smiley Jr., of the York County Circuit Court here, told Mr. Atkins's lawyers on Thursday. "That's your problem." The judge described a clear standard. "The issues are bright lights and targeted with a bull's-eye," Judge Smiley said. Richard Burr, who represents Mr. Atkins along with Joseph A. Migliozzi Jr., disagreed. "For people real close to the edge, there is nothing easy about that," Mr. Burr said. "There is going to be controverted evidence, subject to sharp disputes and disagreements." Jurors in Mr. Atkins's case, which will be tried this spring or summer, will probably hear from mental health experts, teachers, family members, classmates and, perhaps, victims of some of the 16 other felonies that Mr. Atkins committed when he was 18 in what Dr. Nelson called a four-month crime spree. He dropped out of high school that year, his third attempt to pass the tenth grade. Virginia's handling of mental retardation in capital cases is relatively unusual. In new cases, juries in this state do not reach the question until after they have convicted the defendant. Many other states have a judge decide the issue before trial. Judge Smiley said he planned to tell jurors that Mr. Atkins was convicted and sentenced to death. He will also allow prosecutors to dismiss jurors who say they oppose the death penalty in all circumstances. Mr. Atkins's lawyers asked the Virginia Supreme Court to reverse those rulings. On Wednesday, that court declined to hear the case. "This proceeding has veered off the course of fairness," Mr. Burr told Judge Smiley on Thursday. "We want to have the opportunity to prove that Daryl Atkins is mentally retarded." Mr. Atkins nodded in agreement. From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:27:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:27:48 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Joel Kotkin: Rule, Suburbia Message-ID: Rule, Suburbia: The Verdict's In. We Love It There http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A364-2005Feb5?language=printer 5.2.6 [Splendid picture of three views of downtown Bethesda in the print edition.] The battle's over. For half a century, legions of planners, urbanists, environmentalists and big city editorialists have waged war against sprawl. Now it's time to call it a day and declare a victor. The winner is, yes, sprawl. The numbers are incontestable and the trends inexorable. Since 1950, more than 90 percent of metropolitan population growth in America has taken place in the suburbs. Today, roughly two out of three people in the nation's metro areas are suburban dwellers. "The burbs" have become the homeland of American success, with an increasing share of our national wealth and half the poverty of the urban core. We may continue to decry them and make fun of them, in cynical movies like "American Beauty" or on spoofy television shows like "Desperate Housewives." But we have embraced the suburbs and made them our home. For most of us, they represent both our present and our future. Over the next quarter century, according to a Brookings Institution study, the nation will add 50 percent to the current stock of houses, offices and shops, and the great majority of that new building will take place in lower-density locations, not traditional inner cities. Once we acknowledge this reality, we can turn to the task of making the best of it. The suburbs have given us -- in terms of space, quality of life, safety and privacy -- much more of what we call "the American Dream" than cities ever could. What they have failed to do, often miserably, is to live up to their promise of becoming self-contained, manageable communities that can both coexist amiably with the natural environment and offer a sense of identity. The prospect of a nation crisscrossed by ugly sprawl corridors like Lee Highway in Virginia or Interstate 10 between Los Angeles and San Bernardino may be too gruesome to contemplate. I'm the first to admit that most students at the architecture school where I teach -- like talented young people generally -- would rather work in the big city, designing cool lofts or arresting high-rise towers, museums and concert halls, than try to create something in the jumble of the suburban periphery. But the suburbs are where the action's going to be in the future. The great challenge of the 21st century -- not to mention the main economic opportunity -- lies in transforming suburban sprawl into something more efficient, interesting and humane. That's because, despite the ardent wishes of urban advocates, the suburbs are becoming ever more ubiquitous. Instead of clustering in large, crowded cities, Americans are building bigger and bigger houses -- twice the size of those in 1950 -- and doing so increasingly in low-density, low-cost regions such as Orlando, Fla., San Bernardino-Riverside, Calif., Phoenix and Las Vegas, where job growth has also been most robust. Many in the planning profession and others who bemoan the "cultural wasteland" of the suburbs will find it hard to swallow the reality that the suburbs rule. Others will hold on to the hope that higher oil prices will force more suburbanites back into dense urban cores. One city enthusiast, writer James Kunstler, declared on his Weblog last fall that it was time "to let the gloating begin." But I doubt that it's time for such new-urbanist glass-clinking. Suburbanization proceeded apace during the steep energy price rises of the 1970s; it has also accelerated in Europe and Japan, where energy prices are already sky-high. Traditional urban America isn't going to die. Instead, city living, as urban analyst Bill Fulton has put it, will likely become primarily a "niche lifestyle," preferred mostly by the young, the childless and the rich. But just as cities won't prosper if they don't cater to the niche resident, the suburbs need to evolve from a pale extension of the city into something more like a self-sustaining archipelago of villages. This concept has its roots in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when visionaries like writer H.G. Wells saw movement to the periphery -- what he called the "centrifugal possibilities" -- as a bold alternative to the horrors of the contemporary industrial city. This vision was widely embraced by both the right and the left. Friedrich Engels predicted that the overthrow of capitalism would lead to the end of the large mega-city and the dispersal of the industrial proletariat into the countryside, delivering the rural population from "isolation and stupor" while finally solving the working class's persistent housing crisis. For the conservative thinker Thomas Carlyle, the growth of the industrial city had undermined the traditional ties between workers, their families, communities and churches. Moving the working and middle classes to "villages" in the outlying regions of major cities could restore a more wholesome and intimate environment. Perhaps the most influential advocate of suburbia was British planner Ebenezer Howard. Horrified by the disorder, disease and crime of the Edwardian industrial metropolis, he advocated the creation of "garden cities" on the suburban periphery. These self-contained towns, surrounded by rural areas, would have their own employment base and neighborhoods of pleasant cottages. "Town and country must be married," Howard preached, "and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization." Howard's great vision remains a compelling one, and not only in America. Today, despite differing cultural patterns and political systems, virtually every major metropolitan area in the advanced world is suburbanizing, and usually rapidly. The urban centers of Tokyo, Sydney, London, Frankfurt and even that paragon of enforced centralization, Paris, are either losing population or barely holding steady as both jobs and people flee to the periphery. Yet the suburbs have largely failed in creating Howard's "new civilization." They lack a basic definition of what they are and the boundaries between them often seem vague at best. This is sprawl's most lamented and least admirable quality: It produces vast "slurbs" of undistinguished, unappealing space. And yet, build them and people come. It's amazing, given that suburbs often suffer from a deadening lack of things to do. And then there's the traffic. This remains their worst defining feature. In Los Angeles, where I live, the hours wasted in traffic have doubled since the early 1980s. Fleeing to the farther fringe, such as San Bernardino-Riverside, is no escape -- the traffic there is growing worse at an even faster pace. Suburbanites around the country, from greater Washington to greater Atlanta to the San Francisco Bay area, all register similar complaints. Ironically, this may prove the new imperative for suburbia's evolution. With transit to downtowns and other suburbs increasingly dicey, suburbs are being forced to supply an ever-wider array of basic needs, from cultural infrastructure to shopping and business services. They cannot lean as heavily on the central core, even if they wanted to. "In the San Fernando Valley, we have achieved our own kind of secession," attorney David Fleming, a leader of the suburban area's failed attempt to break away from Los Angeles, quipped to me recently. "It's called traffic." The digital revolution has also made it easier for suburbanites to bypass the city. The home-based workforce has grown 23 percent over the past decade, according to the U.S. Census. A lawyer working in Thousand Oaks, an often excruciating commute from downtown Los Angeles that can take as long as two hours, can now do his job without braving the freeway except to appear in court. The urbanization of suburbia -- the creation of a more sophisticated, self-sufficient community -- is already beginning. From the suburbs of Northern Virginia to the Los Angeles basin, cities are restoring the commercial cores of what had once been autonomous small towns. Often devastated by malls and big-box shopping centers, these downtowns once gave suburban towns a sense of distinctiveness -- something many now wish to recover. Other places are attempting to create whole new communities, with their own defined town centers complete with fine restaurants, smart shops and even nightclubs. Over the past decade, for example, Naperville, Ill., has grown from simply another Chicago suburb into a definable place, with a well-appointed old town center, a lovely riverside park and even some striking public architecture. It is filled with pedestrians from the surrounding area. "Our downtown is what keeps us together," says Christine Jeffries, a civic leader in the community of 138,000. "It gives us an identity." This new principle of village-building can also be seen in some newer developments, such as Valencia in Southern California. With a well-defined town center, paths for pedestrians and cyclists, a lake and a range of housing types, Valencia is closer to a traditional village environment than the prototypical sprawl suburb so common in the region. This model is being repeated in numerous other places, particularly fast-growing regions such as southwest Florida, suburban Atlanta and the outer reaches of Houston. With this new development has come a relatively new phenomenon, the construction of large-scale cultural and religious institutions in the periphery. The suburbs are now host to some of the nation's largest new cultural centers -- the Music Center at Strathmore that just opened in north Bethesda, the Cobb Galleria Centre outside Atlanta and the sparkling Orange County Performing Arts Center in Southern California -- as well as a plethora of smaller, community-based arts facilities. And, at a time when churches in the hearts of many major cities are closing, new churches, as well as synagogues, mosques and Hindu temples reflecting suburbia's growing ethnic diversity, are rising in the outer periphery. In the coming years, the opportunities to develop suburban identity will grow as baby boomers look to trade in their tract houses for something more walkable and compact. Some urban advocates see them headed for the major downtowns, but high prices, cramped conditions and distance from family and friends militate against a return to the city. Instead, many developers see suburban villages as ideal places for the swelling ranks of empty nesters. "They don't want to move to Florida and they want to stay close to the kids," says Jeff Lee, CEO of a prominent D.C. real estate, architecture and planning firm. "What they are looking for is a funky suburban development -- funky but safe." Village environments might also provide an affordable housing alternative for people who want to be in the suburbs, but can't yet swing the much-desired single-family house. It could also offer a congenial environment for singles and younger couples without children. According to the last census, the number of childless couples and singles grew more than twice as much in the suburbs as it did in the central cities over the last decade. This redefinition of suburbia into someplace more diverse, interesting and multifaceted represents one of the most revolutionary developments of our times. It provides us with an opportunity to stop complaining about sprawl and start learning how to make better the places that most of us have chosen as home. Author's e-mail: [3]jkotkin at pacbell.net Joel Kotkin, an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, teaches urban and suburban history at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and is the author of "The City: A Global History," to be published by Modern Library in April. From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 17:06:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 12:06:19 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reason: Among the Non-Believers: The tedium of dogmatic atheism. Message-ID: Among the Non-Believers: The tedium of dogmatic atheism. http://www.reason.com/0501/cr.cl.among.shtml 5.1 by Chris Lehmann [7]The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris, New York: Norton, 336 pages, $24.95 For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly detail the many contradictions, fallacies, and absurdities that flow from belief in holy writ. As a strictly intellectual proposition, atheism would seem, on the face of things, to have wiped the floor with the believing opposition. Still, village atheists are as numerous, and as shrill, as theyve ever been, for the simple reason that the successive revolutions in thought that have furthered their causethe Enlightenment and Darwinismhave been popular busts. As the secular mind loses mass allegiance, it becomes skittish and reclusive, succumbing to the seductive fancy that its special brand of wisdom is too nuanced, too unblinkingly harsh for the weak-minded Christer, ultraorthodox scold, or wooly pagan. The faithful, meanwhile, take some understandable offense at this broad caricature of their mental capacity and ability to face lifes harder truths. So each side retreats to its corner, more convinced than ever that the other is trafficking in pure, self-infatuated delusion for the basest of reasons: Believers accuse skeptics and unbelievers of thoughtless hedonism and nihilism; the secular set accuses the believoisie of superstition and antiscientific senselessness. Still, the vast majority of people comfortably tolerate the huge paradoxes that so exercise the super-faithful and their no-less-righteous secular pursuers. Americans are, after all, heir to the greatest Enlightenment traditions in self-government and tolerance, while also forming one of the most religion-mad polities in the industrialized West. Polls regularly show that at least 90 percent of Americans believe in God; more than 80 percent agree that the deity is regularly performing miracles in todays world; more than 80 percent also believe in an afterlife and Heaven as an actual physical site for same. Even Jews, who traditionally have not had any scriptural basis for believing in an afterlife, have begun acquiring it as a sort of contact high. The General Social Survey conducted annually by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found in the 1970s that a mere 19 percent of American Jews confessed a belief in the afterlife; in the 1990s, that proportion rose to an astonishing 56 percent. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris, a UCLA philosophy grad student, has seized on the all-too-real specter of Islamist terror as the occasion to revisit the village atheist waterfront, compulsively itemizing all the irrational, surly, atavistic features of faith. Never mind that, among the worlds one billion Islamic believers, the vast majority of clerics and lay Muslims renounce the politicized brand of Islamist dogma that extremists seek to inflict on Muslim and non-Muslim populations alike. Identifying all Islamic beliefs with extreme Islamist terror, as Harris does throughout the book, is a little like saying that the Maoist guerrillas of Perus Shining Path are cognate with the Democratic Leadership Council. Never mind, as well, that militantly atheist movements like Soviet and Khmer Rouge communismas well as volkish pagan ones like Nazism and Tutsi supremacystand behind some of the worst mass violence of the past century. Harris believes religious belief is the single greatest threat to the survival of the human species. Religious faith is not merely a maladaptive superstition, Harris writes; it is the common enemy for all reasonable people concerned with the preservation of the world as we know it. All extant religious traditions, to him, are without exception intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. Harris stoliddare one say dogmatic?failure to see anything in contemporary religion other than the exclusive, world-conquering fantasizing of monotheism at its worst keeps his book mired squarely in a painfully anachronistic atheists bill of indictments, cribbed in most particulars from the heyday of Enlightenment skepticism. Like Voltaire, Harris marvels that ardent believers actually worship words when they think they profess fealty to God: How can any person presume that [theism] is the way the universe works? Harris writes in typical sputtering indignation. Because it says so in our holy books. Then, zeroing in for the kill, he asks, How do we know our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. And even though the language from those books sounds occasionally sonorous or beguiling, fueling that oceanic longing for repose within the universe that religion is supposed to fulfill, we should not forget for an instant that these words have been used to justify mass murder: Words of wisdom and consolation and beauty abound in the pages of Shakespeare, Virgil, and Homer as well, and no one ever murdered strangers by the thousands because of the inspiration he found there. Actually, all three of those authors routinely celebrated all manner of grisly nonreligious state violence. And determined mass murderers can find a rationale for killing in any handy text that comes alongsay, The Rights of Man or Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. But the larger, painfully obvious objection to this argument is a structural one: Reasoning backward under the impression that the destructive results of this or that piece of writing invalidates its purchase on our serious attention could make E=mc squared the most taboo phrase in the language. But Harris central message is the peril inherent in faith, especially in todays world. As he is fond of reiterating, Islamist terror means religious faith has crossed the line, become simply too dangerous to dally with. The September 11 attacks, for Harris, effectively refute all religious schemes of knowledge. Indeed, he launches The End of Faith with a sensational account of a hypothetical suicide bombing and segues promptly to the key object lesson: Why is it so easyyou-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easyto guess the [attackers] religion? And should this be too subtle an exercise, Harris concludes his litany of Enlightenment-era objections to medieval models of piety with this rhetorical wallop: All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective of a man just beginning his day on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, only to find his meandering thoughtsof family and friends, of errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetenerinexplicably interrupted by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity: between being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the concrete below. Thus again are we instructed that the perpetrators of this most heinous act were men of faithperfect faith, as it turns outand this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be. Yet Harris, who is otherwise so singularly obsessed with the single-bullet religious origins of every sort of human infamy, from forced castration to child labor, makes no mention here that suicide bombings were in fact originally the handiwork not of the Islamist faithful but of the Sri Lankan communist guerillas known as the Tamil Tigers. None of this, of course, is to downplay the grave and horrific nature of the Islamist terror threat; it is, however, to suggest that if this sort of historical causation is more complicated than Harris asserts it to be, so it might just be the case that faith is not always and everywhere so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a perverse, cultural singularitya vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible. Nor is it the case, to take Harris emotional (and rather crassly manipulative) example of the hideously sacrificed World Trade Center worker, that 9/11 unambiguously demonstrates the pure irreducible lethality of religious belief. If those opinion polls are any reliable indication, most of the victims of the terrors that day proclaimed faith in warlike, atavistic deities too. As many as 800 of them were adherents of Islam, a religion that Harris flatly asserts is not compatible with civil society (rather a cold comfort, one supposes, as they too laid aside their early morning coffee to ponder their sudden mortal doom). How can it be that the 9/11 suicide bomber, whose spiritual principles and hateful political practices are denounced in the highest reaches of mainstream Islamic observance, is a man of perfect faith, and that the innocent victims of those attacks, Muslim, Jew, Christian, Jain, or Hindu, are automatically symbols of defiled secularism? Harris protracted 9/11 set piece isnt even a credible account of how the religious world was affected by the terror attacks (let alone responded to them); so much the less is it the hard and fast measure of all pretensions to theological knowledge. Its obvious, of course, that a certain derangement of Muslim dogma prompted these men into terrible action, but there are also, again, more complicated forces in play, involving (just for starters) the ruinous course of Israeli-Palestinian relations, the deeply antidemocratic and dissent-resistant political traditions of the Middle East, and a Saudi monarchy and gerontocracy propelling many middle-class young men to the religious fringe. None of these by itself is an explanation of any of the hijackers behavior, but neither is something that isin the actually existing real world, if not in Harris imaginationas broad and variegated as faith. Its necessary to insist upon this point in some detail because Harris, as it happens, is only getting warmed up with the 9/11 scaremongering. Hes ready to roll up his sleeves and endorse pre-emptive assaults on both individual bad believers and dangerous Islamist regimes by any means necessary. In a world-class show of this hurts me more than it hurts you disingenuousness, Harris makes it clear that the fault for this state of affairs resides entirely with the believers he thinks we may have to kill. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If we must, more in sorrow than in anger, expunge Islamist thought by offing its adherents one by one, so we must also gird ourselves for the big coming conflict with a nuclear-armed Islamic power, which prompts Harris to flights of hypothetical fancy worthy of Herman Kahn (if not Dr. Strangeloves Gen. Buck Turgidson). After all, Harris reasons, There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons.Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. Cautioning further that we would never know the actual whereabouts of such lethal weaponry in the hands of a Paradise-addled Islamist power, Harris presses blithely on to the unthinkable: In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. He of course allows that this opening feint of pre-emptive war could trigger a genocidal crusade among the Islamic worlds nuke-wielding imams, but to paraphrase our Vietnam strategists, sometimes you have to destroy a planet in order to save it. In any event, it was the believers who started it. Calling this course of events perfectly insane, Harris once again didactically marvels at how our own pie-eyed tolerance of faith has brought us to this grimmest of all passes: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the worlds population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosophers stone, and unicorns. Here again, Harris glides right by historical precedenta well-advised move for his argument, since the only power that has used nuclear weapons on civilian populations (up to and including the zealots in Pakistan and India who now belong to the nuclear club) is our own secular, Enlightenment-bred American republic, steeped in pragmatic self-regard far afield from faith-induced deliriums of jihad and martyrdom. And its war-ending rationale in 1945 was very much of a piece with the shoot-first reasoning of Harris current doomsday scenario. Presumably, it meant a great deal to the dignity of Hiroshima and Nagasakis incinerated citizens to reflect that they were being sacrificed not to mad faith, but to the prerogatives of a properly calculated nuclear assault, on the part of a Western power that was only rationally pursuing a marginal military advantage. It is a notorious hazard of the village atheists vocation to mimic many of the worst features of the dogma he obsessively denounces. That certainly is the case with The End of Faith. Harris wishes to convict religious belief of mulish literalism, while attacking its tenets in the most bluntly prosaic and anachronistic terms he can muster. Harris attacks the believing worlds maudlin wish fulfillments and faulty logicand winds up exploiting lurid imagined scenarios of the final moments of 9/11 victims as an argument-stilling tactic. Harris excoriates the religious worldviews foreshortened use of fact and evidence, and produces ahistorical, misleading summaries of the most basic features of Muslim belief, geopolitical conflict, and religious thinking generally. Most tellingly, The End of Faith derides the callow apocalyptic temper of the monotheistic traditions, while effectively seeking to bully readers into accepting nuclear Armageddon as a justified response to rampant fundamentalism. Lord knows theres plenty to criticize, and be alarmed by, in todays religious scene. But even if we posit with Harris that faith is itself the enemy, then it behooves any tough-minded strategist to know the enemy. And while Im far from a believer myself, Id also suggest that it behooves any village-atheist counselor of high-stakes nuclear conflict to ponder the Psalms of Pogo, in which it is written that we have met the enemy, and he is us. Chris Lehmann is features editor for New York magazine and author of Revolt of the Masscult (Prickly Paradigm Press). References 6. mailto:Chris_Lehmann at newyorkmag.com 7. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393035158/ref=nosim/reasonmagazineA/ From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:22:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:22:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: New to Capitol Hill? 10 Tips to Avoid Ruin Message-ID: The New York Times > Fashion & Style > New to Capitol Hill? 10 Tips to Avoid Ruin http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/fashion/06rule.html 5.2.6 By ELISABETH BUMILLER WASHINGTON THE start of every presidential term brings to Washington eager new cabinet officers and members of Congress who take the wrong elevators, get lost in the hallways and pop off to reporters. But such faux pas - Senator Ken Salazar, a freshman Democrat from Colorado, says he has not yet found the Senate dining room and is eating ham sandwiches in the public cafeteria - are hardly the worst of it. As everyone knows, Washington is shadowed by the specters of grand scandals past: Richard M. Nixon and Watergate, Oliver North and Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. More recently Bernard B. Kerik, President Bush's short-lived nominee for homeland security secretary, jettisoned himself for his troubles with a nanny and then turned out to have a Manhattan love nest, a serious no-no in Washington. Unlike New York, the nation's capital has always had a Puritan streak and remains a curious mix of raging ambition and Midwestern values. So now that the president's State of the Union address has signaled the official start of the year, here are 10 rules, culled from those who have learned the hard way, for avoiding social, political and legal disaster in Washington. 1. Don't get up in the middle of dinner and announce that you have to run off to do "Larry King Live." Well-mannered Washingtonians tell hostesses that they will drop by before or after their appearances on nightly programs like Mr. King's. "You should tell your hostess ahead of time," said Sally Quinn, the Washington writer and hostess who is married to Benjamin C. Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post, and the author of a book on entertaining. Otherwise, Ms. Quinn said, there will be a gaping hole at the dinner table. (Mr. King's interview show is on CNN at 9 p.m.) For dinner on big occasions like election night, guests can graze in the shows' green rooms, the lavishly catered holding areas that have evolved into the new Washington dinner parties. 2. Don't use the expression "Do you know who I am?" The answer from the young woman looking for your lost ticket at the charity dinner check-in table may well be an embarrassing no. Also, the question is generally not effective, unless your goal is frightening her. "It doesn't make your ticket appear more quickly," said Carolyn Peachey, a longtime Washington event planner who has heard the expression for decades. The only time Ms. Peachey has given a dispensation for the expression's use was last fall, when the music mogul Quincy Jones was prevented from entering a reception at the State Department. A plate in his head from brain surgery had set off the metal detector, Ms. Peachey said, and 20 minutes of talking to the guards made no difference. "Do you know who I am?" Mr. Jones finally asked. The guard replied yes, Ms. Peachey said, but insisted there was nothing to be done. Mr. Jones eventually got in through intervention from higher-ups. 3. Don't withhold information from your lawyer. Former White House counsels, lawyers for white-collar criminals, and the city's highly paid damage controllers all agree: This is the premier mistake that otherwise intelligent people make in Washington. Cover-ups are often worse than the problems themselves. "What inevitably happens is that the facts dribble out, compounding the story, because reporters are not going to give up until they beat the competition and dig up something new," said Lanny J. Davis, a Washington lawyer brought in for White House damage control during the Clinton scandals and the author of "Truth to Tell: Tell it Early, Tell it All, Tell it Yourself." Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel for Ronald Reagan, who vetted the current President Bush's cabinet nominees during the 2000 transition, heartily agrees. Nominees have to be prepared, he said, honestly to answer the awful questions posed by White House lawyers: Have you ever had an affair? Or used drugs? A yes to either of those questions, Mr. Fielding added, was not necessarily a problem. "There's a difference between somebody having an affair years ago, before their first marriage broke up, and someone having an affair with someone he supervised," he said. As for drugs, "occasional drug use in college would not be a disqualifier." 4. Don't change your hairstyle too often. "There is zero tolerance for coif inconsistency," said Mary Matalin, a longtime adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and a former television talk show host who is, at the moment, a brunette. Over the years she has been blonde, light brown or, as she put it, "hijacked by hyper-highlights ranging from dull orange to bright white." In short, Ms. Matalin said, "You have to pick a color and stick with a color." 5. Don't plan to announce your new nominee before a proper vetting. This applies more to presidents than to ordinary folk, but it is an important corollary of Rule No. 3. C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel for the first President Bush, said that he was under constant pressure from the president and his staff rapidly to investigate the background of cabinet nominees so that Mr. Bush could fill jobs. "I was pounded, relentlessly, when I was counsel," Mr. Gray said. He recalled that in 1988, when President-elect Bush insisted on quickly announcing Carla A. Hills as the United States trade representative, Ms. Hills and Mr. Gray agreed that Ms. Hills's husband, Rod, would have to resign from a steel company board to avoid any conflict of interest with his wife's new job. The problem was that Mr. Hills was on a plane until 4 p.m., and the president wanted Ms. Hills announced at 2 p.m. But she refused to say publicly that her husband would resign from the steel board without asking him first. So Mr. Gray called the Federal Aviation Administration and got in touch with the commercial plane's pilot, who summoned Mr. Hills to the cockpit, where Mr. Hills gave his O.K. "I think it violated all kinds of F.A.A. rules," Mr. Gray said. "The point of the story is that these are very difficult issues, and you can't back down." 6. Don't wear a beaded Armani to a Friday night dinner in Cleveland Park. The clean lines of Armani are highly desirable in Washington, and the first lady's white cashmere Oscar de la Renta wowed the town on Inaugural day. But even in a city as formal as the capital, be careful not to overdress. Andrea Mitchell, the NBC correspondent who is married to Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said she was reminded of that recently when she wore a black silk Armani pantsuit with a beaded top to dinner one Friday in Cleveland Park, an affluent, liberal enclave of faded Volvos in the city's northwest quadrant. Every other woman, she said, was in slacks and turtlenecks. What to do? "Laugh it off and realize that in Washington what you say and what you know is more important than what you wear," Ms. Mitchell said. 7. Don't think it is your job to educate reporters. "You just bite your tongue on certain topics," said Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist and the manager of Christie Whitman's successful campaign for governor of New Jersey in 1993. Mr. Rollins did not follow his own advice later that year, when he infamously boasted to reporters at a breakfast in Washington that Ms. Whitman's campaign had paid African-American ministers and Democratic workers $500,000 in "walking-around money" to suppress the black vote. This statement, immediately recanted, prompted a federal investigation, which found nothing illegal. But Mr. Rollins's words had brought the political establishment down on his head and tainted Ms. Whitman's victory. 8. Don't believe your own spin. "I was guilty of that," said Mr. Davis, the Clinton defender. Mr. Davis said he first spun out the argument that there was nothing wrong with political donors attending coffees at the Clinton White House because no money was actually collected there. "I tried to believe it, because I was technically correct," Mr. Davis said. "But people were expected to give money before or after the event." 9. Don't forget who your friends are. "The biggest mistake that people make is that they base their friendships on who is in power and who is not," Ms. Quinn said. "This is short-sighted, because very few people in Washington stay in power for a length of time. In the same vein, people will count people out once they lose power. This is always a huge mistake, because people are never out unless they're in the ground with a stake in the heart." 10. Don't forget where you came from, and that integrity matters. "People think the values here will be different than the ones they left at home, and they're not," said Robert S. Strauss, a Washington sage who is the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a longtime Bush family friend. "It's the same damn thing that you have in Dallas or Los Angeles or Houston. People value loyalty here as much or more as they do anywhere else." If all else fails, Mr. Fielding has the surefire way to avoid social, political and legal ruin in Washington. "Move to Kansas," he said. From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:33:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:33:33 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: The Bachelorette in Academe Message-ID: The Bachelorette in Academe The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.28 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i21/21c00301.htm BALANCING ACT A Ph.D. in history finds that a rural, small-town campus is no place to be single By SARA M. BRADSHAW When I received the offer, everyone congratulated me. I had landed a tenure-track job, one of the old-fashioned kind, with a light teaching load and plenty of time for research. What more could a young historian want? Only one person voiced a concern. My adviser asked hesitantly, "Are you sure that a small town in a rural region is a good place for a single woman?" Eager to show that I was a dedicated historian, I quickly asserted that Rural Town in a rural state out West would be an OK place for me. Hadn't I moved to Madison, London, the Bay Area, and a whole host of other places by myself? And hadn't I been successful in finding relationships and carving out a social life in those areas? Why should Rural Town by any different? Even as I answered his question, I worried. As a scholar of 18th-century British history, I knew that jobs in my field were few and far between. I was fortunate to receive any job offer at all. Still, I had serious doubts as I called to accept the position. That year, the buzz among graduate students was all about the difficulties of being part of a two-career academic couple, and the tensions caused when one partner became the "trailing spouse." Each time I told people about my new job, I was told how fortunate I was that I was single and did not have to worry about finding a job for a partner. No one thought to raise the issue of how difficult it would be for a single person to live in a rural town in a rural state that emphasizes "family values." And like many single people, I was too embarrassed to point out exactly how worried I was. I was not single by choice. I had always wanted to marry, and I had dated throughout college and graduate school; somehow I just had not found the right person. Moving to Rural Town would, I was pretty sure, make it even more difficult to find Mr. Right (or Professor Right). At the orientation for new faculty members that fall, I discovered with a sinking heart that, except for a new colleague in my own department who was gay, every one of the newly hired male faculty members was married. Still, I believed that I could make a life for myself. While I studied the 18th century, I lived in modern-day America: The Internet, cheap long-distance phone service, and air travel would help me build a life. That first year at Rural Town taught me the limits of technology. I was looking for someone with whom I could interact at the end of the day -- not a person I could e-mail in the nearest major city more than eight hours away. Telephone calls helped, but they could not replace an afternoon spent with a friend. Finally, airline tickets proved prohibitively expensive, and traveling anywhere meant changing planes multiple times and spending an entire day in airports. Technology had done little to transform Rural Town, too. It still lacked theaters, museums, interesting lectures on politics, walking tours, good cafes, and even good bookstores in which I could while away a lazy Saturday. In place of those, the town offered only an eerie silence. I couldn't even find a good nonacademic book group. I had never really understood how isolated certain parts of the country can be until I lived in one of them. When I was not in the classroom, the silence became deafening, and I became clinically depressed. I love to read and I love solitude, but like everyone, I need some social interaction. My colleagues, on the other hand, often worked at home, and when they came into the department, they shut their doors and hibernated. Having spouses and families at home, they had no need to create social relationships at work. By Year 3, I was desperate enough to give up my tenure-track job for a non-tenure-track one -- a two-year appointment as a visiting faculty member with a higher teaching load. The university was still in a small town, but the campus was only 40 miles from my hometown and just 80 miles from a major metropolitan area. My situation, however, improved only marginally. True, I was now able to date, and I commuted nearly every weekend to the large city in order to do so. I was also able to spend time with my family. But my depression continued to deepen. At some point I began to realize that my problem was exacerbated by the culture of academe. In both of my jobs, I lived in quaint rural college towns with populations under 20,000. Everyone seemed to have partners or families, and those who didn't were students. The towns seemed to have no room for people like me who were neither students nor family members. Moreover, moving from a tenure-track job to a visiting one only made me more irrelevant on the campus. Academics often candidly admit that they don't bother getting to know visiting professors because the person will move on in a year or two. Two of my 12 colleagues never even bothered to introduce themselves during the two years in which I worked there. Gradually, I realized that the only solution to my problem was to leave academe. I couldn't wait around for a tenure-track job in a better location that might never materialize. Much as I loved history, I could not sacrifice my life for it. While my transition to the nonacademic world was difficult, I ultimately found a wonderful job in a city I love -- and yes, I found a job that enables me to practice history. Leaving has given me an opportunity to meet people -- among them, Mr. Right. My greatest revelation came, however, not when I met Mr. Right (that was a revelation of a different order) but rather when I met a woman in one of my three book groups (that's the good thing about a city -- you can belong to lots of book groups and none of the members will know that you are seeing others). Bright, funny, and well-read, Emily had dropped out of a Ph.D. program in history. She was single and working as a librarian. Tentatively I asked her, "But you are so bright and you have such a passion for history, why did you ever drop out of graduate school?" Her response: "Early on, I realized that academe has no office culture. I know office culture is always seen as a joke, but I realized that as a single person, I was going to need some interaction at work. Academe couldn't offer me that -- but a library could." It took me a while to mull that one over: Librarians are more socially outgoing than academics? Admittedly, there was a little envy on my part, too: If I was so smart, how come I hadn't figured out, as Emily had early on in her graduate career, that I wasn't going to be spending large chunks of my academic career sipping sherry with my colleagues while we discussed a range of issues? Sara M. Bradshaw is the pseudonym of a public historian who lives and works in a metropolitan area on the East Coast. For an archive of previous First Person columns, see [3]http://chronicle.com/jobs/archive/firstpersonarch.htm References 3. http://chronicle.com/jobs/archive/firstpersonarch.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 17:03:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 12:03:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Ha'va'd Crimson: Pinker on Summers plus articles on sex differences Message-ID: Pinker on Summers plus articles on sex differences http://www.thecrimson.com/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=505366 Originally published on Wednesday, January 19, 2005 in the News section of The Harvard Crimson. PSYCHOANALYSIS Q-and-A: Steven Pinker By In an e-mail exchange with The Crimson yesterday, Johnstone Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker, who teaches the popular spring core class "The Human Mind," opined on the latest flap over President Summers' comments on women in science. CRIMSON: From what psychologists know, is there ample evidence to support the hypothesis that a difference in "innate ability" accounts for the under-representation of women on science faculties? PINKER: First, let's be clear what the hypothesis is--every one of Summers' critics has misunderstood it. The hypothesis is, first, that the statistical distributions of men's and women's quantitative and spatial abilities are not identical--that the average for men may be a bit higher than the average for women, and that the variance for men might be a bit higher than the variance for women (both implying that there would be a slightly higher proportion of men at the high end of the scale). It does not mean that all men are better at quantitative abilities than all women! That's why it would be immoral and illogical to discriminate against individual women even if it were shown that some of the statistidcal differences were innate. Second, the hypothesis is that differences in abilities might be one out of several factors that explain differences in the statistical representation of men and women in various professions. It does not mean that it is the only factor. Still, if it is one factor, we cannot reflexively assume that different statistical representation of men and women in science and engineering is itself proof of discrimination. Incidentally, another sign that we are dealing with a taboo is that when it comes to this issue, ordinarily intelligent scientists suddenly lose their ability to think quantitatively and warp statistical hypotheses into crude dichotomies. As far as the evidence is concerned, I'm not sure what "ample" means, but there is certainly enough evidence for the hypothesis to be taken seriously. For example, quantitative and spatial skills vary within a gender according to levels of sex hormones. And in samples of gifted students who are given every conceivable encouragement to excel in science and math, far more men than women expressed an interest in pursuing science and math. CRIMSON: Were President Summers' remarks within the pale of legitimate academic discourse? PINKER: Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That's the difference between a university and a madrassa. CRIMSON: Would it be normal to hear a similar set of hypotheses presented and considered at a conference of psychologists? PINKER: Some psychologists are still offended by such hypotheses, but yes, they could certainly be considered at most major conferences in scientific psychology. CRIMSON: Finally, did you personally find President Summers' remarks (or what you've heard/read of them) to be offensive? PINKER: Look, the truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is "offensive" even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don't get the concept of a university or free inquiry. ----------- Today at UCI: Press Releases: http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1261 University of California, Irvine Release Intelligence in men and women is a gray and white matter Men and women use different brain areas to achieve similar IQ results, UCI study finds Irvine, Calif. , January 20, 2005 While there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, a UC Irvine study has found significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence. The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance. "These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," said Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and longtime human intelligence researcher, who led the study with colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico. "In addition, by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain." Study results appear on the online version of NeuroImage. In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of - or connections between - these processing centers. This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests. The study also identified regional differences with intelligence. For example, 84 percent of gray-matter regions and 86 percent of white-matter regions involved with intellectual performance in women were found in the brain's frontal lobes, compared to 45 percent and zero percent for males, respectively. The gray matter driving male intellectual performance is distributed throughout more of the brain. According to the researchers, this more centralized intelligence processing in women is consistent with clinical findings that frontal brain injuries can be more detrimental to cognitive performance in women than men. Studies such as these, Haier and Jung add, someday may help lead to earlier diagnoses of brain disorders in males and females, as well as more effective and precise treatment protocols to address damage to particular regions in the brain. For this study, UCI and UNM combined their respective neuroimaging technology and subject pools to study brain morphology with magnetic resonance imaging. MRI scanning and cognitive testing involved subjects at UCI and UNM. Using a technique called voxel-based morphometry, Haier and his UCI colleagues converted these MRI pictures into structural brain "maps" that correlated brain tissue volume with IQ. Dr. Michael T. Alkire and Kevin Head of UCI and Ronald A. Yeo of UNM participated in the study, which was supported in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. About the University of California, Irvine: The University of California, Irvine is a top-ranked public university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Founded in 1965, UCI is among the fastest-growing University of California campuses, with more than 24,000 undergraduate and graduate students and about 1,400 faculty members. The second-largest employer in dynamic Orange County, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $3 billion. [38]Frontal views of the human brain. Click on image for comparison with men's brains. Frontal views of the human brain. Click on image for comparison with men's brains. [39]Side views of the human brain. Click on image for comparison with women's brains. Side views of the human brain. Click on image for comparison with women's brains. Contact Tom Vasich (949) 824-6455 References 37. http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=1261#top 38. javascript:openWin('image.asp?section=press_release%E2%84%91_name=050120Haier_fig1_lg.jpg') 39. javascript:openWin('image.asp?section=press_release%E2%84%91_name=050120Haier_fig2_lg.jpg') 40. mailto:tmvasich at uci.edu ------------ ScienceDirect - NeuroImage : The neuroanatomy of general intelligence: sex matters http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_aset=B-WA-A-W-B-MsSAYVW-UUA-AAUEUVUYZA-AAUZZWAZZA-YDWBBCAUV-B-U&_rdoc=1&_fmt=summary&_udi=B6WNP-4F8BF5H-1&_coverDate=01%2F16%2F2005&_cdi=6968&_orig=search&_st=13&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050264&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1010281&md5=53c9e09352873e1138427193865946e5 Rapid Communication The neuroanatomy of general intelligence: sex matters Richard J. Haier[23]^a^, [24]^Corresponding Author Contact Information ^, [25]^E-mail The Corresponding Author , Rex E. Jung[26]^b, Ronald A. Yeo[27]^c, Kevin Head[28]^a and Michael T. Alkire[29]^d ^aDepartment of Pediatrics, University of California, Med. Sci. I, B140, Irvine, CA 92697-5000, USA ^bDepartment of Neurology and MIND Institute, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA ^cDepartment of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA ^dDepartment of Anesthesiology, University of California Irvine Medical Center, Bldg. 53, 104B, Orange, CA 92868-1350, USA Received 21 October 2004; revised 4 November 2004; accepted 9 November 2004. Available online 16 January 2005. Abstract We examined the relationship between structural brain variation and general intelligence using voxel-based morphometric analysis of MRI data in men and women with equivalent IQ scores. Compared to men, women show more white matter and fewer gray matter areas related to intelligence. In men IQ/gray matter correlations are strongest in frontal and parietal lobes (BA 8, 9, 39, 40), whereas the strongest correlations in women are in the frontal lobe (BA10) along with Broca's area. Men and women apparently achieve similar IQ results with different brain regions, suggesting that there is no singular underlying neuroanatomical structure to general intelligence and that different types of brain designs may manifest equivalent intellectual performance. Keywords: Neuroanatomy; General intelligence; Sex [30]^Corresponding Author Contact Information Corresponding author. Fax: +1 949 854 1989. Note to users: The section "Articles in Press" contains peer reviewed and accepted articles to be published in this journal. When the final article is assigned to an issue of the journal, the "Article in Press" version will be removed from this section and will appear in the associated journal issue. Please be aware that "Articles in Press" do not have all bibliographic details available yet. There are two types of "Articles in Press": * Uncorrected proofs: these are articles that are not yet finalized and that will be corrected by the authors. Therefore the text could change before final publication. Uncorrected proofs may be temporarily unavailable for production reasons. * Corrected proofs: these are articles containing the authors' corrections. The content of the article will usually remain unchanged, and possible further corrections are fairly minor. Typically the only difference with the finally published article is that specific issue and page numbers have not yet been assigned. References 23. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_aset=B-WA-A-W-B-MsSAYVW-UUA-AAUEUVUYZA-AAUZZWAZZA-YDWBBCAUV-B-U&_rdoc=1&_fmt=summary&_udi=B6WNP-4F8BF5H-1&_coverDate=01%2F16%2F2005&_cdi=6968&_orig=search&_st=13&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050264&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1010281&md5=53c9e09352873e1138427193865946e5#aff1 24. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_aset=B-WA-A-W-B-MsSAYVW-UUA-AAUEUVUYZA-AAUZZWAZZA-YDWBBCAUV-B-U&_rdoc=1&_fmt=summary&_udi=B6WNP-4F8BF5H-1&_coverDate=01%2F16%2F2005&_cdi=6968&_orig=search&_st=13&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050264&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1010281&md5=53c9e09352873e1138427193865946e5#cor1 25. mailto:rjhaier at uci.edu 26. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_aset=B-WA-A-W-B-MsSAYVW-UUA-AAUEUVUYZA-AAUZZWAZZA-YDWBBCAUV-B-U&_rdoc=1&_fmt=summary&_udi=B6WNP-4F8BF5H-1&_coverDate=01%2F16%2F2005&_cdi=6968&_orig=search&_st=13&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050264&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1010281&md5=53c9e09352873e1138427193865946e5#aff2 27. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_aset=B-WA-A-W-B-MsSAYVW-UUA-AAUEUVUYZA-AAUZZWAZZA-YDWBBCAUV-B-U&_rdoc=1&_fmt=summary&_udi=B6WNP-4F8BF5H-1&_coverDate=01%2F16%2F2005&_cdi=6968&_orig=search&_st=13&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050264&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1010281&md5=53c9e09352873e1138427193865946e5#aff3 28. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_aset=B-WA-A-W-B-MsSAYVW-UUA-AAUEUVUYZA-AAUZZWAZZA-YDWBBCAUV-B-U&_rdoc=1&_fmt=summary&_udi=B6WNP-4F8BF5H-1&_coverDate=01%2F16%2F2005&_cdi=6968&_orig=search&_st=13&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050264&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1010281&md5=53c9e09352873e1138427193865946e5#aff1 29. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_aset=B-WA-A-W-B-MsSAYVW-UUA-AAUEUVUYZA-AAUZZWAZZA-YDWBBCAUV-B-U&_rdoc=1&_fmt=summary&_udi=B6WNP-4F8BF5H-1&_coverDate=01%2F16%2F2005&_cdi=6968&_orig=search&_st=13&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050264&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1010281&md5=53c9e09352873e1138427193865946e5#aff4 30. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_aset=B-WA-A-W-B-MsSAYVW-UUA-AAUEUVUYZA-AAUZZWAZZA-YDWBBCAUV-B-U&_rdoc=1&_fmt=summary&_udi=B6WNP-4F8BF5H-1&_coverDate=01%2F16%2F2005&_cdi=6968&_orig=search&_st=13&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050264&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1010281&md5=53c9e09352873e1138427193865946e5#bcor1 ----------- BBC NEWS | Health | Bad driving 'linked to hormones' http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4202199.stm Car park Parked by a man or a woman? Spatial skills such as map reading and parking may be difficult for some women because they had too little testosterone in the womb. Some men have long held that women are deficient in these skills. Scientists from the University of Giessen, Germany, writing in the journal Intelligence found a lack of the hormone affects spatial ability. Low testosterone levels are also linked to shorter wedding ring fingers, they say. The research looked at the spatial, numerical and verbal skills of 40 student volunteers. Men do seem to be better at spatial abilities, and women at verbal and emotional skills Dr Nick Neave, British Psychological Society Spatial skill is the ability to assess and orientate shapes and spaces. Map reading and parking are spatial skills which men often say women lack. Women tend to disagree. The researchers also looked at the length of the students' wedding and index fingers. In women, the two fingers are usually almost equal in length, as measured from the crease nearest the palm to the fingertip. In men, the ring finger tends to be much longer than the index. For one of the spatial tests, volunteers had to tell which of five drawings could not be rotated so it looked like the other four. The other test involved the ability to think in 3D by mentally "unfolding" a complex shape. Overall, men achieved higher scores in the tests than women. But women with the male pattern of finger length did better than those whose wedding finger was shorter. They also scored better on the numerical tests. Fertility Writing in Intelligence, the researchers, led by Dr Petra Kempel, said women who had 'male-like' finger length ratio patterns outperformed other women. They added that the differences seen within the group studied were "remarkable." However, the researchers accept that their study was limited because only one saliva sample was taken from each person, and no detailed account was taken of women's menstrual cycle, which can affect hormone balance. Other studies looking at finger length ratio have suggested that, in men a long ring finger and symmetrical hands are an indication of fertility, and that women are more likely to be fertile if they have a longer index finger. Another study controversially suggested that finger length ratio could also be linked to sexual orientation, with lesbian women having a greater difference in length between their ring finger and index finger than straight women do. Dr Nick Neave, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Northumbria who specialises in spatial awareness and gender differences. He said: "Being exposed to testosterone early on does seem to affect the way the brain works. "It seems to push it to work in a more masculine way, with a stronger right hemisphere; the spatial hemisphere. "The extra testosterone also appears to cause the ring finger to be longer than the index." Bones contain testosterone receptors, and Dr Neave said the fourth finger appeared to be particularly receptive to levels of the hormone. Higher levels are linked the ring finger being longer than the index. Dr Neave, a member of the British Psychological Society, added: "The sexes do use different skills to find their way around. Men seem to be able to keep the route in their head without landmarks, whereas women do use them. "So men may be better at finding the car when its parked in a huge shopping centre car-park. It may also tap into driving and parking abilities." He added: "Men do seem to be better at spatial abilities, and women at verbal and emotional skills. "It may be a generalisation, but that does seem to be the case." But Dr David Gray of the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University, said: "Correlation between genetic features and skills may often have an environmental intermediary which determines performance at a given skill." He suggested skilled drivers may be those who are more practised at the activity. In addition, he said people with longer ring fingers may have dominating personalities and therefore do more driving. "This practice would make them better at these activities and would be correlated with a physical feature, but not caused by it." SEE ALSO: [45]Finger length heart attack clue 22 Oct 01 | Health [46]A finger on sexuality 29 Mar 00 | Sci/Tech RELATED INTERNET LINKS: [47]University of Giessen - in German [48]British Psychological Society References 45. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1613066.stm 46. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/695142.stm 47. http://www.uni-giessen.de/uni/ 48. http://www.bps.org.uk/ From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sun Feb 6 18:42:45 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 10:42:45 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] feminism In-Reply-To: <200502061246.j16CkMC30972@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050206184245.52453.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Hey guys, is there any way we can post one or two paragraphs of an article, with a link? If there's no link available, it makes sense to post the whole thing, but when there are a dozen long articles posted, I have to skim through them all and probably miss some good info along the way. >>Heterosexuality always was the Achilles heel of feminism because the asymmetries involved usually took the form of adequacy for one sex, inadequacy for the other.<< --The achilles' heel of feminism is that women tend to be competitive for male attention and are sensitive to the pecking order. For feminism to work, women must be able to stand on their own, with or without male approval, and it's as difficult for them as it is for men who are very short or have feminine mannerisms to get respect. Each gender has its outcasts, and any "ism" that wants to get at the root of the problem should champion the outcasts, on both sides. The association of feminism with homosxuality makes sense in that strong women and homosexuals are both at risk for outcast status, but it also becomes an easy for anti-feminists to stereotype feminists without listening to their diverse arguments. Probably the label "feminism" has become such a hindrance that it should be changed, and the easiest way I can think of to do that would be to expand the concept to include males who don't fit in. Society has become more and more zealous in its "fitness" selection process, and with plastic surgery for women and men using steroids to overemphasize their masculinity, it's taking on a fascist flavor that is extremely toxic for young people. Girls are starving themselves and vomiting, boys are threatening their health and falsifying their personalities to become acceptable to the group. Individuals in both genders need permission to stand alone, apart from the selection process, and become who they really are. As long as feminism concentrates on women alone, there will be a polar response by "masculinists" who feel threatened by women gaining power and react by withdrawing into 50's stereotypes. But if feminism joins a broader movement to champion those thrown out of the societal sieve, it may contribute enormous value to both men and woman caught up in a game they don't want to play, which forces their moves at every step under penalty of rejection and humiliation. Michael ===== My blog: http://shallowreflections.blogspot.com/ Link to my website, including art, flash poetry and fledgling CafePress store (t-shirts, bumperstickers etc): http://www.soulaquarium.net We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell "It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population." - R. A. Heinlein __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Feb 6 17:06:28 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 09:06:28 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: (Tom Wolfe) 'The liberal elite hasn't got a clue' Message-ID: <01C50C2B.269ABF90.shovland@mindspring.com> Quite true. I think that a lot of us in the liberal rank-and-file are totally turned off by the liberal elite. That won't make us into Neo-Cons. It will make us into revolutionaries, and Howard Dean is one of the few who has a chance of leading us. In my faxing to Congress I send the same abuse to Republicans and Democrats :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2005 2:57 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org; Human Biodiversity Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: (Tom Wolfe) 'The liberal elite hasn't got a clue' 'The liberal elite hasn't got a clue' As a member of the Manhattan intelligentsia, novelist Tom Wolfe seems a lonely defender of George Bush's conservative values. But, he tells Ed Vulliamy, he's bewildered by a sex-mad society and tired of being lectured to at dinner parties. So is he voting for Dubya tomorrow? He's not quite telling Ed Vulliamy Monday November 01 2004 The Guardian Tom Wolfe casts his gaze across America at this election time, with eyes that change mood in a nanosecond, with a flicker. For the most part, they exude an amused elegance befitting the hallmark white suit and dandy-ish two-tone brogues. But then the look suddenly changes, to become scalpel-sharp, mischievous, seizing upon some detail. It is a metamorphosis which begins to explain, perhaps, how this softly-spoken, immaculately-mannered gentleman journalist from the South can write with such voracity about the grime and sediment which inhabits American society and the human soul. Certainly the view is stirring from the place to which he retreats to write, and where we meet: his outrageously beautiful Manhattan apartment taking up the 14th floor of a block on the Upper East Side, with sweeping views over a Central Park drenched in autumnal sunshine. A grand piano sits in the corner, painted in what Wolfe calls "cocktail lounge navy blue". Shelves are stacked with books on 19th-century, modern and Dutch art. In what he calls his office, next to the sitting room, is a huge, handsome and ornate bureau on which sits handwriting instruments and two panama hats. >From this desk, and the pen of arguably America's greatest current writer >- author of the 1987 epic Bonfire of the Vanities and much more besides - >there now comes a third major novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, to be >published next week, on the other side of election day. Wolfe set out, >for the first time, to write the book on a computer, but gave up in >favour of his usual typewriter. "Then I jammed my finger badly," he says, >"and took up pen and paper. This may turn out to be the last book ever >written that way." A new Tom Wolfe novel is always a literary event: where will he go next? The answer this time is an elite, imaginary Ivy League university, Dupont College, for a book about libido off the leash, and about the cult of what Wolfe calls "the bad comedy" of college sports - athletes taken on by centres of academic excellence for their bodies, not their brains. The novel - researched, as usual, down to the last expletive - concerns a young world speaking "fuck patois", loaded with creatine and cocaine, numbed by PlayStation 3, and charged by alcohol, the "vile spleen" of rap and, above all, ubiquitous sex between the heirs and heiresses to privilege in America. Most intriguingly, in this week of all weeks in American history, the book affords a gateway towards explaining Wolfe's boldly delivered, tantalising, remark: "I have sympathy with what George Bush is trying to do, although obviously the excursion [into Iraq] is not going well." Four years ago, Wolfe wrote an essay to mark the millennium called Hooking Up, about what he called "feverish emphasis on sex and sexiness". In a way, the new novel is a literary fruition of the essay. The excess and decadence at Dupont College are seen through the eyes of his heroine, Charlotte Simmons, who arrives a diligent virgin from the hills of North Carolina, on a full scholarship. She is initially intimidated and appalled, but eventually conquers her fear to partake, indeed to star, in the jock beanfeast. "I personally would be shocked out of my pants if I was at college now," confides Wolfe, who spent four years trawling the campuses for raw material. The book, he says, is "about sex as it interacts with social status. And I have tried to make the sex un-erotic. I will have failed if anyone gets the least bit excited. So much of modern sex is un-erotic, if erotic means flight of fancy or romantic build-up. Sex now is so easy to consummate - it is a pressure that affects everybody, girls more than boys, I think." As he notes, the America which votes tomorrow is a country riven over morality like never before. On the flip side of the culture of ubiquitous sex is that of puritan Christianity, as harnessed in no small part by Bush. "Yes, there is this puritanism," says Wolfe, "and I suppose we are talking here about what you might call the religious right. But I don't think these people are left or right, they are just religious, and if you are religious, you observe certain strictures on sexual activity - you are against the mainstream, morally speaking. And I do have sympathy with them, yes, though I am not religious. I am simply in awe of it all; the openness of sex. In the 60s they talked about a sexual revolution, but it has become a sexual carnival." No writer has chronicled the full American curve over four decades quite like Wolfe. He has been at this, unswervingly, since 1965, when he published a curio about pop culture called The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. His breakthrough came in 1968 with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his chronicle of Ken Kesey's LSD-gobbling Merry Pranksters. "If I have been judged to be right wing," he says, "I think this is because of the things I have mocked. It started with Radical Chic [published in 1970, about a fundraising party for the Black Panthers organised by Leonard Bernstein]. I was denounced because people thought I had jeopardised all progressive causes. But my impulse was not political, it was simply the absurdity of the occasion. Then I wrote The Painted Word, about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one. Then came The Right Stuff [his account of America's first astronauts], after which my relative enthusiasm for Nasa was another sign of perfidy." He is "proud", he says, "that I do not think any political motivation can be detected in my long books. My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie. You can call it honesty, or you can call it ego, but there it is. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer." In his manifesto of 1973 on The New Journalism, Wolfe advocated a "journalistic or perhaps documentary novel". He re-invoked the idea four years ago by way of retort to a fusillade of criticism - an exchange which scandalised New York society - levelled against his last novel, A Man In Full, from no less than Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving. The new book is in itself a counter to that outburst. Wolfe's lambent success in documenting ambition, drunkenness, sloth and meanness in his own country has taken him from his native Virginia to New York which he wrote about in Bonfire of the Vanities, pitching the super-rich "Masters of the Universe" in high finance against the real world of the Bronx. But even as the author of the quintessential New York novel, Wolfe feels estranged in the city, as he surveys America during the final days of the election campaign. Estranged not from the subjects of his scrutiny, the "Masters of the Universe", but rather from the liberal elite. "Here is an example of the situation in America," he says: "Tina Brown wrote in her column that she was at a dinner where a group of media heavyweights were discussing, during dessert, what they could do to stop Bush. Then a waiter announces that he is from the suburbs, and will vote for Bush. And ... Tina's reaction is: 'How can we persuade these people not to vote for Bush?' I draw the opposite lesson: that Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States. You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election. I have never come across a candidate who is so reviled. Reagan was sniggered it, but this is personal, real hatred. "Indeed, I was at a similar dinner, listening to the same conversation, and said: 'If all else fails, you can vote for Bush.' People looked at me as if I had just said: 'Oh, I forgot to tell you, I am a child molester.' I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind." Where does it come from, this endorsement of the most conservative administration within living memory? Of this president who champions the right and the rich, who has taken America into the mire of war, and seeks re-election tomorrow? Wolfe's eyes resume the expression of detached Southern elegance. "I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment. Support for Bush is about resentment in the so-called 'red states' - a confusing term to Guardian readers, I agree - which here means, literally, middle America. I come from one of those states myself, Virginia. It's the same resentment, indeed, as that against your own newspaper when it sent emails targeting individuals in an American county." Wolfe laughs as he chastises. "No one cares to have outsiders or foreigners butting into their affairs. I'm sure that even many of those Iraqis who were cheering the fall of Saddam now object to our being there. As I said, I do not think the excursion is going well." And John Kerry? "He is a man no one should worry about, because he has no beliefs at all. He is not going to introduce some manic radical plan, because he is poll-driven, and it is therefore impossible to know where or for what he stands." As far as Wolfe is concerned, "the great changes in America came with the second world war, since which time I have not seen much shift in what Americans fundamentally believe. Apart from the fact that as recently as the 1970s, Nelson Rockefeller shocked people by leaving his wife of 30 years, while now celebrities routinely have children outside marriage, the mayor of New York leaves his wife for his lover and no one blinks. But a large number of people have remained religious, and it is a divided country - do not forget that Al Gore nearly won the last election. The country is split right along party lines." And there has been a complete climate change in the nation which elected Bill Clinton twice, to that which may confer the same honour on George Bush tomorrow. This, says Wolfe, began not with the election of Bush, but on the morning of September 11 2001. None of us who were in New York that day will ever forget it, and Wolfe is no exception. "I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television, before long there was this procession of people of all kinds, walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd; there was no sound. "That day told us that here was a different kind of enemy. I honestly think that America and the Bush administration felt that something extreme had to be done. But I do not think that the Americans have become a warlike people; it is rare in American history to set about empire-building - acquiring territory and slaves. I've never met an American who wanted to build an empire. And while the invasion of Afghanistan was something that had to be done, I am stunned that Iraq was invaded." Wolfe is by no means afraid to offend the political right - "I'm gratified if you find me to be hard on them too," he says. He also anticipates that "conservatives will not like this new novel because I refuse to take the impact of political correctness seriously - I think PC has probably had a good effect because it is now bad manners to use racial epithets." So what is it about his liberal neighbours and fellow diners in his adoptive New York that Wolfe cannot abide? "I cannot stand the lock-step among everyone in my particular world. They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not one of them." Parting cordially, it seems strange that such an effervescent maverick, such a jester at the court of all power - all vanity, indeed - should so wholeheartedly endorse the power machine behind George Bush. And so an obvious thought occurs: perhaps Wolfe is jester at the court of New York too. Would he really be happier away from New York, out on the plains, in the "red states" where everyone at dinner parties votes for Bush? Wolfe's eyes revert to that mischievous glint, and he allows himself a smile. "I do think," he admits, apparently speaking for himself, his country and his president, "that if you are not having a fight with somebody, then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning." _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 17:08:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 12:08:16 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Nation: Beyond Good and Evil Message-ID: Beyond Good and Evil http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050131&s=banville by JOHN BANVILLE Liquidation by Imre Kert?sz; Tim Wilkinson, trans. Fatelessness by Imre Kert?sz; Tim Wilkinson, trans. Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kert?sz; Tim Wilkinson, trans. [from the January 31, 2005 issue] Adorno said, as we all know, that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. This is not to say, as many imagine, that writing poetry after Auschwitz is to be forbidden, or is impossible. The word Adorno used, barbarisch, is worth pondering. Presumably he was applying it prescriptively to poets in the same way that he applied it to Stravinsky, whose music he reproached for what he saw as its murky neo-primitivism, as against Schoenberg's pure, clear-sighted modernity. Stravinsky, by fleeing to the prehistoric past of jungle rhythm and sacrificial dance, or, later in his career, by leading the Gadarene regression to an ersatz classicism--"Back to Bach!"--was in Adorno's opinion evading existentialist man's duty to confront his own times in all their complexity and atrociousness. Of course, poets, like Stravinsky, took not the slightest notice of Adorno's stricture. Indeed, one of the greatest of twentieth-century poets, Paul Celan, not only continued to write poetry after Auschwitz but wrote poetry about Auschwitz itself, if we take "Auschwitz," as Adorno evidently did, as not only the name of a specific and terrible place but as a collective term for all the camps, and for the Holocaust itself. In Liquidation, the latest novel by the Hungarian Nobel Prize winner Imre Kert?sz to be translated into English, one of the characters, the writer B., or Bee, who was born in the death camp, applied his whole talent to Auschwitz... he was a past master and exclusive artist of the Auschwitz mode of existence. He felt that he had been born illegally, had remained alive for no reason, and nothing could justify his existence unless he were to "decipher the code name Auschwitz." Early on in the book, Kingbitter, the narrator, if such he may be called, a translator and editor and a friend of Bee's, tells how as a student in the 1960s he chanced upon Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus--Kingbitter, or Kert?sz, does not name the novel, but the references in the text identify it. In the course of the "adventures of the imagination" that the book took him on, Kingbitter tells us, he was struck in particular by the notion that "the Ninth Symphony had been withdrawn." (In Mann's novel his protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverk?hn, writes an apocalyptic cantata aimed at negating Beethoven's "Ode to Joy.") Later in Liquidation Bee echoes the notion, but in a more positive application, in the posthumous letter his ex-wife, Judit, receives from him after his suicide, instructing her to burn the manuscript of his final novel: "by virtue of the authority I have lived through and suffered for you, and for you alone, I revoke Auschwitz...." To this, however, Judit's present husband, the non-Jewish Adam, retorts: "No one can revoke Auschwitz, Judit. No one, and by virtue of no authority. Auschwitz is irrevocable." If this sequence seems complicated, it is only one strand of the vertiginously intricate web of cross-reference, echo and self-contradiction that Kert?sz weaves both within individual books and between one book and another. Torgny Lindgren, speaking at the Nobel Prize presentation in 2002, remarked how in Kert?sz's work "the separate parts appear to have grown together, with common root fibers or circulatory systems." The narrator of Kaddish for an Unborn Child, published thirteen years before Liquidation--and with an epigraph from Paul Celan's poem "Todesfuge"--also experienced Auschwitz, but as a boy or young man, not as a newborn child, as was the case with Bee. Internal evidence tends to suggest, however, that this narrator is none other than Bee himself, and that Kaddish is in fact the novel that Bee's wife Judit burned on his instructions. Where Kert?sz's work is concerned, the term "unreliable narrator" is wholly inadequate to denote the twists and turns, the evasions, turnabouts and sheer effrontery of the narrative voice. Still, we have been warned. The epigraph to Liquidation is from Beckett's novel Molloy: "Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining." These, the closing lines of the book, are a devastating and characteristically Beckettian negation of all that has gone before--if it was not midnight, if it was not raining, then there is nothing to prevent us from recognizing that the whole thing is a fiction, which, of course, it is. Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that Liquidation, any more than Molloy, is the product of postmodernist game-playing. Kert?sz, like Beckett, is deadly serious--in the case of both writers that adjective is in no way figurative--and his work is a profound meditation on the great and enduring themes of love, death and the problem of evil, although for Kert?sz, as we shall see, it's not evil that is the problem but good. Kert?sz was born in 1929 into a Jewish family so deeply assimilated into Hungarian society that they did not even consider themselves to be Jews. The Nazis took a different view, of course, and in 1944 the young Imre was rounded up with thousands of others of his kind and sent first to Auschwitz and then on to Buchenwald, where he remained until the camp was liberated in 1945. After the war he worked as a journalist, playwright and translator. The awarding of the Nobel Prize in 2002 came largely as a surprise to what used to be called the West, since not many readers outside Hungary even knew his name, although two earlier novels recently reissued by Vintage--Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child--were published under slightly different titles by Northwestern University Press in, respectively, 1992 and 1997. Of the three Kert?sz novels translated into English, Fatelessness, first published in Hungary in 1975, is the most easily accessible. One might say that it is also the best, save that comparison between it and its two successors would be invidious. Liquidation and Kaddish are, for lack of a better word, experimental in form and, indeed, in content, while Fatelessness, based, closely one assumes, on the author's experience in the camps, is relatively straightforward. It tells the story of 14-year-old Georg Koves's abrupt apprehension by the police on the streets of Budapest and his transportation first to Auschwitz and then to the Buchenwald labor camp. Straightforward the book may be, but it is also an extraordinary and devastating testament to the banality of evil--the by now clich?d phrase of Hannah Arendt's is entirely apt here, for what gives the book much of its peculiar power is the plodding doggedness of Georg's effort to report accurately what happened to him, and to make sense of it. When he arrives at Buchenwald, a "small, mediocre, out-of-the-way, so to say rural concentration camp," Georg, who had unwittingly survived the selection process at Auschwitz by adding two years to his age, is asked by one of the long-term inmates how he "got mixed up in this here," and answers: "Simple: I was asked to get off the bus." It is Georg's tone of sweet reasonableness, his slowness to comprehend fully or to credit the true nature of what Bee in Liquidation calls the "corpse-mincing machine" into which he has been flung, that makes Fatelessness so harrowing. However baffling, cruel or tormenting the circumstances in which he finds himself, Georg is ever anxious to adduce the simplest, most rational and even most benign explanation for the behavior of those who have been set above him as his masters and tormentors. His attitude to anti-Semitism is entirely understanding. In the opening pages he visits the local baker to present the family's bread coupon: He did not bother returning my greeting as it is well known in the neighborhood that he could not abide Jews. That was also why the bread he pushed at me was a good half pound short. I have also heard it said this is how more leftovers from the ration stayed in his hands. Somehow, from his angry look and his deft sleight of hand, I suddenly understood why his train of thought would make it impossible to abide Jews, for otherwise he might have had the unpleasant feeling that he was cheating them. Nor is Georg's own attitude to "the Jews" without its ambiguities. On his arrival at Auschwitz there occurs one of the book's more appalling instances of black and bitter irony, when he catches his first glimpse of the inmates already there, "real convicts, in the striped duds of criminals, and with shaven skulls in round caps": Their faces did not exactly inspire confidence either: jug ears, prominent noses, sunken, beady eyes with a crafty gleam. Quite like Jews in every respect. I found them suspect and altogether foreign-looking. When they spotted us boys, I noticed, they became quite agitated. They immediately launched into a hurried, frantic whispering, which was when I made the surprising discovery that Jews evidently don't only speak Hebrew, as I had supposed up till now... The reason for their agitation, we learn, is that they know that Georg and the other boys of his age will automatically be sent to the gas chambers, unless they pretend to be 16, in which case they will be deemed fit for work and spared from extermination. The title of the book is explained, or at least accounted for, in a remark by another character in Liquidation, the philosopher Dr. Obl?th: "Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate." When at last Georg arrives home, after his year at the heart of the whirlwind, he is regarded less as an object of compassion than of embarrassment, a reminder to those who survived of how little they did to prevent the terrible things that have happened and that are now being firmly thrust into the past. Even the radical journalist who strikes up a conversation with him is baffled by Georg's unwillingness, or inability, to fill the role of victim. When the journalist asks if he will collaborate in writing a series of articles describing to the world the "hell of the camps," he has "nothing at all to say about that as I was not acquainted with hell and couldn't even imagine what that was like." Pressed, he ventures that hell would be "'a place where it is impossible to become bored,' seeing as how that had been possible in the concentration camp, even in Auschwitz." Georg explains how time was a help, since each new enormity arrived as another step in a process: "Were it not for that sequencing in time, and were the entire knowledge to crash in upon a person on the spot, at one fell swoop, it might well be that neither one's brain nor one's heart would cope with it." This is something that the journalist, in turn, finds impossible to imagine. Georg is as accommodating as ever: "For my part, I could see that, and I even thought to myself: so, that must be why they prefer to talk about hell instead." Fatelessness is such a powerful and coolly horrifying work that, for all their fine qualities, its successors may seem hardly more than variations on a theme, making their refinements and discriminations in an area that is, in the Adornian sense, almost beyond contemplation; yet Liquidation and Kaddish are in their subtle ways just as troubling and profound as the earlier book. Kaddish in particular, a breathless, unrelenting monologue in the manner of Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, poses some large and deeply unsettling questions. The narrator tells of an incident in the camps when he was close to death and a man known as "Teacher" returned to him the food ration that he had inadvertently made off with. The gesture is literally fatal, since by keeping the extra ration Teacher might have saved himself, and without it the narrator would certainly have died. Teacher's selflessness brings the narrator to the conclusion that "what is truly irrational and genuinely inexplicable is not evil but, on the contrary, good," and to put forward a possibility that represents a glimmer of what, in the circumstances, one hesitates to call hope, the possibility that there exists a pure concept, untrammelled by any foreign matter, such as our body, our soul, our wild selves, a notion which lives as a uniform image in all our minds, yes, an idea whose--how shall I put this?--inviolability, safekeeping, or what you will, was for him, "Teacher," the sole genuine chance of staying alive, without which his chance of staying alive would have been no chance at all, simply because he did not wish, and what is more in all likelihood, was unable, to live without preserving this concept intact in its pure, untrammelled openness to scrutiny. From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:34:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:34:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Panel Urges Government to Increase Spending on the Study of Cybersecurity Message-ID: Panel Urges Government to Increase Spending on the Study of Cybersecurity The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.1.28 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i21/21a03801.htm By ANDREA L. FOSTER Washington The federal government is not adequately supporting long-term research into protecting the nation's technology infrastructure from terrorist attacks, according to a report that a presidential advisory committee has approved. The report, from the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, concludes that networks supporting the country's financial, utility, telecommunications, transportation, and defense systems are "highly vulnerable to terrorist and criminal attacks." The report recommends, among other things, that the federal government provide more money for research and that it encourage university students to study cybersecurity. The report is scheduled to be given to President Bush first and to be released to the public by early March. But the report's key findings and recommendations were made public this month in a presentation that the advisory committee's cybersecurity panel made to the full committee. The 24-member committee, which includes university and industry scientists, endorsed the cybersecurity panel's final draft. "We hope that by raising the issue and providing some of the documentary evidence that we have that people will take this seriously and attempt to address it in some meaningful way," said Eugene H. Spafford, a member of the subcommittee that prepared the report. He is a computer-science professor at Purdue University and executive director of the university's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. In many ways the report echoes the views of the Computing Research Association, which in July told the cybersecurity panel that the government needed to spend more on cybersecurity research and development. The association represents computer scientists in academe and in industry. Looking to Others Federal agencies assume that other agencies will provide money and grants for research on cybersecurity, the new report says, but no agency is doing enough. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, assumes that industry and the National Science Foundation will provide support for cybersecurity research, according to the cybersecurity panel. And the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency assumes that the science foundation will take up responsibility. The report recommends that the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security provide more money for research on civilian cybersecurity. The report says that researchers are discouraged from applying for cybersecurity grants through the Defense Department agency because it is focused on providing money for short-term projects that can show results in 12 to 18 months. Also, the agency's programs are increasingly classified, excluding most colleges and universities from participation, the report states. The Cyber Trust, set up by the science foundation to provide grants for cybersecurity research, has supported only 8 percent of the proposals it has received, although a quarter of the proposals were worthy of support, the report states. It recommends that the science foundation's cybersecurity budget be increased by $90-million a year. The report observes that fewer than 250 faculty members in the United States are actively involved in cybersecurity research. The federal government should step up its recruitment of cybersecurity researchers and students so that the number of scientists in the field doubles by the end of the decade, the report says. Mr. Spafford said that universities are not paying enough attention to cybersecurity research, in part because the field "doesn't fit neatly within the traditional department." Besides computer engineering and computer science, he said, information security "touches on many other academic disciplines and draws from them," including management, philosophy, and political science. From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:31:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:31:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Salon: The ideas that conquered the world: The NeoCon Reader Message-ID: The ideas that conquered the world: The NeoCon Reader http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/02/04/neocon_reader/print.html "The Neocon Reader" is must reading for liberal losers who want to get their mojo back. By Ann Marlowe 5.2.4 Why should liberal readers dip into this sampling of the other side's ideology? To save themselves. Earnestly, to remind themselves of what it might be like to offer a coherent program again. Cynically, to figure out how the other guys did it. I'm more or less a neocon myself (more libertarian on economic and drug issues, more conservative on some cultural issues) so I find both the substance and the rhetoric of many of the articles here inspiring. But even those who don't might admire the imagination, forthrightness and clarity of most of the contributors. If you're old enough to have followed politics in the '70s, you'll remember that liberals used to be the exciting ones. They were more open-minded, more imaginative and, well, sexier than conservatives. And one big reason Bush won in 2004 was that many of us who were ambivalent about the man and his politics -- I voted for Gore in 2000 -- found the Democrats and their candidate smugly self-righteous, prissy and joyless. Sure, red-staters can be smug, too, but it's as incongruous in liberals as it is in garage bands. My liberal friends asked how I could support the candidate of the Christian right, but Kerry came off as so plastic and corporate, so backpedaling and two-faced, that by election night I felt that wearing a Bush button was a punk rock gesture. If not for Christian fundamentalists, after all, we probably wouldn't have punk rock. Or rap, Goth fashion, skateboarding and lots of recent art. Strong art comes from cultural ferment, from the clash of ideas, not from homogeneity. Liberals have failed to recognize that the "diversity" they so celebrate includes people who disagree with them -- churchgoers and mosque-goers, pro-lifers and hunters. And the life has gone out of liberalism as a result. One of the less well-known contributors to "The Neocon Reader," the Portuguese political theorist Jo?o Carlos Espada, notes that the most successful liberal regimes resulted from "a combination of and a tension between religion and philosophy." "A liberal order," Espada sagely notes, "will be the more successful the less it aims at total supremacy." Those who inveigh against "the religious right" don't consider how dull a country we would have if everyone actually did think like them. A purely blue-stated America would be kind of like Europe (but, alas, without the great food and shoes). Which brings us to the annoying cult of the Continent. "Europe doesn't have Christian fundamentalists," my liberal friends sneer, but then Europe doesn't have much in the way of a living popular culture either. They import their music, fashion and dance forms either from us or various countries of color, oppression and religiosity. They imitate our streetwear, our body language and our movies, and they'd hardly have any artists at all if they didn't subsidize them. Take Berlin, vaunted as a new boho art capital. The whole city has about the same volume of cultural ferment and creativity as one square block of the East Village in the '80s. It's hard to even find a cool T-shirt there. I had no trouble at all, however, finding young people who were upset that the death penalty was applied in the Nuremberg trials. Not because they were Nazi sympathizers, but because they thought capital punishment was barbaric. And here I'd spent decades believing that the only problem with Nuremberg was that they didn't apply the death sentence to enough of the Nazis. But this Rumsfeldian moral clarity is exactly what the left now hates and eschews, to the point where no one could figure out what Kerry's policy was on much of anything except getting elected. And when the left becomes mealy-mouthed, trimming its sails to catch the faintest hint of an electoral breeze, it loses its vaunted moral superiority. Listen to Irving Kristol, the former publisher of the National Interest and the Public Interest, supporting Social Security in 1993: "The conservative hostility to social security, derived from a traditional conservative fiscal monomania, leads to political impotence and a bankrupt social policy ... If the American people want to be generous to their elderly, even to the point of some extravagance, I think it is very nice of them ... [The elderly] do not have illegitimate children, they do not commit crimes, they do not riot in the streets." You may disagree with Kristol, but you know where the hell he stands and that he's sincere. A quote beloved of Christian fundamentalists comes to mind, the one from Revelations about God spewing those who are lukewarm out of his mouth. There is nothing lukewarm about neoconservatives, and this makes the Democrats hate them even more. In fact, the main reason that neocons inspire so much venom, as British journalist Michael Gove explains in his contribution, is that they've stolen the left's thunder. "Because neoconservatism places human rights, democracy, and liberal principles at the heart of its foreign-policy vision, the left have become angered that they no longer have a monopoly on the rhetoric of values. The left cannot abide the twin reverses of losing sole possession of the moral high ground and being proved wrong in the realm of action." What is a liberal to do when a Republican president says, as ours did last week, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world?" (And what are liberals left to say when 8 million Iraqis risk their lives to show that they love liberty every bit as much as Americans?) Well, if you're desperate to differentiate your position, you can try to paint reality so that tyranny looks a little better and democracy looks a little worse. In my view, this has been the strategy of the mainstream American press ever since 9/11. Does anyone else remember how in the fall of 2001 numerous mainstream papers, most notably the New York Times and Washington Post, were anxious to bring the hardships of Taliban sympathizers and jihadi prisoners to readers' attention? The lefty pundits hadn't been able to stop the war, and their early predictions of a quagmire and heavy American losses were quickly proven ludicrous. So they switched to looking for "human rights violations" under every rock in Afghanistan. Which brings us to Iraq. Note that "The Neocon Reader" does not focus on Iraq. But those who oppose the war might profit by tracing its intellectual antecedents in this volume, as far back as Margaret Thatcher's 1996 speech proclaiming "the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction" to be "the single most awesome threat of modern times." Her examples of countries that have acquired them? "Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria." But Thatcher did not imagine the extent of neocon dominance just seven years later: "Given the intellectual climate in the West today, it is probably unrealistic to expect military intervention to remove the source of the threat, as for example against North Korea -- except perhaps when the offender invites us to do so by invading a small neighboring country. Even then, as we now know, our success in destroying Saddam's nuclear and chemical weapons capability was limited." Add to that Condoleezza Rice's October 2002 Manhattan Institute speech (notably blander and flabbier than Thatcher's), Tony Blair's April 1999 speech ("Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men -- Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic") and you have some of the key actors' thoughts. A war for oil? Readers can draw their own conclusions. And although no WMD have been found, politicians and pundits alike have to make choices under imperfect information. The neocons did the best they could with what they had. In part because politics post-9/11 has mainly meant international politics, neoconservativism is largely perceived as a foreign policy doctrine. This was not always the case, and getting the full flavor of the movement requires understanding that it was born as much in the effort to make sense of the collapse of the inner cities in the '70s and '80s and in the original culture wars of the '60s. The two earliest articles in this anthology are about domestic policy: Irving Kristol's 1971 New York Times Magazine defense of censorship of pornography, and James Q. Wilson's now-legendary 1982 Atlantic Monthly essay on urban decay, "Broken Windows." This last might be the exemplary piece here, both for its intellectual virtues and for its influence on government policy. Wilson's title refers to a theory that if a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired, all the windows in the building will soon be smashed, and his article is frequently credited with sparking the new approaches to urban order that led to the revival of New York under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. What is not so often recalled from Wilson's article is that the novel idea of placing officers on foot patrol did not actually reduce the crime rate; it only reduced citizens' perception of the crime rate. But that was enough. That turned out to be what urban vitality was about. Wilson pointed out that in the mid-20th century, the public began to view the police not as the maintainers of public order they had historically been, but as crime fighters. The problem was that they weren't nearly as good at actually apprehending criminals as they had been, in earlier times, at creating the feeling of public safety that allowed neighborhoods of poor and working-class people to flourish. The two police functions were linked, just not in the way people now thought. It wasn't that fingerprinting more and more burglars reduced burglary; it was that "serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked." But the police had more or less stopped trying to punish or prevent such behavior; doing so was now suspected as unfair, racist, judgmental and so on. And the wish to prevent this, and to decriminalize "victimless crimes" (when was the last time you saw that phrase?), led to the collapse of whole neighborhoods. Wilson's essay represents neocon thinking at its best -- not only innovative, but honest and practical. Wilson raises the inherent conflict between the desire to live in a place perceived as safe with the equally strong desire for fairness. How can we be sure that "the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry"? He admits that he is "not confident that there is a satisfactory answer." He further suggests that the precise balance between individual rights and community strength can only emerge empirically and on a case-by-case basis. This is the second point: practicality. If something doesn't work, neocons think, try something else. (Old-line conservatives are sometimes inclined to go down in noble defeat instead.) If something works, continue doing it. And don't pretend you know more than that, if you don't. "Broken Windows" is exemplary of neocon thought in another way, one honored recently as often as it is breached. That is the importance of perceptions. Here the Bush administration has fallen down badly. It doesn't matter if Iraqis are freer than they were under Saddam if they don't feel that way. It doesn't matter if the U.S. has upgraded a lot of the crumbling Iraqi infrastructure if the water and power still don't work well. The Bush administration has often been its own worst enemy in the matter of perceptions, even at the start of the war when Cheney could easily have avoided not only evil but also the appearance of evil, in the form of cronyism. Not to mention the inept handling of Abu Ghraib. Part of having respect for the electorate is having respect for perceptions and sensibilities. While I hope that Democrats will learn from neocons, and some day give us a presidential candidate so interesting and outspoken and creative that even I will think about voting for him, I hope still more strongly that Republicans won't forget why they're winning these days. Ann Marlowe is the author of "How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z" and is working on a book about love and sex in America. From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:29:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:29:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reuters: UN Treaty Writers Weigh Abortion Ban for Disabled Message-ID: UN Treaty Writers Weigh Abortion Ban for Disabled http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=594&u=/nm/20050204/hl_nm/right s_disabilities_un_dc&printer=1 Fri Feb 4, 6:49 PM ET By Irwin Arieff UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. diplomats drafting an international treaty on the rights of the disabled debated a possible ban on the abortion of fetuses with disabilities in an emotional negotiating session that ended on Friday. A working text of the convention would prohibit the termination of a pregnancy in the case of a fetus with a disability in countries where abortion was otherwise legal. "It was a very emotional argument, and if you are a person with disability and you are thinking that you might have been aborted because of your disability, it becomes a very personal issue," said New Zealand Ambassador Don MacKay. Diplomats ended up deferring action on the ban because it was too hot a topic, said MacKay, coordinator of the two-week session. "This will be one of the hardest issues to resolve. but there are a lot of really hard issues here," he said. The convention, which drafters hope will come into effect in 2008, also called on governments to provide financial support to the parents of children born with disabilities. It would require nations ratifying it to adopt laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of any form of disability, from the blind to the mentally ill. The United Nations (news - web sites) has been writing a treaty establishing the rights of the world's 600 million disabled since 2001. Ambassador Luis Gallegos of Ecuador, chairman of the drafting panel, said he hoped it would be completed by the end of 2006 and ratified by enough governments to take force in 2009 at the latest, alongside landmark U.N. conventions protecting women's and children's rights. He had previously estimated the drafting process would be completed by late 2005. Gallegos said the concept of disability and how to deal with it was rapidly evolving. The current challenge was to ensure the rights of the disabled and integrate them into society. Not that long ago, people wearing glasses could neither fly a plane nor drive a car, but now they can, he said. From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:32:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:32:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Oscar: Noble women Message-ID: Noble women http://oscar.virginia.edu/x5604.xml By Robert Brickhouse (MFA, Creative Writing '91) Posted 1/20/05 In the long quest for equal rights for women, generation after generation has lamented the supposed absence of stories celebrating womanhood in the past. Until recent decades, feminist scholars and others have assumed that accounts of female role models have been largely missing or found only as stereotypes of good, elegant behavior. But life stories of notable women, often showing them as daring leaders and innovators, have proved influential and flourished for centuries, according to a University literary scholar. English professor Alison Booth has analyzed hundreds of biographical collections about women in a newly published book and [2]online archive. Most of these forgotten collections were written by men who might appropriately be called the "lost ancestors" of today's women studies. As Booth shows in her book, "How to Make It as a Woman" (University of Chicago Press), beginning about 600 years ago, volumes collecting the life stories of exemplary women appeared in Europe and, with the help of expanding literacy and printing, gained phenomenal popularity towards the 19th century. Featuring heroines of war such as Joan of Arc and queens Elizabeth and Victoria, and honoring famous adventurers, reformers, writers and bold murderesses such as the biblical Judith, these widely read "group biographies" exerted enormous influence and furthered the progress of women's rights, Booth writes. At various times during the previous two centuries, readers of both sexes were absorbing the life stories of hundreds of interesting royal characters such as Catherine the Great of Russia, Marie Antoinette and Mary Queen of Scots, authors such as Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and leaders in science, religion, the arts and other fields. Readers today would recognize many of the most popular heroines of history, but also rediscover dozens of once-famous personalities, such as the blind Laura Bridgman, who has been replaced by Helen Keller in this sort of book, which is still frequently published. Booth traces the long history of the neglected genre beginning with Christine de Pizan's "The Book of the City of Ladies" in the 15th century, and focuses on the more than 900 all-female collections published in English during the genre's heyday between 1830 and 1940. With such titles as "Gift Book of Biography for Young Ladies," "Heroines of Modern Progress" and "Portraits of Celebrated Women," most were designed for entertainment and to instruct on praising famous women the same way that famous men have long been praised. In the 19th-century collections, "the obscure saintly woman drops out and the career woman comes in," Booth said. "They are a preparation for women's movement role models and young women modeled careers on them. They helped change expectations for women's roles." By the 20th century, books took a tone of advocacy, putting forth the political rights of groups. One chapter of "How to Make It as a Woman" focuses on the collected lives of African-American women such as Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells. These collections were intended not only to be reliable guides to female excellence but also as contributions to national history in England and America, Booth said. They are not as numerous as the many life stories of men throughout the centuries, but they were still important role models for young women, she said. "We have forgotten most of these books, and many of the women in them. They show there has always been a lot of recognition of women who broke the mold of good wife and mother. I like to ask how and why these records get lost, as much as what purposes they served in their time." Booth's annotated bibliography is [3]online at the U.Va. Electronic Text Center. She plans for the project to continue to grow and eventually include some of the original texts. Often still available in libraries today, many of the group biographies were lavishly illustrated and aimed at male and female readers. The bibliography lists 930 all-female biography collections published in the United States and Britain between 1830, when both book publishing and women's education began to gain strength, and 1940, when the modern publication boom brought countless stories of women's lives. Most of the 19th-century and early-20th-century books were written by men, often ministers writing to earn money, said Booth, an authority on British and American literature of the period. These authors and their hundreds of collections helped lay the foundation for today's women's studies, she noted. Some pioneering feminist writers, including Anna Jameson and Virginia Woolf, contributed to the development of the genre. Coming out at annual rates from 10 to 40 times per year, the biographical accounts took women seriously, recommended the importance of education and showed that women have played key roles in history. They also showed that there were many variations to strong womanhood. Often nationalistic in tone, "they are proud of their women. They are kind of boasting about `our' women," Booth said. Yet a few "exotic" women, such as Pocahontas, were included as well. Often given as school prizes or sold as coffee-table books, they told the lives of role models -- such as famous nurses Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, who were not only pioneers of their profession but also great administrators, similar to the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry -- as proof that women could change public policy. The author of a study of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot and co-editor of "Norton Introduction to Literature," Booth teaches a course in biography and autobiography. She said these collections of women are more effective in breaking the stereotypes of "good" or "noble" womanhood because the biographies are presented as a group, showing variety and contrast among the names, images and stories. Her curiosity was sparked when she began to notice how widespread these short biographical collections are. She began to read them and "it was really a lot of fun. It was detective work. The books can be beautiful, and the stories are like great historical fiction." Searching first through online catalogues and then with visits to major libraries, she has now produced what is the first full interpretation of the genre. But her news shouldn't be surprising, she added, because written accounts of strong and famous women are found in societies all over the world. "As soon as you have a literate culture with a sense of its own history, you have a collection of exemplary women," she said. _________________________________________________________________ Robert Brickhouse (MFA, Creative Writing '91) is a freelance writer in Charlottesville, formerly with the U.Va. Office of News Services. References 3. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/WomensBios/ 4. http://oscar.virginia.edu/x2751.xml From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:46:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:46:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Daily Kos: Framing Idea: Lies of the Bush Administration Message-ID: Framing Idea: Lies of the Bush Administration http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/28/231424/939 [Article by Jim Lobe appended.] Who would have thought that a secular Jew, 1938 refugee from Germany, is the inspiration for American fascism?? Read on. by Subversive Fri Jan 28th, 2005 I recently read that one of the most influential philosophers to the neoconservative movement was a guy named Leo Strauss, and that one of the key features of his philosophy was that he believed that those in charge, who really know what is going on, need to lie to the masses for their own good because only they know what is really best for everyone. ?Well, hey, look at all the lies of the Bush Administration... ...Saddam has WMDs, Saddam has ties to al Quaeda, Social Security is in a crisis, NCLB is working, etc., all repeated ad nauseam on Fox News and via payola until the masses believe it "for their own good." ?This is more than just putting one's best foot forward or exaggerating one's better qualities and successes--this is part of a strategy based of lying to the masses.? Those of us on the left aren't really the ones being lied to because we already know Bush is full of it and he doesn't really care what we think. ?But there are a great many on the right ("paleoconservatives") and in the middle out there who have no idea that the neoconservatives consider them to be the ignorant masses who deserve to be lied to for their own good. Personally, I'd get really pissed off if I learned that someone who I respected and believed in was just misleading me because they thought I was just a stupid peon who didn't know what was good for himself. ?And I think there just might be a way to help these people learn what is really going on. Hitting them over the head with it won't work because it is just too polarizing. ?But maybe some of them could figure it out for themselves if we just popularize the name of Leo Strauss a bit. Maybe we could do this by reframing general references to Bush's lies, whenever and wherever they occur in the media, as something such as "Straussian tactics." ?Let people start speculating about the influence of Leo Strauss behind every Bush lie, let them start paying even more attention to Bush's lies, and perhaps encourage people do some simple research on Strauss for themselves. ?We don't have to polarize people by accusing Bush of lying everytime that he does so, perhaps we only need to publicly speculate about the influence of founding neoconservative strategist, Leo Strauss, and his many pupils. Instead of calling a misleading statement by the Bush Administration a "lie," speculate about the "Straussian tactics" behind the deception. This is my first diary entry and this idea still needs some work, but maybe someone reading this will have something interesting to add. ?Does anyone have any idea how to put this idea more in the format of a Lakoff-style frame??? I'd also be particularly interested in reading comments from students of political philosophy and others who may already be aware of Strauss' influence. ?For everyone else, here are some weblinks to the neoconservative philosophy of Leo Strauss to get you started: http://www.alternet.org/story/15935 [see below] http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/49/articles/leo_strauss/noflash.html http://tinyurl.com/68nt3 (Googlecache of antiwar.com) http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=Leo_Strauss http://www.straightdope.com/columns/031212.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception By Jim Lobe, AlterNet Posted on May 19, 2003, Printed on January 29, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/ What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war? A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done - people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect. The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) - an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq. Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky's alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973. Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) (home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney), and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger. Strauss' philosophy is hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men - as is obvious in Shulsky's 1999 essay titled "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author Schmitt "criticize America's intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued that Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception." Rule One: Deception It's hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical - divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right - the right of the superior to rule over the inferior." This dichotomy requires "perpetual deception" between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says, "The people are told what they need to know and no more." While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury, author of 'Leo Strauss and the American Right' (St. Martin's 1999). Second Principle: Power of Religion According to Drury, Strauss had a "huge contempt" for secular democracy. Nazism, he believed, was a nihilistic reaction to the irreligious and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic. Among other neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control. At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud." As Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine points out, "Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers." "Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing,'' Drury says, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats. Bailey argues that it is this firm belief in the political utility of religion as an "opiate of the masses" that helps explain why secular Jews like Kristol in 'Commentary' magazine and other neoconservative journals have allied themselves with the Christian Right and even taken on Darwin's theory of evolution. Third Principle: Aggressive Nationalism Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united - and they can only be united against other people." Not surprisingly, Strauss' attitude toward foreign policy was distinctly Machiavellian. "Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat," Drury wrote in her book. "Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured (emphases added)." "Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in," says Drury. The idea easily translates into, in her words, an "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," of the kind that has been advocated by neocon groups like PNAC and AEI scholars - not to mention Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who have called for a world order dominated by U.S. military power. Strauss' neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a "national destiny" - as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983 - that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a "myopic national security." As to what a Straussian world order might look like, the analogy was best captured by the philosopher himself in one of his - and student Allen Bloom's - many allusions to Gulliver's Travels. In Drury's words, "When Lilliput was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect." The image encapsulates the neoconservative vision of the United States' relationship with the rest of the world - as well as the relationship between their relationship as a ruling elite with the masses. "They really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but they're conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy," Drury says. From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:37:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:37:48 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Open Center: Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right: A Two-Day Conference, April 29-30 Message-ID: Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right: A Two-Day Conference, April 29-30 http://www.opencenter.org/Trainings/Religious_Right_Agenda.html Co-sponsored by the NY Open Center and CUNY Graduate Center Public Programs with Karen Armstrong, Joan Bokaer, Chip Berlet, Katherine Yurica, John Sugg, Hugh Urban, Frederick Clarkson, Jeffrey Sharlet, Skipp Porteous & Charles Strozier "Until progressives come to understand what [fundamentalists] read, hear, are told and deeply believe, we cannot understand American politics, much less be effective." - Joe Bageant Most Americans outside the Bible Belt have little idea of the beliefs held by millions of fundamentalist churchgoers. We have an almost total lack of awareness of the rise of Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism, forms of theology that advocate a biblical vision of God's kingdom on earth. Some fundamentalists also foresee events such as The Rapture, the Times of Tribulation, Armageddon, and the Second Coming of Christ as we enter The End Days. This conference will give rigorous attention to the worldview of Dominionism, its influence in contemporary political culture and its agenda for America. While not all Christian fundamentalists are Dominionists, Dominionism's influence is powerful and growing. Its adherents play a significant role in secretive organizations such as The Council on National Policy, which exerts a strong influence on the strategy of the religious right The 2004 election tells us that socially conscious citizens need to awaken to the ambitions of this influential religious movement. What do fundamentalist theologies advocate regarding theocracy, abortion and homosexuality? What is the nature of the world order under God's law that they anticipate? How do many fundamentalists interpret the role of Israel? How does this affect U.S. policy? Why are so many fundamentalists opposed to environmentalism and the UN? Why are millions in America drawn to this form of belief, and how can we come to understand them? Join us for this important conference as America grapples with the growing influence of fundamentalist religion and its political goals. Clearly, something within this movement addresses the need for spirituality and community in an America submerged under materialism and consumerism. The time has arrived to take the ambitions and prophecies of extreme Christian fundamentalism seriously, and to examine the compatibility of these beliefs with democracy as we currently know it. ________________________________ Presentations include: Fundamentalism: The Fear and the Rage - Karen Armstrong The Rise of Dominionism in the U.S. Government - Joan Bokaer Millennialist and Apocalyptic Influences on Dominionism - Chip Berlet Learning about the Christian Right, and What in the World to Do - Frederick Clarkson The Real Hidden Religious Agenda: The Theocratic States of America - John Sugg Is an Unholy American Theocracy Here? - Katherine Yurica On the Psychology and Theocracy of George W. Bush: Reflections in a Culture of Fear - Charles Strozier Christian Jihad - Skipp Porteous Jesus Plus Nothing: Elite Fundamentalism, Pragmatic Dominionism - Jeff Sharlet Religion and Secrecy in the Bush Administration - Hugh Urban ________________________________ Registration Information: Friday evening, April 29, 7:30-10pm Saturday, April 30, 10am-5:30pm 05WEC58TZI Full Conference Nonmembers $85/Members $75 05WEC58TAI Friday only Nonmembers $22/Members $20 05WEC58TBI Saturday only Nonmembers $75/Members $65 Limited scholarships are available Supporting donations are welcomed! http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cepp/ From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:43:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:43:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Al-Jazeerah: KGB Chieftain finds Home at US Homeland Security By Mike Whitney Message-ID: KGB Chieftain finds Home at US Homeland Security By Mike Whitney http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2005%20Opinion%20Editorials/January/22o/KGB%20Chieftain%20finds%20Home%20at%20US%20Homeland%20Security%20By%20Mike%20Whitney.htm Opinion Editorials, January 2005 [I have not seen any confirmation of this.] By Mike Whitney Al-Jazeerah, January 22, 2005 "Security and liberty go hand-in-hand. Members of Congress, like too many Americans, don't understand that society with no constraints on its government cannot be secure. History proves that societies crumble when governments become more powerful than the people and private institutions." -- Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) Why would Homeland Security hire former Stasi chief, Markus Wolfe and former head of the KGB, General Yevgeni Primakov? Is this part of the Bush anti-terror strategy? After all, Wolfe is the man who is credited with building up the feared East German secret police that was responsible for the disappearance and deaths of thousands of citizens. And, Primakov's record is not any better. As skipper of the KGB he was driving force behind the machinery of state terror; a legacy that still has a chilling affect on many Russians. Now, apparently, they've found a new place to hang their hats at Homeland Security. Or have they? Perhaps, the numerous stories on the internet are just fabrications intended to mislead independent research. That's certainly one possibility. But, consider this; for those who have followed the activities of the current administration (the torture, the deception, the death squads, the destruction of Falluja) stories like this are difficult to discount. As a matter of fact, the hiring of Primakov and Wolfe seems fairly consistent with the long-term goals of the Bush team. We already know that there's a power struggle within the government from the number of top agents who have been jettisoned at the CIA. Why not develop a new Security apparatus under the auspices of a proven loyalist like Michael Chertoff? (the new appointee at Homeland Security.) That would require the expertise of a couple of old pros who can help-out with the basics and get the machinery of state repression clanking along? The move is not unprecedented either. As Noam Chomsky points out in SS officer Klaus Barbie, "The Butcher of Lyon" was employed by the US Army after WW2 to "spy on the French". Col. Eugene Kolb of Army counterintelligence later admitted that Barbie's "skills were badly needed...His activities had been directed against the underground French Communist party and the resistance' who were targeted for repression by the American liberators". ("What Uncle Sam Really Wants") Other Nazi leaders were also used in counterintelligence operations in Italy. They were regarded as "specialists in anti-resistance activities." Primakov has allegedly been hired to oversee the issuing of federal IDs. Now that the new Intelligence Reform Act has passed, (uniform) federal standards will be required for licenses within two years. All the citizens personal, credit and biometric history will be stored on one small document. No one will drive a car or get on a plane without one. Don't leave home without it, or else. The new federal ID will be required in all financial transactions. Details will be electronically transferred to Office of Internal Security (which falls under the authority of Homeland Security) which will keep "threat files" on each citizen. Ultimately, the ID will be used as an "internal passport" (Primakov's words) so the government can keep tabs on the movements of every citizen; to keep us safe, of course. Sound Orwellian? This is what our "freedom loving" Congressmen and Senators overwhelmingly supported in the Intelligence Reform Act. Most of its provisions were written nearly a full year earlier as part of Patriot Act 2. It slipped by the media without a whimper of dissent. There's also plenty of "enhanced powers" for the President; like the ability to incarcerate suspects indefinitely without charges. But, then, George would never abuse that authority, would he? Apparently, there's a Patriot Act 3 in the hopper, too. Investigative journalist Al Martin believes that this new addition will be intended to "establish the internal mechanism to coordinate, as an official function of state, a system of informants." "System of informants"? The land of the free and the home of the snitches. This must be where a man with Markus Wolfe's unique talents fits in. As Stasi king-pin he reportedly groomed an impressive network of moles, finks and stool-pigeons. His professional know-how will probably be soothing balm to the quick-learners at Homeland Security. It's bon voyage to the enemies of the State. Of course, all of this could just be more paranoid, conspiratorial claptrap? After sitting through 45 minutes of President Windy's delusional ramblings of "global liberation", that seems rather unlikely. Our national nightmare is grounded in some very real changes in the law, and we already know how far these people will go. The political remedies to the Bush onslaught are diminishing by the day and the observations of Texas congressman Ron Paul are looking increasingly more prophetic. Paul said, "Those who believe a police-state can't happen here are poor students of history. Every government, democratic or not, is capable of tyranny. We must understand this if we hope to remain a free people." --Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) "It Can't Happen Here" Thanks to Al Martins "Get Ready for the USSA" (United Soviet States of America) "Behind the scenes in the Beltway" From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:26:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:26:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Mag. Letters: The Making of a Child Molester Message-ID: The New York Times > Magazine > Letters http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/magazine/06LETTERS.html 5.2.6 Readers said Daniel Bergner's account of a cybermolester was as compelling as it was disturbing. Many shared the writer's reservations about the level of responsibility that the offender took for his acts; some were skeptical about a penalty -- therapy and probation -- that did not seem to fit the crime. _________________________________________________________________ The Making of a Molester Daniel Bergner (Jan. 23) did an outstanding job of presenting the inner thoughts of a convicted child molester. I felt ambivalence and sadness toward Roy. After a great effort at rehabilitation, he seems to have no grasp of the enormity of his actions. Instead, he blames not only his victim but also her mother, the Internet, pornography, the media and society in general. What makes me most sad for Roy, and more important for his victim, is that he never owns up to the truth of what he did. He seems shocked and surprised to be a sexual predator convicted of his crime. Jennifer Liquori Your article suggests that pedophiles are "made": ordinary citizens transformed into predators by external actions as, with Roy, the comments of a spouse about her daughter reaching puberty. This is contrary to my 30 years' experience prosecuting child abusers. Neither comments nor the Internet "make" pedophiles. They exist among us, disguised as ordinary people, until they reveal themselves to be the criminals they really are. In other words, Roy wasn't made he was simply unmasked. Roy is not unlike the defendants arrested in undercover Internet stings conducted by my office: defendants with no prior criminal record who appeared to lead normal lives. Many admitted abusing children previously. And sex-offender probation didn't stop a 42-year-old teacher from soliciting a minor a second time. If we fail to recognize that a pedophile always was and always will be a pedophile, we do so at our children's peril. Jeanine Pirro District Attorney, Westchester County White Plains, N.Y. I very much respect the therapeutic focus on learning appropriate social skills and learning how to stop negative behaviors by understanding and responding to triggers, but I see problems. Both Roy and his therapist are placed in a very difficult contractual situation. The therapist is responsible to the probation department. The patient (probationer) is very much aware of this arrangement. How can the therapist expect total honesty in treatment if the patient knows that the therapist reports to the probation officer and if whatever the patient says can be used to take away privileges including time on probation? This is a Catch-22. Cal Flachner New York If one of the key factors in these atrocities is the blurring between fiction and reality in the molester's mind, as Bergner suggests, then what better way to bring reality back, front and center (for both the reader and the molester), than to focus on the way real human lives are brutalized and permanently scarred? I am no therapist, but I believe that Patrick Liddle, the group's therapist, ought to spend less time having these men visualize "a field of tall grass" and confessing their fantasies and more time having them hear from the voices of those they have hurt. Eileen O'Brien Williamsburg, Va. While studies of deviant sexual-arousal patterns are interesting, arousal is only a small part of what makes a molester. What defines a healthy and mature person is not simply the ability to control what we think and feel, but to control what we do with what we think and feel. It is possible to have "socially inappropriate" feelings, and all of us do. It is the loss of awareness of, or worse, indifference to, the impact of our acts on others that makes us monsters. Barbara Zevin Roslyn, N.Y. Bergner establishes that inappropriate erotic thinking can manifest in many individuals, and then he asks why some cross "that clear line" and act on their thoughts. If you stand back from the content of the crime and look at the broader narrative of Roy's life, you see a remarkable absence of "clear lines" all around: like the early involvement with his victim's mother, who was the wife of his childhood friend; his employer's and co-workers' remarkable blindness to the character pathology despite adjudication and sentencing; his new wife's blindness to the significance of her own dissonance, despite saying, "I can't understand how he could write crap like that to a little girl." The run for the fence at the end of the story is the first evidence of any awareness of a clear line in many aspects of Roy's life. Denise Legacki Tompkins Naperville, Ill. I hope the low recidivism rates reported in the article will be interpreted cautiously. The recidivism rate will appear reassuringly low if the study doesn't take into account the molester's window of opportunity to commit another crime. Obviously, if a person is doing some serious jail time, he doesn't have the chance to commit more crimes, and this can skew the results. Mary Kennedy Wilmington, Del. The magazine is to be commended for publishing Bergner's article. Serious public discussion of this topic is virtually nonexistent. There was an attempt to treat this subject in the cinema as far back as 1961, and, given the era and circumstances, it was way ahead of its time. Readers might be interested in this British film, "The Mark," starring Rod Steiger and Stuart Whitman. Steiger plays a psychiatrist and Whitman the part of a man released after serving a sentence in prison for intent to molest a child. The depiction is unflinching. The film offers no easy answer there is none. But it does offer hope. Conrad P. Rutkowski Spring Valley, N.Y. [other letters omitted] From checker at panix.com Sun Feb 6 16:35:59 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2005 11:35:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Cases: A Pill's Surprises, for Patient and Doctor Alike Message-ID: Cases: A Pill's Surprises, for Patient and Doctor Alike NYT January 25, 2005 By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. As a psychopharmacologist, I know that every patient responds slightly differently to medication. But it wasn't until I met Susan that I understood just how differently. She'd come to see me because she was depressed, and I'd successfully treated her with a course of Zoloft, a popular antidepressant. But as often happens, Susan's desire for sex had vanished along with her depressed mood. "I kind of miss it, but I feel really bad for my husband, who's getting very frustrated," she said. The sexual side effects of antidepressants like Zoloft and Prozac - the class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.'s - are well known. The drugs frequently cause diminished libido, erectile dysfunction in men, and delayed orgasm or an inability to climax at all in women. The same flooding of the brain with serotonin that alleviates depression leads to sexual effects in many patients. Early on, the rates of sexual side effects from S.S.R.I.'s reported in the medical literature were quite low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent. But clinicians knew better. Most of their patients reported some sexual effects, and it quickly became clear that the early reports were wrong. The reason for this error was simple. Early clinical trials of the drugs did not look for sexual side effects; they just recorded problems that patients spontaneously reported. Because most patients are reluctant to bring up any sexual side effects on their own, the researchers got the false impression that these drugs had little effect on sexuality. When the subjects were specifically asked about sexual side effects, the rates rose to 40 percent to 50 percent. Susan fell into that unlucky percentage, and she asked me if anything could be done. There were three possible approaches, I told her. She could stop the drug from time to time, a strategy that might temporarily restore her sex drive but could cause discontinuation symptoms; she could lower the dose of the antidepressant, which might provoke a relapse of depression; or we could try to counteract the side effects with another medication. A temporary escape didn't appeal to Susan, so we decided on the third approach, an antidote. The question was, Which one? Serotonin-blocking drugs like Periactin, an antihistamine, treat sexual side effects, but they can also undo the drugs' antidepressant effects. I decided to prescribe Wellbutrin, a different class of antidepressant that has shown some ability to counteract sexual dysfunction caused by S.S.R.I.'s. Little did I know. Two weeks later, Susan called from her cellphone to say that the antidote was working. While shopping, she said, she spontaneously had an orgasm that had lasted on and off for nearly two hours . She was more delighted than alarmed, but I was stunned. I have had my share of therapeutic surprises, but this was hard to believe. Was this a medical emergency or unrepeatable fluke that Susan needn't worry about? When I saw her the next day in my office, she was calm and somewhat amused by my concern. After all, since when is an orgasm a cause for alarm? I was worried, though, that the addition of Wellbutrin had set off an episode of mania, an effect that antidepressants can have in up to 5 percent of patients. In that case, her prolonged orgasm might be a symptom of hypersexuality, common in mania. But Susan didn't seem either manic or depressed. It seems that for her, the Wellbutrin just had an extreme sexually enhancing effect. Several colleagues told me about patients of theirs who had experienced heightened sexual desire on Wellbutrin, but none of the reports came close to Susan's. That Wellbutrin can enhance sexual pleasure isn't surprising: it increases the activity of dopamine, a key neurotransmitter in the brain's reward pathway. In fact, drugs of abuse, like cocaine, alcohol and opiates, release dopamine in this circuit - and so does sex. A year has passed without a recurrence of this surprising side effect. But Susan is enjoying sex now - clearly more than she did before she became depressed. Because this was her first episode of major depression, the chance of a recurrence was only about 50 percent, so I suggested stopping the antidepressant. She liked that idea, but then paused and asked, "Do I have to stop the Wellbutrin, too?" We both laughed. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/health/25case.html From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 20:31:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 15:31:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] American Psychological Society: Think Fast: Reaction Time and IQ May Predict Long Life Message-ID: Think Fast: Reaction Time and IQ May Predict Long Life http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2005/pr050202.cfm [The report itself is at http://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/ps/reaction_time.pdf .] News Release, 5.2.2 The ancient Greeks imagined three Fates - one spun the thread of life, the second measured its length, and the third snipped it off. Science has tried to provide more plausible (if less poetic) reasons for why some of us live longer than others. Now two researchers in Scotland have made a discovery even the Greeks couldn't have imagined: Reaction time may be a core indicator of long life. Ian Deary, University of Edinburgh, and Geoff Der, MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Glasgow, report on a study from the MRC Unit that measured both the IQs and the reaction times of middle-aged subjects. Both tests of mental ability were associated with life span, but reaction time was the stronger indicator. These findings, presented in the study "Reaction Time Explains IQ's Association with Death," will appear in the January 2005 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society. The new research builds on earlier studies showing that people with lower IQs tend to die at younger ages than those with higher IQs. Deary and Der, however, wanted to use a more fundamental measure of mental ability - which they define as efficiency in processing information. They thought IQ tests might relate to physical health because people with higher IQs typically are more likely to be in occupations with safer environments. Reaction time is moderately related to IQ, but is a simpler assessment of the brain's information-processing ability - one that doesn't bear so much on other, possibly confounding factors like knowledge, education, or background. To test their theory they examined data from the MRC Unit that, back in 1988, had 412 male and 486 female 54- to 58-year-olds living in west Scotland. The participants took both an IQ test measuring their verbal and numeric cognitive abilities and a reaction-time test that measured how quickly they pressed a button after seeing a number on a screen. The researchers also recorded the participants' gender, employment, education, and smoking status. Over the next 14 years, 185 participants died, and Deary and Der compared their test results to see if the IQ or reaction-time responses predicted their mortality. The researchers learned that those with higher IQ scores lived longer, a result consistent with other studies. The study also showed that characteristics significantly related to death included male gender and smoking. But Deary and Der also found something new - faster reaction times seemed an even better predictor of long life than IQ. There are different ways the results could be interpreted. Slow reaction times could reflect a degeneration of the brain, which in turn could reflect degenerating physical health (an obvious possible cause of earlier mortality). But in another study the IQs of 11-year-old subjects also were found to predict life span length, just as accurately as it did for the middle-aged participants in Deary and Der's 14-year study. Future studies of reaction times in younger-aged people may shed more light on the IQ-mortality connection. Professor Deary said, "It is only in the last few years that we have come to realize that IQ-type scores are related to mortality, even when the mental tests were taken decades before death. Now, several research teams have replicated this finding. What we need to do now is understand it. We and others are following up several possible explanations for this intriguing new association between intelligence and survival." For more information, contact Deary at [13]i.deary at ed.ac. A full copy of the article is available at the APS Media Center at [14]www.psychologicalscience.org/media. Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. The American Psychological Society represents psychologists advocating science-based research in the public's interest. References 13. mailto:i.deary at ed.ac From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 20:32:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 15:32:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: Throw-away babies Message-ID: Throw-away babies http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2087590&window_type=print Frank Dikotter 12 January 1996 The growth of eugenic policies and practices in China The People's Republic of China recently passed eugenic legislation to prevent what are called "inferior births" from becoming a burden on the state and society. As Chen Muhua, Vice-President of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and President of the Women's Federation, declared: "Eugenics not only affects the success of the state and the prosperity of the race, but also the well-being of the people and social stability." Although such ideas have long been discredited in the West on both ethical and scientific grounds, eugenic laws in China have been implemented at the provincial level since 1988, while first drafts of the present national law were made some time ago. As a development which potentially endows medical authorities with the power to grant or deny life to millions of children, its medical, ethical and political implications deserve to be more closely scrutinized than has so far been the case. Whether or not all the allegations made by the Channel 4 programme Return to the Dying Room will stand up to closer scrutiny, it is beyond doubt that the increase over the past few years in the number of children suffering from minor accidents of birth who are abandoned is closely related to the spread of eugenic ideas in China. The control of the "quality" of births is thought in China to be as important as the control of "quantity": both have regularly been heralded as the twin goals in the regulation of reproduction since Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978. The new eugenics law, which came into effect in June 1995, is not a random addition to the arsenal of regulations aimed at the control of the population's fertility, but an intrinsic part of population policies which has been in the making for over a decade. The term "eugenics", it should be emphasized from the outset, is not without its particular problems: there is generally no consensus as to what precisely constitutes "eugenics" or what characterizes its relation to contemporary genetics. Conflicting definitions of the term often reflect broader political positions, and its use in Europe generally expresses fears about direct government programmes. In China, the term used since the 1920s literally translates as "science for superior birth". In contrast to the West, China made no attempt after the Second World War to distinguish between "eugenics", a concept identified with Nazi policies, and "genetic counselling", meant to make medical information about reproductive health accessible to responsible individuals. A closer look at the recent legislation reveals both positive efforts to improve the accessibility of genetic counselling and worrying signs of official efforts to curb individual rights in the name of a genetic imperative. The 1995 law, renamed "Maternal and Infant Law" after protests against a preliminary draft entitled "Eugenics Law", supports the systematic "implementation of premarital medical checkups" in order to detect whether one of the couple suffers from "serious hereditary", ven-ereal or reproductive disorders as well as "relevant mental disorders" or "legal contagious diseases"; it suggests that those "deemed unsuitable for reproduction" should become celibate, or undergo sterilization or abortion in order to prevent "inferior births". The law explicitly points to voluntary sterilization and individual choice; the question is what importance will be given to "individual choice" in a regime that has never hesitated to imprison citizens who disagree with official policy, or to use military force to suppress dissent, as it demonstrated in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. In particular, one wonders what weight will be given to the "individual choice" of people defined as "mentally ill" and others deemed "unfit" by medical authorities and local cadres, and how these "choices" could be respected without the necessary legal framework. It is easy to slip from voluntary sterilization to compulsion, and one fundamental difference between genetic counselling and eugenics is precisely that the former informs families of potential risks; whereas the latter instructs them whether or not to bear children. The coercive implementation of birth-control programmes so far indicates that eugenic legislation will be carried out without any respect for couples' wishes. The second most troublesome aspect of Chinese eugenic legislation is that the right to reproduce, or even the right to exist, is determined by ill-defined and misguided ideas about "genetic fitness". There is a lack of a clear definition of what constitutes or should be considered, for instance, a "severe" handicap. Down's syndrome and hydrocephalia are often given as examples of "severe inherited diseases", but so are haemophilia, mucopolysaccharidosis or even diabetes; it has been suggested that foetuses which are found to be affected by any of these disorders by a DNA test after the first four months of pregnancy should be "instantly aborted". No definition is provided for the terms "mental retardation" and "mental illness", often referred to in official statements and eugenic legislation. There is a wide range of mental disabilities, many of which are only partially understood, and few forms of mental illness have been clearly demonstrated to have a genetic cause, yet political and medical authorities do not hesitate to prescribe sterilization for those judged to be "retarded". In 1988, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of Gansu Province passed the country's first law prohibiting mentally retarded people from having children. The law was directed at people whose condition was either inherited or a consequence of marriage between close relatives, and it decreed that they would not be allowed to marry until they had undergone sterilization surgery. Those who were married before the promulgation of the law would also be sterilized, and pregnant women diagnosed as suffering from mental retardation were required to have their pregnancies terminated. It remains to be established how many women have been forced to undergo sterilization or forced abortion in Gansu following this provincial law, but the crucial point is that the government has only recently started to recognize that a lack of iodine, rather than "defective" genes, is at the root of many mental-health problems in the countryside. This example indicates the human cost of the confusions which are frequently made in China between the dietary, environmental and genetic factors of population health. Such problems are compounded by a lack of discussion of the benign nature or relatively easy therapeutic treatment of some of the diseases that are represented as grave threats to social welfare. In general, both medical literature and official legislation rarely focus on specific cases in which the unique circumstances of individual cases need to be taken into account. Discussions about the ethical implications of eugenic laws, moreover, are hampered when such terms as "ethical" and "human" are viewed with suspicion in a socialist regime that dismisses such values as "bourgeois". Even in those rare cases of a demonstrable one-to-one correspondence between a gene and a defect, sterilization will not always reduce its incidence in the population. If an undesirable genetic trait is recessive or polygenic, sterilization is an entirely utopian measure, in particular since a person with such a hereditary disability is more often than not the offspring of normal parents. For example, to rid the "gene pool" in Britain of the recessive form of PKU, a metabolic disorder which can lead to mental deficiency, as Lionel Penrose calculated over half a century ago, 1 per cent of the British population would have to be sterilized. The absence of clear definitions of health and ill-health in eugenic legislation in China logically entails that every single individual's reproduction should be controlled, since all human beings are the bearer of some sort of "defective" gene. This indicates that the reasons for promoting such legislation may have more to do with politics than medicine, as it gives enormous power to local cadres and medical experts, a suspicion confirmed by the insertion of a clause in the 1995 law which notes that it is sufficient for a doctor merely to "suspect" a pregnant woman of foetal abnormality to recommend diagnostic tests and possibly the termination of pregnancy. Eugenic measures, furthermore, are constantly justified in the name of future generations. Abstractions like the "race", "future generations" and the "gene pool" are raised above the rights and needs of individuals and their families, just as claims about "the state", "the revolution" or "the party" have been used in the past in the political repression of population. How are these eugenic policies initiated? In the case of birth-control programmes, it has been suggested that hard-line policies generally emerged from a small group of high functionaries, while relaxations and accommodations were negotiated at local level by family-planning personnel and by specialists in research institutes. Similarly, it might be hypothesized that eugenic policies are resisted by the population at large. Li Peng, a high official who was also directly involved in the events in Tiananmen Square, is certainly one of the most open and active supporters of eugenics. ("Idiots breed idiots" is perhaps one of his most notorious public statements.) Many of the officials behind the promotion of eugenic legislation, in particular Peng Peiyun, head of the State Family Planning Committee, Chen Muhua, Chairperson of a Eugenics Symposium in 1989, and Chen Minzhang, the Minister of Public Health, all have close ties with Li Peng, confirming the impression that eugenic policies are supported by a small fraction of conservative party officials. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that these policies are being effectively opposed at grass-roots level; there is ample evidence to suggest that eugenics is supported by specialists and medical authorities throughout much of the country. As in Nazi Germany, the eugenic ideas of senior bureaucrats have found widespread support in research institutions and among population specialists, many of whom have been put into powerful positions of responsibility after decades of official ostracism before the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping. It would be equally misleading to think that research circles retain some independence from the government. The close relationship between research institutions and government in China is well known, while formal government control and informal personal networks contribute to the integration of research with government policy. Eugenic legislation, furthermore, thrives on social prejudice, in particular, folk models of inheritance which see disorders as running in family lines. The one-child family policy has effectively prepared the terrain for a better acceptance of eugenic legislation among large sectors of the urban population; many families which are allowed to have one child only are keen to avoid "defective" births themselves. A prolific medical discourse has responded to the general public's concern for healthy offspring, a virtuous child or even a genetically improved line of descent. Numerous pamphlets of scientific vulgarization thus dispense advice on the art of engendering a prodigy child, suggesting that the eugenic vision of the government is shared to a great extent by a population which is anxious to avoid "inferior births". The lack of any effort to establish guidelines on what constitutes a "birth defect" is compounded by social prejudice, in particular the cultural preference for a son; a female embryo might be considered a defect in itself. Although the government has issued a ban on tests to determine the sex of an embryo, it should not surprise us that the number of abandoned female children with minor defects, such as a harelip or a cleft palate both only require a minor surgical operation to be corrected has soared over the past few years. Tens of thousands of children are born with minor genetic illnesses every year, and many are abandoned by their parents. "Rabbit children", suffering from congenitally deformed mouths, and "whitoes", as children with albinism are called, are seen to be a burden on parents and on the state. Throw-away children, most of them girls, end up and die in crowded welfare centres and orphanages. Some lucky children are adopted by couples from Hong Kong, Singapore or Europe, but the majority remain patients for life. Serious birth defects are one of the most tragic and painful challenges any individual family can face, and all possible ethical considerations and medical options should be carefully considered and openly debated in order to reach some sort of consensus. The present eugenic legislation does not reflect any consensus; it is imposed by those who politically benefit from it. The argument that concern with human rights is a typically eurocentric activity, and that people in China find authoritarian policies relatively more tolerable, disregards the great diversity of cultural traditions in China. Some supporters of authoritarian approaches underline the sense of discipline which is thought to be inherent to "Confucian traditions". Even if one could find evidence for this in China's vast cultural heritage, it is not clear how that would compare to other cultures which have similarly emphasized the need for self-discipline, from Saint Augustine to the Protestant work ethic. Reproductive freedom is not the prerogative of a few privileged cultures, but an inalienable part of the individual rights which the government in China has consistently suppressed ever since it came to power in 1949. Coercive methods are only possible in non-democratic states, and the sterilization programmes used in India during the "emergency period" in the 1970s were over-whelmingly rejected when general elections were finally held. In China, too, the socialist regime knows that its policies would be directly attacked if democratic elections and legal freedom existed. Eugenics legislation is not only an important part of the population policies which have been actively pursued during the Deng Xiaoping era; it constitutes a fundamental aspect of a more general attempt to regulate the sexuality of each and every individual. Instead of distinguishing between individual sexual preferences, lines have been drawn between procreative and nonprocreative acts that are administered in the name of a higher entity, be it "the nation", "the state", or "future generations". Non-procreative forms of sexuality in particular pre-marital and extra-marital sex are not recognized as legitimate expressions of individual desire, but as psychologically disturbed and socially deviant acts that should be suppressed in the interest of the nation. Medical technologies have been mobilized in the official campaign against undisciplined sexuality in young people. It has been reported that extreme methods of "scientific control" have actually been used, including psychological and medical treatment for young people who are thought to suffer from "sexual hyperfunction" and "sexual addiction" (one article has recommended the regulation of the level of sex hormones for dangerous sex criminals and for sexually active young girls). The medical consequences of the government's efforts to restrict sexuality to a marital context have a direct impact on the population's health. To an even greater degree than in the West, for instance, HIV/AIDS is represented as a disease caused by sexual promiscuity instead of a virus which can potentially be contracted by every sexually active person. Until last month, unambiguous and clear statements about the protective value of condoms could not be found, and the human cost of the systematic campaign of misinformation carried out by medical institutions and government officials in China still remains to be estimated. Ignorance is already the main reason for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in China. The regulation of sexuality in the name of the nation, rather than the control of disease for the sake of individual health, has thus been the ultimate objective of legal sanctions, social controls and medical norms in China ever since Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978. Racial nationalism has also been on the increase in the post-Tiananmen era, from the representation of early hominids in China as the "ancestors" of the "yellow race" in palaeo-anthropology to the identification of the Han as the descendants of the Yellow Emperor in serological studies. A few publications in demography have even made claims about the "biological fitness" of the nation and herald the next century as an era to be dominated by "biological competition" between the "white race" and the "yellow race". The mastery of reproductive technologies and genetic engineering is seen to be crucial in the future battle of the genes, and the government has given much support to medical research in human genetics. A research team was even set up in November 1993 to isolate the quintessentially "Chinese genes" of the genetic code of human DNA. All aspects related to reproductive health, in other words, are linked to a nationalist agenda in which individuals are seen to be relatively insignificant elements of a greater collectivity. Whether the regulation of sexuality has replaced ideological control as the main tool of repression in the People's Republic is an important question which is open to debate. It is beyond question, however, that the signs of a drift towards an authoritarian form of government guided by biological imperatives have been accumulating in China for some time, and anybody with a serious interest in that country and its people should consider the implications of that drift carefully. Frank Dikoetter's book, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical science and the construction of sexual liberties in the early republican period, will be reviewed in a future issue of the TLS. From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 20:33:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 15:33:03 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Hate Messages on Google Site Draw Concern Message-ID: The New York Times > Technology > Hate Messages on Google Site Draw Concern http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/technology/07orkut.html 5.2.7 By GARY RIVLIN SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 6 - Over the last year, millions of Internet users have gravitated to Orkut, a Web site created and run by [1]Google that permits people, by invitation only, to join any of a long list of online communities. Communities have been created around a shared interest in photography, Miles Davis's music and travel to offbeat places. A small minority, however, advance a hatred for Jews, blacks or gays, including a "Death to the Jews" site and a site called "Death to Blacks." By now no one should be surprised that people use the Internet to spread repugnant views about race, religion or sexuality. But what is different about Orkut, online specialists say, is that the hate-filled dialogues are taking place inside a members-only social network site that - at least in theory - strictly forbids this kind of conduct in its user's agreement. The hatemongering is fast becoming an embarrassment for Google, the world's most popular search engine, particularly because the company has adopted "don't be evil" as its motto. The potential for tarnishing Google's gold-plated brand name also underscores the risks the company faces as it expands into new Internet businesses in which it has less experience. "Given the prestige and familiarity of Google, I think this is an important development, if not quite radically new," said Cass R. Sunstein, a professor of law at the University of Chicago and author of the book "[2]Republic.com," which concludes that the Internet inadvertently helps foster extreme viewpoints. For Google, the trouble on Orkut - which is still in beta, or test, form - could easily escalate. A prosecutor in Brazil, where the service is especially popular, has already initiated an investigation into some of the more virulent Orkut sites. For the moment, Google is not saying much about the issue. In response to a request for comment, a Google spokeswoman, Eileen Rodriguez, wrote in an e-mail message, "There are instances when [3]orkut.com members misuse the service, but it is a very small number compared to everyone who uses it. There is a certain amount of trust we have to place in our users." Google would not pinpoint the number of people signed up for Orkut, but characterized it as "millions." Orkut members are required to follow the company's "terms of service and community standards," Ms. Rodriguez wrote, which state that "an account cannot upload, transmit or contain material that is hateful or offensive based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender or sexual orientation." When users "don't follow these terms and we are made aware of an issue, we take the necessary steps, which may include removing the content," she said. Google would not say if it had ever taken such action. Internet law and custom generally exempt Internet service providers from responsibility for the behavior of their users. But when it comes to social networking sites like Orkut that invite users to seek out potential business contacts, dates or like-minded souls through links with friends and friends of friends, the responsibilities of the Internet host are more ambiguous. "When these new tools are introduced to the social world, the social norms, like manners and etiquette, and basic questions of who's responsible for what, get all scrambled," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "What we're seeing is the havoc that the Internet wreaked on plenty of business is now playing out in the social world." Despite the company's stated policies, Orkut users - who are allowed to participate only if invited by a current member - can join the 2,300 people who already belong to an "I Hate Queens, Faggots and Gays" group, created in August by a Brazilian Orkut member. When setting up the community, the group's founder described it as a forum for Portuguese-speaking people to "show your indignation and make jokes" about a "type of person" who "is gaining in society." Because access to the Orkut site requires membership, general Internet users cannot stumble accidentally onto these groups. Orkut members can also sign up to join a myriad of communities dedicated to despising people of color, including one in English that advocates the founder's position of death to all black people. The founder of that group, Kiarash Poursaleh, who described himself in his profile as an 18-year-old living in Tehran, also listed "Mein Kampf" by Hitler as a favorite book, named "shooting" as his favorite sport and described his humor as "friendly." All members create a personal profile and can add their own communities to the Orkut site. Mr. Poursaleh has joined dozens of other English-language Orkut communities, including the "Adolf Hitler SS Army Fan Club" and an "anti-Jewry" community, as well as a group for fans of the television show "Friends." Mr. Poursaleh, who did not respond to an e-mail request for an interview, is also a member of "Anti-Arab Iranians," a community with the motto, "We Hate Arabs!!! Kill Them All!" Other social networking sites have confronted similar issues of hatemongering, but the problem is more pronounced at Orkut because the service encourages people to create and participate in online communities of like-minded individuals. Community groups help to distinguish Orkut from its competitors, like Friendster, the first widely popular social networking site. Tribe Networks is another social networking site that encourages users to create communities of shared interest. "Mainly we're reactive, rather than proactive, when it comes to these hate sites," said Mark J. Pincus, the chief executive of Tribe, based in San Francisco. "But we have a full-time staffer who looks for these kinds of things and deals with complaints when they come up." Plugging the word "hate" into the site's search engine delivered a listing of more than 200 "tribes," but they tended to be more humorous and offbeat. Users have created groups for those who hate "the n-word," online dating, dogs, ranch dressing or any of a random list of B-list celebrities (Ryan Seacrest, Brittany Murphy, Carrot Top). Though Orkut began life a year ago as a venue for Silicon Valley's digerati, now nearly two-thirds of registered users are from Brazil. Google said one explanation for this seemingly inexplicable phenomenon was that Brazilians are quick to adopt new technologies. In late January, Christiano Jorge Santos, a state prosecutor in S?o Paulo, began a criminal investigation of some of the hate communities hosted by Orkut. The impetus was the cyberassault of a 13-year-old black child who lives in S?o Paulo. Those behind a Portuguese language community called "Antiheroes" posted a copy of the child's picture at the site, without his knowledge, and then invited visitors to "unload all your fury on this poor, innocent little black kid. Click on him and get revenge." Such an action is clearly criminal under Brazilian law, Mr. Santos said. "That's racism, and in Brazil racism is a crime," he said. Under Brazilian law, it is a crime to practice, induce or incite discrimination or prejudice on the grounds of race, color, ethnicity, religion or national origin. If convicted, offenders could serve two to five years in prison, in addition to paying a sizable fine. "The U.S. is pretty unusual providing the broad protection we do to hate speech," said Professor Sunstein. In "South America, Europe - Google could have problems with many other jurisdictions." Mr. Santos, the author of a book on hate crimes in Brazil, is targeting "all the communities that use racist and discriminatory terms on the site [4]www.orkut.com," according to documents he filed in court. Because Brazilian law does not include discrimination based on sexuality in its criminal code, those behind sites like "I Hate Transvestites" would not face criminal charges. Among the Orkut groups that Mr. Santos has focused on is a "Death to Blacks" site, written in Portuguese. That group's founder, Alex Pazzo, also created the "Death to the Jews" group, also written in Portuguese. (Mr. Pazzo did not respond to an e-mail message, sent through the Orkut system, seeking comment.) It is also unlikely that Google could be held criminally responsible in a Brazilian court, Mr. Santos said, since he would have to prove that the company was intentionally complicit in disseminating racist materials. Nevertheless, Google could be sued for damages in a Brazilian civil court, he said, because of a lack of precautionary measures against racist crimes. Other Portuguese-language Orkut groups include "I Hate Argentines," "I Hate Transvestites" and "I Hate the Universal Church," which refers to the evangelical church popular among Brazil's poor. The majority of the Orkut hate sites seem to be written in Portuguese, but many are written in English as well. For instance, an English-language "Anti-Jews" site, created in November, lists Schenectady, N.Y., as its home base. The community logo is a caricature of a man with a Star of David tattooed on his forehead. The site was created by Timothy Schultz, an Orkut member who says in his profile that he was born in Germany but now lives in the United States. He describes his mother as "Persian," but assures those reading his Orkut profile that both parents are "Aryan." The group's mission statement declares that it matters not whether members are Christian, Muslim or Buddhist, "the fact is we are all angry about what they have done and what they are doing to human beings all around the world." While the group has only 98 members, they come from a variety of places around the globe, like Iran, Korea and Marblehead, Mass. In one of the oddities of an online universe in which software, not a human brain, is behind a service, Orkut lists a "Jesus Christ" site ("for people who love Jesus") as a "related community" to "Anti-Jews." At the Anti-Jews site, when a woman going by the screen name Wasay 666 said that she was against the murder of Jews, several posters scoffed at her view. What concerns Professor Sunstein is that "if you get like-minded people together around a hatred of Jews, or blacks, or whatever, they end up being more hateful." Todd Benson contributed reporting from Brazil for this article. From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 20:36:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 15:36:13 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Psychology Today: Happy Hour Message-ID: Happy Hour http://cms.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20050119-000002.xml&print=1 [First the summary from The Chronicle of Higher Education.] MAGAZINES & JOURNALS A glance at the February issue of "Psychology Today": Training our minds to be happy Living in the present may be the key to happiness, says Carlin Flora, a staff writer at the magazine. "Our sense of well-being is intimately tied into our perception of time," she says. Age also makes a difference, she says, citing research by a professor of psychology at Stanford University. The professor, Laura Carstensen, has found that younger people focus more on the negative, while older people release bad feelings faster and maintain good ones longer. "Carstensen thinks this shift toward the positive occurs because as we age, we become aware, consciously or not, that time is running out," Ms. Flora writes. "The awareness of life's fragility turns our attention to the present moment, so we worry less." Ms. Carstensen is also investigating how Buddhist meditation, which involves an intense focus on the present, may affect the brain. Ms. Flora also cites research on that topic by Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Mr. Davidson's research, she says, shows that Buddhist monks who spent more than 10,000 hours meditating had significantly more activity in a part of the brain that is associated with positive emotions than they did in a similar part of the brain associated with negative emotions. "The finding suggests," Ms. Flora says, "that if we train ourselves to become more mindful and slow down our sense of passing time, we can learn to monitor our moods and thoughts before they spiral downward. We can, in other words, make ourselves happier." The article, "Happy Hour," is online at http://cms.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20050119-000002.html _________________________________________________________________ Happy Hour By: [4]Carlin Flora Summary: We search for happiness in eager anticipation and joyful memories, but we're better off paying attention to each moment as it passes. Jason Carpenter was one of those Red Sox fans--determined, passionate and absolutely convinced that a World Series win would be a life-changing event. The baseball team famously botched an easy win during the 1986 championships, and Carpenter, 13 at the time, broke down in sobs. Yet he never gave up on his dream: that the Red Sox would one day prove they deserved his unwavering devotion. "I imagined crying with happiness," he says. Last fall, Carpenter, now 31 and living in New York City, saw his dream come true when his team beat the Yankees--their blood rivals--in the league championships, after the biggest comeback in baseball history. Carpenter was over the moon. "I went nuts with 200 of my closest 'strangers,' all displaced Boston fans, partying in the streets deep in the heart of enemy territory until 4 a.m." With the next morning, though, came the darker side of triumph. Carpenter's elation had worn off. "I was wondering what to do with myself. I was depressed." Years of longing for a win had boiled down to a fleeting moment of bliss. What Carpenter had believed his whole life would make him happy actually happened--and then he faced...nothingness. The things we expect will bring us lasting joy rarely do. Whether it's losing 25 pounds, getting a major promotion or watching a troupe of perennial losers finally win the big one, long-anticipated events give us a swell of glee...and then we settle back into being just about as happy as we've always been. Most of us have a happiness "set point," fixed by temperament and early life experience, which is very difficult to shift. Whether you win the lottery or wind up in a wheelchair, within a year or two you generally end up just about as happy (or unhappy) as you started out. Yet the quest for happiness isn't futile. Psychologists now believe that many of us can turn the well-being thermostat up or down a few notches by changing how we think about anticipation, memory and the present moment. Our sense of well-being is intimately tied into our perception of time. The problem is that we usually get it wrong. Memory tricks us--we don't remember our experiences properly, and that leaves us unable to accurately imagine the way we'll feel in the future. At the same time, expectations mislead us: We never learn to predict what will make us happy, or how to anticipate the impact of major life experiences. Focusing on the moment may help us understand how to be happy. Besides, we have a built-in tendency to grow more cheerful as we get older: Aging helps us ignore the negative and shift our attention toward the positive. Finding happiness isn't hopeless--it seems to be just a question of time. Youth is a downer, it turns out. Young people naturally pay more attention to the negative. Older people are faster than younger people to orient to smiling faces rather than scowling ones in advertisements, finds Linda Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford who studies how age influences time perception and goals. Similarly, young people are quicker to pick up on negative stimuli. This youthful attention to the bad may be a necessary part of growing up--a cognitive mechanism that helps with survival. Since the young are focused on new (and therefore possibly dangerous) experiences and acquaintances, they may be more likely to put themselves in harm's way. "Young people need to take risks, and as such, they need to pay attention to the potentially negative, to recognize the lion or bear that is going to jump out at them," Carstensen explains. As we grow older, though, we are increasingly drawn to the familiar, like close friends and relatives. If given a chance to meet either their favorite author or a close friend for lunch, younger people chose the former, while older people preferred the latter. Carstensen's findings shatter the stereotype of seniors as a crabby bunch. When she spent one week frequently monitoring the moods of 184 adults, aged 18 to 94, she saw that older people experienced highly positive emotional experiences for longer periods of time than younger people, and their highly negative emotional experiences subsided more quickly. In other research, she showed that their memories were in general more positive. The sunny habit of revising history may explain why seniors tend not to wallow in bad moods: Pleasant memories are always invading their thoughts, and these fond recollections may "wash away" anger or sadness. "There is no empirical evidence that older people are grouchy," she says, although personality studies have revealed that they do tend to care less about what other people think of them. Carstensen thinks this shift toward the positive occurs because as we age, we become aware, consciously or not, that time is running out. The awareness of life's fragility turns our attention to the present moment, so we worry less. The potential missteps and possible catastrophes that cloud a young person's vision of the future fade away. "If you think about the things you worry about ---getting a job, finding a mate or an apartment--they are almost always concerns about the future," she says. The gap between ambition and achievement, a major source of stress and unhappiness for young people, also narrows with age. As we get older, we either achieve our goals or replace them with more reachable aims. Older people's positivity bias can even boost their memories. The elderly generally do poorly on tests of short-term memory. But when Joseph Mikels, a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at Stanford and researcher in Carstensen's lab, showed them joyful scenes of babies and puppies, older adults demonstrated better visual memory than their younger counterparts. He theorizes that they are able to overcome their cognitive handicaps because they are highly motivated to remember images that match up with their personal goals of fostering warm relationships. These cheerful habits of mind can also be adopted by young people, especially when a chapter of life is coming to a close. Think of getting ready to move to a new city. Annoyances or grudges toward local friends recede; memories of good times flood your mind. Your awareness that your time with them is finite pushes the things you'll miss about them to the foreground, and the present moment comes more clearly into focus. Mikels says that conjuring this state of mind, simply by appreciating life's brevity, could help young people find the contentment that comes more naturally to their elders. Carstensen and her team are now studying Buddhist meditators, to see how their practice alters their perception of time. Her theory is that meditation may cultivate a mind-set similar to an old person's, since it shuts out thoughts of the past and the future in favor of the present. "The religion is centered around the fact that we could die at any moment," she says. Related research by psychologist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has in fact shown that meditation may change how the brain works. He measured brain activity in people who had finished eight weeks of meditation training and found significantly more activity in the left prefrontal cortex, a region associated with positive feelings and pursuit of goals. More recently, Davidson traveled to India to measure the brain activity of Buddhist monks who had each spent at least 10,000 hours in meditation. The activity in their left prefrontal cortex far exceeded that in their right prefrontal cortex, which is the brain's home for negative emotions and anxiety. Most of us don't have 10,000 free hours to devote to brain resculpturing. But the finding suggests that if we train ourselves to become more mindful and slow down our sense of passing time, we can learn to monitor our moods and thoughts before they spiral downward. We can, in other words, make ourselves happier. In the quest for happiness, most of us try to guess what the future might bring, then project our current selves--with all of our hopes, quirks and predilections--into that unknown. We use a fuzzy image of the future to make all kinds of decisions, whether it's what to make for dinner or whom to marry. Those predictions are essential to happiness--and they are almost always wrong, finds Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard. As a result, our efforts to improve our lives often fall flat. Working with Tim Wilson, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, Gilbert has shown that we are remarkably bad at "affective forecasting," or predicting how we'll feel in the future. The good things are never as good as we imagine they'll be; the bad things are never as bad. We think of ourselves as both more fragile and more easily satisfied than we really are. We overestimate the impact of a good turn of event: We think that a fresh career or a new relationship will permanently change us, when all it does is provide a short-term mood boost. On the other hand, we are also much more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. Most of us do recover emotionally from life's traumas, whether it's the death of a close friend or a bitter divorce. "Memory is a flawed partner to anticipation," explains Gilbert. "If I ask you to remember a terrorist attack, you will instantly think of Sept. 11, not because it's a prototypical act of terrorism but because it's so unrepresentative." But if your memory provides you with the example of Sept. 11 as a representative for all terrorist attacks, you're very likely to mispredict how you'll feel in response to future attacks. You expect that you will feel the way you did after Sept. 11, yet because the vast majority of terrorist attacks are very small and involve the loss of relatively few lives, you would probably be a lot less upset and recover more quickly. The bright side to forecasting errors like this is that they expose our built-in psychological immune system, as Gilbert calls it, which ensures we will survive future horrors we can't predict. There are many other reasons why we have such trouble imagining how we'll feel in the future: We don't account for our own internal spin-room, the rationalization techniques we use to explain away bad situations. ("She wasn't right for me anyway.") We also tend to anticipate the most dramatic symbol of a future event. If it's a promotion, for example, we fantasize about the moment the boss breaks the news. What we forget is that life goes on after the congratulatory handshake--there will still be a job to do, a commute to endure and a family to raise. Even simple choices between concrete alternatives are plagued by forecasting errors, shows Christopher Hsee, an economist from the University of Chicago. As a result, we have a hard time picking the job, the house or the car that will make us happiest. That's because there is a big difference between the criteria we use to choose something and the criteria we use to evaluate it later. If, for example, you're hemming and hawing over whether to buy a top-of-the-line camera that is bulky and heavy or a second-best model that's easier to carry, the comparative difference in picture quality may steer you toward the unwieldy model. Once you get the fancy camera home, though, you no longer have the lesser-quality photo to compare it with. All you notice is that it's a hassle to lug around--and as a result you barely use it. A better strategy is to try to get a holistic impression of each experience or product you're contemplating, Hsee says. Just consider the first camera and imagine how it would be to use it, without immediately comparing it with the second. Gilbert has another solution to the prediction problem: asking other people for advice. "Grandmothers, rabbis and philosophers have been telling us for years that we shouldn't want shiny new things, but it's impossible not to," he says. "The important lesson is to learn how to predict more accurately what will give us lasting pleasure versus short-term pleasure, because there are things from the mundane to the transcendental that really do bring pleasure and happiness." His remedy is surrogation, or quite simply, asking people who have already done what you're considering doing how they liked it. "Most of the futures you're contemplating are someone else's memory," he says. While it helps to have a lot in common with a "surrogate," even a randomly chosen person can probably give you a better estimate of how much you would enjoy an experience than would your own impulses. Yet few people are willing to use this technique. To his dismay, Gilbert's research shows that people would rather close their eyes and imagine a vacation spot, or a new job, than ask someone what that holiday or that career was like for them. This is because although we are remarkably similar in our emotional reactions to events, we like to think of ourselves as unique, Gilbert says. We can correct our forecasting errors, but at a high cost to our self-image--we would rather be original than happy. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman grew up near the Bois de Bologne in Paris, and from time to time, his parents would take him on a trip to the woods. Young Danny, engrossed in some other activity, would scream bloody murder at the prospect of being interrupted. Yet once he got to the woods, he'd get so involved in his play that when it was time to go home, he'd cry again. For Kahneman, those fits of tears are proof that he was a happy child. "When you don't want to stop what you're doing, that's a happy condition," he says. "There is something sad about people who live their lives wanting to be elsewhere." Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his insights in irrationality and decision-making, but has since turned his attention to well-being. That has led him to study the value of time, "the ultimate finite resource." He's examining the difference between immediate and remembered experience and has zeroed in on the fact that our actual experience and our memories of life operate on separate tracks, and affect our happiness in completely distinct ways. Most psychologists who study happiness have focused on how we think of our lives in retrospect, but Kahneman believes that there's a lot to be learned from looking at "online" happiness--or how we feel in the moment. Because our memories are all we keep of our experiences, we have a built-in bias that favors memory over immediate experience. Our experiencing self, the part of us that registers events as they happen without anticipation or reflection, doesn't have much of a voice in influencing how happy we are with our lives, he says. Instead, memory dominates. Imagine you've thrown a marvelous party. You've spent hours reveling, but just as the night is winding down, two drunk guests get into a vicious argument. Even though your pleasure during the preceding hours was real, you will remember the event as a total disaster. That spoiled night is a clear example of the "evaluating self" at work, explains Kahneman. To create a narrative out of life's thousands of disconnected moments, our evaluating self focuses on the most intense moments and the final moments of an experience. That's the way we're built, but our tendency to rely mostly on memory to judge our well-being can lead us to make counterproductive decisions that undermine our own happiness. For instance, many parents believe they'd be happier if they spent more time with their children. But because spending more time together might not raise the intensity or change the concluding moments of the experience, it won't be reflected in rosier memories. "If you double the time that you spend with your children, it may have very little effect on what you will remember about that time," Kahneman says. If memory is all that matters, spending additional time with your children accomplishes nothing. Another example: You had a great time on summer vacation in Italy last year, so you consider going back. But since returning to the same place wouldn't give you many new memories to savor, your evaluating self might decide against it--even though your experiencing self would clearly enjoy the trip. "The point is that we shouldn't measure our lives on the quality of our memories alone," says Kahneman. He doesn't simply mean we should be more spontaneous--in fact, he points out that since time is our most valuable resource, we should pay careful attention to how we spend it. We need to vigilantly protect our time from the biases of our evaluating self by not relying on memory alone. Otherwise, we risk wasting it in ways that contradict our values and don't bring us happiness. Well-being is also a product of "focal time," or how we direct our attention. This is the key idea behind the different roles that pleasures and comforts have in creating happiness, a distinction originally posited by the late Stanford economist Tibor Scitovsky. Comforts are objects or experiences we tend to take for granted: a computer that doesn't crash, boots that don't leak or even a spouse who is supportive and warm. Pleasures, on the other hand, are stimuli that you focus your attention on: a good meal, a silky shirt, a boisterous evening with friends. The difference isn't intrinsic to the thing itself but rather lies in our attitude toward it: whether it captures our attention or recedes into the background. Our evaluating self misleads us by giving more weight to comforts, those things that make life easier, but that we become accustomed to. Our experiencing self, meanwhile, prefers pleasures--absorbing events or interactions that hold us captive. If you ask someone with a Lexus if she likes it, she'll probably say yes, since its high quality really does bring happiness. But that's only while she's thinking about it--and she probably doesn't think about it very often. "Suppose you are driving in your car with your spouse and you are quarreling," Kahneman posits. "Are you better off if you're driving an Escort or a Lexus?" You're much too busy arguing to pay attention to the Lexus' smooth ride, so at that moment the quality of the car hardly matters. At the same time, something trivial that grabs your focus and interest, like getting flowers, will bring you happiness. If you got flowers every day, though, it would become routine, and neither garner your attention nor bring you much pleasure. Kahneman's point: Nothing is as important as it is when you're thinking about it. As he's explored the role of attention and moment-by-moment experiences in happiness, Kahneman has identified factors that have a powerful effect in determining immediate mood. When asked how they feel "in the moment," he's found that people report being happier when they are with friends than when they're with a spouse or child. It sounds counterintuitive, but it makes sense: When we're with friends, we're intensely engaged, whereas we don't pay as much focused attention to family--they recede into the background, since we see them all the time. Similarly, getting enough sleep is crucial, probably because it is difficult to be engaged with the things you enjoy when you are tired. And people under time pressure at work don't report much happiness, as they are unable to pay attention to anything other than their impending deadlines. Kahneman acknowledges the power of the well-being "setpoint," but he still thinks that we can influence our own happiness in small ways--by attending to the moment, and by choosing activities that engage rather than numb our minds. If we heed what does give us immediate pleasure, and if we are skeptical of our error-riddled memories and predictions, we can learn to spend our money, time and attention in ways that make us happier. If it's simply our nature to root for a cursed team or to chase a dream that, when realized, will never be as sweet as it is in our mind's eye, then we can try to appreciate the joy that comes in the striving. PT Publication: Psychology Today Magazine Publication Date: Jan/Feb 2005 Last Revised: 19 Jan 2005 From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 20:38:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 15:38:50 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Wolfe) Bush's Official Reading List, and a Racy Omission Message-ID: The New York Times > Washington > White House Letter: Bush's Official Reading List, and a Racy Omission http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/politics/07letter.html 5.2.7 WHITE HOUSE LETTER Bush's Official Reading List, and a Racy Omission By ELISABETH BUMILLER WASHINGTON If you ask the White House what President Bush is reading these days, the press office will call back with the official list: "His Excellency: George Washington" by Joseph J. Ellis, "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow and, not least, the Bible. What the official list omits is Tom Wolfe's racy new beer- and sex-soaked novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons." The president, a fan of Mr. Wolfe, has not only read the book but also is enthusiastically recommending it to friends. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Bush liked so much about the book, which is told from the point of view of Charlotte Simmons, a young woman from the God-fearing backwoods of North Carolina who is the first in her family to go to college. Charlotte, who is at first shocked by the booze and debauchery she encounters at Mr. Wolfe's Dupont University, modeled on Duke among others, eventually succumbs in a chapter-long deflowering scene at the hands of a drunken fraternity rat. Then she sinks into depression. Mr. Bush, who was the hard-drinking, hard-partying president of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the jock fraternity at Yale, is also the father of two partying daughters, Jenna and Barbara. Jenna graduated last year from the University of Texas and Barbara from Yale, and on neither campus is the milieu of Charlotte Simmons entirely foreign. Does Mr. Bush like the book because it is a journey back to his keg nights at Deke, or because it offers a glimpse into the world of his daughters' generation? Or does he like the writing? Or is it all of the above? The White House won't say. Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, did not respond to phone calls or e-mail messages last week asking about Mr. Bush's interest in Mr. Wolfe's book. So perhaps Mr. Wolfe had some thoughts. In relatively short order he was located last Friday at a conference at his alma mater in Lexington, Va., Washington and Lee University. He was asked if he thought it unusual that a 58-year-old man, that is, the president, had so embraced his book. "Well, a 74-year-old man wrote it," Mr. Wolfe replied. He said he had no idea why Mr. Bush liked it. "I imagine he responded to the blinding talent," Mr. Wolfe added, chuckling, "but beyond that, I'm just not sure." Mr. Wolfe, who voted for Mr. Bush and was invited by the first lady to the White House last year to speak at a salute to the authors Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Truman Capote, said he had not talked to the president about his book. But he said that Mr. Bush's father once told him how much he liked "Bonfire of the Vanities," Mr. Wolfe's novel about New York City bond traders and racial politics during the excesses of the 1980's. Friends note that the current President Bush has read every one of Mr. Wolfe's books, including "A Man in Full," the behemoth about real estate and social change in Atlanta in the 1990's. Mr. Bush, who does his reading for pleasure on Air Force One, on weekends and before bed at night, has long said he prefers books to channel surfing, although he does watch television sports. "I'm reading, I think on a good night, maybe 20 to 30 pages," the president told Brian Lamb of C-Span in an interview at the White House last month. "I'm exercising quite hard these days, and I get up very early, and so the book has become somewhat of a sedative. I mean, maybe there are some other old guys like me who get into bed, open the book, 20 pages later you're out cold." Mr. Bush added that "in this job, there are some simple pleasures in life that really help you cope. One is Barney the dog, and the other is books. I mean, books are a great escape. Books are a way to get your mind on something else." Friends say that Mr. Bush, who like most modern American presidents is drawn to the biographies of those who governed before him, reads more nonfiction than fiction and tends toward history. "It turns out that the president better have seen the day that has gone in order to be able to help lead to the day that is coming," Mr. Bush told Mr. Lamb, paraphrasing the Texas writer and painter Tom Lea. "In other words, history really matters for the president." Mr. Bush noted that he liked the Hamilton biography because "it was a very interesting history of how hard it was to get democracy started." He also told Mr. Lamb that he reads the Bible daily every other year, and in the years in between he reads a daily devotional by Oswald Chambers, a Protestant minister of Scotland from a century ago. Mr. Bush told Mr. Lamb that "Oswald Chambers was one of the great Christian thinkers" and that "the easier it is to understand what he writes, I think, the more understanding of religion a person becomes." This year, the president said, he is once again making his way through the Bible. He did not utter a word to Mr. Lamb about "I Am Charlotte Simmons." From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 20:41:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 15:41:35 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote Message-ID: U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote New York Times, 1967.9.4 http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news3/nytviet.htm U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote: Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967) WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here. Pending more detailed reports, neither the State Department nor the White House would comment on the balloting or the victory of the military candidates, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, who was running for president, and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, the candidate for vice president. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February. The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta. Few members of that junta are still around, most having been ousted or exiled in subsequent shifts of power. Significance Not Diminished The fact that the backing of the electorate has gone to the generals who have been ruling South Vietnam for the last two years does not, in the Administration's view, diminish the significance of the constitutional step that has been taken. The hope here is that the new government will be able to maneuver with a confidence and legitimacy long lacking in South Vietnamese politics. That hope could have been dashed either by a small turnout, indicating widespread scorn or a lack of interest in constitutional development, or by the Vietcong's disruption of the balloting. American officials had hoped for an 80 per cent turnout. That was the figure in the election in September for the Constituent Assembly. Seventy-eight per cent of the registered voters went to the polls in elections for local officials last spring. Before the results of the presidential election started to come in, the American officials warned that the turnout might be less than 80 per cent because the polling place would be open for two or three hours less than in the election a year ago. The turnout of 83 per cent was a welcome surprise. The turnout in the 1964 United States Presidential election was 62 per cent. Captured documents and interrogations indicated in the last week a serious concern among Vietcong leaders that a major effort would be required to render the election meaningless. This effort has not succeeded, judging from the reports from Saigon. From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 21:07:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 16:07:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: President Plans No Price Controls or Strict Accountability Rules for Colleges, New Education Secretary Says in Interview Message-ID: President Plans No Price Controls or Strict Accountability Rules for Colleges, New Education Secretary Says in Interview News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.7 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/02/2005020701n.htm By JEFFREY SELINGO Washington The Bush administration has no plans to impose price controls on college tuition or to extend strict accountability measures to postsecondary institutions, the new U.S. secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, told The Chronicle in an exclusive interview on Friday. In a wide-ranging discussion at the end of her first official week on the job, Ms. Spellings also said that states and college governing boards, not the federal government, should be responsible for ensuring that campuses foster a variety of political and religious beliefs. The comments were the first extended remarks Ms. Spellings has made about higher-education issues beyond her confirmation hearing last month. As the president's domestic-policy adviser in his first term, Ms. Spellings was one of the chief architects of the No Child Left Behind Act, which in 2002 introduced nationwide standards and mandatory testing to elementary and secondary schools. Some college officials have feared that she would use the law as a template for similar measures in higher education ([63]The Chronicle, November 26, 2004). But the secretary said on Friday that the administration's efforts in higher education over the next four years would focus mostly on providing better information to parents and students. As the parent of a high-school senior, the secretary said, she has experienced firsthand how difficult the college-search process can be for families. "It's a hard process to navigate ... where your kid ought to go to college," Ms. Spellings said. "I think we can do better." Without accessible and easy-to-use government sources of information about colleges and financial-aid options, the secretary said, families have come to "rely on, for right or wrong, the U.S. News & World Report, the Princeton Review, and some of these other sorts of rankings, which are fine and good, but I'm not sure there is an understanding about what all goes into that." While Ms. Spellings was not specific about the range of information that should be made available to the public, she said, as an example, that parents should be able to find out easily how long it will take their child to graduate from a particular institution, how much it will cost, and what are the chances their child will still be enrolled after two years. She did not give any details about how the administration would require colleges to provide such information or on how the government would disseminate what it collects to the public. "We're very early in this whole process," Ms. Spellings said. "The first thing you would want to do is start at the beginning and say what do you want to know that we don't know, what do we know. That's where we ought to start." Better information would particularly be helpful, she said, when it comes to tuition. Last year Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, the California Republican who heads the principal subcommittee on higher education in the U.S. House of Representatives, dropped a proposal that would have penalized colleges that raised their prices too high by preventing them from participating in some federal student-aid programs. Some Republicans and Democrats said his proposal would have amounted to price controls in higher education. Ms. Spellings said that in putting together its proposals for the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the federal law that governs most federal student aid programs, the administration "wouldn't start with price controls." "This is where information can play a real part," she said. "What are the costs, how fast are they escalating, what are the reasons." So far, Ms. Spellings said, she has been encouraged by the reaction of colleges to the administration's call for more and better information for families. "I think they want to be able to tell their story better," she said. "They are served when they can do that with real data and no anecdotes." When asked if college campuses have a liberal bias, Ms. Spellings said, "Some institutions do and some institutions don't." But she said the federal government should not get involved in policing professors' politics, even after incidents like the controversy at the University of Colorado at Boulder in which a faculty member compared the victims of the September 11 attacks to Nazis (see [64]a related article). "That's not something the federal government is going to get into," she said. "It's a local-control thing. That's something for states and governing boards and academic faculties to see about. I hope they do worry about those things." More from the interview with Secretary Spellings will appear in next week's issue of The Chronicle. * [65]Republicans in U.S. House Introduce Bill to Renew Higher Education Act That Mirrors Last Year's (2/3/2005) * [66]Congress Should Not Impose Cost Controls on Colleges, Senate Republican Says (2/2/2005) * [67]Spellings Takes Office as Education Secretary; Stroup Says She'll Stay On in Top Higher-Education Post (2/1/2005) * [68]President's Choice for Education Secretary Wins Unanimous Approval From Senate Panel (1/14/2005) * [69]A New Face for Education in a Second Bush Term (11/26/2004) * [70]Worried on the Right and the Left (7/9/2004) * [71]Plan to Punish Big Increases in Tuition Is Dropped (3/12/2004) * [72]Will Congress Require Colleges to Grade Themselves? (4/4/2003) References 63. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i14/14a01901.htm 64. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/02/2005020709n.htm 65. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/02/2005020301n.htm 66. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/02/2005020202n.htm 67. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/02/2005020102n.htm 68. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i19/19a02601.htm 69. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i14/14a01901.htm 70. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i44/44a02101.htm 71. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i27/27a00101.htm 72. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i30/30a02701.htm From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 21:10:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 16:10:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Publishing Groups Say Google's Library-Scanning Effort May Violate Copyright Laws Message-ID: Publishing Groups Say Google's Library-Scanning Effort May Violate Copyright Laws News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.7 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/02/2005020703n.htm By JEFFREY R. YOUNG Some publishing groups say that Google's ambitious project to scan millions of library volumes and make them searchable could run afoul of copyright laws, and that Google should get permission from publishers before proceeding. The project, announced in December, involves libraries at Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford, in England, as well as the New York Public Library ([63]The Chronicle, December 14). Google said that it would begin by scanning works that are in the public domain and that the full texts of those books would be accessible online through its popular search engine. But the company also plans to scan copyrighted books in some of the libraries. The search engine will not give users the full texts of those volumes, but will provide up to three short excerpts, each consisting of only a few lines of text in which a search term appears. Google officials say that such limited use will not violate copyright law. But some publishing-industry officials say that even scanning a book and offering brief excerpts without the publishers' permission could violate copyright because scanning the book would represent a reproduction of the work, and the copying would have been done by a commercial entity rather than the library that purchased the book. Some officials also worry that some material that Google decides is in the public domain might not be, such as books that were published in many countries with copyright laws that are often different from those in the United States. Steve Langdon, a spokesman for Google, said in an e-mail interview that the company "respects the rights of copyright holders and the tremendous creative effort of authors, which is why we're only allowing users to view the full texts of books when they're in the public domain." "We will also show a few pages from a book when we have an agreement to do so from the publisher," he wrote. "Books that are still in copyright will show up in our search results, but users will only be able to view very small text snippets and/or bibliographic information until we get permission from the publisher to show full page views. "In every case Google's presentation of the works to the public will keep authors and publishers in mind and be well within the bounds of copyright law," he said. The concerns were first reported last week by the journal Nature in an article on its[64] Web site. Sally C.L. Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, said in an interview on Friday that she had contacted Google officials last week to raise the concern that Google's plans to scan some material might violate the rights of academic publishers. She said she had asked for more information about the company's plans. "They seem to be certain that what they're doing is OK under copyright law, but I can't understand how they think so," she said. "There are thousands and thousands of publishers, so I can see why they wouldn't want to" secure permission first. "But that doesn't mean there's not a legal requirement to do it." "It's a matter of legal principle," she said, noting that many publishers were likely to agree to Google's arrangement if approached. "But they haven't been asked, and so they haven't had the opportunity to say yes or no." Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, said his group also had concerns about the scanning project. "What is very murky here is the whole rights situation, and whether Google does or does not have the rights to digitize this material and make it available," Mr. Givler said. "In very general terms we are concerned," he said. "We'd just like more information from Google." He declined to comment further, referring additional queries to Allan Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs for the Association of American Publishers. In an interview, Mr. Adler was also reluctant to discuss the issue. "It's fair to say that the Google initiative with libraries is still being discussed within the association," he said. "In comparing notes there are still some questions that remain." Terry Hulbert, head of electronic development and strategy for the Institute of Physics, an international scholarly society based in England, said he also had questions about Google's plans. "There are things that need to be clarified," he added. "You need to get beneath the bonnet and look at this stuff in detail." The society has its own database that many libraries pay to use. "We have actually digitized all of the archived content back to 1874" for some journals, he said. "We've spent a lot of time and money doing that." Mr. Hulbert also said he worried that Google might be assuming U.S. copyright law can guide all of its digitizing decisions. "Lots of content that they're going to be digitizing at some of these U.S. libraries is covered under U.K. and E.U. protection," he said. _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [65]Google Will Digitize and Search Millions of Books From 5 Top Research Libraries (1/7/2005) * [66]Google's New Deals Promise to Realize a 60-Year-Old Vision (1/7/2005) * [67]Google Unveils a Search Engine Focused on Scholarly Materials (12/3/2004) References 63. http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/12/2004121401n.htm 64. http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v433/n7025/full/433446a_fs.html 65. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18a03701.htm 66. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18a03801.htm 67. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i15/15a03401.htm From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 21:11:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 16:11:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: High-School Graduates Are Poorly Prepared for Work or College, Survey Finds Message-ID: High-School Graduates Are Poorly Prepared for Work or College, Survey Finds News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.7 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/02/2005020704n.htm By MICHELLE DIAMENT As many as 4 in 10 high-school graduates are not ready for the demands that they face after graduation, whether they are going to college or to work, according to survey findings scheduled for release today. Achieve Inc., a nonprofit organization created by state governors and business leaders that focuses on raising academic standards, surveyed recent high-school graduates, employers, and college instructors about the preparedness of young people entering college or the work force. The poll of 2,200 people was conducted in December and January. According to a report based on the survey, college instructors thought that the recent graduates' greatest deficiencies were in writing and mathematics. Students largely concurred, with 81 percent saying they approved of graduation tests in math and English. Many students who responded to the survey indicated that it was easy to slide by in high school, but said they would have worked harder if more had been asked of them, said Geoff Garin, one of the pollsters. In particular, students pointed to academic counseling and course requirements as areas to bolster. One of the governors involved in the organization is Gov. Bob Taft of Ohio. "This survey should be a real wake-up call to the governors around the country," said Mr. Taft, a Republican. "We're hearing a clear message from our graduates that we do them no favors if we set the bar for performance too low." Socioeconomic circumstances were not a decisive factor for success, Mr. Garin said. Rather a high level of expectation proved essential for graduates no matter what their goals, he said, because many of the same skills now are necessary for both work-bound students and those continuing their education. The full text of the report, "Rising to the Challenge: Are High-School Graduates Prepared for College and Work?," is available on Achieve's [63]Web site. _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [64]Undergraduates Study Much Less Than Professors Expect, Survey of Student 'Engagement' Says (11/15/2004) * [65]Core Curricula in High Schools Provide Inadequate Preparation for College Work, Report Says (10/15/2004) * [66]Report Being Sent to High Schools Outlines What College Freshmen Need to Know to Succeed (4/22/2003) * [67]High Schools Fail to Prepare Many Students for College, Stanford Study Says (3/5/2003) * [68]'Report Card' on States and Higher Education Finds Better Student Preparation, Mixed Opportunities (10/2/2002) * [69]Report Finds the Majority of U.S. Students Not Prepared for College (10/5/2001) References 63. http://www.achieve.org/ 64. http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/11/2004111501n.htm 65. http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/10/2004101502n.htm 66. http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/04/2003042201n.htm 67. http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/03/2003030502n.htm 68. http://chronicle.com/daily/2002/10/2002100205n.htm 69. http://chronicle.com/daily/2001/10/2001100501n.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 21:05:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 16:05:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Liberal Education: Beyond Computer Literacy Message-ID: Beyond Computer Literacy http://www.aacu-edu.org/liberaleducation/le-fa04/le-fa04feature1.cfm Liberal Education, Fall 2004 [First, the summary from the News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.7:] Computers and the Internet already play important roles in liberal education, but greater attention is needed to the educational outcomes of the technologies, argues Stephen Ehrmann, vice president of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Group, a consulting organization that focuses on teaching with technology. More and more of the goals of liberal education, such as analytical thinking and communication skills, require technological proficiency, Mr. Ehrmann writes. For example, students need to acquire skills in finding, retrieving, and analyzing information in a library, on the Internet, or elsewhere. One way to gauge students' computer literacy is to require them to turn in electronic portfolios of their work, Mr. Ehrmann says. Portfolios could include Web projects, video recordings of oral presentations, and students' thoughts on how those tasks advanced their skills and learning, and the portfolios could even be made available to prospective employers, he says. Electronic portfolios could also help faculties see how well students are meeting instructional goals, and that could guide curricular change, he suggests. "When portfolios are used in that way, the doorway to rapid, intentional evolution of liberal education opens," he writes. Institutions that are already taking account of such changes and possibilities are the ones that will "redefine what it means to be an educated person in the 21st century," he argues. _________________________________________________________________ Beyond Computer Literacy: Implications of Technology for the Content of a College Education By Stephen Ehrmann Computers and the Internet already play several important roles in liberal education. 1. Computer literacy and fluency: the ability of students to use computers and the Internet as tools for general purposes 2. Effectiveness: the use of technology to foster faculty-student connections, student-student collaboration, active learning, and other practices that can improve outcomes 3. Access: the use of technology to support programs and practices that are fully available to nontraditional learners who would otherwise be unable to enroll and excel All three of these applications are well established and growing. Now there's another application of technology to liberal education to consider: 4. Content: Computers and the Internet, as they're used in the larger world, have implications for what all college students, by the time they graduate, should have learned from their majors as well as from general education requirements. These implications go far beyond computer literacy. What students should learn These changes in content, too, are already in motion, although they're at an earlier stage than the first three. A recent AAC&U report, Our Students' Best Work, specifies five key educational outcomes for liberal education (2004, 5-6). 1. strong analytical, communication, quantitative, and information skills 2. deep understanding of and hands-on experience with the inquiry practices of disciplines that explore the natural, social, and cultural realms 3. ntercultural knowledge and collaborative problem-solving skills 4. a proactive sense of responsibility for individual, civic, and social choices 5. habits of mind that foster integrative thinking and the ability to transfer skills and knowledge from one setting to another For each of these five, computers and the Web are already beginning to affect faculty thinking about what all students should learn, and how. First outcome "Strong analytical, communication, quantitative, and information skills--achieved and demonstrated through learning in a range of fields, settings, and media, and through advanced studies in one or more areas of concentration"(AAC&U 2004, 5). Today there are important types of analytical thinking, communication, quantitative reasoning, and information skills that cannot be used, or learned, without technology. Let's look at just two: information literacy and the ability to create Web sites as a medium of academic expression. Information literacy is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information in a library, on the Web, or anywhere else. Virtually all majors require some form of information literacy, which almost always requires knowing how to use a maze of information on the Internet, as well as print resources. Information literacy, like writing across the curriculum, is learned via a series of assignments and feedback on those assignments that should occur frequently and throughout the student's course of study. Earlham College's Diana Punzo, associate professor of psychology, talks about how computers have changed the process of research in her discipline. "When I was a student, we didn't use computers. You had to spend hours thumbing through indices of the literature. Now the process is far more efficient and students can focus on the literature itself and the process of research." In course after course, psychology students at Earlham get briefings from librarians and do research on the literature. They learn, for example, the difference between using "racism" and "prejudice" as search terms. Faculty members coordinate their efforts informally, talking about these skills and other facets of the curriculum in biweekly departmental meetings. Over the years, students learn skills that are manifested and assessed in a senior year capstone experience. For psychology majors at Earlham, the capstone experience is a multipart project. In one piece of it, students are each given an article written for the general public (e.g., from a newspaper). They have to search and interpret the academic literature on the topic and then write an analysis of the article, also geared to the general public. In another part of this capstone, seniors do an experimental project and must search and analyze the relevant research literature. These capstone projects are each graded by a pair of faculty who examine, among many other things, the students' use of the literature. Student-created Web sites as a medium of academic expression: Imagine a course on nineteenth-century English literature or a course on the politics of urban neighborhoods. Multimedia projects offer several distinctive advantages for learning and assessment. Here are just a few: * Student authors of Web sites can include evidence such as pictures, audio recordings, video clips, databases, and live links to references. Providing the reader with direct access to the supporting evidence also puts more pressure on the student to explain why the evidence is being cited instead of just inserting a terse "Smith 1996" and moving on. * When creating a Web-based project, students can create an argument that operates on several levels: a summary form of the argument that links at several points to more detailed explanations, data, and responses to anticipated objections. * One of the most educationally important features of creating Web-based projects is the option of expanding the audience. The implications of this shift surprised the faculty and students who initially tried it. For example, in 1995 Bosnian peace talks began in Dayton, Ohio. Not far away, students in a journalism course at Miami University were asked to create a Web site with background on the conflict and the peace talks. Professor Linda Crider wrote later that students quickly received e-mail criticisms to their site from as far away as Bosnia. The students were shocked, but soon, Crider wrote, she was shocked more than they were because she had never seen students work that hard. Suddenly this assignment was real and they didn't want to be embarrassed in front of the world. Students today can create projects for use by other students (students who take the course in future semesters or students in the public schools, for example) or as parts of internships. Later in this article, we'll see some examples of such projects. As with their skills of writing or information literacy, students usually cannot learn how to use the Web as a medium for thought and communication in just a single course. The more courses that encourage or require students to create multimedia projects in addition to writing papers, the easier it becomes for each new faculty member to take advantage of, and further develop, this new and important skill. The University of Southern California's Institute of Multimedia Literacy is a leader in this area, providing faculty development and support across the institution. Starting in fall 2004, USC is offering a new honors program in multimedia scholarship to help lead the way in further development of undergraduate skills. Sixty students from twenty-five different departments have been admitted to this four-year program. Stanford is also taking steps to foster multimedia literacy across the curriculum: the university's new required second-year course in communications includes development of multimedia by students, along with writing and oral presentation. Second outcome "Deep understanding and hands-on experience with the inquiry practices of disciplines that explore the natural, social, and cultural realms--achieved and demonstrated through studies that build conceptual knowledge by engaging learners in concepts and modes of inquiry that are basic to the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts" (AAC&U 2004, 5). Professionals in almost every discipline now use technology-based tools to think in new ways. For example, statisticians explore data differently now, using new statistical procedures and displaying results graphically. Technology-based tools enable relative novices to ask meaningful questions of their own--literature students learning a bit about inquiry in biology, and vice versa. In addition to these "power tools for novices," technology is playing other roles in helping people from all fields learn skills of inquiry. In order to attract and educate students, science literacy programs often use active forms of learning. At West Point, for example, all students must learn math and science. In calculus courses, students are told that they have captured a number of perfectly serviceable cannons with plenty of ammunition. Unfortunately, however, the operations manuals are missing, so the students must experiment. They are allowed to measure the distance the ball travels when the cannon is fired at one particular angle. Working in teams with their laptop computers and using theory learned in physics and calculus, students must then deduce muzzle velocity. With that information and some more physics, they should be able to figure out the appropriate angle of elevation to hit any target so long as they know the target's distance and elevation. Each team gets a different target and only one shot. Visiting a calculus class at the right moment, one can see cheering students who've just hit a distant target with the first shot of their toy cannon. West Point uses a number of such games, often based on simulations, to help all students learn to think the way that scientists and engineers do. Physics and calculus are not the only realms of science literacy where technology can play a transformative role. BioQUEST creates, collects, and distributes realistic research simulations in biology. BioQUEST values the "Three P's": 1. Problem posing: creating a research problem to do in the simulated world, such as a genetics experiment or a biochemical analysis 2. Problem solving: carrying out the research and developing a conclusion based on the evidence 3. Persuasion: persuading first a peer and then the instructor that the experimental evidence is sufficient to support the student's conclusion One nice feature of the BioQUEST software is that not even the instructor can "open" the simulation to find the right answer. The instructor, like the peers and the student investigator, must examine the chain of experiments and the resulting evidence in order to grade the student's work. Third outcome "Intercultural knowledge and collaborative problem-solving skills--achieved and demonstrated in a variety of collaborative contexts (classroom, community-based, international, and online) that prepare students both for democratic citizenship and for work" (AAC&U 2004, 5). Imagine an undergraduate from suburbia reading a translation of Beowulf or studying a novel of Appalachia. How can the student develop a deeper understanding of another culture where familiar words may not have familiar meanings? How can the student express that understanding in a form that allows feedback? In two different courses Professor Patricia O'Connor of Georgetown University has asked her students to create Web sites that annotate text from their readings. Students link each selected word and phrase to illustrate commentary about their meaning in context; terms used in the commentary are themselves linked to other such commentaries, creating a web of description of that culture. Andrew Owen, one of O'Connor's students, analyzed a brief passage from River of Earth, a novel by James Still set in Appalachia. Dozens of phrases and terms such as "patriarchy," "God's green earth," and "homeplace" were analyzed and illustrated with archival images. Owen's analysis, like the culture it depicts, has no beginning or end--each narrative annotation stands partly on its own, but it is interlinked with, and given further meaning by, several other such annotations. Technology is making more direct learning about other cultures possible, too. For example, "Raison d'Etre" is a project conducted jointly by the University of South Carolina, Lyc?e Paul H?roult, and Dickinson College. Students learning French in the United States interact regularly with students in France who are majoring in English. They correspond weekly, engage in regular chat sessions, and use Web cams as they talk about one another's cultures. The project won a 2003 National Award from the American Council of Education's AT&T Program on Technology as a Tool for Internationalization. Another ACE/AT&T national award-winner was Ball State University's Global Media Network. Thirteen institutions on five continents are members. The technology they share makes it possible to have highly interactive class meetings with faculty and students from pairs of institutions. Imagine a conference table with faculty and students from an American institution and a university in Korea seated around it and talking with one another. A major goal of the program is to provide initial international exposure to lower-division students in the university's core curriculum. These are just two examples of how technology can open gateways into other cultures from a distance. Technology can also make it easier, and more productive, to study abroad, as the next section describes. Fourth outcome "A proactive sense of responsibility for individual, civic, and social choices--achieved and demonstrated through forms of learning that connect knowledge, skills, values, and public action, and through reflection on students' own roles and responsibilities in social and civic contexts" (AAC&U 2004, 6). Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has had for thirty years one of the most exciting programs in engineering education. For example, the Interactive Qualifying Project, typically done in the junior year, requires students to apply what they've learned in their majors to problems of social significance. Surprisingly, half of WPI's students go abroad to do this project these days. Technology seems to have a subtle but spectacular impact on the feasibility of study abroad. The Web allows students to define and prepare for their projects long before they and their faculty advisors travel to London, Thailand, or any of WPI's more than twenty other off-campus sites. And digital communications (including cell phones that WPI provides the students and faculty) make it easier for them to be so far from campus for seven or eight weeks while working on their projects. Last year, for example, seven student teams and two faculty advisors traveled to WPI's London site. One of those student teams, composed of students from several engineering programs, was assigned to respond to a request for help from the municipal government of the borough of Merton, a London suburb. A new census of the UK had just been done, and the planning unit wanted the students to prepare a display of the data relevant to the borough, perhaps a sixty-page book of the sort that had been created for the previous census, a decade earlier. Working with other students and with their faculty advisors in a preparatory course, two months before leaving for London, the students were guided into asking questions about this task. How was the book used in the last ten years? By whom? For what? This dialogue led the students and the borough to redefine the task: the four-student team would create a Web-based resource for mapping and analyzing census data. Professor Paul Davis, a mathematician who was one of the faculty supervisors of the London site and is dean of interdisciplinary and global studies at WPI, commented, "In terms of liberal education, this is a key step, where students are grappling with open-ended issues and trying to form a project they can do in the weeks they're on site. They identified the problem as helping policy makers visualize deprivation on maps of the borough." In London, the WPI students created a geographic information system that turned indices based on census data (such as number of toilets per resident in buildings) into maps. The maps helped planners identify a swath of poverty that crossed the boundary from Merton into a neighboring borough. In an "aha!" moment, the planners realized that they could collaborate with that borough in applying for funds to work on the problems, rather than competing with it for funds as they had in the past. Professor Davis commented, "The lesson we think the students carried away was that the technology, well used, could inform important social decisions. They also realized they hadn't solved the problem of deprivation or even answered all the possible questions. Instead they got a sense of technology's possibilities and limits, the complexity of social issues, and the political and social environment in which those problems exist. From our perspective those are all successes for liberal education." Fifth outcome "Habits of mind that foster integrative thinking and the ability to transfer skills and knowledge from one setting to another--achieved and demonstrated through advanced research and/or creative projects in which students take the primary responsibility for framing questions, carrying out an analysis, and producing work of substantial complexity and quality" (AAC&U 2004, 6). Many of the approaches to teaching described above have dealt with integrative thinking and the ability to apply what has been learned in one context to an unfamiliar problem or setting. This ability to think about your own thinking doesn't develop automatically while studying in traditional courses, as Professor Sharon Hamilton discovered in her teaching at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). She and her colleagues asked students to reflect on their learning in relation to artifacts the students had uploaded on the electronic portfolios. Hamilton commented, "There were several top-notch writing students in the pilot, and I was eager to read their reflections." One student, who had uploaded a thoughtful analysis and synthesis of a group of novels of the South as an example of her ability, wrote, Reflection involves analysis and synthesis to come to a new understanding. In this paper, I analyzed six novels and synthesized their approaches to the role of women in the South. I learned a lot about different perceptions of women in the South from this critical thinking. "And that was...one of the top achieving students in the group!" Hamilton exclaimed. "It became evident to me that students require instruction and support for their reflective writing." Electronic portfolios IUPUI accelerated its work with electronic portfolios. Portfolios have been used for centuries in disciplines such as architecture and the arts. A portfolio is a thoughtfully organized collection of student work, usually including work other than, or in addition to, traditional academic papers. Portfolios also often include student reflections about how the project demonstrates their developing skills. These reflective statements are one way in which portfolio use is intended to deepen student learning. Alverno College in Milwaukee pioneered the use of portfolios in liberal education starting in the 1970s, using them to chart student progress in developing competencies required of all students by graduation. Electronic portfolios store those projects, or recordings of them, plus reflections and feedback, on computers so that these records can easily be accessed online. For example, Web projects can be stored in portfolios, as can video recordings of student performances (oral presentations, participation in teams, dances). In contrast to paper portfolios, the online portfolio can organize the projects in several different ways: one "view" organized for an individual course, another view organizing the content to show progress toward goals of liberal education, another showing progress in the major, and yet another that might be used for employment or graduate school applications. The work can be used over a period of time by the student, by faculty, and, at some institutions, by people outside the institution (e.g., potential employers). This ability to revisit a project long after the project is completed is one of many distinctive values of electronic portfolios. Electronic portfolios offer an ideal infrastructure for the development of all the outcomes of liberal education described in this paper--doubly so because, as we've seen, a growing proportion of student work in all these areas is being done with computers and Internet resources. Bit by bit, putting it all together Electronic portfolios have at least one other kind of significance for changing the content of a college education: they can help faculty members, as a group, see what's going on and guide curricular change. In the past, college education has resembled an elephant designed by a committee of blind men, each faculty member teaching a course while knowing almost nothing about teaching and learning inside courses taught by other faculty. Electronic student portfolios can be used to change that. Some of the impacts of student portfolios are subtle. For example, at Alverno faculty need to designate "Key Performances" in each course--assignments, assessments, and projects that represent the most important goals for the course and, usually, for meeting requirements of the major and for graduation from the college. These Key Performances, including descriptions, criteria, student self-assessments, and faculty feedback, are visible to other faculty. Linda Ehley, associate professor of computer science at Alverno, reports that this ability to see, and be seen, provides a basis for both collaboration and faculty development. Other impacts of student portfolios on the ability to plan are more obvious and strategic. Clemson Provost Doris Helms comments that electronic portfolios have "freed us to think about general education as something other than a smorgasbord of courses." Clemson is using portfolios to collect student projects that are intended to demonstrate progress toward institutional educational goals. Portfolios used in this way require faculty to work together in describing the intellectual achievement represented by student work: first, to frame the goals, and then, to provide feedback to students about whether they've provided adequate evidence of progress toward meeting those goals for graduation. Provost Helms told me, "We'll not only assess student work but also use student portfolios for research--where are students learning what they're learning? For example, what are students learning while outside the classroom, in jobs, at home, and in extracurricular experiences? What kinds of learning should we foster, more intentionally, outside the course?" So the electronic portfolio can also provide data for scholarship of teaching and learning by the faculty working as a research team. Helms said that such a use of portfolios would not have been feasible at a large public institution such as Clemson without the online dimension. Three conditions are critical if student portfolios are to provide a tool for collaborative planning by faculty: 1. Faculty need to collaborate in deciding what kinds of learning are to be charted by the portfolio. 2. Faculty need to collaborate in assessing at least some aspects of student progress. 3. Faculty need to use what they learn from assessment to consider whether and how to change the goals, the curriculum, their teaching, and assessment. When portfolios are used that way, the doorway to rapid, intentional evolution of liberal education opens. Concluding thoughts The changes in the content of a college education described above have several common elements. First, students use the technologies as a tool more often than as a "teacher": these uses of technology alter and enhance the role of the faculty member. The more powerful and widely used the technology, the more invisible it becomes to both students and faculty. They think with the technology rather than thinking about it. In fact, one reason that faculty are finding some of these changes relatively easy to make is that they themselves already use these technologies in their research and their lives outside the college. Second, technology widens the range of experiences and resources available to the student, which creates an even greater need to help students learn use such freedom, rather than floundering in it. More than ever, college needs to help students learn how to learn. Third, the curricular changes described in this article require a mix of bottom-up, incremental changes coming out of individual courses and top-down, strategic changes (e.g., portfolios) that come out of faculty and administrative leadership. Fourth, there is no magic level of technology that an institution needs before such changes can begin. I've seen examples of such changes in the content of education for almost a quarter century now, the earliest ones relying on Apple II computers. But the pace is accelerating, especially now that most students can use computers and the Internet as personal tools. What seems most important for each institution is that some level of technology be extremely reliable. When people no longer need to think consciously about their skills or worry overmuch about things breaking down, that particular technology achieves a certain invisibility. How many people still think of word processing as "technology?" Once that happens, faculty and students can think about advancing education instead of just about advancing technology. Institutional leadership comes from a thoughtful, committed coalition of faculty, administrators, students, and alumni, not from cutting edge technology. This is an extraordinarily exciting moment in the evolution of liberal education. This article has mentioned a number of institutions that are currently among the leaders in redefining the curriculum. The chances are excellent that, in five years, additional institutions will have leapfrogged forward, drawing international attention to their academic programs. Their fame will not come from having (for a brief moment) the newest of the new technologies. Instead, these institutions will attract attention and resources because they have helped redefine what it means to be an educated person in the twenty-first century. _________________________________________________________________ Work Cited Board of Directors, Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). 2004. Our students' best work: A framework of accountability worthy of our mission. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities. Also at www.aacu.org/publications/pdfs/StudentsBestReport.pdf. _________________________________________________________________ Stephen C. Ehrmann is director of the Flashlight Program for the Study and Improvement of Educational Uses of Technology and vice president of The Teaching, Learning, and Technology Group. _________________________________________________________________ To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled at aacu.org, with the author's name on the subject line. From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Feb 7 21:14:36 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 13:14:36 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq Elections: A Curious Silence Message-ID: <01C50D16.F9D2CAB0.shovland@mindspring.com> Is it that they can't get the numbers? Is it that they can't get the numbers they want? The Sunnis stayed home. The Kurds say there weren't enough ballots. The Insurgents won't quit. The Shia clerics think they have won. The US wants Allawi. A political Gordian knot if there ever was one. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 22:21:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 17:21:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: In a Blink, Bush Becomes Reviewer in Chief Message-ID: In a Blink, Bush Becomes Reviewer in Chief The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.11 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i23/23b01401.htm CRITIC AT LARGE By CARLIN ROMANO Remember the Bush administration's rote response when identifiable flying objects such as Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty (about cabinet turncoat Paul O'Neill), Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies, and Justin A. Frank's Bush on the Couch threatened to smash into its daily message? "We don't do book reviews!" presidential spokesman Scott McLellan and others chanted over and over, until it became the administration's retort as mantra. So you might have thought that the big book news coming out of George W. Bush's flurry of second-inaugural interviews -- the boss's absolute flip-flop on that policy -- would please stalwarts of American literary culture, usually annoyed by all things Bush. Not quite. First, Bush told The Washington Times, "If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy." He added that the heartfelt meditation by Israel's minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs and former Soviet dissident and political prisoner, subtitled "The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror," should go on the "recommended reading list" of America's "opinion leaders." Then, like a freelance book reviewer eager to maximize his critical clout, he intensified the blurb barrage, and his A-team followed suit. Sharansky's book, Bush told CNN, "summarizes how I feel. I would urge people to read it." Condoleezza Rice cited it in her confirmation hearings. Newsweek labeled it Bush's "manifesto" and reported that he recommends it constantly to visitors. Alas, Bush got no more credit for that among hostile book types than he received for marrying a librarian. It took only a political nanosecond for bloggers and anti-Bush forces to start complaining that the book reviewer in chief had simply found a tome, in the words of the BBC's Clare Murphy, that "mirrors his own views." When The New York Times -- no Bush favorite -- finally got its 40 minutes with the president, Bush kept up the promotional campaign, confirming that synchronicity of views did have something to do with his rave. Bush told the Times that Sharansky's take on tyranny and terror -- that they must be fought through an expansion of freedom throughout the world -- is "part of my presidential DNA. I mean, it's what I think; it's a part of all policy." Elisabeth Bumiller, noting parallel passages in Sharansky's book and Bush's inaugural speech, dubbed (or Dubyaed) the situation "a circular pattern of admiration" (unlike, one presumes, the standard rave by one West Side author of another West Side author in The New York Times Book Review). What would you expect? GWB, as his inner circle refers to him in e-mails, can't win when it comes to reading -- even reading of short stuff. Two immortal solecisms from Bush's wisdom on the subject during the 2000 campaign can be found among the "George W. Bushisms" gathered by Slate editor Jacob Weisberg in those next-to-the-register volumes that lead many to "misunderestimate" the president: "Reading is the basics for all learning," and, "One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures." After Bush told Fox News anchor Brit Hume in a September 2003 interview that he doesn't read newspapers, preferring to "glance at the headlines, just to get kind of a flavor," all hell broke loose. Washington graybeards remembered that Eisenhower read nine newspapers a day (according to his press secretary) and JFK tried the Evelyn Wood speed-reading technique to aid his news-junkie consumption. Sure enough, GWB's explanation only got him into deeper doo. Admitting he "rarely read the stories" in newspapers, he complained that "a lot of times there's opinions mixed in with news." Bush ventured that "the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world." It's been that way, he owned up, since the beginning of his administration. The man gets his news from "people who probably read the news themselves." (LA Weekly, typical of print media angered by those remarks, expressed doubt about the reliability of "The Daily Condi.") Move on to books, and ridicule of the president seems part of the DNA of a certain slice of the chattering classes, arising from what John Podhoretz, in his book Bush Country, called "Crazy Liberal Idea #1: Bush is a Moron." Podhoretz writes that the idiot image of GWB remained so ingrained among many boys and girls on the bus in 2000 (some nicknamed him "The English Patient") that even putative evidence of Bush's reading -- he lent his personal copy of Tim O'Brien's literary/political novel, In the Lake of the Woods, to New York Times reporter Frank Bruni -- drew skepticism. Podhoretz writes that in Bruni's own book, Ambling Into History, the author reports Bush's annoyance at the suggestion that his being a "devotee of books by and about Winston Churchill" was thought to be an attempt to charm tough-guy talk-show host Chris Matthews. "Do you think," Bruni reports Bush asking Matthews, "that I'd take time out of my life to research what the hell you like?" And dare one mention that the only time GWB couldn't stop reading a book in public -- when he kept at My Pet Goat after Andrew Card whispered the first breaking news of 9/11 in his ear -- he got attacked again, this time for not knowing when to put down a good read? The miracle is that GWB has not become antibook, with the threat to civil liberties that might entail. Put yourself in his shoes last year. As the campaign revved up, liberals started falling all over themselves to write a book, or pull together one from old columns, as if only they, Revere-like, could warn the American people about the president's stupidity and corruption. If he strolled into a Barnes & Noble, Bush could have picked from among scores of forgettable volumes spewing condescension, among them Ian Williams's Deserter, about Bush's "War on Military Families," James Carroll's Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, which noted how Bush "openly displayed his willful illiteracy," and William Turner's Mission Not Accomplished, which castigated Bush for "the shallowness of his life experience" and his insistence on making decisions from "gut instinct." Ye shall know these books by their indexes. Bush could have thumbed through a typical one -- say, the index of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq, by Christopher Scheer, Robert Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry, and found himself segmented into "divisiveness of, 64," "inability to admit failure, 35, 173-74," and "lies and deception by, 9, 11-12, ..." Yet GWB perseveres. As his second term commences, he may not have metamorphosized into a polished states-man, diplomat, or speaker, but he now ranks among "our crowd" -- folks who like to read books, review them, push them. Instead of mocking Bush's reading, friend and foe alike -- particularly scholars and college professors avid for the smallest influence on world affairs -- should ask: What kind of book can sway this president? What kind of critic is he? And therein lies the most ironic rub of all: The reviewer in chief couldn't be more with it. Sharansky's autobiographical meditation on how his life forged his beliefs doesn't rely on textured argument, weighty historical and political detail, or ingenious syllogistic logic. It's primal, intuitive, and anecdotal -- argument lite. As he writes, "During my long journey through the world of evil, I had discovered three sources of power: the power of an individual's inner freedom, the power of a free society, and the power of the solidarity of the free world." His positions emerge from moral experience, sharpened by personal suffering. "Moral clarity," he remarks, "provides us with a place to stand." No wonder Bush loves it, even though Sharansky harshly criticizes the president's father -- GHWB -- for his so-called "Chicken Kiev" speech of 1991, in which 41 called on Ukrainians to avoid "suicidal nationalism." Bush isn't peering into The Case for Democracy and seeing precisely himself. Rather, both he and Sharansky practice "thin slicing." They understand the "power of thinking without thinking." That's right! Here's the beauty of this literary moment. That "circular pattern" Bumiller talks about needs to include the darling of Northeast literary media today, the sophisticated Manhattan intellectual telling one and all lately that, in the words of his blistering publicity machine, "judgments based on first impressions and the smallest bits of information" aren't "simple just because they're made quickly." Yes -- welcome political philosopher Natan Sharansky and book critic George W. Bush under a new prestigious aegis -- Type-A Blinkers. For in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell -- savaged by Rich-ard A. Posner in The New Republic for shoddy reasoning, but protected by New Yorker fairy dust and lionized by almost everyone else -- says that's OK. Consider The Case for Democracy the first unifying "blink" book: directly praised by red-state types, indirectly praised by blue-state types. American elite literary media have met the enemy. Is he us? He's certainly the thinker Malcolm Gladwell says we all should be -- and maybe are. This could be the tipping point for GWB. Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 22:31:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 17:31:00 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Globe: Collection of essays highlights Hornby's love of reading, flair for writing Message-ID: Collection of essays highlights Hornby's love of reading, flair for writing http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2005/01/19/collection_of_essays_highlights_hornbys_love_of_reading_flair_for_writing?mode=PF By Carol Iaciofano, Globe Correspondent | January 19, 2005 The Polysyllabic Spree: A Hilarious and True Account of One Man's Struggle With the Monthly Tide of the Books He's Bought and the Books He's Been Meaning to Read, By Nick Hornby, Believer Books 230 pp., $14 If you love to read, or like to read, or you're in that vast category of those wishing for more time to read, here is a book that will have you saying "yes" and "so true," or just have you smiling in knowing amusement at most pages. "The Polysyllabic Spree," (yes, it's a takeoff on "The Polyphonic Spree") is a collection of English writer Nick Hornby's recent "Stuff I've Been Reading" monthly columns for The Believer magazine, whose stated mission is to be an "amiable yet rigorous forum for writing about books." Fans of Hornby know him for books such as "About a Boy" and "High Fidelity" (and movies of the same names). Fans also know that being persistently amiable is not his style. Which, of course, makes his writing very entertaining. This is not a collection of book reviews, but a reading diary of sharp and thoughtful musings on literature that ultimately asks: Why do we read, anyway? Like many of us, Hornby buys a lot more books than he reads. The reasons are not mysterious. He's got a job, three kids, and a love of (English) football. He watches TV to unwind. In his first essay, he sets an unapologetic tone by dismissing any potential complaints that he spends too much on books. "I know that already," he says. "I certainly 'intend' to read all of them, more or less. My 'intentions' are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it, too." Er, how did you know? But buying books is half the fun. For anyone who's ever browsed around a bookstore, reading Hornby's accounts of how one book led him to another, or how he discovered a new author nearly by accident, is like reconnecting with an erudite friend. Each essay is bannered by two lists: "Books Bought" and "Books Read." This gives the ensuing essay a personality before you start it. The "Books Read" list also includes notations of which ones are unfinished and which ones have been abandoned. One book Hornby couldn't make himself finish was Bob Woodward's "Bush at War." Hornby only read about a third of it before grumbling that "Woodward's tone was too matey and sympathetic for me." One passage did surprise him. He's amazed that the Secret Service needed to wake up President Bush at 11:08 on the night of Sept. 11, 2001. "Woken up! He didn't work late that night? And he wasn't too buzzy to get off to sleep?" Hornby reads all kinds of books -- from Robert Lowell's poems to Dennis Lehane's novels to helpful books on quitting smoking (which he's read again and again). Of Lehane's multilayered novels, Hornby admiringly writes "everything seems organic . . . almost nothing . . . seems contrived." These are the kinds of books that Hornby searches for, those that will make you "walk into a lamp-post" while reading them. But reading widely doesn't mean you've read everything. Hornby takes to task those literary critics who give away plots of classics in their essays, under the assumption that everyone has already read them ("I know the only thing brainy people do with their lives is reread great works of fiction, but surely even . . . Harold Bloom read before [he] reread.") Hornby has other frustrations, all voiced with droll acuity, all stemming from the love of the well-written word. He can dispatch a scholarly trend with a few short strokes. Take the current "obsession with austerity" in universities and writing workshops, designed to pare all writing down to bare bone. "Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound like manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a [cushy] thing to do in the first place." Not one to diagnose without offering a cure, Hornby has a useful antidote for another bookish dilemma: all the Really Big Biographies that frequently burden the bestseller lists. Under Hornby's rules, before writing a biography, you would apply to the "National Biography Office" for a permit that spells out "the number of pages you get." A biography would only edge toward a thousand pages for someone of Dickens's stature. In this framework, most current biographies would be about 200-300 pages shorter than the length at which they're published. This would also spare many of us the guilt of avoiding books we can't pick up with one hand. Chekhov's "A Life in Letters" is excerpted at the end of the book. The letters resonate as strongly today as they did when the great man wrote them. As Hornby says, "useful advice -- and tough love." Some of the same could be said for Hornby's writing and his love of books. From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 22:32:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 17:32:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] World Future Society: Top 10 Forecasts from Outlook 2005 Message-ID: Top 10 Forecasts from Outlook 2005 http://www.wfs.org/forecasts.htm Each year since 1985, the editors of THE FUTURIST have selected the most thought-provoking ideas and forecasts appearing in the magazine. Over the years, Outlook has spotlighted the emergence of such epochal developments as the Internet, virtual reality, and the end of the Cold War. Here are the editors' top 10 forecasts from Outlook 2005: 1. Skills for tomorrow: In the future, even more emphasis will be placed on skills that cannot be automated. These "hyper-human" skills include caring, judgment, intuition, ethics, inspiration, friendliness, and imagination. Instead of a "secretary," for instance, you might become an "administrative response specialist" by developing your situation-management and problem-anticipation skills. --Richard W. Samson, "How to Succeed in the Hyper-Human Economy," Sep-Oct 2004, p. 40 2. Skills for right now: Can you work in a team? Solve complex problems? Communicate clearly in print and in person? These are skills that employers are increasingly demanding, according to Syracuse University public-affairs professor Bill Coplin, author of 10 things Employers Want You to Learn in College. Among the skills that will help keep workers marketable in the near term are self-motivation, time management, strong oral and written communication, relationship building, salesmanship, problem solving, information evaluation, and leadership. --Futurist Update, Feb 2004 3. Worm shortage ahead. Increasing worldwide demand for fish is creating a shortage of worms to supply anglers and fish farmers. To supplement dwindling fresh-worm supplies from local worm farmers, exporters are developing new high-tech worm-storage methods such as cryogenics. --Environment in Brief, Nov-Dec 2003, p. 7 4. Winning the battle against the desert. For less than a dollar a tree, Tunisia is planting 40 million trees a year to combat desertification. The government-sponsored "green wall" project uses military manpower to keep costs low; soldiers are also being deployed to help nomads adapt to farming. Observers believe Tunisia's program could serve as a model for its Saharan neighbors. --World Trends & Forecasts, Government, May-June 2004, p. 6 5. All-day eating. Rigid distinctions among breakfast, lunch, and dinner--and of the times of day they occur--are fading as individuals fit their dining habits around more flexible and fluid work and life schedules. Restaurants accommodating these blurred dining habits will offer a mix of big, little, and medium meals during all hours. --Art Siemering, "Cooking Globally, Eating Whenever: The Future of Dining," May-June 2004, p. 52 6. Coral reef loss may rival that of rain forests. Hurricanes, disease, climate change, pollution, and overfishing are decimating the coral life on many of the world's reef ecosystems. The loss of 80% of Caribbean coral reef cover in the past three decades exceeds the rate of tropical forest loss. Researchers now predict that, with global climate change, coral reef ecosystems will se greater changes in the next 50 years than they have faced in the last half million years. --World Trends & Forecasts, Environment, Jan-Feb 2004, p. 14 7. The global wage gap is closing. Rapid income growth in China and southern Asia is helping to narrow average income inequality worldwide. This represents a turnaround over historic trends, according to Penn State sociologiest Glenn Firebaugh. --World Trends & Forecasts, Economics, Mar-Apr 2004, p. 7 8. Children's aggressiveness may increase as they spend more time with video games than television. Because gaming is more participatory than watching TV, children exposed to violence in video and computer games are more at risk of acting out on aggressive impulses. --World Trends & Forecasts, Society, July-Aug 2004, p. 16 9. Older workers could help expand the business day. A steadily growing cadre of older workers could expand the productive working days of businesses. Older people--whose numbers are rising rapidly--tend to be early risers and at their sharpest in the morning. An early-riser work shift of 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. could expand commerce in cities as more businesses offer services for the early birds. --World Trends & Forecasts, Economics, May-June 2004, p. 19 10. Water "wars" could prevent the real kind. Working out their conflicts over water may help countries and regions resolve other conflicts. Cooperation among Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians on water issues in the Jordan River basin, for instance, involves processes of negotiation and decision making that could serve as a model of collaboration, says one researcher. --World Trends & Forecasts, Government, Mar-Apr 2004, p. 9 Outlook 2005, originally published in the November-December 2004 issue of THE FUTURIST, is available as a special 12-page report for $4 ($3.60 for Society members), cat. no. R-2425. From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 22:35:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 17:35:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Republic: Posner on Gladwell's Blinkered Message-ID: Blinkered http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=IUusjQ2glE8WmawdDKV1hQ== by Richard A. Posner Post date 01.16.05 | Issue date 01.24.05 Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking By Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown, 277 pp., $25.95) T here are two types of thinking, to oversimplify grossly. We may call them intuitive and articulate. The first is the domain of hunches, snap judgments, emotional reactions, and first impressions--in short, instant responses to sensations. Obviously there is a cognitive process involved in such mental processes; one is responding to information. But there is no conscious thought, because there is no time for it. The second type of thinking is the domain of logic, deliberation, reasoned discussion, and scientific method. Here thinking is conscious: it occurs in words or sentences or symbols or concepts or formulas, and so it takes time. Articulate thinking is the model of rationality, while intuitive thinking is often seen as primitive, "emotional" in a derogatory sense, the only type of thinking of which animals are capable; and so it is articulate thinking that distinguishes human beings from the "lower" animals. When, many years ago, a judge confessed that his decisions were based largely on hunch, this caused a bit of a scandal; but there is increasing recognition that while judicial opinions, in which the judge explains his decision, are models of articulate thinking, the decision itself--the outcome, the winner--will often come to the judge in a flash. But finally the contrast between intuitive and articulate thinking is overdrawn: it ignores the fact that deliberative procedures can become unconscious simply by becoming habitual, without thereby being intuitive in the sense of pre-verbal or emotional; and that might be the case with judicial decisions, too. Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist, wishes to bring to a popular audience the results of recent research in psychology and related disciplines, such as neuroscience, which not only confirm the importance of intuitive cognition in human beings but also offer a qualified vindication of it. He argues that intuition is often superior to articulate thinking. It often misleads, to be sure; but with an awareness of the pitfalls we may be able to avoid them. As Exhibit A for the superiority of intuitive to articulate thinking, Gladwell offers the case of a purported ancient Greek statue that was offered to the Getty Museum for $10 million. Months of careful study by a geologist (to determine the age of the statue) and by the museum's lawyers (to trace the statue's provenance) convinced the museum that it was genuine. But when historians of ancient art looked at it, they experienced an "intuitive revulsion," and indeed it was eventually proved to be a fake. The example is actually a bad one for Gladwell's point, though it is a good illustration of the weakness of this book, which is a series of loosely connected anecdotes, rich in "human interest" particulars but poor in analysis. There is irony in the book's blizzard of anecdotal details. One of Gladwell's themes is that clear thinking can be overwhelmed by irrelevant information, but he revels in the irrelevant. An anecdote about food tasters begins: "One bright summer day, I had lunch with two women who run a company in New Jersey called Sensory Spectrum." The weather, the season, and the state are all irrelevant. And likewise that hospital chairman Brendan Reilly "is a tall man with a runner's slender build." Or that "inside, JFCOM [Joint Forces Command] looks like a very ordinary office building.... The business of JFCOM, however, is anything but ordinary." These are typical examples of Gladwell's style, which is bland and padded with clich?s. But back to the case of the Greek statue. It illustrates not the difference between intuitive thinking and articulate thinking, but different articulate methods of determining the authenticity of a work of art. One method is to trace the chain of title, ideally back to the artist himself (impossible in this case); another is to perform chemical tests on the material of the work; and a third is to compare the appearance of the work to that of works of art known to be authentic. The fact that the first two methods happened to take longer in the particular case of the Getty statue is happenstance. Had the seller produced a bill of sale from Phidias to Cleopatra, or the chemist noticed that the statue was made out of plastic rather than marble, the fake would have been detected in the blink of an eye. Conversely, had the statue looked more like authentic statues of its type, the art historians might have had to conduct a painstakingly detailed comparison of each feature of the work with the corresponding features of authentic works. Thus the speed with which the historians spotted this particular fake is irrelevant to Gladwell's thesis. Practice may not make perfect, but it enables an experienced person to arrive at conclusions more quickly than a neophyte. The expert's snap judgment is the result of a deliberative process made unconscious through habituation. As one moves from anecdote to anecdote, the reader of Blink quickly realizes, though its author does not, that a variety of interestingly different mental operations are being crammed unhelpfully into the "rapid cognition" pigeonhole. In one anecdote, Dr. Lee Goldman discovers that the most reliable quick way of determining whether a patient admitted to a hospital with chest pains is about to have a heart attack is by using an algorithm based on just four data: the results of the patient's electrocardiogram, the pain being unstable angina, the presence of fluid in the lungs, and systolic blood pressure below one hundred. There is no diagnostic gain, Goldman found, from also knowing whether the patient has the traditional risk factors for heart disease, such as being a smoker or suffering from diabetes. In fact, there is a diagnostic loss, because an admitting doctor who gave weight to these factors (which are indeed good long-term predictors of heart disease) would be unlikely to admit a patient who had none of the traditional risk factors but was predicted by the algorithm to be about to have a heart attack. T o illustrate where rapid cognition can go wrong, Gladwell introduces us to Bob Golomb, an auto salesman who attributes his success to the fact that "he tries never to judge anyone on the basis of his or her appearance." More unwitting irony here, for Gladwell himself is preoccupied with people's appearances. Think of Reilly, with his runner's build; or John Gottman, who claims to be able by listening to a married couple talk for fifteen minutes to determine with almost 90 percent accuracy whether they will still be married in fifteen years, and whom Gladwell superfluously describes as "a middle-aged man with owl-like eyes, silvery hair, and a neatly trimmed beard. He is short and very charming...." And then there is "Klin, who bears a striking resemblance to the actor Martin Short, is half Israeli and half Brazilian, and he speaks with an understandably peculiar accent." Sheer clutter. Golomb, the successful auto salesman, is contrasted with the salesmen in a study in which black and white men and women, carefully selected to be similar in every aspect except race and sex, pretended to shop for cars. The blacks were quoted higher prices than the whites, and the women higher prices than the men. Gladwell interprets this to mean that the salesmen lost out on good deals by judging people on the basis of their appearance. But the study shows no such thing. The authors of the study did not say, and Gladwell does not show, and Golomb did not suggest, that auto salesmen are incorrect in believing that blacks and women are less experienced or assiduous or pertinacious car shoppers than white males and therefore can be induced to pay higher prices. The Golomb story contained no mention of race or sex. (Flemington, where Golomb works, is a small town in central New Jersey that is only 3 percent black.) And when he said he tries not to judge a person on the basis of the person's appearance, it seems that all he meant was that shabbily dressed and otherwise unprepossessing shoppers are often serious about buying a car. "Now, if you saw this man [a farmer], with his coveralls and his cow dung, you'd figure he was not a worthy customer. But in fact, as we say in the trade, he's all cashed up." It would not occur to Gladwell, a good liberal, that an auto salesman's discriminating on the basis of race or sex might be a rational form of the "rapid cognition" that he admires. If two groups happen to differ on average, even though there is considerable overlap between the groups, it may be sensible to ascribe the group's average characteristics to each member of the group, even though one knows that many members deviate from the average. An individual's characteristics may be difficult to determine in a brief encounter, and a salesman cannot afford to waste his time in a protracted one, and so he may quote a high price to every black shopper even though he knows that some blacks are just as shrewd and experienced car shoppers as the average white, or more so. Economists use the term "statistical discrimination" to describe this behavior. It is a better label than stereotyping for what is going on in the auto-dealer case, because it is more precise and lacks the distracting negative connotation of stereotype, defined by Gladwell as "a rigid and unyielding system." But is it? Think of how stereotypes of professional women, Asians, and homosexuals have changed in recent years. Statistical discrimination erodes as the average characteristics of different groups converge. Gladwell reports an experiment in which some students are told before a test to think about professors and other students are told to think about soccer hooligans, and the first group does better on the test. He thinks this result shows the fallacy of stereotypical thinking. The experimenter claimed it showed that people are so suggestible that they can be put in a frame of mind in which they feel smarter and therefore perform smarter. The claim is undermined by a literature of which Gladwell seems unaware, which finds that self-esteem is correlated negatively rather than positively with academic performance. Yet, true or false, the claim is unrelated to statistical discrimination, which is a matter of basing judgments on partial information. The average male CEO of a Fortune 500 company is significantly taller than the average American male, and Gladwell offers this as another example of stereotypical thinking. That is not very plausible; a CEO is selected only after a careful search to determine the candidate's individual characteristics. Gladwell ignores the possibility that tall men are disproportionately selected for leadership positions because of personality characteristics that are correlated with height, notably self-confidence and a sense of superiority perhaps derived from experiences in childhood, when tall boys lord it over short ones. Height might be a tiebreaker, but it would be unlikely to land the job for a candidate whom an elaborate search process revealed to be less qualified than a shorter candidate. G ladwell applauds the rule that a police officer who stops a car driven by someone thought to be armed should approach the seated driver from the rear on the driver's side but pause before he reaches the driver, so that he will be standing slightly behind where the driver is sitting. The driver, if he wants to shoot the officer, will have to twist around in his seat, and this will give the officer more time to react. Gladwell says that this rule is designed to prevent what he calls "temporary autism." This is one of many cutesy phrases and business-guru slogans in which this book abounds. Others include "mind-blindness," "listening with your eyes," "thin slicing"--which means basing a decision on a small amount of the available information--and the "Warren Harding error," which is thinking that someone who looks presidential must have the qualities of a good president. Autistic people treat people as inanimate objects rather than as thinking beings like themselves, and as a result they have trouble predicting behavior. Gladwell argues that a police officer who fears that his life is in danger will be unable to read the suspect's face and gestures for reliable clues to intentions (Gladwell calls this "mind reading") and is therefore likely to make a mistake; he is "mind-blinded," as if he were autistic. The rule gives him more time to decide what the suspect's intentions are. It seems a sensible rule, but the assessment of it gains nothing from a reference to autism. Obviously you are less likely to shoot a person in mistaken self-defense the more time you have in which to assess his intentions. Gladwell endorses a claim by the psychologist Paul Ekman that careful study of a person's face while he is speaking will reveal unerringly whether he is lying. Were this true, the implications would be revolutionary. The CIA could discard its lie detectors. Psychologists trained by Ekman could be hired to study videotapes of courtroom testimony and advise judges and jurors whom to believe and whom to convict of perjury. Ekman's "Facial Action Coding System" would dominate the trial process. Gladwell is completely credulous about Ekman's claims. Ekman told him that he studied Bill Clinton's facial expressions during the 1992 campaign and told his wife, "This is a guy who wants to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and have us love him for it anyway." This self-serving testimony is no evidence of anything. The natural follow-up question for Gladwell to have asked would have been whether, when Ekman saw the videotape of Clinton's deposition during the run-up to his impeachment, he realized that Clinton was lying. He didn't ask that question. Nor does he mention the flaws that critics have found in Ekman's work. As with Gladwell's other tales, the Ekman story is not actually about the strengths and the weaknesses of rapid cognition. It took Ekman years to construct his Facial Action Coding System, which Gladwell tells us fills a five-hundred-page binder. Now, it is perfectly true that we can often infer a person's feelings, intentions, and other mental dispositions from a glance at his face. But people are as skillful at concealing their feelings and intentions as they are at reading them in others--hence the need for the FACS, which is itself a product of articulate thinking. So Gladwell should not have been surprised by the results of an experiment to test alternative methods of discovering certain personal characteristics of college kids, such as emotional stability. One method was to ask the person's best friends; another was to ask strangers to peek inside the person's room. The latter method proved superior. People conceal as well as reveal themselves in their interactions with their friends. In arranging their rooms, they are less likely to be trying to make an impression, so the stranger will not be fooled by prior interactions with the person whose room it is. The better method happened to be the quicker one. But it wasn't better because it was quicker. R emember JFCOM? In 2002, it conducted a war game called "Millennium Challenge" in anticipation of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. As commander of the "Red Team" (the adversary in a war game), JFCOM chose a retired Marine general named Paul Van Riper. Oddly, Gladwell never mentions that Van Riper was a general. This omission, I think, is owed to Gladwell's practice of presenting everyone who gets the psychology right as an enemy of the establishment, and it is hard to think of a general in that light, though in fact Van Riper is something of a maverick. The Blue Team was equipped with an elaborate computerized decision-making tool called "Operational Net Assessment." Van Riper beat the Blue Team in the war game using low-tech, commonsense tactics: when the Blue Team knocked out the Red Team's electronic communications, for example, he used couriers on motorcycles to deliver messages. Was Van Riper's strategy a triumph of rapid cognition, as Gladwell portrays it? Operational Net Assessment was and is an experimental program for integrating military intelligence from all sources in order to dispel the "fog of war." The military is continuing to work on it. That Van Riper beat it two years ago is no more surprising than that chess champions easily beat the earliest chess-playing computers: today, in a triumph of articulate "thinking" over intuition, it is the computers that are the champs. Gladwell also discusses alternative approaches in dating. (The procession of his anecdotes here becomes dizzying.) One is to make a list of the characteristics one desires in a date and then go looking for possible dates that fit the characteristics. The other, which experiments reveal, plausibly, to be superior, is to date a variety of people until you find someone with whom you click. The distinction is not between articulate thinking and intuitive thinking, but between deduction and induction. If you have never dated, you will not have a good idea of what you are looking for. As you date, you will acquire a better idea, and eventually you will be able to construct a useful checklist of characteristics. So this is yet another little tale that doesn't fit the ostensible subject of his book. Gladwell does not discuss "love at first sight," which would be a good illustration of the unreliability of rapid cognition. In discussing racial discrimination, Gladwell distinguishes between "unconscious attitudes" and "conscious attitudes. That is what we choose to believe." But beliefs are not chosen. You might think it very nice to believe in the immortality of the soul, but you could not will yourself (at least if you are intellectually honest) to believe it. Elsewhere he remarks of someone that when he is excited "his eyes light up and open even wider." But eyes don't light up; it is only by opening them wider that one conveys a sense of excitement. The metaphor of eyes lighting up is harmless, but one is surprised to find it being used by a writer who is at pains to explain exactly how we read intentions in facial expressions--and it is not by observing ocular flashes. T his book also succumbs to the fallacy that people with good ideas must be good people. Everyone in the book who gets psychology right is not only or mainly a bright person, he is also a noble human being; so there is much emphasis, Kerry-like, on Van Riper's combat performance in the Vietnam War, without explicitly mentioning that he went on to become a lieutenant-general. Such pratfalls, together with the inaptness of the stories that constitute the entirety of the book, make me wonder how far Gladwell has actually delved into the literatures that bear on his subject, which is not a new one. These include a philosophical literature illustrated by the work of Michael Polanyi on tacit knowledge and on "know how" versus "know that"; a psychological literature on cognitive capabilities and distortions; a literature in both philosophy and psychology that explores the cognitive role of the emotions; a literature in evolutionary biology that relates some of these distortions to conditions in the "ancestral environment" (the environment in which the human brain reached approximately its current level of development); a psychiatric literature on autism and other cognitive disturbances; an economic literature on the costs of acquiring and absorbing information; a literature at the intersection of philosophy, statistics, and economics that explores the rationality of basing decisions on subjective estimates of probability (Bayes's Theorem); and a literature in neuroscience that relates cognitive and emotional states to specific parts of and neuronal activities in the brain. Taken together, these literatures demonstrate the importance of unconscious cognition, but their findings are obscured rather than elucidated by Gladwell's parade of poorly understood yarns. He wants to tell stories rather than to analyze a phenomenon. He tells them well enough, if you can stand the style. (Blink is written like a book intended for people who do not read books.) And there are interesting and even illuminating facts scattered here and there, such as the blindfold "sip" test that led Coca-Cola into the disastrous error of changing the formula for Coke so that it would taste more like Pepsi. As Gladwell explains, people do not decide what food or beverage to buy solely on the basis of taste, let alone taste in the artificial setting of a blindfold test; the taste of a food or a drink is influenced by its visual properties. So that was a case in which less information really was less, and not more. And of course he is right that we may drown in information, so that to know less about a situation may sometimes be to know more about it. It is a lesson he should have taken to heart. [31]Richard A. Posner is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. References 31. http://www.tnr.com/showBio.mhtml?pid=62 From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 22:36:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 17:36:33 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Robert Conquest: Downloading Democracy Message-ID: Robert Conquest: Downloading Democracy http://www.nationalinterest.org/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications::Article&mid=1ABA92EFCD8348688A4EBEB3D69D33EF&tier=4&id=235512C943E7401BA568C1A1CD5F24ED Issue Date: Winter 2004/05, Posted On: 12/22/2004 The common addiction to general words or concepts tends to produce mind blockers or reality distorters. As Clive James has put it, "verbal cleverness, unless its limitations are clearly and continuously seen by its possessors, is an unbeatable way of blurring reality until nothing can be seen at all." "Democracy" is high on the list of blur-begetters--not a weasel word so much as a huge rampaging Kodiak bear of a word. The conception is, of course, Greek. It was a matter of the free vote by the public (though confined to males and citizens). Pericles, praising the Athenian system, is especially proud of the fact that policies are argued about and debated before being put into action, thus, he says, "avoiding the worst thing in the world", which is to rush into action without considering the consequences. And, indeed, the Athenians did discuss and debate, often sensibly. Its faults are almost as obvious as its virtues. And examples are many--for instance, the sentencing of Socrates, who lost votes because of his politically incorrect speech in his own defense. Or the Athenian assembly voting for the death of all the adult males and the enslavement of all the women and children of Mytilene, then regretting the decision and sending a second boat to intercept, just in time, the boat carrying the order. Democracy had the even more grievous result of procuring the ruin of Athens, by voting for the disastrous and pointless expedition to Syracuse against the advice of the more sensible, on being bamboozled by the attractive promises of the destructive demagogue Alcibiades. Even in failure, the thought-fires it set off went on burning. But the views it posed did not really return to Europe and elsewhere until a quarter of a millennium ago. Thus it was not its example but its theory that hit the inexperienced thinkers of the European Enlightenment. Unfortunately, the inheritance was less about the Periclean need for debate than about the need to harness the people (to a succession of rulers). And though the broader forces of real consensual rule began to penetrate, from England and elsewhere (such as the early New England town meetings or those of Swiss rural cantons), they had to compete in the struggle for the vote with inexperienced populations and "philosophical" elites. The revival of the concept of democracy on the European continent saw this huge stress on the demos, the people. They could not in fact match the direct participation of the Athenian demos, but they could be "represented" by any revolutionary regime claiming to do so--often concerned, above all, to repress "enemies of the people." Also, the people, or those of military age, could be conscripted in bulk--the levZe en masse that long defeated more conventional armies. As the 19th century continued, the people could be polled in plebiscites and thus democratically authenticated. Napoleon III, of course, relied on this, and it is clear that he actually had high majority support. In any case, the new orders, democratic or not, had to seek or claim authentication by the people, the masses, the population. Another aspect of premature "democracy" is the adulation of what used to be and might still be called "the city mob" (noted by Aristotle as ochlocracy). In France, of course, in the 1790s, a spate of ideologues turned to the Paris mob, in riot after riot, until the 18th Brumaire, Napoleon's coup of 1799. The ploy was that, as A. E. Housman put it, a capital city with far fewer inhabitants could decide the fate of the country's millions. That democracy is not the only, or inevitable, criterion of social progress is obvious. If free elections give power to a repression of consensuality, they are worse than useless. We will presumably not forget that Hitler came to power in 1933 by election, with mass and militant support. The communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 was effected by constitutional intrigues backed by "mass demonstrations." We need hardly mention the "peoples' democracies" and the 90 percent votes they always received. As to later elections, a few years ago there was a fairly authentic one in Algeria. If its results had been honored, it would have replaced the established military rulers with an Islamist political order. This was something like the choice facing Pakistan in 2002. At any rate, it is not a matter on which the simple concepts of democracy and free elections provide us with clear criteria. "Democracy" is often given as the essential definition of Western political culture. At the same time, it is applied to other areas of the world in a formal and misleading way. So we are told to regard more or less uncritically the legitimacy of any regime in which a majority has thus won an election. But "democracy" did not develop or become viable in the West until quite a time after a law-and-liberty polity had emerged. Habeas corpus, the jury system and the rule of law were not products of "democracy", but of a long effort, from medieval times, to curb the power of the English executive. And democracy can only be seen in any positive or laudable sense if it emerges from and is an aspect of the law-and-liberty tradition. Institutions that differ in the United States and the United Kingdom have worked (though forms created in other countries that were theoretically much the same have often collapsed). That is to say, at least two formally different sets of institutions have generally flourished. It seems that the main thing they share is not so much the institutions as the habits of mind, which are far more crucial, and, above all, the acceptance of the traditional rules of the political game. More broadly, in the West it has been tradition that has been generally determinant of public policy. Habituation is more central to a viable constitution than any other factor. Even the Western "democracies" are not exactly models of societies generated by the word, the abstract idea. Still they, or some of them, roughly embody the concept, as we know it, and at least are basically consensual and plural--the product of at best a long evolution. The countries without at least a particle of that background or evolution cannot be expected to become instant democracies; and if they do not live up to it, they will unavoidably be, with their Western sponsors, denounced as failures. Democracy in any Western sense is not easily constructed or imposed. The experience of Haiti should be enough comment. What we can hope for and work for is the emergence, in former rogue or ideomaniac states, of a beginning, a minimum. The new orders must be non-militant, non-expansionist, non-fanatical. And that goes with, or tends to go with, some level of internal tolerance, of plural order, with some real prospect of settling into habit or tradition. Democracy cannot work without a fair level of political and social stability. This implies a certain amount of political apathy. Anything resembling fanaticism, a domination of the normal internal debate by "activists" is plainly to be deplored. And democracy must accept anomalies. As John Paul Jones, the American naval hero, sensibly put it in 1775, "True as may be the political principles for which we are now contending, . . . the ships themselves must be ruled under a system of absolute despotism." The navy, indeed, is an extreme case; no democratization in any real degree makes sense, any more than it does in, say, a university, at the other end of the spectrum. Democratization of undemocratizable institutions is sometimes doubtless the expression of a genuine utopian ideal, as when the Jacobins by these means destroyed the French navy. But more often it is (in the minds of the leading activists, at least) a conscious attempt to ruin the institutions in question, as when the Bolsheviks used the idea to destroy the old Russian army. When this, among other things, enabled them to take power themselves, they were the first to insist on a discipline even more vigorous. In its most important aspect, civic order is that which has created a strong state while still maintaining the principle of consensus that existed in primitive society. Such an aim involves the articulation of a complex political and social order. The strains cannot be eliminated but can be continually adjusted. Political civilization is thus not primarily a matter of the goodwill of leadership or of ideal constitutions. It is, above all, a matter of time in custom. All the major troubles we have had in the last half century have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania. The politician should be a servant and should play a limited role. For what our political culture has stood for (as against the principles of total theorists and abstractionists) is the view of society as a developing and broadening of established liberties and responsibilities, and the belief, founded on experience, that in political and social matters, long-term predictions, however exciting and visionary, seldom work out. Democracy is almost invariably criticized by revolutionaries for the blemishes found in any real example, as compared with the grand abstraction of the mere word. Real politics is full of what it would be charitable to call imperfections. And there are those who, often without knowing it, become apologists and finally accomplices of the closing of society. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist (No. 1), "A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us, that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism, than the latter." But with a civic culture it is more clearly a matter of a basis on which improvements can be made. For a civic society is a society in which the various elements can express themselves politically, in which an articulation exists between those elements at the political level: not a perfect social order, which is in any case unobtainable, but a society that hears, considers and reforms grievances. It is not necessarily democratic, but it contains the possibility of democracy. We cannot predict. The near future teems with urgent problems, with as yet irresoluble balances of force and thought. The law-and-liberty cultures may flourish, and as yet unpromising regions may over a period bring not merely the forms but the habits of consensuality to their populations. Let us hope. Everywhere we always find the human urges to preserve at least a measure of personal autonomy, on the one hand, and to form communal relationships, on the other. It is the latter that tends to get out of hand. To form a national or other such grouping without forfeiting liberties and without generating venom against other such groupings--such is the problem before the world. To cope with it, we need careful thinking, balanced understanding, open yet unservile minds. And this is also why we still need to be careful about the signing of international treaties and the acceptance of international tribunals that appeal to a certain internationalist idealism, but one that needs to be carefully deployed. It is surely right to note that the acceptance of international obligations, and nowadays especially those affecting the policies, interests and traditional rights and powers of the states of established law and liberty, must be preceded by, at the least, negotiation that is careful, skeptical and unaffected by superficial generalities, however attractive at first sight. Permitting international bodies to intrude into the law-and-liberty countries also involves the institutionalization, on purely abstract grounds, of an as yet primitive apparat. A very important trouble with international arrangements of all types has also been that Western governments sign on to policies that have not been properly (or at all) argued or debated by their publics or legislatures. Thus these arrangements are a means of giving more power to their own executive branches and, of course, more power to the international bureaucracies and permanent staff. In particular, the UN, like the EU, approaches "human rights" on the basis of the general high-mindedness of the Continental Enlightenment. Declarations are made, agreements are reached. It is taken for granted that many states--about half the membership of the UN--will not in fact conform. And in the regions where liberty largely prevails, the signatories find their own countries denounced, often by their own citizens. The result is that under abstract human rights definitions, every state in the West that submits to treaties of the human rights sort lays itself open to aggressive litigation. As the late Raymond Aron, who spent so much of his life trying to educate the French intelligentsia, put it, "every known regime is blameworthy if one holds it to an abstract idea of equality over liberty." From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 22:43:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 17:43:50 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wilson Q.: Higher Ed, Inc. by James B. Twitchell Message-ID: Higher Ed, Inc. by James B. Twitchell http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=105061 In the early afternoon of December 2, 1964, Mario Savio took off his shoes and climbed onto the hood of a car. Savio was a junior majoring in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and he was upset that the administration of the university had arrested a handful of students and forbidden student groups to set up tables promoting various political and social causes. So he put himself upon the gears of the machine: If this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then Ill tell you something: The faculty are a bunch of employees, and were the raw material! But were a bunch of raw material[s] that dont mean to have any process upon us, dont mean to be made into any product, dont mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! Were human beings! In the four decades since Savios expression of defiance, Higher Ed, Inc., has become a huge business indeed. And as is typical of absorbent capitalism, it does not deny its struggles so much as market them. Mario Savio died in 1996. To honor his activism and insight, the academic senate at Berkeley agreed to name a set of steps in Sproul Plaza, the site of many political speeches, the Savio Steps. In an interesting bit of corporate assimilation, Savio became a lasting part of his own observations: He himself got branded. Although Mario Savio didnt mention it, the success story of Higher Ed, Inc., is based foursquare on the very transformation that allowed him access to Berkeley. For each generation since World War II, the doors to higher education have opened wider. Unquestionably, university education is the key component in a meritocracy, the sine qua non of an open market. A university degree is the stamp that sayswhether its true or notthis kid is educated, qualified, smart. The more prestigious the university, in theory, the smarter the kid. And increased access to university life has succeeded beyond anyones wildest expectation. In fact, the current dilemma is the price of success. There are too many seats, too much supply, and not enough Marios. The boom is over. Now the marketing begins. Counting everything but its huge endowment holdings, Higher Ed, Inc., is a $250 to $270 billion businessbigger than religion, much bigger than art. And though no one in the business will openly admit it, getting into college is a cinch. The problem, of course, is that too many students want to get into the same handful of nameplate colleges, making it seem that the entire market is tight. It most certainly is not. Heres the crucial statistic: There are about 2,500 four-year colleges in this country, and only about 100 of them refuse more applicants than they accept. Most schools accept 80 percent or more of those who apply. Its the rare student who cant get in somewhere. The explosive growth of Higher Ed, Inc., is evident in increasing enrollments, new construction, expanding statewide university systems, more federal monies, and changes in the professoriate. In the 1950 census, for example, there were 190,000 faculty members. A decade later, shortly before Savio took to the hood of the car, there were 281,000. In 1970, when I entered the ranks, there were 532,000, and in 1998, the latest year for which figures are available from the U.S. Department of Education, some 1,074,000. And remember, what distinguishes the academic world is a lifetime hold on employment. About 70 percent of todays faculty have tenured or tenure-track jobs. Even ministers get furloughed. Museum directors get canned. But make it through the tenure process, and youre set forever. At the turn of the 20th century, one percent of high school graduates attended college; that figure is now close to 70 percent. This is an industry that produces a yearly revenue flow more than six times the revenue generated by the steel industry. Woe to the state without a special funding program (with the word merit in it) that assures middle-class kids who graduate in the upper half of their high school class a pass to State U. College has become what high school used to be, and thanks to grade inflation, its almost impossible to flunk out. If real estates motto is location, location, location, higher educations is enrollment, enrollment, enrollment. College enrollment hit a record level of 14.5 million in fall 1998, fell off slightly, and then reached a new high of 15.3 million in 2000. How did this happen, when the qualified applicant pool remained relatively stable? Despite decreases in the traditional college-age population during the 1980s and early 1990s, total enrollment increased because of the high enrollment rate of students who previously had been excluded. What has really helped Higher Ed, Inc., is its ability to open up new markets. Although affirmative action was certainly part of court-mandated fair play, it was also a godsend. It insulated higher education from the market shocks suffered by other cultural institutions. In addition, universities have been able to extend their product line upward, into graduate and professional schools. Another growth market? Foreign students. No one talks about it much, but this market has been profoundly affected by 9/11. Foreign students have stopped coming. There are enough rabbits still in the python that universities havent been affected yet. But they will be. What makes this enrollment explosion interesting from a marketing point of view is that Savios observations (the faculty are a bunch of employees, and were the raw material) have been confirmed. What he didnt appreciate is that instead of eating up raw material and spitting it out, Higher Ed, Inc., has done something far more interesting. As it has grown, its content has been profoundly changeddumbed down, some would say. Theres a reason for that. At the undergraduate level, its now in the business of delivering consumer satisfaction. I teach at a large public university, the University of Florida. As I leave the campus to go home, I bike past massive new construction. Heres whats being built. On my distant left, the student union is doubling in size: food court, ballrooms, cineplex, bowling alley, three-story hotel, student legal services and bicycle repair (both free), career counseling, and all manner of stuff that used to belong in the mall, including a store half the size of a football field with a floor devoted to selling what is called spiritware (everything you can imagine with the school logo and mascot), an art gallery, video games, an optical store, a travel agency, a frame store, an outdoor outfitter, and a huge aquarium filled with only orange and blue (the school colors) fish. On a normal day some 20,000 patrons pass through the building. The student union is looking eerily like a department store. So is the university. On my immediate left, I pass the football stadium. One side of it is being torn apart to add a cluster of skyboxes. Skyboxes are a valuable resource, as they are almost pure profit. The state is not paying for them. The athletic department is. They will be rented mainly to corporations to allow their VIPs air-conditioned splendor high above the hoi polloi. The skyboxes have granite countertops, curved ceilings, and express elevators. In a skybox, you watch the football game on television. Better yet, the skyboxes allow whats forbidden to the groundlings: alcohol. How expensive are these splendid aeries? There are 347 padded 21-inch seats in the Bull Gator Deck. Theyll run you $14,000 a person, and you get only four games in the box. For the other four, youre in the stands. Dont worry about doing the math. The boxes are already sold out. I teach in a huge building that looks like the starship Enterprise. It houses classrooms and faculty offices and cost $10 million when it was built a few years ago. These skyboxes and some club seats are coming in at $50 million. Everyone agrees, the skyboxes are a good idea. Theyll make money. Better yet, theyll build the brand. Across from the football stadium, at the edge of the campus on my right, is the future of my institution. I pass an enormous new building with a vast atrium of aggressively wasted space. This building houses the headquarters of the University of Florida Foun- dation. The foundation funnels millions of dollars of private money the state will never know about into and through various parts of the university. I dont complain. No one does. Two decades ago, the foundation gave nothing to the English department; now, about a hundred grand a year comes our way. In front of the foundation, where a statue of some illustrious donor or beloved professor would stand at an elite school, is a bronze statue of the athletic departments trademarked mascots, Albert and Alberta Alligator. On this side of campus, enrollment, enrollment, enrollment is becoming endowment, endowment, endowment. Americans donate more money to higher education than to any other cause except religion. And Florida, with its millions of retirees looking for memorial opportunities, is a cash cow just waiting for the farmers gentle hands. The residents of Florida have almost no interest in funding education, especially not K-12 education, which really is in dire shape. But there are wads of money to fund bits and pieces of the campus in exchange for good feelings and occasional naming rights. American colleges and universities raise about $25 billion a year from private sources. Public universities are new to this game, but theyve learned that its where the action is. Private dollars now account for about 30 percent of the University of Illinois annual budget, about 20 percent of Berkeleys, and about 10 percent of Floridas. In a sense, tuition-paying undergrads are now the loss leaders in the enterprise. What used to be the knowledge business has become the business of selling an experience, an affiliation, a commodity that can be manufactured, packaged, bought, and sold. Dont misunderstand. The intellectual work of universities is still going on and has never been stronger. Great creative acts still occur, and discoveries are made. But the experience of higher education, all the accessories, the amenities, the aura, has been commercialized, outsourced, franchised, branded. The professional manager has replaced the professor as the central figure in delivering the goods. From a branding point of view, what happens in the classroom is beside the point. I mean that literally. The old image of the classroom as fulfillment of the Socratic ideal is no longer even invoked. Higher Ed, Inc., is more like a sawmill. A few years ago, Harvard University started a small department called the Instructional Computing Group, which employs several people to videotape about 30 courses a semester. Although it was intended for students who unavoidably missed class, it soon became a way not to attend class. Any enrolled student could attend on the Web, fast-forwarding through all the dull parts. This is distance education from a dorm room, at an advertised $37,928 a year. Elite schools are no longer in the traditional education business. They are in the sponsored research and edutainment business. What they offer is just one more thing that you shop for, one more thing you consume, one more story you tell and are told. Its no accident that you hear students talking about how much the degree costs and how much its worth. Thats very much how the schools themselves talk as they look for new sources of research or developmental funding. In many schools theres even a period called shopping around, in which the student attends as many classes as possible looking for a fit, almost like channel surfing. So we do college as we do lunch or do shopping or do church. Thats because for most students in the upper-tier schools the real activity is getting in and then continuing on into the professional schools. No one cares whats taught in grades 1316. How many times have I heard my nonacademic friends complain that theres no coherence in the courses their kids are exposed to? Back in the 1950s, introductory courses used the same textbooks, not just intramurally but extramurally. So Introduction to Writing (freshman English) used the same half-dozen handbooks all across the country. No longer. The writing courses are a free-for-all. Ditto the upper-level courses. Here are some subjects my department covers in what used to be English 101, the vanilla composition course: attitudes toward marriage, business, bestsellers, carnivals, computer games, fashion, horror films, The Simpsons, homophobia, living arrangements, rap music, soap operas, Elvis, sports, theme parks, AIDS, play, and the ever-popular marginalization of this or that group. But cries that the classroom is being dumbed down or politicized miss the point. Hardly anyone in Higher Ed, Inc., cares about what is taught, because that is not our charge. We are not in the business of transmitting what E. D. Hirsch would call cultural literacy; nor are we in the business of teaching the difference between the right word and the almost right word, as Mark Twain might have thought important. Were in the business of creating a total environment, delivering an experience, gaining satisfied customers, and applying the smart stamp when they head for the exits. The classroom reflects this. Our real business is being transacted elsewhere on campus. The most far-reaching changes in postsecondary education are not seen on the playing fields or in the classroom or even in the admissions office. Theyre inside the administration, in an area murkily called development. If you dont believe it, enter the administration building of any school that enrolls more than 10,000 students (10 percent of campuses of that size or larger now account for a shade less than 50 percent of all students) and ask for the university development office. Youll notice how, on this part of the campus, the carpets are thick, the wainscoting is polished, and the lights are dimmed. Often, the development office has a new name picked up from the corporate model. Sometimes its hidden inside Public Affairs, or, more commonly, Public Relations. My favorite: University Advancement. The driving force at my university is now the University of Florida Foundation. Development is both PR and fundraising, the intersection of getting the brand out and the contributions in, and daily it becomes more crucial. Thats because schools like mine have four basic revenue streams: student tuition, research funding, public (state) support, and private giving. The least important is tuition; the most prestigious is external research dollars; the most fickle is state support; and the most remunerative is what passes through the development office. Leaf through The Chronicle of Higher Education, the weekly journal of the industry, and youll see how much newsprint is devoted to the comings and goings of development. Consider where the development office is housed on most campuses, often right beside the presidents office, and note how many people it employs. At many schools, theres also a buried pipeline that connects the development office with the admissions office. Most academic administrators prefer that it be buried deep, but from time to time someone digs it up. In The Wall Street Journal for February 3, 2003, Daniel Golden reported on how the formal practice of giving preference to students whose parents are wealthycalled development admitshas profound implications not just for affirmative action but for the vaunted academic ideal of fair play. Remember the scene in the third season of The Sopranos when Carmella has a lunch meeting with the dean of Columbia Universitys undergraduate school? She thinks the lunch is about her daughter Meadow, but the dean wants a little development money. Carmella listens to his charming patter before being hit with the magic number of $50,000. She goes to Tony, who protests that the Ivy League is extorting them and says he wont give more than five gs. But the dean eventually gets his 50 gs; Tony, the consummate shakedown artist, has met his match. When enrollments began to escalate in the 1960s, what used to be a pyramid systemwith rich, selective schools at the top (read Ivy League and a handful of other elites) and then a gradation downward through increasing supply and deceasing rigor to junior and community college systems at the basebecame an hourglass lying on its side. Theres now a small bubble of excellent small schools on one side (Ivy League schools qualify as small) that are really indistinguishable, and, on the other, a big bubble of huge schools of varying quality. The most interesting branding is occurring on the small-bubble side, as premier schools vie for dominance, but the process is almost exactly the same, although less intense, for the big suppliers. Good schools have little interest in the bachelors degree. In fact, the better the school, the less important the terminal undergraduate degree. The job of the student is to get in, and the job of the elite school is to get the student out into graduate school. The schools certify students as worthy of further education, in law, medicine, the arts, or business. Premier schools have to separate their students from the rest of the pack by generating a story about how special they are. We have the smart ones, they say. Thats why they care little about such hot-button issues as grade inflation, teaching quality, student recommendations, or even the curriculum. Its not in their interest to tarnish the brand by drawing distinctions among their students. These schools essentially let the various testsLSAT, MCAT, GREmake the distinctions for them. And, if you notice, they never divulge how well their students do on those tests to the outside world. They have this information, but they keep it to themselves. Theyre not stupid; they have to protect the brand for incoming consumers because thats where they really compete. In one of the few candid assessments of the branding of Higher Ed, Inc., Robert L. Woodbury, former chancellor of the University of Maine system, noted the folly of the current institutional U.S. News and World Report rankings: When Consumer Reports rates and compares cars, it measures them on the basis of categories such as performance, safety, reliability, and value. It tries to measure outputsin short, what the car does. U.S. News mostly looks at inputs (money spent, class size, test scores of students, degrees held by faculty), rather than assessing what the college or university actually accomplishes for students over the lives of their enrollment. If Consumer Reports functioned like U.S. News, it would rank cars on the amount of steel and plastic used in their construction, the opinions of competing car dealers, the driving skills of customers, the percentage of managers and sales people with MBAs, and the sticker price on the vehicle (the higher, the better). The emphasis on inputs explains why the elite schools arent threatened by what others fear: the much-ballyhooed click universities, such as the University of Phoenix and Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc., because those schools generate no peer effects. So, too, theres no threat from corporate universities, such as those put together by Microsoft, Motorola, and Ford, or even from the Open University of England and The Learning Annex. The industrial schools have not yet made their presence felt, though they will. The upper tier on the small side of the hourglass is not threatened by learning at a distance or drive-through schools, because the elites are not as concerned with learning as they are with maintaining selectivity at the front door and safe passage to still-higher education at the back door. So whats it like at the upper end among the deluxe brand-name schools, where Harry Winston competes with Tiffany, where Louis Vuitton elbows Prada, where Lexus dukes it out with Mercedes? In a word, its brutal, an academic arms race. How did the competition become so intense? Until 1991, the Ivy League schools and the Massachusetts Institute of Tecnology met around a conference table each April to fix financial aid packages for students who had been admitted to more than one school. That year, after the Justice Department sued the schools, accusing them of antitrust violations, the universities agreed to stop the practice. As happened with Major League Baseball after television contracts made the teams rich, bidding pandemonium broke out. Finite number of players + almost infinite cash = market bubble. Heres the staggering result. Over the past three decades, tuition at the most select schools has increased fivefold, nearly double the rate of inflation. Yet precious few students pay the full fare. The war is fought over who gets in and how much theyre going to have to be paid to attend. The fact of the matter is that the cost of tuition has become unimportant in the Ivy League. Like grade inflation, its uncontrollableand hardly anyone in Higher Ed, Inc., really cares. As with other luxury providers, the higher the advertised price, the longer the line. The other nifty irony is that, among elite schools, the more the consumer pays for formal education (or at least is charged), the less of it he or she gets. The mandated class time necessary to qualify for a degree is often less at Stanford than at State U. As a general rule, the better the school, the shorter the week. At many good schools, the weekend starts on Thursday. Ask almost anyone in the education industry whats the most overrated brand and theyll tell you Harvard. Its one of the most timid and derivative schools in the country, yet it has been able to maintain a reputation as the ?ber-brand. Think of any important change in higher education, and you can bet (1) that it didnt originate at Harvard, and (2) that if its central to popular recognition, Harvard now owns it. Why is Harvard synonymous with the ne plus ultra? Not because of what comes out of the place but because of what goes in: namely, the best students, the most contributed money, and, especially, the deepest faith in the brand. Everyone knows that Harvard is the most selective university, with a refusal rate of almost 90 percent. But more important, the school is obscenely rich, with an endowment of almost $20 billion. Remember that number. Its key to the brand. The endowment is greater than the assets of the Dell computer company, the gross domestic product of Libya, the net worth of all but five of the Forbes 400, or the holdings of every nonprofit in the world except the Roman Catholic Church. In a marketing sense, the value of the endowment is not monetary but psychological: Any place with that many zeros after the dollar sign has got to be good. The huge endowments of the nameplate schools force other schools, the second-tier schools, to spend themselves into penury. So your gift to Harvard does more harm than good to the general weal of Higher Ed, Inc. It does, however, maintain the Harvard brand. With the possible exception of Harvard, the best schools are about as interchangeable as the second-tier ones. All premier schools have essentially the same teaching staff, the same student amenities, the same library books, the same wondrous athletic facilities, the same carefully trimmed lawns, the same broadband connection lines in the dorms. Look at the websites for the most selective schools, and youll see almost exactly the same images irrespective of place, supposed mission, etc. True, they may attempt to slide in some attention-getting fact (If you use our library, you may notice our Gutenberg Bible, or The nuclear accelerator is buried beneath the butterfly collection), but by and large the websites are like the soap aisle at Safeway. If you really want evidence of the indistinguishability of the elites, consider the so-called viewbook, the newest marketing tool sent to prospective applicants. The viewbook is a glossy come-on, bigger than a prospectus and smaller than a catalog, that sets the brand. As with the websites, what you see in almost every view is a never-ending loop of smiling faces of diverse backgrounds, classrooms filled with eager beavers, endless falling leaves in a blue-sky autumn, lush pictures of lacrosse, squash, and rugby (because football, basketball, and baseball are part of the mass-supplier brands), and a collection of students whose interests are just like yours. From a branding point of view, the viewbook is additionally interesting because it illustrates how repeating a claim is the hallmark of undifferentiated producers. Heres what Nicolaus Mills, an American studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College, found a decade ago, just as the viewbook was starting to become standardized. Every school had the same sort of glossy photographs proving the same claim of diversity: Diversity is the hallmark of the Harvard/Radcliffe experience, the first sentence in the Harvard University register declares. Diversity is the virtual core of University life, the University of Michigan bulletin announces. Diversity is rooted deeply in the liberal arts tradition and is key to our educational philosophy, Connecticut College insists. Dukes 5,800 undergraduates come from regions which are truly diverse, the Duke University bulletin declares. Stanford values a class that is both ethnically and economically diverse, the Stanford University bulletin notes. Brown University says, When asked to describe the undergraduate life at The Collegeand particularly their first strongest impression of Brown as freshmenstudents consistently bring up the same topic: the diversity of the student body. In this kind of marketing, Higher Ed, Inc., is like the crowd in Monty Pythons Life of Brian. Graham Chapman as Brian, the man mistaken for the Messiah, exhorts a crowd of devotees: Dont follow me! Dont follow anyone! Think for yourselves! You are all individuals! To which the crowd replies in perfect unison, Yes, Master, we are all individuals. We are all individuals. We are all individuals. The elite schools have to produce an entering class thats not just the best and brightest they can gather, but one that will demonstrate an unbridgeable quality gap between themselves and other schools. They need this entering class because its precisely what they will sell to the next crop of consumers. Its the annuity that gives them financial security. In other words, what makes Higher Ed, Inc., unlike other American industries is that its consumer value is based almost entirely on who is consuming the product. At the point of admissions, the goal is not money. The goal is to publicize whos getting in. Thats the product. Who sits next to you in class generates value. So its to the advantage of a good school to exploit the appearance of customer merit, not customer need. But how to pay for this competitive largesse if tuition is not the income spigot? At four-year private colleges and universities, fully three-quarters of all undergraduates get aid of some sort. In fact, 44 percent of all dependent students, a technical term that refers to young, single undergraduates with annual family incomes of $100,000 or less, get aid. What elite schools lose on tuition they recover elsewhere. Take Williams College, for example. The average school spends about $11,000 a student and takes in $3,500 in tuition and fees; Williams, a superbrand, spends about $75,000 per student and charges, after accounting for scholarships and other items, a net of $22,000. Why? Because Williams figures that to maintain its brand value, to protect its franchise, it can superdiscount fees and make up the difference with the cash thats to come in the future. In theory, if an elite school could get the right student body, it would be in its best interest to give the product away: no tuition in exchange for the very best students. (Thats a policy not without risk, as Williams found last year when Moodys lowered its credit rating because the college had dipped too deeply into endowment to fund its extraordinary incoming class.) How does the brand sensitivity of the elite institutions affect the quality of the educational experience for the rest of us? How dangerous is it that schools follow the corporate model of marketing? The prestige school has other money pots than tuition. Every two weeks, for example, Harvards endowment throws off enough cash to cover all undergraduate tuition. But what happens to schools below the privileged top tier? They, too, have to discount their sticker prices to maintain perceived value. So competition at the top essentially raises costs everywhere, though only some schools have pockets deep enough to afford the increase. The escalation in competitive amenities is especially acute in venues where a wannabe school is next to an elite one. Things get worse the further you move from the top. To get the students it needs to achieve a higher ranking in annual surveysand thereby draw better students, who boost external giving, which finances new projects, raises salaries, and increases the endowment needed for getting better students, wholl win the institution a higher national ranking, which . . . etc.the second-tier school must perpetually treat students as transient consumers. Really good schools have all those so-called competitive amenities, all those things that attract students but have nothing to do with their oft-stated lofty mission and often get little useOlympic-quality gyms, Broadway-style theaters, personal trainers, glitzy student unions with movie theaters, and endless playing fields, mostly covered with grass, not athletes. This marketing madness is now occurring among the mass-supplier institutions. So the University of Houston has a $53 million wellness center with a five-story climbing wall; Washington State University has the largest Jacuzzi on the West Coast (it holds 53 students); Ohio State University is building a $140 million complex featuring batting cages, ropes courses, and the now-essential climbing wall; and the University of Southern Missis- sippi is planning a full-fledged water park. These schools, according to Moodys, are selling billions of dollars of bonds for construction that has nothing whatsoever to do with education. Its all about branding. The commercialization of higher education has had many salutary effects: wider access, the dismantling of discriminatory practices, increased breadth and sophistication in many fields of research, and an intense, often refreshing, concern about customer relations. But consider other consequences for a place such as the University of Florida, which is a typical mass-provider campus. To get the student body we need for a respectable spot in the national rankings, we essentially give the product away. We have no choice. Other states will take our best students if we dont. Ivy League monies come from endowment and have the promise of being replenished if the school retains its reputation. But state universities are heavily dependent on the largesse of state legislatures, and to keep the money coming they need to be able to boast about their ability to attract the states best and brightest. So about half of them have been sucked into simple-minded plans that are essentially a subvention of education for middle-class kids. Everyone admits that most of these kids would go to college anyway. But would they go to the state system? Who wants to find out the hard way? Mario Savio was right. Before all else, the modern university is a business selling a branded product. The Age of Money has reshaped the terrain of higher education, writes David Kirp, of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Gone, except in the rosy reminiscences of retired university presidents, is any commitment to maintaining a community of scholars, an intellectual city on a hill free to engage critically with the conventional wisdom of the day. The hoary call for a marketplace of ideas has turned into a double-entendre. Administrators and the professoriate have not just allowed this transformation of the academy, theyve willingly, often gleefully, collaborated in it. The results have not been all bad. But the fact is that weve gone from artisanal guild to department store, from gatekeeper to ticket taker, from page turner to video clicker. This commodification, selling out, commercialization, corporatizationwhatever you want to call itis what happens when marketing becomes an end, not a means. Universities are making money by lending their names to credit card companies, selling their alumni lists, offering their buildings for naming rights, and extending their campuses to include retirement communities and graveyards. Its past time for the participants in Higher Ed, Inc., to recall what Savio said years ago: The university is being industrialized not by outside forces but by internal ones. Rather like the child who, after murdering his parents, asks for leniency because hes an orphan, universities grown plump feeding at the commercial trough now complain that theyve been victimized by the market. This contention of victimization is, of course, a central part of the modern Higher Ed, Inc., brand. The next words youll hear will be Please give. We desperately need your support! James B. Twitchell is a professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is the author of many books, including most recently Living It Up: Americas Love Affair with Luxury (2002). This essay is drawn from his forthcoming book Branded Nation, to be published by Simon & Schuster. Total messages: 11 | Started: 01/29/2005 The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and in no way represent the views or opinions of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Higher Ed, Inc. A vastly entertaining and amusing article. Is it accurate? Well, for the most part, what is stated has been readily observable for some years in our institutions of higher learning. The author clearly makes the point that all of what has developed is not necessarily to be deplored. As a fellow observer, I would comment that, in fact, most of what has developed is an improvement over my personal experience in obtaining degrees in the 1950s and 1960s. Does the good Professor protest too much? Probably. Pat West, D.Sc. Posted by: Pat West 01/29/2005 Reaction Prof Twitchell's article was provoking and insightful in exposing the marketing process. I was hoping he'd say something about resultant academic standards. My prof friends say it's bad. Posted by: Bob Foley 01/29/2005 censorship at Folk U. Mario Savio is also intimately associated with "academic freedom" as he is credited with initiating the Free Speech Movement. Freedom of speech, however, is rapidly dying on America's campuses. In no slight way, this is attributable to the "commodification" of higher ed, and the view of students as cusomers/consumers. No one with power or influence objects to a corporation's "right" to censor its employees, it being understood that the First Amendment does not extend to the so-called "private sector." But that fussy distinction is being obscured all across the land, as corporate values swamp academia. Professors and students alike are being gagged everywhere, lest potential shoppers be offended and thus alienated. My region of the country--what some designate as the Sixth Reich whose capital is Censornati, Ohio--has already experienced the first stage of brutal repression and silencing at the hands of federal judges who despise their oath to uphold the Constitution. Free speech, once the hallmark of higher education, must defer to the commercial exigencies of America's new order. Ohio gave us the Kent State massacre in 1971; now it gives us snazzy concentration camps. Ohio Hitlist! Posted by: John C. Bonnell 01/30/2005 The learnint communitiy might survive After thirty years on the faculty of an elite private liberal arts college conscious of the insidious shift from learning community to consumerist enclave, I made an interesting transition. I retired ten years ago and joined the faculty at a remote branch campus of a two-year tribal college in the Southwest with none of the amenities that Professor Twitchell describes. Instead I found myself teaching ill-prepared students struggling to catch up to their more privileged off-reservation peers. For many that means learning to read and write, to do research at the most basic level, to overcome economic and cultural obstacles totally foreign to students in the mainstream. While I find the challenges sometimes daunting, I take renewed pleasure in the teaching I do. Students come to campus not expecting wellness centers, food courts or bookstores that resemble giant boutiques. Instead, they want to master the computer keyboard, to learn algebra, to grow comfortable with the printed page, to make up in whatever way possible for the substandard educations they recieved in their previous schooling. Under those circumstances the classroom becomes central to the enterprise. Now as I watch students learn how to formulate an idea and put it in writing or discover the structure underlying a sonnet, I regain the idealism that drew me to an academic career in the first place and feel like I am in a learning community once again. Posted by: Paul Zolbrod 01/30/2005 I simply want to second Professor Zolbrod's comment. I too teach at a non-elite, non-flagship school, and my experience is nothing like Dr. Twitchell's. I saw something of that in my grad and undergrad careers, but the reality is that for many schools, the kind of luxury that Twitchell describes is a distant fantasy. Our freshman comp courses teach basic composition, and do not drift off into various themes, because many of our students still have not mastered the most basic writing skills. My field is history - while I would enjoy teaching more esoteric material, the reality is all but my upper division specialty courses must focus primarily on cultural literacy, because my students do not have it. In our debate about the strengths and weaknesses of higher, and grade school, education, we must be careful to recognize the diversity of these institutions. Twitchell describes an institution living on some high-sugar diet, but many of us work in a very different world, with very different challenges. Posted by: Theron Corse 01/30/2005 Foreign phrases, misuse of The definite article in the phrase "the hoi polloi" is redundant. Hoi polloi means (more or less) the public; hoi = the, get it? Professors of English in my day knew at least basic Greek Tsk tsk Posted by: Bryna Kaye 01/30/2005 [spacer.gif] hoi polloi hmm, well in its ancient context it doesn't so much mean public as much as it means the common citizen (heavy infantry) as compared to the aristocratic citizen (calvary). both of which were upper class to some regard to the metics, slaves, etc. in athens. of course, uses vary these days. Posted by: jeremy hunsinger 01/31/2005 Is Education Worse? Twitchell repeats an assertion one often hears now: that Universities no longer focus on academic and intellectual development and primarily concern themselves with "branding," creating an "experience," treating students as "consumers," and obtaining money and prestige. My question: was the University so intellectually centered in the good old days? Did students get a better education? How can one measure such things? While I don't think students at the university where I teach are getting the best education possible, I also think it could be true that they are being taught by more knowledgeable and more productive faculty than in years past. I'd like to hear about an empirical, convincing study that says that education has worsened in our universities because of the trends Twitchell is analyzing. Posted by: AG 01/30/2005 [spacer.gif] Results This is an interesting article. However, it seems to condemn higher education without making any claims about the quality of the education students are receiving. The author makes a short comment about colleges not revealing LSAT, GRE, and other graduate test scores. He fails to actually show that students scores on these standardized tests have drop. A proper analysis would use time-series data at individual schools. While Dr. Twitchell may argue that a corporate mentality should be removed from higher education as an evil in and of itself, he certainly fails to show that it has had any negative effects on the quality of educaiton. One other thing to keep in mind. While colleges may not release the LSAT, MCAT, and GRE scores of their students, the relative quality of a schools students can be determined by looking at the composition of classes at top graduate programs. For instance, if a college is able to send a large number of students on to Harvard Law, they are probably providing a high quality education. Prospective students are very much concerned with what the quality of education a school provides, as they will want to get into good graduate programs or find good jobs when they graduate. While schools may be concerned with marketing a college experience, they also must market their academic program. In a corporate environment their is no getting around the fact that results matter, and colleges are always going to be concerned with producing top talent, as that alone will attract the next class of students. Posted by: Matt 01/30/2005 You think this is bad? From the point of view of someone who works in the proprietary education industry, as I do, Prof. Twitchell's concern is almost quaint. In my industry, the apparatus that he decribes has been fully distilled into pure marketing. There are pros and cons, of course, as Prof. Twitchell and most others recognize. What does this all mean? Does it merely reflect changing American attitudes toward education? How would the average American react to this trend? Posted by: RMS 01/30/2005 Dumbing down teaching materials I am the lead author on an introductory economics textbook ("Microeconomics in Context" -- Houghton Mifflin, 2005)and have looked at a lot of other textbooks, teachers' manuals, and other teaching aids, along with the literature on teaching this subject. There are a lot of criticisms of economics courses, reflecting the sad reality confessed by one Economics Department Chair: "our students hate us." I believe that the reason most students are turned off by their first exposure to economics (only 5% will go on to major in the subject) is that, as presented in most college classes, it bears little relation to the complexity of the real world. Unfortunately, the conclusion drawn in most academic discussions of the problem is that the subject is too complex -- and the suggested remedy is to simplify further. "Just pick half a dozen facts about the economic system, and don't try to teach anything else." The teaching aids similarly spoon-feed and dumb down. These observations relate to the treatment of students as consumers -- and also to the way the printed media increasingly acts as if it would be wrong and unreasonable to ask people to think. Ask people to think about real things of real importance to themselves, and they may rise to the challenge. But the commercialization of education as well as of the press makes that challenge seem too risky. Posted by: Neva Goodwin 01/30/2005 Related Articles [34]The Revenge of the Nerds by Steven Lagerfeld [35]Schools and the g Factor by Linda S. Gottfredson References 34. http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=105057 35. http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=105059 From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 22:48:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 17:48:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wilson Q.: The Revenge of the Nerds by Steven Lagerfeld Message-ID: The Revenge of the Nerds by Steven Lagerfeld http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=105057 When Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life 10 years ago, the book provoked a more violent response than any other in recent memory. Enough heated reviews and articles appeared to fill several anthologies. Yet the critics said very little about one of Murray and Herrnsteins central contentions: that a high-IQ cognitive elite is consolidating a dominant position atop American society. Maybe that silence is understandable, given that the two men made several far more incendiary argumentsabout IQ as a source of intractable forms of social and economic inequality, and about the differences in IQ between whites and blacks. Then, in 2002, Richard Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida, a professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University, came at the question from the opposite end of the political spectrum, barely breathing the word intelligence while asserting that creative professionalsin reality, smart peopleincreasingly dominate American society. Florida argued that cities seeking to revive their fortunes need to do everything possible to attract his liberal, tolerant cultural creatives. Again there was controversy, but again it wasnt about one of the books key arguments. To critics in the universities and the news media, the notion that people like themselves possess extraordinary mental powers must have seemed obvious. In fact, the evidence for this view is debatable. But one thing we do know conclusively: The smart people who mold opinion in this country think its true. Its not just the academic and media elite who worship smarts. In this nation of casually anti-intellectual pragmatists, where Thomas Edison once brushed off the accolades heaped upon him with the observation that genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, it has become fashionable to be smart. Our books and movies reveal a fascination with the intellectually gifted: Einstein in Love, A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting. In the highly popular Matrix trilogy, the heroes are hypertalented computer geeks chosen for their extraordinary ability to manipulate technology. The geek and the wonk, once social outcasts, are now cultural heroes. If you cant be smart, you can at least look the part by donning a pair of thick-rimmed eyeglasses and a shirt with a long, pointy collar, buttoned all the way up. The annual announcement of the MacArthur Foundations genius grants (a name the foundation disavows) is greeted as eagerly as the Queens Honors List in Britain. We have smart cars, smart mobs, and smart growth. Thanks to Smarty Jones, even horses appear to be getting smart. It may seem implausible to speak of a cult of smarts in the age of Paris Hilton and 30-second political attack ads, when it appears that America is being relentlessly dumbed down. But dont blame dumb people for that. Dumbing down is the idea of film and television executives, political consultants, newspaper magnates, and other very intelligent people. Its a shrewd moneymaking strategy. It also reveals one of the problems of putting too much stock in pure brainpower: Smart people are uniquely capable of producing noxious ideas. The triumph of these canny operators points to the key reason why intelligence has achieved such high status: Its not so much that brains have risen in our esteem as that other qualities have declined. Intelligence has always been respected and rewarded, but in the past it existed in a larger world of shared values that were intensively cultivated by social institutions. The consensus that supported this system has largely dissolved, and many of the personal and institutional virtues it encouraged have been weakened. But theres at least one quality about whose goodness we still seem able to agree: raw intelligence. It now enjoys a status akin to virtue. Why havent intellectuals and nascent philosopher-kings benefited much from the new status dispensation? Because Americans prefer their smarts in the form of relatively narrow expertise, and all the better if ratified by a significant paycheck. Intellectuals and academics win time in the sun only when they can convey specialized knowledge about subjects such as the economy and the Middle East. There are other, more tangible reasons for the elevation of intelligence. The transformation of the economy since World War II, with the decline of farming and manufacturing and the rise of service industries and technology, has put a new premium on education, training, and the smarts needed to obtain them. (Ironically, the public schools are one of the few institutions that have not come to terms with this reality.) Along with economic transformation came social change. Beginning in the 1950s, doors that had once been closed to the talented were thrown open; the less-than-brilliant son of an alumnus was no longer guaranteed admission to Harvardor to the American elite. Many bright people have had opportunities they would not have had in the past. Yet the rising value we attach to smarts exceeds any increase in their actual importance. Americas postwar changes are of relatively recent vintage, and there are other forms of economic and social inequality that still play a role in determining who rises. At the very highest levels of society, moreover, its hard to know whether some new increment of IQ is really needed. Do todays political and corporate leaders need to be smarter than yesterdays? Is there any evidence that they are ? Nowhere is the trend toward the worship of smartsand both its positive and negative consequencesmore apparent than in the business world. The corporate titan as cultural hero pretty much vanished from the American scene in the 1960s, and when he reappeared a couple of decades later, he had shed his sober, Ike-like mien and gray flannel suit and become a dazzling, iconoclastic genius in a polo shirt. Instead of drearily working their way to the top, todays exalted executives travel a route more like something out of a Harry Potter novel. Initially, the wunderkind finds his way to one of our most elite universities, which still proves inadequate to contain his prodigious mental energies, as in the case of Harvard dropout Bill Gates and the two founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who abandoned a Stanford Ph.D. program. Then he retreats to a holy site (often a Silicon Valley garage), where theres a period of mysterious wizardry involving smoke and flashes of light before our hero emerges with his Creation. More years of struggle follow, and then comes the magical ceremony that finally earns him the mantle of true genius: the initial public offering. Turn the pages of a Fortune magazine from 50 years ago and you will encounter an entirely different kind of business leader. It was the world of Organization Men and team players. The first line of a profile of construction magnate Steve Bechtel describes him as a man who works himself to the bone. He has some of the old-time construction mans swagger and knows how to exert a certain force on other men. He is surrounded by tough, well-schooled engineers and executives. Sam Mosher, the head of Signal Oil & Gas, has five hard years of farming behind him and works very hard and seriously. Of course these men were smart, but in 1954 that was not a fact Fortune thought worth emphasizing. Successful business leaders were hard working, seasoned by experience, a bit macho. Brains can produce wonderful things. They gave us Google and cracked the human genetic code. But we tend to forget that big brains also ran Enron, MCI, and scores of short-lived technology company skyrockets. (One account of the Enron debacle is called The Smartest Guys in the Room.) During the mid-1990s, investors sank a fortune into Long-Term Capital Management, the now-infamous hedge fund, trusting in the scintillating brains of its two economists, Myron Scholes of Stanford University and Robert C. Merton of Harvard University, who had done pioneering work on the modeling of stock-price movements. For a time, the firm was fabulously successful. In 1997, Scholes and Merton won the Nobel Prize in economics. A year later, when the Russian bond market collapsed, Long-Term Capital Management lost $2 billion in the space of weeks and teetered on the edge of a collapse which, thanks to its intricate deals with Wall Street institutions, threatened to wipe out billions more in assets and trigger a global financial crisis. Only the intervention of the Federal Reserve saved the day. How could high intellect go so wrong? asked Edward Tenner, the author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (1996). Easy. Brilliance is dangerous. It tempts those who have it to pronouncements that outrun experience and even common sense. Still, the hot pursuit of business genius goes on. Its seen in Wall Streets continuing quest for the next big idea. Its seen in the incredible increase in the pay of corporate CEOs. In the early 1970s, CEOs earned 30 to 35 times as much as the average corporate employee. Today the multiple is about 300, or $150,000 per week. Thats a paycheck only a superhuman could deserve. It ought to be clear that high intelligence is no guarantee of good political leadership, yet we incessantly discuss the raw intelligence of our leaders as if it would determine the quality of their performance in office. Journalist Daniel Seligman, who gathered information on U.S. presidents IQs from their biographies, reports that John F. Kennedy scored 119on the upper end of the normal range on the IQ scalebefore he entered Choate Academy, while the young Richard Nixon recorded an impressive 143. How many people now wish the smarter man had won the election of 1960? Before they went on trial at Nuremberg, the Nazi war criminals were given IQ tests that turned up uniformly high levels of intelligence: Albert Speer had an IQ of 128, Hermann Goering 138. In fact, research suggests that JFKs relatively modest IQ was just about perfect for the presidency, or most other leadership positions. Above that level, a persons ideas and language may become too complex for a mass audience, according to Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis. Other traits matter more. Many empirical studies confirm the central prediction that an IQ near 119 is the prescription for leader success, Simonton writes in Greatness: Who Makes History and Why (1994). Yet the reigning assumption in the world of opinion makers is that high intelligence is a singular qualification for leadership. Political parties, which were once reasonably effective at vetting politicians on the basis of other qualities, such as their judgment, loyalty, and character, are no longer strong enough to do that job. We are left instead to rely on other, more limited standards. If there were any doubt that intellectual brilliance is not the sine qua non of effective leadership, the case of former president Ronald Reagan should have put an end to it. Amid the remarkable bipartisan outpouring of admiration for Reagan during the week surrounding his funeral, a few critics dredged up the failings of the Reagan yearsthe budget deficits, the rise in poverty, Iran-contrabut hardly anybody seemed to recall one of the most damning charges the cognitive elite lodged against him in his day: that he was a simpleton, slow, a man who needed to have the world reduced to 3x5 index cards, a movie actor. Even some of Reagans friends and supporters on the right had their doubts about his intellectual candlepower, writes biographer Lou Cannon in President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (1991). (Cannon, who covered Reagan for many years as a reporter, doesnt share those doubts, and offers an interesting portrait of Reagans brand of nonanalytic intelligence.) Now Reagan is hailed for his vision, his decisiveness and determination, his modesty and civility, his self-deprecating sense of humor. Some of these are traits that cant be taught, but the othersalong with still more that arent ordinarily attached to the 40th presidentare qualities American society once recognized as virtues and labored to cultivate and reward. The virtues went by names such as loyalty, fairness, discipline, hard work, and balanced judgment, and they were learned in school, in church, at the university, and in the wider world. In higher education, for example, the goal once was to mold a well-rounded person, grounded in many areas of learning and closely acquainted with the ideas and forces that had shaped the past. The modern university aims, reasonably enough, to create well-rounded classes, with the proper complement of violinists, designated ethnic groups, and lacrosse players. But it leaves individual students to look for meaning and direction on their own, or to burrow into the increasingly narrow and specialized disciplines that dominate the campus. Survive by your wits, they are told. At some level, we all seem to recognize that a world in which only wits matter is impossible. Far from the heights of the American corporation, for example, the people who search for talent administer batteries of personality tests and pray for job candidates with emotional intelligencea useful quality, perhaps, but in the end nearly as morally neutral as brainpower. Intelligence researchers themselves often say that smarts are an overrated quality, but the conversation then quickly moves on. We agree emphatically. . . , Herrnstein and Murray write in The Bell Curve, that the concept of intelligence has taken on a much higher place in the pantheon of human virtues than it deserves. Men and women of high intelligence certainly deserve our admiration, but our greatest admiration ought to be reserved for those who combine whatever mental gifts they have with virtues such as humanity, prudence, and wisdom. Ironically, it was left to a genius, Albert Einstein, to say it best: We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. Steven Lagerfeld is editor of The Wilson Quarterly. Total messages: 1 | Started: 01/31/2005 The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and in no way represent the views or opinions of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Wither egalitarianism? It is interesting that it is 'intelligence', rather than, say, learnedness or education that is the focus of attention. There is something anti-egalitarian in this; anyone (given opportunities) can become educated; intelligence, especially of the 'genius' and 'brillance' variety would seem to be pretty much innate, or is certainly viewed as such; if there is any doubt about the centrality of this latter value the tales above about Gates, Brin and Page should make this clear - schooling didn't make them; if anything, it stood in their way. Those qualities mentioned in Fortune magazine from fifty years ago, such as hard-work, experience, seriousness, and interestingly enough, being 'well-schooled', are different in the sense that they would seem to be more easily obtainable by someone who doesn't have them, than an innate quality like intelligence is. If you just aren't all that bright, there's not much that any amount of effort on your part or from others (such as increased spending on public education) is going to do for you. But anyone can work harder, gain experience, adopt a serious outlook, and, most tellingly, become well-schooled, (the smarts of yore) with enough opportunity, desire and determination. Does this mean that social mobility in North-America is half-acknowledged as being on the wane, and that it has become fashionable to celebrate qualties that would seem to embody its opposite? Posted by: Paul Taborsky 01/31/2005 From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 22:51:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 17:51:29 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wilson Q.: Schools and the g Factor by Linda S. Gottfredson Message-ID: Schools and the g Factor by Linda S. Gottfredson http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=105059 In the world of the American public school, few subjects are more controversial than intelligence. If theres a tension in American society between the ideal of equality and the pursuit of meritocracy, that tension escalates into the equivalent of a migraine headache in the schools. Called upon to produce young people fully prepared for citizenship and ready to meet the competitive challenges of the modern economy, the schools are also seen, at the same time, as the nations last best hope to level the playing field and ensure equal opportunity for all. In no American institution is the egalitarian strain of the American creed stronger. And the very notion that school performance is strongly influenced by general intelligencea quality partly inbornseems to contradict this deeply held ideal of equality. During the past few decades, the word intelligence has been attached to an increasing number of different forms of competence and accomplishmentemotional intelligence, football intelligence, and so on. Researchers in the field, however, have largely abandoned the term, together with their old debates over what sorts of abilities should and should not be classified as part of intelligence. Helped by the advent of new technologies for researching the brain, they have increasingly turned their attention to a century-old concept of a single overarching mental power. They call it simply g, which is short for the general mental ability factor. The g factor is a universal and reliably measured distinction among humans in their ability to learn, reason, and solve problems. It corresponds to what most people mean when they describe some individuals as smarter than others, and its well measured by IQ (intelligence quotient) tests, which assess high-level mental skills such as the ability to draw inferences, see similarities and differences, and process complex information of virtually any kind. Understanding gs biological basis in the brain is the new frontier in intelligence research today. The g factor was discovered by the first mental testers, who found that people who scored well on one type of mental test tended to score well on all of them. Regardless of their contents (words, numbers, pictures, shapes), how they are administered (individually or in groups; orally, in writing, or pantomimed), or what theyre intended to measure (vocabulary, mathematical reasoning, spatial ability), all mental tests measure mostly the same thing. This common factor, g, can be distilled from scores on any broad set of cognitive tests, and it takes the same form among individuals of every age, race, sex, and nation yet studied. In other words, the g factor exists independently of schooling, paper-and-pencil tests, and culture. Though there has been intense controversy about IQ tests over the years, psychologists continue to see them as valid and useful gauges of student potential. No longer routinely administered to whole school populationsachievement tests are much better suited to tasks such as grouping students for instructionthey are widely used by school psychologists in individual assessments to determine, for example, whether a child who is having difficulties in school has a learning disability or some other problem. As a practical matter, all good standardized tests of IQ and achievement end up ranking students in much the same way because g is the major predictor of academic achievement. During the 1960s and 1970s, educators launched several ambitious efforts to raise the IQs of disadvantaged youngsters in experimental preschools. The results were discouraging: Even when it was possible to raise the IQs of young children, the gains never translated into comparable gains on achievement tests, and the IQ gains evaporated soon after children left the programs. The disappointing results helped fuel an attack by some researchers on the very idea of IQ and g and also contributed to the rapturous reception for the theory of multiple intelligences that emerged in the 1980s, notably in Howard Gardners Frames of Mind (1983). To replace the idea of general intelligence, Gardner, a developmental psychologist at Harvard Universitys Graduate School of Education, proposed seven coequal intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (he later added naturalist, to make eight). Gardners theory offers a useful reminder that there are many human abilities and forms of accomplishment, and it puts new labels on some of the most common of them. Thus, good athletes have bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, and self-help celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey have intrapersonal intelligence. Gardner takes the seemingly commonsensical notion that people meet the world in different ways and elevates it into a comforting accolade: Everybody is smart in some way. In the classroom, the theory seems to give teachers a new language to describe their perceptions of students and classroom life. Teacher guidebooks such as Teaching and Learning through Multiple Intelligences (1995) suggest using the eight intelligences as different entry points for leading students into a single lesson. To teach a unit about photosynthesis, for example, a teacher might have all students read a description of photosynthesis to provide an entry point for the linguistically intelligent, have the class compare plants grown with and without sufficient light to reach children with naturalist intelligence, engage the logical-mathematical students by asking the class to prepare a timeline for the steps of photosynthesis, require painting those steps to aid the visually-spatially inclined, have students role-play the characters in photosynthesis to help the bodily-kinesthetic childand so on, until all eight intelligences have been accommodated. Theres something very appealing about this scenario, but its unlikely that students kept so busy walking through multiple doorways will have much time to advance very far once they get through them. As one biology teacher told me recently, the multiple intelligence approach may allow students with special talents to express their understanding in ways that are personally gratifying, but science is inherently analytical, and understanding it ultimately requires the application of strong reasoning and analysis skillsperiod. However much we might wish that there were many distinct forms of mental ability, a century of research has found none as widely useful as g. Neither of the two major multiple intelligence theorists, Howard Gardner and Yale Universitys Robert Sternberg, disputes the existence of g, only its preeminence among mental abilities. There are, to be sure, many different human mental abilities, but they are neither independent of one another nor equally useful. The past 100 years of research has yielded a body of knowledge that virtually all those working in the field accept as valid, despite their various perspectives and the controversies surrounding this issue. Differences in IQ among young children can be traced in about equal parts to differences in their genes and their environment. (A special panel named by the American Psychological Association to summarize the state of knowledge on intelligence in 1995 noted that the lowest possible estimate of the genetic component is about 40 percent.) Genetic differences become a bigger source of intelligence differences as children age. Behavior geneticists suspect the reason is that as they achieve more independence, children are more able to select and shape their environments, which then shape them. The power of genes can be seen in the fact that identical twins reared apart are more alike, after meeting in adulthood, in IQ, brain function, personality, and many other traits and behaviors than fraternal twins raised in the same home. Genes probably work their influence by shaping various metabolic, electrical, and structural features of the brain. For example, the brains of people with higher IQs tend to have a relatively lower rate of energy use (as measured by glucose metabolism) while solving problems, and quicker and more complex brain waves in response to simple perceptual stimuli such as lights and sounds. Researchers have long debated whether people with higher IQs have bigger brains, and the latest findings, based on studies with new brain-scan technology, show that they do. Distinctions in g, or general intelligence, are evidently as much a fact of nature as differences in height, blood pressure, and the like. A great deal of research also shows that g matters well beyond school. In Who Gets Ahead? (1979), sociologist Christopher Jencks and his colleagues reviewed many large studies and showed that an individuals IQ predicts his occupational level and income in adulthood (as well as years of schooling completed) better than his fathers education or occupation does. The influence of g varies in different realms of lifeschooling, work, parenthoodsimply because some are less cognitively demanding than others. Some life outcomes are also shaped more than others by such factors as ones noncognitive traits (ambition, extraversion) and decisions that others make about the individual (college admissions, hiring, pay raises). Yet the evidence of gs pervasive and lasting impact is well documented, especially when it comes to lifes more complex tasks. For example, personnel psychologists Frank Schmidt and John Hunter reviewed thousands of studies that were conducted over 85 years in many different companies, government agencies, and military settings, and that used everything from handwriting analysis to job tryouts to forecast job performance. Their meta-analyses of these data showed that mental tests predict on-the-job performance better than personality, integrity level, experience, and education. In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I recently published a study showing that both IQ and adult functional literacy correlate in the same pattern with a wide variety of adult outcomes, including health and longevity (in part because maintaining ones health requires learning and adaptation), all regardless of social background. In that same journal, University of Edinburgh psychologist-physician Ian Deary and his colleagues reported on a study showing that each one-point increase in IQ when the study participants were 11 years old predicted a one percent decrease in mortality by age 50. If IQ is book smarts, it is clearly much more besides. Drawing a bead on exactly what g is and how it works remains a difficult task, but specialists in mental testing now commonly agree that g sits atop a hierarchy of mental abilities. Most of these researchers have adopted the three-level hierarchy developed by educational psychologist John B. Carroll in his monumental Human Cognitive Abilities (1993). After statistically extracting the common ability factors from more than 450 earlier studies in which multiple tests had been administered to the same individuals, Carroll classified all abilities into three levels. At the highest level, Stratum III, Carroll found evidence of only one ability: g. In Stratum II, he documented eight broad abilities involving language, reasoning, spatial visualization, auditory perception, memory, and cognitive speediness. Stratum I includes relatively specific mental abilities, such as memory span and reading comprehension. All Stratum II aptitudes are highly correlated with one another. A person with weak language ability, for example, is very unlikely to be strongly endowed with another Stratum II ability, such as spatial visualization. Tests of these abilities show that they are highly correlated both with one another and with g. All consist primarily of g plus a dose of some more specific ability. As Carroll puts it, the Stratum II abilities are all different flavors of g. Despite many attempts, nobody has ever succeeded in creating tests that measure these abilities without simultaneously measuring mostly g. Most IQ test batteries are composed of about a dozen subtests (involving, for example, vocabulary, sentence completion, number series, matrices, and similarities) of abilities near the Stratum I level. A persons scores on each are added together to produce an IQ score. But ones intuitive sense that the Stratum I abilities are the building blocks of intelligence is incorrect. The basic element at each level is g. A Stratum II ability is made up of g plus some more specialized ability. A Stratum I ability is produced by adding an even more specialized ability to this mix. Each lower stratum thus includes increasingly numerous and more complex amalgams of skills that are targeted to fewer and more specific kinds of tasks. Researchers have drawn quite a clear picture of human mental abilities. For instance, the technical manual for one widely used test, the Stanford-Binet IV, shows that the Stratum I ability vocabulary is about three parts g, plus two parts a special language facility that makes its entrance at the Stratum II level, plus one part a vocabulary-specific ability entering at Stratum I. Similarly, the Stratum I ability memory for sentences is roughly two parts g, one part each special verbal and memory abilities entering at Stratum II, and one part an ability specific to Stratum I. Carroll points out that four of Gardners intelligences (linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, and musical) correspond to four Stratum II abilities. They arent independent abilities, as Gardner asserts, but rather are linked to one another and to g. Three of Gardners four other intelligences fall largely outside the cognitive realm, while the fourth (naturalist) is too diffuse to analyze. Gardners intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences seem to be matters mostly of personality, while his bodily-kinesthetic intelligence reflects mostly psychomotor strengths such as eye-hand coordination. These are useful qualities, to be sure, and they can help a person get by in the world, but they will not help that person apprehend the world. For that you need g. Because gifted children tend to have more jagged ability profiles than children of average or below-average intelligencethink of the classic math wiz who is not as dazzling in subjects such as history that depend on verbal reasoningGardner can allow educators to draw the inference that every child can be smart in some way. But the math wiz will still have relatively strong verbal skills. Where theres notable talent, theres always a high level of g. Gardner implicitly acknowledges this when he concedes that all the individuals he names as exemplars of his eight intelligences probably had IQs above 120 (the 90th percentile). His eight domains of achievement may enrich our lives, but they do not represent independent faculties of mind or alternate pathways to mastering school curricula, jobs, or everyday tasks. Gardners theory has been protected from direct contradiction by his failure to develop any formal tests of his proposed intelligences. (He believes that assessments should be more holistic.) None of the assessments that schools currently use to identify students multiple intelligences would satisfy the standards for testing jointly promulgated by the three major professional organizations in the field. Mindy Kornhaber, a Gardner collaborator now at the University of Pennsylvania, evaluated three major methods for identifying gifted students in terms of multiple intelligences and concluded in In the Eyes of the Beholder (2004) that they are not technically strong enough to withstand modest scrutiny. Among other problems, some use checklists that seem to assess interests rather than abilities, and none have clear enough procedures for raters to agree on who is gifted or in what way. In the education textbooks used to instruct tomorrows teachers, however, one doesnt get any sense that ample evidence favors a single broadly useful intelligence rather than multiple independent ones. Textbooks written by educational psychologists tend to report the facts about IQ with reasonable accuracy, but they systematically minimize or muddy the measures relevance. For example, they will report that IQ tests predict academic achievement quite well, but then imply that this fact need not be taken seriously because, after all, thats precisely what IQ tests were first developed to do. IQ, they say, represents only a narrow academic ability, book smarts, and it matters little outside school. All of this is often topped off with the closing argument that IQ does not capture everything important about the human mind and soulas if intelligence researchers have ever said otherwise. The presentation of facts may be muddied but the larger message is clear: Multiple intelligence theories are the modern alternativethe antidoteto outmoded unitary, narrow, and exclusionary theories of ability. Textbooks create an aura of scientific superiority for the new theories by substituting their advocates certitude for evidence, and the absence of any pertinent research for readers to critique leaves the claims pristine. Take, for example, Laurence Steinbergs Adolescence (2002), a textbook assigned to future teachers at the University of Delawares School of Education, where I am on the faculty. Steinberg blithely asserts that even the best IQ tests used today measure only a very specific type of intelligence, and that there are ways of being equally intelligent as individuals who score high on IQ testsbut intelligent in a different way. Multiple intelligence theory gathers unto itself all good things. Commonly accepted pedagogical principles that have no necessary relation to multiple intelligence theorythat teachers should go beyond rote learning, appreciate students strengths and weaknesses, use different modes of presenting information, and believe that all students can learnare described as if they were the hallmarks of the multiple intelligence approach alone. The theorys proponents link harmful, distasteful, and patently false beliefs with IQfor example, that IQ is immutable, environments do not affect learning, some children cannot learn, and IQ is a measure of human worth. Readers are left with the impression that it is morally suspect to favor narrow views of intelligence, which are elitist, and segregate or privilege some students. For all their rhetoric about diversity, proponents of multiple intelligence betray a deep uneasiness with difference. The vogue for multiple intelligences is just one manifestation of an attack on ability grouping and curriculum tracking in the schools that has been underway for decades. Federal enthusiasm for programs for gifted children, for example, spiked after the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, and then evaporated in the early 1960s. (Since that decade, scores by Americas highest-performing students have fallen on national tests such as the SAT and the Stanford Achievement Test.) Access to advanced placement courses and programs for the gifted is being opened up in the name of inclusion, and as a result, many programs are sacrificing their rigor and distinctive curricula. Grouping students by ability level in classes or in small groups within classes offers the promise of differentiating instruction to better fit diverse student-ability levels (though in reality that promise is seldom fulfilled). As recently as the 1980s, between 80 and 90 percent of eighth and tenth graders were being taught in ability-homogeneous classrooms. Twenty-two percent of seventh graders were in homogeneous classes for all subjects, and 47 percent for some subjects. About 90 percent of elementary schools at the time were using within-class grouping for at least one subject, and 70 percent were using between-class grouping. Im aware of no more recent surveys, but observers agree that increasing numbers of schools are attempting to eliminate grouping and tracking and also to mainstream both gifted and special-education students into regular classrooms. The effects of this trend, so cavalierly endorsed by those who fantasize classrooms full of pluralistically smart students, are more candidly described in textbooks for teaching instructional strategies. The text we use at the University of Delaware, Looking in Classrooms (2003), declares that educators thinking has progressively moved away from policies of exclusion and homogeneous grouping toward an emphasis on the value of diversity, policies of inclusion, and practices that meet the needs of all students. But Looking in Classrooms is very clear about the realities teachers face. It paints a sobering portrait of the heterogeneous classes created by the demise of grouping, tracking, and special classes for disabled or gifted students. Its case example is a sixth-grade classroom with 26 students from varied racial and ethnic backgrounds and family configurations. Three of the students spoke little or no English, and one of them was legally blind. Among the 23 who could be validly tested, the grade equivalents for reading ranged along a breathtaking span from 2.3 to 10.5; two students were gifted. Such large disparities are common in heterogeneous junior-high classrooms. As Looking in Class- rooms describes it, the teachers solution for orchestrating appropriately different instruction of the same key ideas for her 26 highly diverse students calls for an effort that is nothing short of heroic. Its as if teachers today must not only work in a one-room schoolhouse but also individualize instruction for all their charges so that all can master the same (trimmed down) curriculum in lockstep. Degrouping, which is meant to prevent the social distinctions that arise when students are segregated by ability level, can create even bigger distinctions. Placing the intellectually unequal in proximity forces students to observe their differences in capability more directly. It is hard to miss the fact that some students typically learn two to five times faster than others, or that some are reading difficult books while others struggle with simple ones. All teacher textbooks therefore emphasize, at least implicitly, that a teachers first concern in mixed-ability classrooms must be to ensure that students perceive each other as social equals. Looking in Classrooms reviews research on some of the familiar techniques for putting this into practice, such as cooperative learning and peer tutoring. These are strategies for having students interact across ability lines in ways that enhance the performance of low-ability students without stigmatizing them for their lesser achievement. Proponents cite experimental studies showing that these methods do indeed improve performance among low-achieving students, while somewhat enhancing, or at least not impairing, performance among more-able students. Only the fine print reveals that the experiments deal just with basic skills, not with higher levels of understanding. Like other textbooks, Looking in Classrooms mentions highly able students only when discussing how to lean on them for tutoring of their less-able classmates. In reality, these instructional strategies for mixed-ability classes preclude precisely what helps the more-able students most: accelerating their curriculum, allowing them to interact with their intellectual peers, and making them work hard. Accelerated and compacted curricula can double the speed at which highly able students advance, but such differential treatment is decried as elitist and exclusionary. As targeted instruction for gifted children is reduced in the public schools, their parents must increasingly rely on opportunities outside regular school settings. Summer programs for talented youngsters at universities, for example, are routinely able to advance the top one percent of 13-year-olds one full year in biology, chemistry, physics, Latin, or math in the space of only three weeks. Tracking and grouping persist in American schools despite the strong pressure for their elimination. Math and science teachers remain strong advocates of tracking, and many parents lobby hard for the programs they think their children need. Theres also significant pressure from above: College and university admissions offices want to be able to identify students who have taken demanding courses. And theres the inescapable reality that its very difficult to produce good results for any students when they are placed in heterogeneous classes. As James A. Kulik of the University of Michigan reported in the Handbook of Gifted Education (2003), On the basis of site visits, experts have concluded that untracking brings no guarantee of high-quality instruction for everyone but may instead lead all to a common level of educational mediocrity. Multiple intelligence theory is only the latest rationale for acting as if most children dont differ much in learning ability. An older approach, still widely embraced, is to accept IQ as a concept but act as if differences in IQ dont make much difference in the classroom. Education textbooks and journals in this vein speak only of exceptional versus regular students. So-called regular students are those who score between the upper threshold for mental retardation (IQ 70) and the lower threshold for giftedness (IQ 130). That continuum includes 95 percent of students. A closer look at differences in intellectual functioning across the 60-point range illustrates how different educability actually is, even among the supposedly average. For example, individuals with IQs between 70 and 80 (but still above the threshold for mild retardation) require instruction that is highly structured, detailed, concrete, well sequenced, omits no intermediate steps, and links to what the individuals already know. They often need one-to-one supervision and hands-on practice to learn even simple procedures. As specialists in adult education explain, the material to be learned must be stripped of all nonessentials, including theoretical principles, and require only simple inferences. Any information, written or spoken, must be presented in small pieces with clear introductions and simple vocabulary. Because people with IQs below 80 (the 10th percentile) are difficult to train, federal law bars their induction into the military. Successively higher IQs are associated with better odds of learning readily from more demanding forms of instruction, learning more independently, and mastering increasingly abstract and multifaceted material. Individuals of average IQ (100) can master relatively large bodies of written and spoken knowledge and procedure, especially when it is presented to them in an organized manner that allows them practice and provides feedback. By IQ 120, individuals are more self-instructing and better able to develop and organize knowledge on their own. The complete instruction that is most helpful for low-g learners is dysfunctional for these high-g individuals. The latter easily fill in gaps in instruction on their own and benefit most from abstract, self-directed, incomplete instruction that allows them to assemble new knowledge and reassemble old knowledge in idiosyncratic ways. But such forms of instruction are dysfunctional for low-g learners, who are more likely to be confused than stimulated by its incompleteness, abstractness, and requirements for self-direction. As any teacher will attest, many other things besides g-level affect childrens learningillness, incentives, peer pressure, conscientiousness, parental support, familiarity with the language of instruction, and more. For these and other reasons, high g does not guarantee successor low g guarantee failure. Theres no question, however, that higher levels of g constitute a constant tailwind and lower levels a persistent headwind in cognitively demanding settings such as schools. Perhaps most important, g level affects what students are likely to learn with a reasonable expenditure of time and effort. Textbooks on instructional strategies rightly treat time as a precious commodity to be jealously guarded and wisely spent, and they note that slow students often need much more of it than others to learn the same material. Instruction must therefore be more tightly focused on what is most essential for them to learn. Although slow learners cannot be turned into fast learners, all students could learn much more than they now do. Students learn best and reap the most gratification for their efforts when instruction is targeted to their cognitive needs. Good targeting is all too rare, even in schools with ability grouping and curriculum tracking. As Looking in Classrooms laments, such adaptive instruction is regularly attacked as discriminatory because it means treating students differently. Its critics would rather give all students access to the high-status curricula and self-directed, constructivist learning activities that benefit bright students. But that path is far more likely to harm than to help these students, robbing them of the motivation to learn, depriving them of their full potential, and hampering their prospects in a world that increasingly requires (and rewards) well-educated people. Depriving faster learners of curricula that allow them to make the most of their abilities is likewise an injustice to them and to the society that stands to benefit from their eventual contributions. By denying the difficulties in accommodating intellectual difference, multiple intelligence theories may do little more than squander scarce learning time and significant opportunities for improvements in the quality of American schooling. The substantial heritability of intelligence has been a source of great controversyalbeit only outside the community of researchers who study the subject. But that element of heritability provides the very hope it is often said to obliterate. While it frustrates our efforts to raise IQ, it also greatly limits the harm that poor environments can do. Research roundly affirms what experience suggests: People with higher IQs have a remarkable ability to make their way out of even the most dire environments. This protection, along with the little-appreciated fact that the laws of genetics ensure that parents and children will tend to differ substantially in IQ, guarantees that talent will emerge from even the worst of environments, in turn ensuring considerable social mobility in any free society. Its not only the distribution of IQ that is helped by the laws of genetics. The mixture of genes from two parents creates traits in children that neither parent has. Heritability thus provides a very broad guarantee of difference and variety we would not have in a world where environment was all, a world that might leave humans free not only to create an egalitarian paradise but to forge the ultimate caste society of rich and poor. It has always been the task of Americas public schools to facilitate social mobility, and, historically, they have performed the job well. They should now turn their attention to optimizing the development of all children. For that to happen, well have to acknowledge that God or nature did not make us all equal intellectually. By embracing rather than rejecting the scientific knowledge about g, educators can develop curricula and classroom techniques that well serve the nations cognitively diverse students. Linda S. Gottfredson is a professor of education at the University of Delaware and an affiliated faculty member in its University Honors Program. She is the author of many articles on the role of intelligence differences in school, work, and everyday life, and the editor of several special journal issues on these topics, including an issue of Intelligence, Intelligence and Social Policy (1997). [There were no comments posted to the Wilson Quarterly site.] From checker at panix.com Mon Feb 7 22:54:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 17:54:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hoover: After Fidel by William Ratliff Message-ID: After Fidel by William Ratliff http://www.hooverdigest.org/044/ratliff.html Hoover Digest 2004 No. 4 Once the islands aging caudillo is finally gone, what will become of Cuba? An assessment by William Ratliff. [17]William Ratliff is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. The chorus began as soon as the Soviet Union fell: Fidel Castro Is History! The standard argument that the Cuban dictator could not long survive without the massive aid he had received for decades from Moscow was contained in a book entitled Castros Final Hour. Well over 100,000 hours have passed since that book was published in 1992, and, with Fidel still raging on, analysts now usually couch their discussions of his eventual demise more modestly, in terms of Cubas post-Fidel transition (whenever it may come). Most American (including Cuban American) analysts look forward to a time when Cuba will have a democratic government and a vibrant market economy. But estimates vary considerably on how or when that goal will be reached. The best-known dissident on the island today, Oswaldo Paya Sardinas, has called for a step-by-step transition to greater popular representation beginning now. Paya outlined his ideas in his detailed Transitional Program, which was informally released in Cuba in December 2002. In March and April 2003 Castro responded to this and an increasingly active dissident movement with his most brutal wave of arrests and imprisonments in decades, demonstrating that obstacles to gradual reform remain formidable. In May 2004 the Bush administrations newly established Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba published a program described as a proactive, integrated, and disciplined approach to undermine the survival strategies of the Castro regime and contribute to conditions that will help the Cuban people hasten the dictatorships end. In hundreds of pages, it laid out steps to that end, ranging from sharply curtailing Cuban American remittances and travel to Cuba to increased support for dissidents on the island. Some of the steps were being implemented by the end of the June. If there is an immediate move toward democracy after Fidel goes, as envisioned by some in the States, including many Cubans living abroad, then new Cuban leaders may draw some lessons from the experiences of post-Franco Spain and several Eastern European countries that have recently moved from authoritarian to democratic systems. I think it is more realistic to expect the island to remain for some time under some kind of authoritarian control, an expectation I share with many top scholars, intelligence analysts, and defectors. The Survivor Regime Assuming some version of authoritarian control in a post-Castro Cuba, there are several strategies Fidels survivors may adopt and the Bush administration hopes to thwart. The following is not a blueprint of what I would like to see happen in Cuba in the early years following Fidel Castros departure. Rather, it is an examination of what Cubas immediate post-Fidel government is most likely to do and what the consequences of its choices and policies may be. All such speculation is constrained by the fact that we do not know when Fidel will finally depart the scene, who will be in position to take power, or what domestic and international conditions the new leadership will inherit. What we can anticipate with some certainty is that Fidels successors will inherit a decrepit economy and a volatile society. The survival strategy discussed here is the possible Cuban adaptation of some of the ideas and experiences of the past quarter-century in China. In sharp contrast to Chinese leaders and analysts during the Maoist decades, the Chinese today do not recommend a Chinese model for Cuba or any other country. During Ra?l Castros visit to China in 1997 then-premier Li Peng remarked that Chinas experience can only be taken as a reference as every socialist country has its own conditions. In the broadest of terms the Chinese model (or learning from China) might be defined as the promotion of primarily export-oriented, market-style domestic economic reforms by means of programs and institutions that are guided by a largely authoritarian government that continues to proclaim itself socialist. During the past 15 years, important members of the Cuban political, military, and business elite, including Fidel and Ra?l Castro and two-thirds of the members of the Communist Party Politburo, have visited China and remarked with great interest on the Chinese reform experience. A former high-level Cuban intelligence official, Domingo Amuchastegui, has said that after the younger Castros visit to China, Zhu Rongji, the chief architect of Chinas economic reforms, sent one of his chief aides to Cuba, at Ra?ls request, where he lectured hundreds of Cuban executives and leaders, causing a tremendous impact. Fidel Castro will leave Cuba in a terrible political and economic mess, just as Mao Zedong left China when he died in 1976, and Castros successors will be sorely taxed just to retain power. If post-Fidel governments are to remain authoritarian for some years, their political or military leaders, or both, will need to understand that although the Cuban people put up with abject poverty under Fidel, they will not long tolerate such conditions under any other leader. This poses a daunting challenge to future leaders because on the one hand they will have to undertake substantive reforms to simply retain power; on the other hand, the opening process itself may create so many demands that the new leadership will be overwhelmed. Still, in one form or another, authoritarianism has the edge over democracy for the immediate post-Fidel period. One might ask why reforms have not been launched already. The answer is that, although Fidel has visited China, he is far closer in his ideas and policies to Mao Zedong than to any Soviet leader, never mind any post-Mao Chinese leader. Castros alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and his often very strong criticism of China, was based almost entirely on his need for Soviet-bloc money, arms, and a nuclear shield during his conflict with the United States. Like Mao, Fidel cannot abandon his old ideas at the end of his life without admitting that his career was a terrible mistake. So just as Mao held on to his egalitarian socialism until the very end, Fidel remains steadfast and allows private initiative only periodically, when the economy is in a particularly disastrous condition. The most recent period of crisis was during the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Suddenly Cuba was left without the massive aid and credits that for decades had amounted to about 30 percent of the Cuban GNP. When the worst of a crisis passes, however, Castro usually begins again to harass, restrict, or outlaw private initiative, even in the black market, which is more difficult to control. At the same time, although Castro will never tolerate Chinese-style market reforms, he has provided theoretical grounds for such changes when he is gone, which is more than Mao ever did. One example is Castros attitude toward Deng Xiaoping. When Deng took power in the late 1970s, Castro called him a numbskull and a caricature of Hitler. But when Deng died in 1997, Castro referred to him as an illustrious son of the Chinese nation who had made a valiant contribution to the consolidation of socialism in China. Thus, although Castro will never undertake Dengs market-oriented reforms, future Cuban leaders can argue that Fidel accepted them as consolidating socialism in China, so why not in Cuba too? And Cubas post-Fidel leaders are likely to follow that lead. As Alcibiades Hidalgo, Ra?ls former top aide and a former U.N. ambassador, told me in 2003, the younger Castro has sympathized for many years with change in the Chinese style, that is, capitalism or something like it in the economy but a single party and repression of politics. Former intelligence official Amuchastegui added, Once Fidel Castro is out of the game, other areas of the Chinese experience [other than the role of the military] will most probably be implemented in Cuba rather quickly. Potential lessons from the Chinese experience include the following: o Cubans need to adopt a new way of thinking, different from both the egalitarianism of the Castro decades and the paternalism of the colonial centuries. Despite the proven business prowess of many Cuban Americans in Miami, this may be the most difficult lesson of all. Several Cuba specialists at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences emphasize that first and foremost Cuban leaders and people need to jettison stifling egalitarianism and turn instead to promoting initiative, market productivity, and growth. They argue that when government policies encourage individuals and groupsdomestic and foreignwho wish to produce, the economy will expand, and living standards will rise for most Cubans, as they have for the majority of the Chinese. The fact that Chinese leaders and people have made this change so successfully, given their long traditional and Maoist history, might in itself be considered an inspiration to Cubans. One important aspect of this change in thinking relates to the overseas Cuban community. The overseas Chinese were critical to Chinas reform process in that they quickly returned to China, took advantage of the opportunities, and adapted to the limitations of the new system. Overseas Cubans, particularly in America, are numerous, and many are wealthy, highly skilled, and well connected. They could make a major contribution to development in Cuba even during a post-Fidel authoritarian period, should Cubans on the island and abroad decide to cooperate and commit themselves to economic policies that give all Cubans a chance to work and prosper. At present, most Cubans, wherever they are, do not seem disposed to such cooperation with a post-Fidel authoritarian regimeand current U.S. policy discourages it. o The model of a successful (so far), peaceful, and orderly succession of leaders within an authoritarian system was initiated by Deng and continued through Jiang Zemin to the current Hu Jintao. Deng, Jiang, and Hu have been largely successful, despite important continuing challenges, because their reforms have benefited a substantial majority of the people. Fidel has designated Ra?l as his successor, though the latter lacks charisma and may not live long enough to take power. Cuba does not seem to have an internal process for choosing future leaders even within the ruling bureaucracy, as was the case in China under Mao. o China achieved the longest period of double-digit economic growth of any major country in modern history by undertaking economic reforms that promoted (often by simply permitting) initiative, competition, and production among a suppressed but potentially highly creative people. These reforms ranged from the wholesale transformation of current institutions and practices to the encouragement of private shops and industries of all sizes. Many of the changes are enumerated by Carmelo Mesa-Lago in his Growing Economic and Social Disparities in Cuba (2002), published by the Cuba Transition Project, a program at the University of Miami that examines conditions in Cuba today and the many reform possibilities that lie ahead after Fidel Castro is gone. After reading Mesa-Lagos list of economic reforms, a prominent Chinese analyst noted that all of the economic recommendations are possible and desirable. But, he reiterated, the most important thing is not specific measures, but a changing of the traditional mentality among the people. o The Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) was for some years a major player in Chinese economic development. The Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) are already much involved in the Cuban economy, though not yet so broadly as the PLA was in the early 1990s. Because the FAR is the most relatively efficient and highly trained institution in Cuba, the prospects are that its role will expand in the foreseeable future. The negative qualities of the Chinese experience, ranging from corruption to loss of institutional focus, are also already evident in Cuba. In time, Cuba may want to examine how in recent years the Chinese have reduced the PLAs involvement in economic activities not related directly to the military sector. o One of the critical unanswerable questions today is what the Cuban military and police would do in the event of a major uprising against Fidel (which is unlikely) or his successor. Deng Xiaopings conviction that stability is essential for steady economic growth under authoritarian guidance was demonstrated by the Tiananmen repression of June 4, 1989, in Beijing and other cities. Fidel Castro approved of Dengs use of the military in that crisis, but it is unclear to what degree the Cuban police or military would follow the PLA example. Conclusion The types and timetables of reforms in Cuba are impossible to predict with certainty. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government has repeatedly tightened the embargo, the first two times (1992 and 1996) with the essential support of President Bill Clinton. Now, under George W. Bush, the executive branch is promoting a more integrated and proactive involvement in the hope of speeding up and molding changes in the country. If current U.S. efforts to strengthen Cuban civil society succeed, perhaps at least in the post-Fidel period the current silent majority of Cubans, who up to now have been united only in their determination not to rock the political boat, will be able to advance the cause of democracy and free markets. So far, however, the main consequence of the Bush administrations more activist approach seems to have been the retaliatory mass arrests of MarchApril 2003, which decapitated the democratic opposition on the island. If Cuban developments in the short and middle term follow trajectories at times observable on the island, they are likely to move slowly toward an open society. That movement is likely to be manifested first in economic reforms, as Cubas future leaders examine their obvious needs and apply ideas gleaned from the Chinese or Vietnamese authoritarian models. Such a movement would be positive, even if more gradual than quick democracy, both for the economic well-being of the Cuban people and for the islands step-by-step entry into the modern world. _________________________________________________________________ A longer version of this essay was published in English and Spanish as Chinas Lessons for Cubas Transition? in the summer of 2004 by the Cuba Transition Project, Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, at the University of Miami. References 17. http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/ratliff.htm From paul.werbos at verizon.net Mon Feb 7 23:05:20 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2005 18:05:20 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] proposal re Iraq In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050207174600.01df4aa0@incoming.verizon.net> As I think about the psychological variables driving a lot of people.. driving what happens in Iraq and elsewhere.... and I think about the recent discussion of Kennedy's proposal... It would be in the common interest BOTH of the President AND of the rest of the world if the Administration would introduce a bill something like... Iraqi Sovereignty Affirmation Act Preamble The President of the United States has announced that the US will remove its troops from Iraq when and if the legitimate elected government of Iraq asks them to leave. It is hoped that this will happen, and will be consistent with domestic peace within Iraq, at the soonest possible time. This act is not intended to change that policy, but rather to affirm it and give it force of law in concrete terms. The purpose of doing so is to dispel any grounds for doubt or skepticism about the sincere intention of the United States government to adhere to this policy. (1) After the people of Iraq have ratified a new Constitution, and that Constitution comes into effect, the executive branch of the United States is obligated to follow any decisions made by the government of Iraq under its constitution to limit the levels of US troops. More precisely, if the government of Iraq specifies a schedule of maximum permitted US troops on the sovereign territory of Iraq, then the US executive branch is ordered to obey that schedule, with one caveat. The caveat is that the President may insist on up to six months prior notice of required troop reductions, if he deems that logistic realities require such notice. (2) Even before a new Constitution is ratified, the US executive branch is required to give some respect to the new representatives of the Iraqi people elected in January 2005. If at any time a properly constituted meeting of those representatives votes by a 2/3 majority to impose a schedule of maximum permissible troop levels, then the executive branch of the US is required to obey that schedule, with two caveats. First, as in clause (1), the President may ask for up to six months prior notice for troop reductions. Second, if a majority of those representatives vote at any time to raise the allowable troop levels for any period of time, that modified schedule would immediately go into effect (subject still to the six months notice requirement for actual reductions). ======== Of course, I can imagine folks who would like to add all kinds of extra permissions and fuzzy stuff here -- but I think that such additions would be a VERY BAD idea. Clarity and simplicity is very important for this kind of thing. --- Whatever... anyone know anyone who might be interested? Best of luck to us all... Paul From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 8 00:49:00 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 16:49:00 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] proposal re Iraq Message-ID: <01C50D34.ED1A2020.shovland@mindspring.com> I suspect that the insurgents won't be interested... You may have heard that the Marines did not make their recruiting quota last month. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Paul J. Werbos, Dr. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Monday, February 07, 2005 3:05 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] proposal re Iraq As I think about the psychological variables driving a lot of people.. driving what happens in Iraq and elsewhere.... and I think about the recent discussion of Kennedy's proposal... It would be in the common interest BOTH of the President AND of the rest of the world if the Administration would introduce a bill something like... Iraqi Sovereignty Affirmation Act Preamble The President of the United States has announced that the US will remove its troops from Iraq when and if the legitimate elected government of Iraq asks them to leave. It is hoped that this will happen, and will be consistent with domestic peace within Iraq, at the soonest possible time. This act is not intended to change that policy, but rather to affirm it and give it force of law in concrete terms. The purpose of doing so is to dispel any grounds for doubt or skepticism about the sincere intention of the United States government to adhere to this policy. (1) After the people of Iraq have ratified a new Constitution, and that Constitution comes into effect, the executive branch of the United States is obligated to follow any decisions made by the government of Iraq under its constitution to limit the levels of US troops. More precisely, if the government of Iraq specifies a schedule of maximum permitted US troops on the sovereign territory of Iraq, then the US executive branch is ordered to obey that schedule, with one caveat. The caveat is that the President may insist on up to six months prior notice of required troop reductions, if he deems that logistic realities require such notice. (2) Even before a new Constitution is ratified, the US executive branch is required to give some respect to the new representatives of the Iraqi people elected in January 2005. If at any time a properly constituted meeting of those representatives votes by a 2/3 majority to impose a schedule of maximum permissible troop levels, then the executive branch of the US is required to obey that schedule, with two caveats. First, as in clause (1), the President may ask for up to six months prior notice for troop reductions. Second, if a majority of those representatives vote at any time to raise the allowable troop levels for any period of time, that modified schedule would immediately go into effect (subject still to the six months notice requirement for actual reductions). ======== Of course, I can imagine folks who would like to add all kinds of extra permissions and fuzzy stuff here -- but I think that such additions would be a VERY BAD idea. Clarity and simplicity is very important for this kind of thing. --- Whatever... anyone know anyone who might be interested? Best of luck to us all... Paul _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 8 10:08:40 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 02:08:40 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Islamic Theocracy in Iraq? Message-ID: <01C50D83.1DED3950.shovland@mindspring.com> Women as second class citizens. Allied with Iran. Is that why all this blood and money has been spent? Who started this? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 18:47:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 13:47:00 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: CHE: Publishing Groups Say Google's Library-Scanning Effort May Violate Copyright Laws In-Reply-To: <6.2.0.14.2.20050208090916.062b4568@mail.vicnet.net.au> References: <6.2.0.14.2.20050208090916.062b4568@mail.vicnet.net.au> Message-ID: Frank Forman here: I wrote up my own opinions on this issue a couple of years ago. I append it after your message. Basically, what's going on is rent-seeking, esp. the desire of the Disney Corporation to keep Mickey Mouse forever out of the public domain. Disney and Playboy are the two groups that send lawyers down on copyright violators faster than anyone else, those and cults like Scientologists and the various groups surrounding Dr. Leonard Peikoff, who inherited the copyrights to Ayn Rand's works. It just occurred to me that changing the copyright law to a single term of 20 years might force authors who wrote one profitable book to not rest on any expectation of continued royalties but keep on writing. Hard to say. On 2005-02-08, James Guest opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 09:26:13 +1100 > From: James Guest > To: Premise Checker , paleopsych at paleopsych.org, > Transhuman Tech , h-bd at yahoogroups.com > Subject: Re: CHE: Publishing Groups Say Google's Library-Scanning Effort May > Violate Copyright Laws > > Frank and All > > My list memberships won't allow my reply to go to all your recipients so you > might like to pass it on selectively or generally. > > The recent Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia brought the > absurdities of our copyright laws jarringly to my attention. There is > clearly no public interest in giving original authors and adapters copyright > protection of 70 or more years after the author's death. Patents, which > protect really important inventions that would not be produced without the > promise of patent protection (unlike many books, poems and musical products) > have nothing like that length of protection. > > So what should it be? The minimum needed to make it worthwhile for 95-98 per > cent of what is produced to continue to be produced I suggest. So why not > make it life plus 15 years or 25 or 30 years whichever is the longer? In the > case of a corporation 25 years should be the rule. There is no doubt that > the thriving business of buying up old copyrights is encouraged by very long > terms but, if there is a problem about the "it's not patentable so they won't > do research on it" analogue to cases in the area of medical science looking > at herbs then some sort of special temporary protection could be provided > for, at a price payable to the state, while an adapter puts on his musical or > whatever. > > Why should we pay for 70 year old authors to have the means of providing for > their great-great-grandchildren? It won't affect their productivity at all. > I am thinking of sponsoring a Master's thesis which might provided me with a > solid economic case on which to campaign about copyright. So I should be > interested in any counter-arguments, statistics, points about the law, > psychology or economics of copyright. > > James Guest COPYRIGHT, CONGRESS, DUE DILIGENCE, AND COASE by Frank Forman checker at panix.com [I place this in the public domain, so use freely as you see fit. I would like, however, suggestions about who to send it to or where I might publish it. My main aim is to get others to steal my ideas about a way of making a compromise between academics and other scholars and business interests.] Congress should amend the copyright act to allow anyone to reprint an old book if a decent effort to track down the copyright holder turns up blank or to pay only a nominal amount if the book hasn't been in print for a long time. Once the book, or article, or sound recording, or whatever, goes back into print in this way, it should forever remain the public domain. This should keep the big boys--Disney, Playboy, the big publishers--reasonably happy, and all the little people, like scholars, should be happy too. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution authorizes Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." You and I might naively think that this means that a judicious balance will be struck about just how long these limited times are, and those of us with business calculators know that there is very little difference between an annuity that pays out for fifty, even twenty, years and one that pays out forever. Copyrights should not last for very long, twenty years being my somewhat educated guess. But in a democracy (rule by rent-seeking pressure groups), this judicious balance is not struck, and the reason is that those who stand to gain, however slightly, from long copyrights are concentrated, while those who stand to benefit from shorter ones are diffused. The only way to strike an actual balance is to have experts rule or to change human nature so that politicians follow an abstract public interest rather than trying to get reelected. We've tried the both with unhappy results. I see no prospect that the big publishers are going to start acting in the interests of scholars, but those who would like to revive old, forgotten books are getting organized. Politicians need their votes, too. Hence, the compromise I have proposed. I can't work out the details of what a decent effort (called "due diligence" by regulators) to track down a copyright holder would be, nor to specify what the other terms of the compromise might mean. Spelling these out will be the job, not so much for Congress as for the U.S. Copyright Office, whose staff numbers over 400 but does not include a single economist, so Marybeth Peters, then and now the charming Register of Copyrights, told me at a convention of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections several years ago. I *am* an economist, and I'm here to propose something more than just a compromise. This takes us to the Coase of my title, specifically to Ronald Coase and "The Problem of Social Cost," which is the most widely cited paper both in economics journals and in legal journals. It came out in 1960 in a journal called, not very surprisingly, the _Journal of Law *and* Economics_. It is so well written that you do not need a single course in either field to understand it. It is a pleasure to read, too, and I recommend it. It has been reprinted in a Coase anthology _The Firm, the Market, and the Law_. Coase says, with the terribly important qualifier *in the absence of transaction costs* (the whole point of my writing here, but later), that it makes no difference in behavior how property rights are drawn up. Coase's famous illustration is the case of a railroad scattering sparks along the tracks as it sped through farmland, occasionally causing fires. Who's to pay? If the railroad is liable, it can either pay for the fires or put devices on its locomotives to prevent the fires. Whether the fires are so rare that it doesn't pay to install the devices is up to the folks on the railroads to decide. On the other hand, if the railroads are not liable and if the safety devices are economical, then the farmers should get together and pay the railroads to install the devices. Coase's point is that the pure economics of the situation, not where the liability lies, is all that matters, though of course the railroads would rather not be liable and the farmers wish they were. The practical difficulties of protecting farms from sparks, when there is no liability on the part of the railroads, are immediately obvious: the farmers would have to get organized so that they all paid and each farmer didn't expect the other farmers to pay and not he. In other words, what we economists call the "transaction costs" involved in organizing the farmers would be prohibitive. And so they often are, in finding the copyright holders of a book that has long since ceased to make anyone money but is still legally under copyright protection. I know someone who wanted to put Henry Veatch's _Intentional Logic_ up on her website. It was copyrighted in 1952. She wanted to know if Yale University Press had renewed its copyright, for otherwise it would now be in the public domain. She wrote the press, and they did not bother to reply. She asked me to check at the Library of Congress. I hiked up there, a mile or so up Capitol Hill on my lunch hour, to a huge room in the Madison Building. It was between Christmas and New Year's with hardly anyone there, so I got immediate help and was taken over to the correct bank of 3x5 file cabinets, which I could never have found on my own, and shown what the markings on those cards meant. Anyone further afield would have had to pay the Library of Congress to do the search, and you know that you always have to pay for the minimum of an hour. It would take the obligatory "six to eight weeks," too. As it happened, Yale had sent in the forms and paid the fees to get the copyright extended for the second term of twenty-eight years. Apparently Yale did so for all its books. Most books did not get their copyrights renewed under the old system of twenty-eight years plus twenty-eight years renewable (it was fourteen plus fourteen in 1790), and this would still be true of most books today. Veatch's book was an easy case. Publishers go out of business. Individual copyright owners die, oftentimes without wills. Copyrights can be sold, with the Library of Congress never finding out. All this can be difficult to track down. And if Yale University Press won't bother to answer a simple inquiry, you can bet on the difficulties elsewhere. Worse, and even if Yale did answer the inquiry, there are a great many people in this world whose job it is to say no. Or to charge you a minimum of $250 (like the infamous Nieman-Marcus cookie recipe. Since the Waldorf-Astoria hotel allegedly did the same thing in the 1930s for its Red Velvet Cake, both stories are likely bogus. Google nieman waldorf recipe). It was just not worth it to her to pay out $250 for the privilege of scanning in the book and putting it on her site. Apparently some people like this book. My friend did, and one copy was recently offered on http://www.bookfinder.com for $350. Personally, I'd rather have the cookie recipe and $100 in change (one old man's rant--the Veatch book to me--is another man's freedom fighter). Not enough people thought the book was worth even the cover price to keep it in print. Yale, I am sure, has no intention of reprinting it. The transaction costs for what is of little or no economic value are too great. You have to find the current copyright holder, who may not bother to respond, or say no, or charge $250. The costs being too great, the Coase theorem, which says it doesn't matter who owns the copyright in the *absence* of these transaction costs, does not hold. It does matter, and it matters more than just the political transfer of a rights from one pocket (the public with its stake in having works enter the *public* domain) into another (the publishers). It means that the "Progress of Science and useful Arts" is being hampered and not promoted, since books that would have are not getting a second life. What to do? Let anyone reprint an old book, old meaning twenty years, provided he determines that the book is no longer in print. If the book is younger than that and not in print, he must conduct a "due diligence" search to track down the current copyright owners. He must ask the publisher, and the publisher must respond. If the publisher has vanished, he must make a "diligent" effort to find out who bought out the publisher. He must not have to pay $200 to have someone else do the search for him. If the book is younger than twenty years and the copyright holder says no or wants $250 and that's too much, it's just too bad. Our would- be reprinter has to wait out the twenty years to see if the book is still in print. And in print means selling a certain number of copies, not just being printable on demand for an outrageous sum. (We'd better get moving here, before on-demand publishers start hiring lobbyists.) Finally, in the case of free-lance articles in magazines and newspapers, I'd allow the editor to keep the article on the website if he fails to track down the author after a diligent search, after five years. We've all got to keep moving. I might prefer that all newspaper articles enter the public domain after ten years, but that won't happen. Publishers are indeed too organized, but they have transaction costs, too, and should be allowed to keep free-lance articles on their sites. Lot's of controversy here: I myself don't want anyone using the copyright laws to keep embarrassing things out of the public domain. (I can't decide about J.D. Salinger's letters.) Information does want to be free, but it also has to be paid for, which is why there is a copyright law in the first place. We all know how organized publishers are, but academics and others are getting organized too. The converse of the Coase theorem--in the *presence* of heavy transaction costs, it matters greatly how the copyrights are drawn up-- makes the case for letting low value books go back into the public domain cheaply. ---------------------- Frank Forman is an economist at the U.S. Department of Education, is speaking on his own, and is the author of _The Metaphysics of Liberty_ (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989). From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 20:49:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 15:49:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Orhan Pamuk: Snow--Reviews and Interviews Message-ID: Orhan Pamuk's _Snow_ is nearly an ideal book for my project of abandoning reality as a source of knowledge of human nature and turning to fiction instead. Again, I thank Trish for enthusiastically recommending this book. It's a beautifully written and moving novel, as the reviewers mostly all agree. The main theme of the novel is the protagonist's struggle to decide between the Western world, where he exiled to, and the increasingly religious Turkey of his upbringing. But does it show vast differences in mentalities between Western and other processes of thought? I must say that it does not and that I'll have to read fiction from sources further removed from the West than Turkey. Recommendations welcome! There are about sixty reviews and interviews below. So this is a very long e-message. It documents how many times a book can get independently reviewed in the English speaking press. Some of these reviews got printed in several papers. ----------------- Financial Times (London,England) May 10, 2003 Saturday To have and have not Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk tells Robert Cottrell the west has pushed the world's poor towards envy and nationalism By ROBERT COTTRELL The view from the terrace offers a vision of earthly riches so sweeping and extravagant that if the Devil were trying again to tempt Christ after 40 days in the wilderness, I would recommend his doing it in Istanbul. The city seethes and glitters for miles on all sides, its hills laden with palaces and mosques and gilded domes. Its lights dance, reflected on the dark waters of the Bosporus below. Hong Kong or San Francisco may be as picturesque, but neither can rival Istanbul for sheer drama. Here two continents begin and end. On the near side of the Bosporus lies Europe. On the far side lies Asia. And Turkey straddles the space between them, geographically, historically and intellectually. The terrace, not far from Taksim Square in the heart of the city, belongs to Orhan Pamuk, widely considered Turkey's greatest living novelist. The view is one great delight of this flat that he keeps for writing. The other is the mass of books lining the walls, thousands of them, roughly arranged by topics from Japanese fiction to French philosophy. I think for a moment that Pamuk has all my favourite books, then I realise he probably has everybody's favourite books. He is a tall man, a fit-looking 50, dressed casually in the American fashion, soft-spoken and courteous. His grandfather made a fortune early last century building railways for the Ataturk regime. His father, who died just a few months ago, spent the fortune living well, investing badly, and translating French poetry - a lifestyle choice that Pamuk clearly admires, even though it left him less rich than he might have been. John Updike, the American novelist, has compared him with Proust. The analogy is one that Pamuk himself also makes, a little wistfully, as we talk. Western readers know Pamuk best for My Name is Red, an intricate and seductive murder mystery set among 16th-century Ottoman miniaturist painters, which was published in English in 2001. The plot is a fine weave of theological disputes, court etiquette and miniaturist techniques, shot through with sex and violence. The critic Maureen Freely called the book "almost perfect... All it needs now is the Nobel prize". He is working on a book about Istanbul that will be part-memoir and part-meditation. He wants to test his own sense of the city, where he was born and grew up, against the Istanbul that others have remembered and imagined down the centuries. After that he has a novel planned, "about the idea of museums, collections, the attachment to objects and the loss of love". But if all this sounds a little abstract, a little bookish, there is another side to Pamuk, a political engagement. He made headlines in 1999, and risked prosecution, when he signed an international petition urging the Turkish government to give members of the country's Kurdish minority "constitutional guarantees" of their rights, and so rescue Turkey from the "shame" of past repressive policies. In the last five years, says Pamuk, he has become "more and more political". Attacks on his liberal views in the Turkish press have only made him "more angry and more involved", he says. "It is a son-of-a-bitch kind of anger and it turns out to be part of your life." An article of his which sticks in my mind is one he wrote in September 2001 soon after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. He describes meeting a neighbour on the street, an elderly man, who says to him: "Sir, have you seen, they have bombed America? They did the right thing!" Pamuk muses on what could prompt an old man in Istanbul to condone terror in New York, or a Palestinian to admire the Taliban, and he arrives at a formulation that does not quite blame the west, but which assigns it a contributory negligence. The basic problem, he says, is "not Islam, nor what is idiotically described as the clash between east and west, nor poverty itself. It is the feeling of impotence deriving from degradation, the failure to be understood, and the inability of such people to make their voices heard." The west has not tried enough "to understand the damned of the world". Pamuk, who professes no religion, has made his own bid since then to understand Islamic fundamentalism by writing a political novel about its place in provincial Turkey today. His aim, he says, was to "understand what a fundamentalist is, in his own terms. Not why he is so right, but why he is so angry." The subject is a highly sensitive one for Turkey, which has an overwhelmingly Muslim population, but has proclaimed itself a secular state since 1923. The government allows freedom of worship, but keeps a close eye on it through a Directorate of Religious Affairs, and clamps down smartly on what it regards as signs of fundamentalism - such as the wearing of headscarves by women, which is forbidden in official buildings. This latest novel, called Snow, has sold 140,000 copies at home since publication last year, and is now being translated into English. It made him enemies on two fronts. First were "the ultra- secularists, who were not pleased to see me going into the inner (thoughts) of religious fundamentalists," he says. "They did not want to see Islamists as human beings, they wanted to see them as fanatics, midway to barbarians." Then there were the Islamists, angered that he gave his religious characters an active sexual life. "They said, 'How can an Islamist, a true believer, have sex outside marriage?'" The Islamists, like Marxists before them, "wanted writers to portray an idealised version of people". Pamuk accepts cheerfully enough that he makes an easy target for critics. "I have my subscriptions to the TLS and The New Yorker," he says, "while other people are more limited here. My name is on the billboards. I am from the spoiled upper class. People are very resentful." But when it comes to the war in Iraq, at its height when we talk, Pamuk is very much in tune with the popular mood. He thought it a dangerous mistake, as did everybody else I met in Turkey, from a bus driver in Ankara to a professor of economics in Istanbul. They saw the war as a foolish adventure promoted by a wilful US president, a US government wanting Iraqi oil, and a US industrial sector hungry to profit from reconstructing the country once the war was over. Saddam may be a bad man, they say, but that did not give the US any right to depose him. So far, so familiar. The same sort of criticisms could be heard almost everywhere in the world at the time. But in Turkey they were voiced with a special anxiety. The country's border with Iraq made it a front-line state in the war, exposed to stray bombs and refugees. Ninety per cent of the public was appalled, according to Pamuk, when the Turkish government seemed ready to join the US war effort in exchange for a big enough package of US aid - many billions of dollars - which Turkey desperately needed. That plan was scuppered unexpectedly by the parliament in Ankara, which voted against letting US combat troops invade northern Iraq from Turkish soil. Pamuk compares the US intervention in Iraq to a strong person "slapping" or "insulting" a weak one: bad behaviour even when the strong person believes he has been provoked. The US can do such a thing, he says, partly because it believes Muslims are "lesser people, backward, stupid, lazy orientals who don't know about things, who torment women. You have the feeling that one American life is more important than thousands of these people. The justification of the war starts with these things." Reading my notes of the conversation later, I have to remind myself that Pamuk is an outspoken admirer of western values, western culture, western democracy. He welcomes globalisation, and Amazon.com cartons litter his floor. He believes the US is a highly successful social and economic model. What he objects to is the manner of exporting it. The US is becoming "fanatical" too, he believes. If the Americans would only "take all the money they have spent on this war, and spend it like Soros has done on civil societies in these countries, then in 10 years they would have wonderful results." He sees the divide widening between what he calls "this relentless civilisation of the west, superior in arts, science, education" on one side, and "85 per cent of the human race, with much lesser, disintegrating, unsuccessful civilisations" on the other. But he dismisses the idea that the divide is mainly a religious one, even between the US and Arab countries. "The Koran is a small part of it. It is not a text that makes this history, it is history itself: the people, the land, the climate, the geography. The fact that there is less democracy in the Middle East, that the Middle East is poor, these are things shaped not by the Koran but by layers of history and of interaction with the west." The real gulf, he says, is the material one, between wealth and poverty. The real question is why it should have become such an acute problem now. The answer he comes to is that global media have become so successful, so universal in projecting images of western wealth, that the picture is getting "impossible to accept, impossible to come to terms with" in poor countries. The poor have no comparable means of celebrating their own culture, their own way of life, which might otherwise give them solace. They are left only with "material envy", says Pamuk, "it is inevitable, they want the things the Americans have." So long as they lack those things, he feels, "the only consolation for such a time is nationalism, past glories, the enjoyment of this or that terrorist attack. They may know that ethically, morally, this is not right, but secretly they enjoy it." In an ideal world, I say, we might debate this, try to understand that envy of the east and moderate the stereotypes of the west. But in the case of Iraq, the rich part of the world believed the angry part of the world was posing a direct threat to it, and was acting to block that threat. Not so, says Pamuk. In Iraq it is "the rich part of the world making a direct, violent attack on the poor, disorganised part of the world". The west may or may not be right to worry about dangers from "ruthless dictators" in the Middle East, he says, but right now it is part of the west that is controlled by "a vulgar and brutal and not very sophisticated ruler, Bush." The other big Turkish worry about the war concerned the Kurds, whose communities straddle the borderlands between eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. The Turks feared the war might lead to a Kurdish state in northern Iraq, and with it a new spur to Kurdish separatism in eastern Turkey. Only four years have passed since the last wave of guerrilla warfare subsided with the arrest of the Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan and the collapse of his movement, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or the PKK. The separatist campaign, and Turkey's brutal suppression of it, cost 30,000 lives, most of them Kurdish. It cast a long shadow over civil liberties and human rights. It soured relations with the European Union so badly as to set back Turkey's hopes of joining the EU by at least a decade. Nobody in Turkey, liberal or conservative, wants to go back to those days. Alternatively, there is Pamuk's approach, which has the merit of simplicity. "Kurds in northern Iraq should have every right to decide for themselves what they want to do," he says, "and if they want to have a state that is their business." If Turkey fears a contagion of separatism among its own Kurds, it should treat them more kindly and so make them less restive. Besides, he adds, Turkey is a fragile country economically, and "the geopolitics of a fragile country should be: 'I am polite to my neighbours'." I imagine Pamuk (pictured below) is polite to his neighbours too, even when they applaud the knocking down of the World Trade Center. He loves Istanbul and everything in it. While researching his new book he has studied engravings of the city, and finds them full of "nationalistic and nostalgic sentiments", above all "the feeling of melancholy that comes from loss of empire". He feels an echo there "of the decay of my family, as it disintegrates from a big family with uncles and grandmothers to just the four of us, parents and children, moving from big house to apartment building, then on our different ways." The big house he knew as a baby was home to an extended family of 12 or 14 people. Now, after a recent divorce, he lives alone. We talk more about melancholy, and I begin to sense how he can admire the US so much, while criticising it so strongly. "Countries without much history, or without much sad history, are more naive," he says. "But in their naivety they are realists, they can see their problems easily. Here we have lots of melancholy which blurs the vision and which saps the energy to invent, to invest, to create." Robert Cottrell has recently completed a spell as the FT's Moscow bureau chief Orhan Pamuk's novels The White Castle The Black Book The New Life (all three published in Faber's Threebies series at oe12.99) My Name is Red (Faber oe7.99) Snow (will appear in the UK in January 2004) LOAD-DATE: May 12, 2003 ---------------- Turkish Daily News April 15, 2004 TURKEY'S BEST-SELLING NOVELIST SPEAKS IN ANKARA SINEM TASSEVEN ANKARA - Internationally renowned Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk said he was not uncomfortable with his sophisticated style becoming more accessible to the masses but said he was aware his true audience were few in number. Pamuk addressed students attending a conference at Ankara's Middle East Technical University (METU) on Wednesday, sharing the experiences, ironies and conflicts he has had over the past 31 years while building his career as a novelist. "I don't think it's a bad thing that a large number of people are buying my novels. This is not a loss. However, I also don't believe that I write for everyone. There are a number of people in Turkey who read books, and I am writing for them," said Pamuk. Upon a question of whether he wanted to be a popular novelist or a novelist with a limited but devoted audience base, Pamuk said, "These are not contradictory, because I have both." Having experienced the success of becoming a best-selling novelist in a country in which the book-reading public is extremely small, Pamuk has often been the target of criticism for the conduct of advertising campaigns for his books -- complete with his picture plastered on billboards in big cities -- a style to which traditional Turkish readers are unaccustomed. Still, he doesn't seem to be surprised by his every move causing controversy and questions in people's minds, especially since his perceptions of things going on around him, his political stance and his way of life -- which seem to belong nowhere and which appear to be unlike those of any other group of people -- are considered. Tragedy of novelists on world's periphery In response to a question posed at the conference, Pamuk said: "When an author in the West writes about the ordinary elements of life -- the pain, the sorrow, the happiness he sees around him, it is characterized as a story of humanity. But when an author from a country on the periphery does the same thing, he is perceived as having voiced ethnic problems. This is the tragedy of an author living on the periphery but who borrows knowledge and techniques accumulated by West." As to his discomfort in being perceived as voicing generalizations, Pamuk added: "However, it is also meaningless to display hostility towards the West because such an approach may turn into prejudice against the West, which is not a good thing." Who is Orhan Pamuk? Pamuk is by far the country's most prolific best-selling novelist, and his books have been translated into more than 20 languages. His first novel, "Cevdet Bey and His Sons," a dynastic saga of the Istanbul bourgeoisie, appeared in 1982 after an eight-year search for a publisher. His second novel, "The White Castle" (published in 1979 but translated in 1990), the story of a Turkish master and his European slave, is a perfect example of his melding of modern with traditional Eastern elements. By the end of the novel the two main characters are indistinguishable. One of them dies, but we are not quite sure which one. With his fourth novel, "The Black Book" (1990), a mystery that arrives at no obvious solution, Pamuk confirmed his international reputation. Pamuk's novel "My Name is Red," a detective story of sorts, a multi-layered tale of revenge and jealousy growing out of the Ottomans and the rise of the Christian West, also attracted the attention of many Western readers. His novels are rich with allusion to old Sufi stories and traditional Islamic tales as well as the tinsel of popular culture. His other books are "Secret Face, Silent House, New Life, Other Colors, Snow" and his latest, "Istanbul, Memoirs and the City." In an article that appeared in Time magazine, journalist Andrew Finkel wrote: "His work is a rejection of an intellectual tradition that aspired to be Western by forgetting about the past. 'If you try to repress memories, something always comes back,' Pamuk says. 'I'm what comes back'." LOAD-DATE: April 20, 2004 ------------- The Irish Times May 1, 2004 Lukewarm on the heels of the story Snow By Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely Faber, 436pp. ? 12.99 By EILEEN BATTERSBY Ka, a poet and political exile living in Frankfurt, returns to Turkey on a mission. He has a job, the investigation of a series of suicides taking place in Kars, an isolated city near the Armenian border. As he sits on the old bus taking him there, we are informed of the significance of the glamorous coat he is wearing. Right from the outset there is something slightly odd, almost half-hearted, about this novel. No one could appear less like a journalist hot on the heels of a suicide epidemic story. Ka's 12 years in Germany may have rendered him an exile, but Orhan Pamuk is not content to allow the reader to speculate. He steps right in and within a page is offering a rather thorough pen-portrait of a character he is presumably hoping will retain our interest for the next 435 pages. The real reason Ka has come to Turkey is to bury his mother. And oh yes, there is a girl. He was never involved with her, but now he knows he loves her. Snow is a novel in which there is a great deal of talking and not very much said. It is a disappointment not only because it comes from the Orhan Pamuk who wrote The White Castle (1979), which impressed on the appearance of its English translation in 1990, The Black Book (1990, English translation 1994) and The New Life (1993, 1997), but especially because it comes from the author of a flamboyantly rich picaresque-thriller-cum-art-history tour de force, My Name is Red (1998, 2001), which won last year's Dublin International IMPAC Literary Award. Always a metaphysical, determinedly intellectual writer, with echoes of Calvino, Borges and Paul Auster, Pamuk is also a daring voice combing subversion as well as an awareness of Turkey's extraordinary culture and the ongoing East-West, or Oriental-European, tensions that frustrate, confuse and intrigue all who explore them. This novel Snow is consistently at odds with its ambitions and achievement. Apparently the source of much debate in Turkey, where it managed to outrage both Islamists and westernised Turks on its publication in 2002, it presents an unflattering, near-comic portrait of Kars as a place in which no one is all that sure of anything aside from the fact that several young girls have killed themselves. In tone, it is reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's offbeat yarn The Unconsoled (1995). In common with that book it suffers from being very long, but whereas Ishiguro succeeded in making his novel's bizarre nature its ultimate strength, Pamuk's narrative merely emerges as longwinded and improvisational. For all the sideswipes at the confused politics of several of the characters who are presented as revolutionaries but are in fact fanatics and failed lovers mainly at war with themselves, Pamuk has here missed an opportunity to consider the internal cultural confusions of a country that is as much torn between its notions of Europe and its place within that Europe, as Europe itself is confused about where exactly Turkey fits. Snow is more than the title, it also describes a state of mind or, at least, the notion of perception as it exists within the book. Ka is a drifter whose politics are well overshadowed by his poetry and by his obsessional love for Ipek, a girl whose beauty is one of the major themes in the narrative. Once in Kars, Ka - whose name also means snow - begins writing poems with a frenzy akin to the way other people suffer panic attacks. The poems simply happen. At no time does it seem that he will be writing any news story. For a western reader, there is something very confusing about this novel in that Pamuk himself does not seem to have any opinion regarding the Kurds or anything else. Belief is throughout treated as a common cold, merely a nuisance but not all that important. Elsewhere there is a throwaway remark when Blue, a revolutionary of sorts, remarks to Ka: "Contrary to what our own Europe-admiring atheists assume, all European intellectuals take their religion, and their crosses, very seriously. But when our guys return to Turkey, they never mention this . . ." The same character later announces: "I refuse to be a European . . . I'm going to live out my own history and be no one but myself." Some of the stilted exchanges are funny, as are the sexual digressions, if only because the entire novel is so odd. There are also a couple of almost comic sequences, such as when one young would-be revolutionary wants to tell Ka ,the poet, about the science fiction novel he wants to write. Ka, a Woody Allen without the wit, a study in dozy ambivalence, never engages the reader because he does not exist beyond Ipek's beauty. One would wonder at Pamuk's intentions in this rambling, heavy-footed and slight-as-cake performance. He has populated Kars with a cast of misfits who spend their days watching television and the snow, who complain but will only undertake the craziest of projects, and who have somehow missed the point of both their country and their culture. Snow, written in a heavy prose not helped by the preening authorial intrusions, is not only lacking Pamuk's proven metaphysical intelligence and imagination, it is also without his sense of direction, or conviction. Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times LOAD-DATE: May 1, 2004 ------------------ The Spectator May 08, 2004 Rather cold Turkey; BOOKS John de Falbe SNOW by Orhan Pamuk Faber, GBP 16.99, pp. 436, ISBN 057121830X In 1919 my grandfather was in Kars, near what is now Turkey's north-eastern frontier, as part of a British occupation force connected with what might be regarded as the first oil war. Kars had recently been abandoned by the Russians after nearly a century (Pushkin stayed there) and was soon to be handed over to the Turks. Twenty years ago I happened to visit this dilapidated town myself; the colonial buildings still endowed it with pathetic grandeur. The Russians and Armenians who once lived here hover like shadows behind the modern Turks of Snow, and the prejudices and politics that bedevil the characters of this remarkable novel echo the forces that ejected their predecessors from the city. What was once a place of some sophistication is now as poor and backward as anywhere in Turkey - which is partly why Pamuk has chosen to set Snow here. Another reason is the town's name. The Turkish title is Kar, the Turkish for snow. During the three days of Snow's action Kars has been cut off from the outside world by heavy snowfalls. It won't give much away to say that the denouement occurs during what the Border City Gazette describes as 'an adaptation of a drama penned by Thomas Kyd . . .' If this doesn't make you want to read the book, then it might stir your curiosity to learn that the main performers are Sunay, a washed-up actor who staged a coup in a performance two days previously, and Kadife, a beautiful 16-year-old girl who is about to remove her headscarf before an audience that includes many politicised Muslims. The novel's main character is Ka, a poet who has returned from political exile in Germany to write a piece for an Istanbul newspaper about the spate of suicides by Kars girls. An innocent abroad, he is caught up in a bloody coup. He only wants to get back to Frankfurt with Kadife's sister but instead finds himself used as a gobetween by the Ataturk-loving Sunay, and Blue, a terrorist loved by Kadife. Regarded as an atheist by the Islamists and credulous by the secular group, his position is complicated by the fact that poems start crowding in on him. The title of his Kars collection is, of course, Snow. Pamuk uses the snow metaphor to dizzying effect (there is an echo, too, in Ka's name). Snow isolates people but also draws them together, it smothers and freezes them but it also reminds Ka of God, 'of the beauty and mystery of creation, of the essential joy that is life'. Snowflakes, like people, are unique. Pamuk is persuasive about Ka's religious sentiments, but he isn't in the business of offering solutions: he is persuasive from every direction, so that we feel sympathetic to Blue's contempt for the West's cult of the individual just as we despair at the confusions of political Islam. Snow has already been a bestseller in Turkey - given Pamuk's stature as a novelist and the novel's content it could hardly fail to be. But what makes it a brilliant novel is its artistry. Pamuk keeps so many balls in the air that you cannot separate the inquiry into the nature of religious belief from the examination of modern Turkey, the investigation of East-West relations, and the nature of art itself - and, by implication, life, for the stage(d) coup is certainly deadly, and art and life mimic one another with hideous, occasionally hilarious, persistence. All this rolled into a gripping political thriller. LOAD-DATE: May 10, 2004 ----------------- The Guardian (London) - Final Edition May 8, 2004 Saturday Review: Profile: Orhan Pamuk: Occidental hero: Orhan Pamuk: Occidental hero: Born in Istanbul to a wealthy family, he abandoned architecture studies to write his first book, but struggled to find a publisher. Now Turkey's best-selling novelist, his newly translated Snow depicts a military coup. His opposition to the Rushdie fatwa and support for the Kurds means he is seen by some as a political renegade, but he remains outspoken. Nicholas Wroe reports Nicholas Wroe In 1994, billboards appeared all over Istanbul bearing the words: "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." They formed part of an advertising campaign for Orhan Pamuk's novel of that year, The New Life , and the phrase was the book's opening line. The marketing of popular fiction in this way is nothing new -although it was innovative in Turkey at the time - but what made the approach so unusual was that Pamuk's writing would not be immediately recognisable as the stuff of mass-market campaigns. John Updike, praising The New Life , said Pamuk "in his dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection suggests Proust". But Updike also noted that Pamuk was that most unusual of literary creatures, "both a best-selling author and an avant-garde writer". Pamuk's novels exuberantly embrace postmodernist narrative trickery and his work has been compared to Kafka, Borges, Calvino and Garcia Marquez. "I was as surprised as anyone about my sales," he says. "My first novel ( Cevdet Bey and His Sons, 1982) sold 2,000 copies in Turkey in the first year. The second ( The Quiet House, 1983) sold 8,000 copies, which was very good. But then the third book ( The White Castle, 1985) sold 16,000 and the fourth ( The Black Book, 1990) 32,000. So I was joking with friends that The New Life would sell 64,000 but it sold 164,000 copies in its first year." It was by some distance the fastest-selling novel in Turkish publishing history and the print run for his next novel, My Name is Red , in 1998, was the largest-ever in Turkey. The flat where Pamuk writes in Istanbul overlooks the Golden Horn and has views of the Topkapi Palace on one side and the suspension bridge that links Europe and Asia on the other. To the periodic accompaniment of a muezzin's call to prayer from the next-door mosque, he attempts to make sense of his unprecedented commercial success. "When I was first published, the Marxists and the conservatives and the political Islamists were all fighting against each other and fighting among themselves," he recalls. "So, because I was a newcomer they all kind of welcomed me, although a bit suspiciously. But it meant that I got all the prizes. And then a media boom began in Turkey and suddenly the interest in books was huge." While this helps to explain the demographics of his success, in artistic terms his work has tapped into the modern Turkish psyche at a most profound level. He acknowledges that a common theme in his books has been "cultural change; living in a westernised fashion in a country that is essentially not western". His work is full of reminiscences and he subtly engages with the past of his characters and their societies. An aggressive westernising agenda has been the dominant official force in Turkish life for more than a century, and Pamuk is a product of a ruling class that has benefited from this regime. But his work, like the world around him, is also marked by the legacy of a longer social, cultural and religious history. The novelist and journalist Maureen Freely was brought up in Istanbul as a contemporary of Pamuk's and knew his family. She is also the translator of his latest novel, Snow , which is published in the UK this month. "The rapidity of social change in Turkey has been amazing," she says. "And it has also been a source of considerable pain and confusion. Everything Orhan writes speaks to that and to the debates people are having inside themselves but they can't quite put into words." Freely adds that while his "modernist/postmodernist games involve using elements from opposing traditions that, when seen together, defy reason and make a 'grand narrative' impossible, they are perhaps less difficult for a modern Turkish reader to understand in that this is their daily experience - living in a part-eastern, part-western culture that changes rapidly - and there is never time to sit back and ask how it all adds up". Professor Jale Parla of Bilgi University in Istanbul has written extensively about Pamuk. She ascribes his success to his "rare gift of that genius that beguiles at the same time as it challenges. The paradox that he is a 'difficult' best-seller is a myth that is created by the intellectual community in Turkey who are aware of the complexity of his novels but miss their beguiling simplicity." (Parla also acknowledges that there are readers who see only the simplicity and "miss the beguiling".) In Turkey, the launch of a new Pamuk novel has more in common with the release of a Hollywood film than the publication of a book. There is media saturation and considerable cachet in being seen with his latest work. Although some snipe that he is probably more bought than read, a more serious criticism, usually from a left-nationalist perspective, is that he has sold out to a European audience, a view apparently given added credence when Pamuk was awarded the euros 100,000 Impac prize last year for My Name is Red "When my sales went up my welcome from the Turkish literary scene disappeared," he says. "And I haven't been given any prizes in Turkey since the age of 35. I started to get harsh and envious criticism and I now don't expect to get good reviews any more. For the last few books they haven't even criticised what I have written, instead they criticise the marketing campaign." It is difficult to overestimate his public profile. "If he puts one foot in front of the other it will get into the papers," says one friend. His outspoken stance on the broad human-rights agenda, which has included women's and Kurdish rights, democratic reforms as well as environmentalism, has made him a lightning conductor for criticism. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the radical French student leader-turned Green European MP, first met Pamuk in 2001 on an official visit to Istanbul. He invited Pamuk on to his Swiss television show about books. Cohn-Bendit says Pamuk "was one of the intellectuals who made me understand the importance of Turkey joining the European Union. It is so important for democrats in that country. Orhan is not only one of the most important modern writers in Europe, he is one of the examples of the possible modernity of Turkey." But for all the contentious stances he has taken, Pamuk rarely deals with political issues head-on in his fiction, and he has even been criticised by his natural supporters, who claim the distancing effect of some of his postmodernist techniques has made his work too apolitical. However, Pamuk says the idea of writing a "Dostoyevskian political novel" was in his head while he was working on Snow . "In the late-70s I tried to write a political novel about people like me: upper-class or middle-class students who went with their families to summer houses but also played around with guns and Maoist texts and had fanciful ideas about throwing a bomb at the prime minister." However in 1980, when the army responded to a parliamentary logjam, a deteriorating economy and widespread political violence by staging a coup and formally taking over the running of a country much of which was already under martial law, it was impossible to publish such a book. Pamuk says that 18 years on the vogue for Marxism had passed, "and the interesting thing was political Islamists. I had lots of friends who secretly admired them. Many hard-core political Islamists learned a lot from Turkey's Marxist-Leninists because nationalism and anti-westernism are at the heart of both. It is a secret anthropological history how similar they are. So I decided to write another novel. I liked the idea of this town being cut off from the rest of Turkey by snow; and there is a military coup." Set in 1992, the novel is part love story, part political thriller and features a poet visiting a remote town in eastern Turkey under the pretext of a journalistic assignment. Pamuk used the same ruse to undertake his research and many of the details in the book reflect his own experiences in the town of Kars, including being picked up by the local police who were suspicious of his movements. All Pamuk's novels have included autobiographical strands, but in his most recent book, Istanbul - published in Turkey late last year and due out in the UK in 2005 - he explicitly mixes memoir with his thoughts about the city. One of the chapters is about "The Rich", the social group into which he was born. "My grandfather was a rich person and my father's generation had much money, which they wasted. My childhood was full of my grandmother crying because my father or uncles were selling this or that. The family wealth came from building railroads in the 1930s. They were instigating the new Turkish republic and were literally building the nation. By the time I was growing up, the wealth was going down, but they still had the instincts of rich people. Even though my grandfather's money had evaporated, our lifestyle didn't change. But there were signs that the money was going and there were always feuds. People blamed other people all the time." Pamuk was born in Istanbul in June 1952 and a description of the upper-class neighbourhood he grew up in can be found in the The Black Book . "I was meticulous and perhaps pompous; I wanted to be like James Joyce in getting every detail correct about which shops were there at the time. Before I was born my family had a large house, the ultimate Ottoman mansion, with the whole family in different parts of the building and lots of servants. But that disintegrated and they wanted to be western, so they built an apartment block for themselves where the main doors were locked but inside all the apartment doors were open, and I would walk between the apartments of my uncles and cousins and my grandmother. But as the money ran out they began to sell the apartments and my family eventually moved to a better one, but one they rented and didn't own." Pamuk has bought a flat in the original family block and lives there again. His father, who died last year, was a businessman and a "failed poet" - "perhaps typical of second-generation wealth". Like the father figure in My Name is Red , he would periodically disappear from home. "He looked down on the Turkish literary scene but thought of Paris as a cool place to be so that's where he went," says Pamuk. "He married early and had chil dren and I think he regretted that. He wanted to carry on with his youth." Pamuk's mother and elder brother, a professor of economics, still live in the city. There is tension between the brothers, says Pamuk, because in Istanbul he wrote about the beatings he received from his brother when they were children. "People thought that because I am an apparently successful, upper-class, happy person I wouldn't write about things like that. But it is in our culture and it was my right to write about it. And then the media latched on to it and it made headlines." Pamuk and his brother attended the American school in Istanbul where they were taught in English and Turkish. The school catered for a social elite and has produced several Turkish prime ministers, but most of its alumni run Turkish industry and academia. "That sort of education makes you too secular and too westernised to properly stay in touch with traditional voters," says Pamuk. Vedit Inal, now a lecturer in economics, was a school and college friend and remembers Pamuk as witty, a good student and a basketball player. "He hasn't changed much as a character. He was always able to look at things from an unusual angle. And at first he wanted to be a painter, not a writer." Pamuk says he went through childhood being told he had a talent for painting, but the family tradition in engineering meant "that only things like engineering and mathematics counted. Religion, for example, was something just for the poor. The only time I was taken to the mosque was by my maid, when she went there to chat to her friends. The ruling westernised elite thought religion was one of the reasons for our glorious Ottoman empire's decline. But from the 60s they also saw it had an immense political power. If you showed the voters you were religious you got more votes and since then the upper classes have been scared of the lower classes and urban Turkey has been more religious." The arts and humanities were similarly disregarded and his family was not enthusiastic about the idea of him becoming a professional painter. "But instead of sending me to be a civil engineer, they thought because I was an arty guy perhaps I should be an architect." When Pamuk went to university in Istanbul in 1970 it was a militant Marxist campus and he was on the left. "But although I was reading the literature of all these little Marxist factions, I never joined any, and I would go home and read Virginia Woolf. Although I had my sympathies, I saved my spirits by reading Woolf and Faulkner and Mann and Proust. I felt guilty but I also felt they were more interesting." Pamuk had been a prodigious reader of classic French, Russian and English fiction since childhood and after three years studying architecture, "suddenly announced that I wasn't going to go to school any more and I wasn't going to paint. I was going to write novels." Freely says several contemporaries were, like Pamuk, interestingly quirky thinkers. "But while they fell by the way side, he pushed on and found out who he really was through his writing. And it was difficult. For families from his class engineering was everything. Of course there were quite a few of us interested in artistic things, but there was a very strong feeling that anyone with skills should put them in service of the country. His family were not happy at all about what he was doing but that wouldn't mean they didn't support him. Your family is your social security over there." Pamuk says he received "pocket money" from his father until he was 32. "But even my father, who had translated Valery, said I should stay on and finish that stupid architecture school. Their attitude was that all the artists and intellectuals in the country were doomed because there was not much interest in what they had to offer. And they were all drunks. So I worked very hard to make myself a novelist and finish my first book. I didn't want anyone to say - even though secretly I was saying it to myself - that I left school for nothing and was wasting my life." Although a leftist himself he felt little sympathy with the socialist-sanctioned realism of Gorky or Steinbeck or some Turkish village novelists. "There were modernist poetry groups and magazines with which I sympathised but I didn't really develop any literary friendships in my 20s. I was arrogant and I looked down a little on them and thought they were a bit simplistic. Because of that it was a problem to publish my first book." It took him four years to complete Cevdet Bey and His Sons - "a family saga that is really about my grandfather making his money" - and although it won a competition to be published, Pamuk eventually had to sue the publisher before it finally appeared in print three years later. "Getting published in England and America and in 35 languages was easy compared with first getting published in Turkey," he laughs. Throughout his time writing the novel, Pamuk had been enrolled in a journalism school just to put off his military service. But aged 30 in 1982, he did his spell in the military, and when he came out he married Aylin Turegen, a historian of Russian descent. Their daughter, Ruya, was born in 1991. The couple divorced three years ago. Cevdet Bey was published the same year as his marriage, followed the next year by The Quiet House Parla sees Pamuk "as a very conscious inheritor of the novelistic tradition, both with regards to Turkey and the west. It is no coincidence that he started his writing in a very classical format, that of the bildungsroman, in Cevdet Bey, and moved gradually through the modernism of Sessiz Ev ( The Quiet House ) to the post-colonial and post-modern works exemplified by The White Castle , The Black Book , The New Life , and My Name Is Red ." After the 1985 publication of his third novel, The White Castle, about a 17th-century Christian slave and his Muslim master who swap identities, the Pamuks moved to New York for three years so Aylin could study for a PhD at Columbia. Pamuk attended the Iowa writing school and taught a Turkish language class, but mostly he occupied a small room above the Col-umbia library where he began work on The Black Book , the contemporary story of a lawyer searching Istanbul for his lost wife. "My cubicle was above three million books and I was very happy there," he says. "There was a good collection of Turkish books going back to the 1930s and many of them had not even had the pages cut. No one had ever looked at them before me." The publisher Keith Goldsmith, now with Knopf in New York, was working for Carcanet, the British publisher. He was recommended Pamuk's work by a Turkish friend and through him The White Castle became Pamuk's first book translated into English. "Orhan was a very attractive character who was constantly chain-smoking, drinking coffee and speaking a mile a minute," says Goldsmith. "And it was plain that in his work, although it was cast in an historical period, he was addressing something of the essence of what was going on in the world today. He has obviously put his finger on something that relates to Turkey, but he has a resonance far beyond the place and the time he is apparently writing about. He is really a writer for the ages." The books now sell worldwide and Pamuk says the initial impact of this was to make him more conscious of his Turkishness. "I was surprised that the word Turk was used as a sort of synonym for my name. Instead of writing 'Pamuk says this or that' they wrote that 'this Turkish author said this or that'. It did upset me a little. If I write an essay about Proust or Hemingway I might occasionally write about the French or American author, but not all the time. It seems if you write fiction in that part of the world your nationality is not that important, but if you write fiction in this part of the world your nationality and, even worse, ethnicity are important. When an English writer writes about a love affair he writes about humanity's love affair, but when I write about a love affair I am only talking about a Turk's love affair." Pamuk says that as soon as he began to publish he realised he was expected to have an opinion on everything. "They would ask me what deodorants I used and I would answer them so I got a reputation for answering every question. For the first three or four years I didn't worry much about politics. The previous generation sneered at me as someone who became popular after a military coup. They implied my work was a product of that coup, which of course was not true. But although I was not in any party, I was still a leftist like them and as my fame grew, the new generation knew my opinions on things and especially on the Kurdish issue and on freedom of speech." He, and two other Turkish novelists, Yasar Kemal and Aziz Nesin, were the first writers from a Muslim country to speak out against the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie. "Three days later President Rafsanjani answered back from Tehran complaining that Iran's neighbours were siding with Rushdie, who had insulted the Prophet. I was famous by then, but not that famous. No one knew my address, so I didn't worry too much." Following the success of The New Life, he agreed to sell a Kurdish newspaper on the streets after the bombing of its offices by, it was generally assumed, government agencies. Through much of the 80s and 90s, a civil war was fought in east and southeast Turkey between government forces and Kurdish rebels from the secessionist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Pamuk recalls a "horrific atmosphere " at the time and says that when some "leftists and liberals and Kurds who were not ultra-nationalist tried to do something against the war and they wanted to use me, I said OK." The result was that he was called a "renegade" on the front page of a national newspaper, and sections of Turkish society and the state have never forgiven him. Pamuk began to write controversial articles for German newspapers and, in the late 90s, he signed a statement with other writers and intellectuals calling the government's Kurdish policy "a huge mistake". The government offered him an olive branch with the accolade of "state artist", but Pamuk refused it, saying that if he accepted, he couldn't "look in the face of people I care about". He now says the Kurds lost that war, which he thought "was bad for Turkey. There should have been concessions from both sides to reach a peace. That would have saved so much time and would have been much better for the country. I just hope that over time the Turks forget some of their Turkishness and Kurds forget some of their Kurdishness. And my dream of Europe is something that can do that. " "He has been courageous about human-rights issues," says Freely, "and has been very lucky not to have spent time in prison for his views. Any classmate of ours who was remotely interested in politics ended up in prison at some time or other. The fact that he can get away with saying things about the state because of his international reputation makes the obligation greater for him to do so when he can. And there is a sense that the human rights issue has to be addressed before they stand any chance of joining the European Union." Inal says that writers have an unusual mission in Turkey. "They are not just people working in their rooms. People ask them about social and political events and they have to respond. He has to give a provocative response so that people can look at things from different angles. Personally he is a loner and would prefer to be at home working and thinking about nothing more than writing. But he knows he also has a mission and he takes his social and political responsibilities seriously." "People say I must have had great self-confidence to continue for so long without being published," he says. "Perhaps that is true, but in fact I had burnt my boats and could not go back. I knew I had to reach that shore and this is how I have done it. "There are writers like Nabokov and Naipaul and Conrad who exchanged their civilisations and nations and even languages. It is a very cherished and fashionable idea in literature and so in a sense I am embarrassed that I have done none of this. I have lived virtually in the same street all my life and I currently live in the apartment block where I was brought up. But this is how it has to be for me and this is what I do. And look at my view. From here it is not so difficult to see the world." Snow is published by Faber & Faber at ?16.99. To order a copy for ?14.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Life at a glance Born: June 7, 1952, Istanbul. Education: Robert College, Istanbul; Istanbul Technical University; Institute of Journalism at the Istanbul University. Family: 1982 married Aylin Turegen; divorced 2001(one daughter, Ruya,born 1991). Some books: 1982 Cevdet Bey ve Ogullari (Cevdet Bey and His Sons); '83 Sessiz Ev (The Quiet House); '91 The White Castle; '95 The Black Book; '97 The New Life; 2001 My Name is Red; '03 Istanbul (not yet translated); '04 Snow. Prizes: 1983 Orhan Kemal Novel Prize; '84 Madarali Novel Prize; 2003 Impac award. LOAD-DATE: May 8, 2004 ---------------------- New Statesman May 10, 2004 LENGTH: 675 words Fiction - Veiled hatred; Snow Orhan Pamuk Faber & Faber, 436pp, GBP12.99 ISBN 0571220657 Julian Evans The concept of the 'Turkish novel', like the Moroccan or the Egyptian novel, is one we accept without question, though it contains the germ of a controversy. The novel, as readers of Cervantes and Dickens understand it, is a European form with roots in the Renaissance, individualism and romanticism, and an awareness of its own fictitiousness. When it is used by a Turkish writer to dramatise the competing claims of European secularism and political Islam, the result, at least at the level of form, is a foregone conclusion - Europe and secularism win. Orhan Pamuk wrestles with this ambiguity on every page of his profound and frequently brilliant new novel. Set in the 1990s, Snow presents Turkey as a nation far more unsure of its identity, and far crueller on both sides of the secular-Islamic divide, than we imagine. Pamuk's device for arranging his material recalls the allegories of writers such as Durrenmatt and Boll. His hero is a poet named Ka who, returning to Turkey after 12 years in political exile in Frankfurt, attends his mother's funeral in Istanbul, then accepts a commission to write an article about the forthcoming elections in the distant city of Kars, near the Armenian border. There has been a spate of suicides by women in the city, and the foreign press, despite local obstruction, is starting to get interested. Kars is poor, on the road to nowhere. It clings to the remnants of a grander Russian past and is uneasily caught between the secular status quo and rising Islamist parties. The thickly falling snow blankets its poverty and, to the poet's eyes, 'casts a veil over hatred'. It also cuts the city off within a day of Ka's arrival. That phrase 'casts a veil over hatred' is indicative of Pamuk's style and the ambiguities it expresses. Hatred is veiled, but veiling it does not resolve it. The snow of the title becomes a potent metaphor, returning Ka to 'the happiness and purity he had once known as a child'; he remembers writing in a poem that 'it snows only once in our dreams'. Snow is beauty and it is obstacle. And blood is brightest - or blackest - against snow. All Pamuk's characters seek stability within Turkey's fragile, undetermined identity. Generally it eludes them. All are tormented by both inner and outer uncertainties. Pamuk recognises that politics and psychology are one; this is one of his 'hidden symmetries'. How can people be free if the state does not free them? How can the state be free if people do not allow diversity in the body politic? The conundrum is worked through with remarkable clarity. At a performance in the National Theatre, where Ka has performed his poem 'Snow', a coup is mounted by freelance military elements and many pupils from the Islamic religious high school are killed. The soldiers' leader is Z Demirkol, an ex-communist whose participation provides another symmetry - the pardoned ex-communist becomes the protector of the secular state, while the passive poor and unemployed are won over to political Islam. The subsequent events - the brutal round-up of religious leaders and Islamist candidates, the negotiations for a truce, Ka's failed love affair - show violence and failure as the blizzard produced by illiberality and indecision. Pamuk's modesty as a writer, his refusal to write as if he knows what is happening, is one of his finest qualities. There are episodes in this novel - such as the con-versation in a coffee shop between the director of the education institute and his assassin about the state's banning of headscarves - that illuminate the confrontation between secular and extremist Islamic worlds better than any work of non- fiction I can think of. One of Ka's interlocutors, a theologian named Blue, complains that because the country has fallen under the spell of the west, it has forgotten its own stories. This may be true. But Pamuk shows decisively that the European novel (here superbly translated by Maureen Freely) remains a form, and a freedom, for which we have reason to be thankful. LOAD-DATE: May 6, 2004 ---------------- The Independent May 14, 2004 BOOKS: A COLD FRONT IN ANATOLIA Paul Bailey Orhan Pamuk's novel is set in the winter of 1992 in the city of Kars in the north-eastern part of Turkey, not far from the borders of Armenia and Russia. Snow is falling heavily when Kerim Alakusoglu, who prefers to be known by his initials Ka, arrives by bus. He is a poet who has lived in Frankfurt for 12 years. He has returned to Turkey to attend his mother's funeral in Istanbul, where he was born and raised. A liberal journal, The Republican, commissions him to write an investigative piece about curious events in the remote city, and that is what Ka intends to do at the outset. A number of young women, fervent Islamists, have committed suicide rather than divest themselves of the headscarves that cover their hair. Ka, in his role of disinterested journalist, questions the girls' families and friends and visits the police, the editor of a newspaper, the Border City Gazette, and other dignitaries. The elegant overcoat he wears (purchased in Frankfurt) marks him out for many in Kars as a Westernised intellectual. For them, Westernisation is synonymous with atheism. They are not to know that during his brief stay among them he is trying to find a way back to God. The multi-layered story is told by Pamuk himself, with the assistance of the notes Ka kept in Kars. These have been retrieved from Ka's flat in Frankfurt, four years later. The principal theme is concerned with the burgeoning of Ka's love for the beautiful Ipek, a former classmate in Istanbul, who is separated from her husband Muhtar, another friend from Ka's student days. With this romantic obsession comes the reflowering of Ka's poetic talent, lying dormant for some time. In beleaguered Kars, he writes 19 poems with a new-found ease and fluency. It's as if they are demanding that he set them down in his green notebook. We know that certain poets had these sudden bursts of creativity and Ka, in the midst of violence and murder, experiences the always surprising contentment that accompanies such fecundity. Snow is also an avowedly political work of fiction, of a kind still relatively rare in Britain. It finds voices for religious and other fanatics, for reactionaries and the occasional moderniser, and those who maintain that their arcane beliefs need not be challenged with reason. Chief among these disconcerting characters is a dashingly handsome terrorist who goes under the sobriquet Blue. He is probably the mastermind who instigated the assassination of a camp television host who cocked a snook too many at Muhammad. His conversations with Ka are teasing and menacing by turns, with Blue setting little linguistic traps for the poet. These scenes are very cunningly written. Blue is flamboyant in his crafty way, but outmatched in flamboyance by Sunay Zaim and his wife Funda Eser, a pair of strolling players who have performed in tiny towns across Anatolia, spreading the word of republicanism in sketches. They reminded me of Dario Fo and Franca Rame, who have been mocking Italian governments for more than three decades. In Snow, Sunay and Funda are responsible for a military coup, following a performance at the National Theatre that incites the fundamentalists in the audience to hurl abuse at the actors and to riot. Pamuk is aware that in certain cultures the theatre has to be subversive. Taking Brecht's theories into account, Sunay and Funda use skits on TV commercials and belly dancing to make people think, even as they are entertaining them. But it's the characterisation of Serdar, editor of the Border City Gazette, that best demon- strates Pamuk's penchant for serious playfulness. It is Serdar 's gift to provide crudely detailed descriptions of events before they happen. Serdar is the classic devious newsman, a fabricator of sensational headlines that just occasionally contain a scintilla of truth. Four epigraphs precede this complex and ambitious novel, two especially apropos. The first is from Robert Brown- ing's "Bishop Blougram's Apology": "Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things,/ The honest thief, the tender murderer,/ The superstitious atheist"; the second is from Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma: "Politics in a literary work are a pistol shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of ugly matters." That's precisely what Snow does, circuitously and cleverly. At its centre is the doomed romantic Ka, who has read the great poets and attempts to bring to his work some of their potent confusions. It's a novel full of orchestrated surprises and shocks, and perhaps too many overlong digressions. Pamuk has fared badly in the past with some English translations, but Maureen Freely has served him excellently here. Those readers who love, as I do, his previous novel My Name is Red, should be warned that Snow is radically different and contemporary. Pamuk is not in the business of offering his public more of the same, exotic thing. Paul Bailey's latest novel is Uncle Rudolf' (Fourth Estate) LOAD-DATE: May 14, 2004 ---------------- Sunday Times (London) May 16, 2004, Sunday White noise Maggie Gee SNOW by Orhan Pamuk translated by Maureen Freely. Faber ?12.99 pp436 Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow sold 100,000 copies in his native Turkey, partly because it managed to offend both the secular Turkish intellectuals and extremist "Islamists" it portrays. Reading it now in Maureen Freely's excellent translation, this ambitious, faintly frustrating book seemed to me, as an outsider, nine parts crowded farce and one part poetic lament. Perhaps it offended everybody by taking nobody seriously. It has one overriding message -men constantly deceive themselves and others. In Pamuk's satirised provincial Turkey the fiercest anti-Europeans have pictures of Venice on their walls, the strongest moralists are repressed lovers, and poets who meddle with politics get symbolically shot through one eye. Ka, a solitary, dreamy Turkish poet in exile, returns to the remote town of Kars just before snow makes the roads impassable. His visit is ostensibly to write an article explaining the epidemic of suicides among young Islamic "covered" women, but really he is here in search of a beautiful, recently divorced contemporary of his, Ipek. As a famous former son, Ka is co-opted by all his home town's countless factions, and acts as a passive foil for, among others, the police, the naive, touching students from the Islamic religious school and the seductively welcoming old local, Sheikh Saadettin Efendi, whose wily kindness makes Ka long to be "provincial too...forgotten in the most unknown corner of the universe". It is a vain wish, for almost as soon as Ka arrives he sees the local head teacher shot dead at point-blank range, and while the snow lasts, Kars becomes the site of a revolution. This becomes so exaggeratedly theatrical -the two main coups actually happen on stage, when guns waved by actors turn out to contain live ammunition -that Pamuk seems to be making the point that all political acts are so much posturing, although in the best pages in the book the tense dialogue between the head teacher and his murderer suggest otherwise. The laughing despair with which Pamuk for the most part sketches his characters' predicaments distances him from them and leaves the original questions about the inner life of the covered women largely unanswered. Ka is too self-conscious and self-obsessed a character to evoke much sympathy, and Ipek, Ka's beloved, remains elliptical, characterised primarily by her physical beauty. But then, as the title suggests, Ka, and behind him Pamuk, is actually in love with the quiet beauty of the snow that frames the human acts. Snow, "the silence of snow", snow in all kinds of light and at all different times of day, make Kars, and the non-human parts of this book, beautiful, a grave backdrop to the ant like kicking and struggling of the people. Pamuk is looking for "hidden symmetries" just as Ka, in the thick of the shootings and interrogations, is listening for "the only sound that could ever make him happy: the sound of his muse". The complexity of Pamuk's skilful structure reveals itself little by little. Halfway through the book we discover Ka is the former schoolfriend of Orhan Bey, the journalist who is supposedly writing the novel after Ka's death. Orhan Bey is in quest of a green notebook containing the sequence of poems built around the form of a six-pointed snowflake, which Ka wrote during his stay in Kars, and judged to be the best thing he had ever written. Their titles lend shape to the novel we are reading, but the notebook itself is never found. In a final Pamukian irony, the poems, ultimate focus of all the hero's efforts, melt like a silent snowflake as this big, noisy novel closes. q Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of ?10.39 plus ?2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 LOAD-DATE: May 17, 2004 ---------------- Time Out May 19, 2004 The white stuff; Books: Preview Omer Ali Omer Ali talks to cultureclash chronicler Orhan Pamuk. An emigri Turkish poet known as Ka finds himself trapped in a town called Kars, on Turkey's north-eastern border with Armenia, first by a blizzard and then by avery Turkish coup: bloody, muddled, steeped in jumbled art and political theory,with military help and under the eye of the intelligence service. Ka's underlying motive for going to Kars is to woo an old flame and persuade herto return to Germany with him, but he finds himself embroiled in a fundamentalist affair, at odds with the precepts of a secular state. Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk has depicted the pressures on a country caught between East and West before, but seventh novel 'Snow', his fifth to be translated into English, is the first time he has tackled politics and religion so overtly. 'This is my thirtieth year of writing fiction, ' the 51-year-old explains on the phone from Istanbul. 'For the first 20 years I neverthought of writing political anything because a previous generation of Turkish writers was so political and, frankly, I hated political fiction.' Since the mid-'90s he has become well known for campaigning on behalf of the Kurds and forfreedom of expression. 'I did so much of it that in the end I became notorious and found myself in politics. I decided that why don't I get this out of my chest do it once and for all. Of course, as a literary form the political novel was outmoded. First of all the question was not political but literary: how to make this old thing new again?' What about the possible repercussions? 'Well, I don't want to exaggerate it, but before the book was published we were a bit worried about various reactions, including the government's, but we didn'thave any problem with the state. But there are two essential reactions, first from the conservative or you can even say fundamentalist political Islamist side, which was essentially, Islamists are not like that. For example, you have an Islamic militant in the book , who the reader knows is also a killer, who ishaving sex outside of marriage a proper Islamist wouldn't do that, which is party true and partly has nothing to do with what happens in life. 'The other criticism comes from the more Jacobean side of the picture: they wereupset by the fact that I was interested in the problems of Turkey's Kurds, problems of freedom of expression in relation to political Islamists and Kurds, and worried about my critique of the army and Turkish bureaucracy and state. They were upset by the fact that I tried to understand why a fundamentalist actsin a certain way, how does he think? These are the questions any of you should ask, by the way.' As in Pamuk's impressive historical mystery 'My Name Is Red', a writer named Orhan works his way into 'Snow'. For Pamuk this solves problems of representation and honesty; like his creator, Ka is Westernised, from a middle-class Istanbul upbringing, and both visited Kars posing as journalists (Ka is there to investigate a suicide epidemic among young women, based on recent real-life events in south-eastern Turkey), where both were followed by the police. As Ka treads the streets from one assignation to another, you could create a map of Kars from Pamuk's description, including vignettes about its inhabitants. When a Kars youth is asked what he would tell Westerners if he was given the chance, the answer comes: 'We're not stupid! We 're just poor!' It is avery beautiful book; each chapter reads like a short story, an idea that catchesPamuk's imagination. 'I wish I could do that: a serialised novel, like nineteenthcentury authors like Dickens or Dostoyevsky. Then I wouldn't be worrying about the beauty of the whole project, which is a bit pretentious somehow, miraculously, it will take care of itself. Writing in instalments wouldsave my soul in a way.' And then there is the snow ('Snow' in Turkish is 'Kar'),which works its way into Ka's psyche and his poems, occurs at crucial moments of'My Name Is Red' and seems to enfold the new book like Ka's characteristic 'charcoal-grey coat bought at Kaufhof'. ' Snow was one of the delights of childhood, as most children know. On the other hand it is also for me a very picturesque thing, which I don't want to abuse. Perhaps it is related to the fact that I wanted to be a painter and everything looks softer, miraculously beautiful, after it snows in my corner of the world. Since it is such an event it pulls people together; the feeling of community, feeling of family and solidarity is stronger after a lovely snow.' 'Snow' is published by Faber at GBP 12.99. LOAD-DATE: May 19, 2004 --------------- Financial Times (London, England) May 22, 2004 Saturday Cold realities Like "a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert", politics are tackled head-on in this devastating parable By ANGEL QUINTANA-GURRIA Snow by Orhan Pamuk translated by Maureen Freely Faber Pounds 16.99, 436 pages An urgent question seethes at the heart of Orhan Pamuk's latest novel: "Can the West endure any democracy achieved by enemies who in no way resemble them?" Judging by the Turkish author's devastating parable of political extremism, the answer is no. Snow is Pamuk's seventh novel, and the fifth to be translated into English. Its narrator is Orhan, familiar to readers of Pamuk's The Black Book. Orhan tells the story of his friend Ka, a poet returning to Turkey after 12 years of exile in Germany. For reasons both professional and personal, Ka travels to the remote town of Kars near Turkey's eastern border. He arrives on the eve of mayoral elections, sent by an Istanbul newspaper to investigate an "epidemic" of young women's suicides. Secretly, Ka is also hoping to find Ipek, a woman he knew in his youth and whose beauty he has cherished ever since. When heavy snowfall cuts off all routes to Kars, isolating the town for three days, Ka feels "as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten". As he goes about his journalistic business in this confined microcosm, he uncovers a hotbed of intolerance and radical politics fuelled on all sides by fear. He can draw no easy conclusions within a culture in which women kill themselves in defence of their religion, but are shunned by their relatives for committing sinful suicide. Although Ka is at ease among the town's secular elite, he discovers that his host's daughter - Ipek's sister - is leading a group of girls demanding the right to wear headscarves. Ipek's ex-husband, once a westernised poet who has since embraced political Islam, is the candidate most likely to succeed in the impending election. Nor are Ka's beliefs as unshakeable as he thinks: a declared atheist, he soon meets and sympathises with "the infamous Islamist terrorist" Blue. And yet he worries like many others "that the Westernised world he had known as a child in Istanbul was coming to an end". The spectre of Iran's ayatollahs looms large over the secularists' nightmare. "What's more important, a decree from Ankara or a decree from God?" asks a zealous Islamist. While Ka merely ponders the question, other characters are prepared to act on what they assume is the correct answer. Faced by the prospect of an Islamist victory at the polls, a theatrical troupe devoted to the modernising mission of Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic, takes advantage of Kars' isolation to stage a deadly coup, brazenly exposing the limits of the democratic principle that modernisers claim to embrace. In the discord that follows, Pamuk heeds all sides. Atheists are chided for relying on the army. Islamists are reminded that they can pray to their heart's content only because "godless" modernisers are running the country. A radical secularist expresses scorn for moderates like Ka, expecting democracy and human rights while "buttering up" Islamic fundamentalists. A self-proclaimed "communist, modernising, secular, democratic patriot" joins forces with Islamists and Nationalist Kurds to protest against the coup, but is soon persuaded that "the army is right to want to keep them out of politics. They're the dregs of society, the most wretched, muddled, brainless people in the city." Caught in the thick of events, Ka's only wish is to flee with Ipek. Upon meeting the narrator after the tale's tragic denouement, an acquaintance of Ka pleads: "If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me... No one could understand us from so far away." This is the type of playfully self-referential twist that has garnered Pamuk well-deserved comparisons to Borges, Calvino and Kafka. One might add Auster, Saramago and Sebald to the list. As in The White Castle and My Name is Red, Pamuk elegantly dissects the recurrent quandary in Turkish history - look westwards, or inwards and backwards. If Snow is less subtle than its predecessors, if it is often didactic and occasionally strident, it is only because its subject matter is more immediate. Never one to flinch from the weighty issues of Turkey's past and present, Pamuk is here at his most political yet. And, as one of the book's epigraphs reminds us, "politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert... We are about to speak of very ugly matters." LOAD-DATE: May 21, 2004 -------------- THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON) May 22, 2004, Saturday Alone in Turkey Tom Payne praises a brave novel that makes us question our world by Tom Payne In 2001, an extraordinary book called My Name Is Red appeared in English. It's impossible to recommend it without sounding eccentric - you try urging a friend to read a Turkish novel, brimming with stories within stories and Koranic dialectic, about murderous miniaturists working in the court of Sultan Murat III in 1591. The novel is set around the 1,000th anniversary of Mohammed's journey from Mecca to Medina, when Islamic reformers were railing against artists in Istanbul. Its opening chapter is a monologue about a corpse, and the story takes in points of view from other perspectives: Satan says his piece, as does a horse, Death, a coin and the colour red. Its translation brought its author, Orhan Pamuk, greater fame in the West, and, for all the book's violence, it could almost be read for entertainment. The book showed Pamuk could do everything - jokes, horror, plot, structure, erudition, love. In Snow, Pamuk uses his powers to show us the critical dilemmas of modern Turkey. How European a country is it? How can it respond to fundamentalist Islam? And how can an artist deal with these issues? The novel is set in Kars, in the far east of Turkey, close to Armenia - the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1908 remains in the characters' minds. For the three days of the story's main action, the town is cut off by snow, so, when a coup takes place, the world cannot intervene. The local paper, the Border City News, has a circulation of 320, and prints news before it happens. The residents watch TV constantly, even when there's nothing on, and most are paid to spy on one another. There is a high rate of suicide among the town's young women. Ka, a poet, wants to know why. Some say it's because the women are beaten at home; others say they are protesting because they can't wear headscarves in school. "Why did your daughter decide to uncover herself?" an Islamist asks Kars 's director of education, before shooting him. "Does she want to become a film star?" The Islamists don't know what to make of the suicides, since the Koran forbids the faithful to take their own lives. Throughout the book, Ka stops to write poetry (mostly taken from the dialogue around him). He asks a woman he loves, "Do you think it's beautiful?... What's beautiful about it?" As a writer, Ka is at odds with the intrigues and fear around him. He is often blissfully happy, and we learn that one poem's theme is "the poet's ability to shut off part of his mind even while the world is in turmoil. But this meant that a poet had no more connection to the present than a ghost did. Such was the price a poet had to pay for his art!" And yet the artists in the story are lethally relevant. When the coup comes, it comes on the stage of a theatre; even as members of the audience are being killed, people mistake the events for a fantastic illusion. For a while, Kars is run by an ageing actor who regrets that he's never played Ataturk. Even Ka, who is mistrusted for being too Western, becomes integral to the action. At one point, Ka reflects on the writers he's known who have been lynched by Islamists, and it's a reminder that writing Snow has been an act of bravery, too. It's an unexpected sort of bravery, though, because Pamuk has made great efforts to enter the Islamists' heads. The effect is like meeting the possessed anarchists in Dostoevsky - these alternative views of the world find full expression, and make us question our own. If Pamuk wrote about real situations and tried to find sympathy with true terrorists, more readers would be alarmed than already have been. But he tailors the terrorists to his requirements - the most seductive of them, Blue, hasn't killed anybody and dotes on puppies. The author's high artistry and fierce politics take our minds further into the age's crisis than any commentator could, and convince us of every character 's intensity, making Snow a vital book in both senses of the word. Orhan Pamuk is the sort of writer for whom the Nobel Prize was invented. Snow by Orhan Pamuk tr by Maureen Freely 436pp, Faber & Faber, pounds 16.99 T pounds 14.99 (plus pounds 2.25 p&p) 0870 1557222 LOAD-DATE: May 22, 2004 --------------------- Independent on Sunday (London) May 23, 2004, Sunday BOOKS: HUNT THE LUSTY FUNDAMENTALIST; A FAST-MOVING TURKISH FARCE DELIGHTS STEPHEN O'SHEA WITH ITS STEPHEN O'SHEA Snow on the shores of the Bosphorus near Turkey's Ortakoy mosque MURAD SEZER/AP It comes as a surprise that political prescience should be yet another of the many gifts of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. Praised as a virtuoso of the postmodern highwire - in the company of Borges, Calvino and Eco - Pamuk has delivered intellectual delights without bothering his readers too much about the times in which they live. My Name is Red, the Impac winner depicting a 16th-century aesthetic feud among Ottoman miniaturists, was hailed as a work of idiosyncratic genius, as was The White Castle, which involves a Muslim master and a Christian slave switching identities. Now, with Snow, composed before 11 September 2001, Pamuk gives convincing proof that the solitary artist is a better bellwether than any televised think-tanker. Set in easternmost Anatolia in the 1990s, the novel deals with the present- day shouting-match between East and West - a subject that is second nature to any native of Istanbul like Pamuk. A meeting of Noises Off and The Clash of Civilisations, the work is a melancholy farce full of rabbit- out-of-a-hat plot twists that, despite its locale, looks uncannily like the magic lantern show of misfire, denial and pratfall that appears daily in our newspapers. How could Pamuk have foreseen this at his writing desk four years ago? Even the beatings and humiliations seem familiar. The show takes place during three eventful February days in Kars, a shivering has-been of a town hard by the border with Armenia. A snowstorm has cut off the place, prompting an itinerant theatrical troupe to stage a coup in the name of old-fashioned Kemalist secular values. Their leader, a thoughtful drunk whose fame rests in his resemblance to Ataturk, is concerned about militant Islamists and Kurdish separatists in Kars, as well as a rash of suicides among the city's pious headscarf-wearing girls. Enter Ka, a poet returned from exile in Germany, to report on the suicides for an article to appear in "Republic" (ie Cumhurriyet), a leading Istanbul newspaper read by Westernised "white Turks" like himself. What Ka finds, as the snow settles on streets lined with dilapidated Tsarist-era mansions, is a city of articulate rage. Angry at being poor, provincial and despised by the godless, the townsfolk confront Ka and disabuse him of his reflexive feelings of superiority, the most memorable harangues spouted by a youth with dreams of becoming "the world's first Islamist science-fiction writer". The Western newcomer, who has spent the past 20 years not writing poetry, masturbating, and collecting political refugee cheques in Frankfurt, is enchanted at finding himself stuck in a tendentious backwater straight out of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, to whom he refers liberally. Ka's muse returns and his libido revives. At his hotel, run by an old socialist with two beautiful daughters, the inevitable boulevardier complications arise, one of the love triangles pitting the atheist poet against a lusty fundamentalist. Ka goes out repeatedly to meet this hunted Islamist mastermind - who came to national attention over the murder of a game-show host - to negotiate matters political, sentimental, and, in the end, theatrical: whether one of the inn-keeper's daughters will remove her headscarf on stage. As the intrigues mount and become ever more deadly before the final betrayal, Pamuk gives us a florid wink by letting his characters take a break every afternoon to watch a Mexican soap opera on television. In Turkey, the novel was criticised for its use of caricatures. Not those of the foolish pasha of tired European travel writing, but the Turk- on-Turk variety: the spent leftist, the brainless policeman, the head- scarf passionaria, the miserable Anatolian. True, Pamuk trades on stereotypes. But the strength of Snow lies in its failings. The less believable the characters, the more true-to-life they appear. It is to Pamuk's credit that he saw this sad farce coming before the rest of us. Stephen O'Shea is the author of The Perfect Heresy' (Profile). His book on Islam and Christianity in the medieval Mediterranean world will appear next year LOAD-DATE: May 23, 2004 ----------------------- The Jerusalem Post May 28, 2004, Friday The voice from Istanbul Talya Halkin HIGHLIGHT: As Turkey's leading novelist, Orhan Pamuk reluctantly straddles the divide between East and West. Box at end of text When the five-year-old Orhan Pamuk's parents went off on a reconciliation trip to Paris, he was sent to stay with an aunt who lived in another part of Istanbul. The aunt and her husband treated him nicely, and showed him a European picture of a wide-eyed child who resembled him. "This is you," they would say jokingly, pointing repeatedly at the picture of the little boy staring out from under a cap. It was during this period that he began entertaining the idea he would write about years later: Somewhere in the city, he came to believe, there lived another boy just like himself. When he was unhappy, he was convinced the other Orhan was undoubtedly having a better time. Walking through the streets, he would stare into unfamiliar houses, wondering whether any of them was where the other Orhan lived. Over the years, this imaginary twin became such an important part of his life he felt he could never leave the city without forsaking his double. "Except for three years spent in New York, I've lived on the same street and in the same family apartment building for the past 50 years," the 52-year-old Pamuk told me when I visited him earlier this month at the Istanbul apartment he uses as an office. Today, Pamuk is considered to be Turkey's leading novelist. His features, however, still reveal the timid, bookish child he once was, so that people familiar with his photographs are always surprised at how tall he is when they encounter him in person. His manner is at once boyish and imperious. Pamuk tells the story of his childhood double in the first chapter of his latest book, Istanbul, which was published in Turkey earlier this year and combines memories and essays about the city. And although he eventually relinquished his childhood fantasy of an identical counterpart, over the past two decades Pamuk has made the relationship between self-knowledge and knowledge of the other into the leitmotif of his work. One can only truly become oneself, his narratives insist, by becoming another - and this process of becoming takes place, more than anywhere else, through the act of telling stories. PAMUK'S SPACIOUS, book-lined office is directly above the Jihangir Mosque, situated on the hillside sloping down to the European bank of the Bosphorus. His secularly minded mother, who gave him the money for the apartment as a gift, deeply disapproved of his choice because of the minarets sticking up right in front of the building like two exclamation points after the word "religion." Foreign journalists, however, love to describe the view the minarets frame. Seagulls flutter picturesquely over the ferries and small yachts dot the water at the confluence of the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and the Sea of Marmara, separating the city's European coast from its Asian one. Like Pamuk himself, the view can symbolize, for those interested in such metaphors, a vision both reassuring and alluring, of the opposing East and West conjoined. Pamuk, however, is less than happy with this image. Sitting across from me on a low couch in a button-down shirt and dark cotton pants, his body arches forward like an oversize question mark. "What I've written about is not the clash of civilizations or the conflict between East and West," he told me. "I hate both the concept and the reality of a Muslim world clashing with the West. What I've been interested in writing about is what you would call in sociological terms 'cultural change,' or in psychological, more personal terms 'problems of identity.' "Thirty years ago, this used to be only Turkey's problem. Now it has become the world's fashionable problem, and I don't like it when journalists turn to me because they want Islamic fundamentalism to be quickly explained to them by a mellow, civilized Turk like myself, who can understand the so-called 'primitives ' and act as a go- between." Pamuk, who defines himself as "a Western writer working in a semi-non-Western cultural climate," grew up in a secular, wealthy Istanbul home. He and his older brother, Shevket, attended the city's American school. Pamuk's father, who died last year, was the son of a successful industrialist who filled journals with existential quandaries and accounts of his Parisian love affairs, translated the modernist French poet Paul Valery into Turkish, and - together with Pamuk's uncle - squandered the family fortune. He also cultivated a good library, in which his son acquired what he describes as "an immense passion to devote my life to books and literature." His literary heroes include both Proust and Montaigne, both of whom he loves and identifies with for the same reason. "They were both," he explained to me, "wealthy men who didn't need to work and were surrounded by lots of books, which they could read and then come back and write. It's a tough position to develop in Turkey, because people here are so political and don't want to accept this way of life, which I eventually made them accept." As a result, Pamuk has accumulated a vast amount of literary knowledge. "You can tell from reading his books that he has almost literally locked himself up in a room all his life," Nuket Esen, a professor of modern Turkish literature at Bosphorus University, told me when I met her in a cafe around the corner from Pamuk's apartment. "He read and read and read, and all of a sudden he began writing and writing and writing." Pamuk's first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, which he wrote when he was 26, was a traditional family novel. It took some time to get published, and finally appeared in 1982. "As soon as I finished it," Pamuk told me, flashing a smile, "I immediately felt it was old-fashioned." Over the next two years, he published two more books in quick succession, in each of them very consciously adapting a particular literary form. In The House of Silence, which appeared in 1983 and has not been translated into English, the narrative explodes into polyphony, as each chapter is recounted through the consciousness of a different protagonist. The novel, which unfolds against the political events of the late 1970s in Turkey, takes place in a dilapidated seaside house inhabited by an old woman, the dwarf who takes care of her, and the three grandchildren who come to visit. The history of the family, which parallels the history of modern Turkey, probes the vicissitudes of Westernization on both the personal and the collective level. Pamuk has a penchant for what literary critics call "intertextuality" - referring within his work not only to the texts of other writers, but to his own earlier novels. His third book, The White Castle, which was published in 1985, begins with a prologue written by an alcoholic historian who is one of the protagonists of The House of Silence. The bulk of the novel is a historical doppelganger story, in which East and West come face to face when an Italian student is overtaken at sea and sold as a slave to a Muslim scholar in 17th-century Istanbul (the two turn out to be spitting images of one another). IN 1982, Pamuk married Aylin Turegen, and the two set off for the United States, where Turegen would pursue her doctoral studies at Columbia University. Living in New York, he told me, was a welcome change from the Istanbul of the 1970s and 1980s, where "everything was very political. You had to immerse yourself in one of these local problems - fundamentalism, nationalism, militarism, communism. I identified with authors like James Joyce, moving from the margins of Western culture to its center, enjoying its cultural openness and wealth while still in the back of their minds worrying about the little world they left behind." Pamuk received a small study at the university's Butler Library, where he began writing parts of what would become The Black Book, apologizing profusely to the young lovers he stumbled upon as he made his way down the long hallway to continue writing at night. That was also the period when, having discovered Borges and Calvino, Pamuk found a way of looking back at the Islamic literary heritage from a postmodern, secular point of view, picking up literary tricks and at the same time becoming aware of the power of those texts. In doing so, he had broken completely with the realism and political themes of other Turkish novelists. The Black Book, which remains perhaps Pamuk's most dazzling literary achievement to date, was published in Turkey in 1990. It takes place over the course of one snowy week in Istanbul, when a young lawyer by the name of Galip discovers that his wife Ruya has disappeared and sets out on a quest to find her, which takes him through the city's streets and underground passages. When he begins to suspect that Ruya's disappearance is related to the sudden absence of her half-brother, the famed columnist Djelal, Galip begins impersonating the latter and writing his daily newspaper columns. His search for the two becomes a search for his own identity and for the identity of Istanbul, which remains forever mysterious. It was the Istanbul of The Black Book that I had wanted Pamuk to show me as we got out of a cab near Divan Yolu, once the main thoroughfare of the Byzantine and Ottoman city. We headed west into the booksellers' bazaar, then continued north through the gardens and arcade courtyard of the Suleymaniye Mosque, heading further west across Ataturk Boulevard and uphill into the narrow, winding streets of Fatih, one of the most religiously conservative neighborhoods in Istanbul, where women carefully cover themselves with head scarves or black chadors. These streets, with their dilapidated wooden houses, are where Pamuk would wander about when he was enrolled at the nearby School of Journalism to avoid the military draft. We stopped in at an old tiled shop for drinks made of fermented wheat. The silver glass holder from which Ataturk, founder of the Turkish republic, is said to have drunk was enshrined on the wall in a specially made reliquary. Pamuk, by his own definition, was a bookish, somewhat timid boy, who left his house only to occasionally go on long walks throughout the city. "In the late Sixties and Seventies," Pamuk told me as we scattered nuts onto the surface of our frothy, cinnamon- flavored drinks, "I walked endlessly in Istanbul. I was moody and angry, and my walks were these furious young man's 'one day I'm going to do something big' kind of walks." Like Galip, who is overcome at times by the strange sensation that the entire city is pervaded by a system of signs which speak to him alone, and which are embedded in the most banal of everyday objects - the titles of volumes at the booksellers' bazaar, neon street signs, bric-a-brac offered for sale at the street vendors' stalls - Pamuk would carefully comb secondhand stores and bookshops, and would return home with a host of acquired objects: Russian or old Ottoman coins, marbles, ashtrays, lighters, cigarette holders. Then he would carry them with him for a while, until they disappeared. Large parts of The Black Book are set in Nisantas, the modern residential neighborhood in which Pamuk grew up. Today, it has evolved into an upscale shopping district, in which fashion designers have replaced the old neighborhood merchants. The store once selling fresh eggs and dairy products is now a shoe store. The mansion garden that used to abut his school courtyard is now a small public park. Pamuk and his wife have been separated now for several years. Their daughter, who was born in 1991, is called Ruya, after Galip's wife in The Black Book. The small shop owned by Aladin - a small, bespectacled man whom Pamuk has known since they were both children - is one of the few still points in this changing neighborhood. Aladin, who has never read any of Pamuk's books, is proud of his new status as a pilgrimage site to some of the writer's foreign fans. "Will you keep promoting me in your next book, sir?" he asked hopefully after The Black Book came out. In the center of the display window, standing back to back with a new translation of a Danielle Steel novel and just above a set of toy pistols, is a black-and-white picture of the smiling young Orhan on the cover of the only remaining copy of Istanbul. PAMUK IS a well-known media personality in Turkey, and people ranging from a hip passerby on his own street to the owner of a run-down shop bordering an abandoned church near the Golden Horn recognize him. Notwithstanding his high degree of intellectual sophistication, he is the first Turkish writer to become a best-seller in the Western sense. Andy Finkel, an American journalist based in Turkey who attended the same school as Pamuk, describes him as "nice and at the same time terribly controlled and disciplined, good at knowing what he wants to be and hanging on to that in a country where people do all they can to put you down." Those who dislike Pamuk seem to be bothered not only by the fanfare that surrounds the publication of his books, but also by the fact that in Turkey, respected novelists have always spent some time in prison - a not-insignificant point in some left-wing circles. According to Maureen Freely, the novelist and journalist who has just translated his most recent novel, Snow, into English, Pamuk's large following in Turkey is mostly made up of members of the younger generation. Nevertheless, she told me, when he appeared in London several years ago, "Everybody mentioned in Snow - the PKK, the secret police, the ambassadors, they were all there because they're obsessed with him. Looking at them, I realized what conflicting emotions he arouses in people - fascination, fear, mistrust." The Black Book was followed by The New Life, which appeared in 1994 and continued the theme of searching out mystical shards of illumination in the everyday. In it, a young man infatuated with a book he reads abandons his life in Istanbul and embarks on a series of ghostly, disturbing bus trips between provincial towns. "What remains unchanged in all his books beginning with The White Castle," Jale Parla, a professor of modern Turkish literature at Istanbul Bigli University, told me, "is a mood of terrible isolation. The major characters all know something is wrong, but what they think is wrong is not really what's wrong. They are going around enveloped in this isolated capsule, finding ways out of it like a caterpillar poking through the cocoon. But they poke at the wrong points all the time. It's a very ironic quest, which is comic at times and tragicomic at others. It's the only continuity in the work of an author who is constantly experimenting with new forms of representation." While The New Life, like The Black Book, received rave reviews when it appeared in English, it was only with the publication of My Name is Red, which came out in English in 2001, that Pamuk became more widely known to American audiences. A historical novel set in the Ottoman court, it revolves around the murders of two of the Sultan's miniaturists and deals with the battle between Eastern and Western models of representation and the opposing worldviews they stood for. My Name is Red came out in the US in the first week of September 2001. In it, Pamuk had written about problems that he has been preoccupied with for many years, but in the wake of September 11, they suddenly seemed to take on a new relevance. "Today," Pamuk told me, leaning against his terrace balcony the day after we first met, "I am much more optimistic about the future of Turkey than I was several years ago. It is in the process of stabilizing, and I hope this stability continues and that other countries learn from Turkey's example that Islam and democracy aren't contradictory, and that you can develop civil society in an Islamic country. I don't want my part of the world fighting with West. I have my foot in both parts, and I want them to be at peace with one another because I want to survive." (BOX) The accidental dissident Snow, which has just appeared in England, is due out in the US this August. It is Pamuk's sixth novel, and the first one to make contemporary Turkish politics its direct subject. The year is 1992 when Ka, a Turkish poet and political exile, travels to the eastern city of Kars, on the Armenian border, to report on forthcoming municipal elections and a series of mysterious female suicides for an Istanbul newspaper. When a blizzard temporarily cuts off communication with the rest of the world, Ka finds himself caught in the midst of religious and political conspiracies that culminate in a military coup staged by a theatrical troupe. The snowed-in city becomes, in this political thriller, a microcosm of the entire country. Pamuk had previously refrained from writing on overtly political subjects because of what he perceives to be the destructive effect that political over-involvement has had on the previous generation of Turkish writers. After winning international recognition, however, he began signing petitions regarding the war against the Kurdish guerrillas and the Turkish state's violations of human rights and freedom of expression. He went on to write articles on these subjects for the foreign press, which were angrily discussed in Turkish newspapers, and within a decade became a political figure in spite of himself. "I finally decided to go ahead and write one political novel so I could get it off my chest," he told me. Like Ka, the protagonist of his novel, Pamuk arrived in Kars carrying a press card from a major Turkish newspaper, and used the pretext of researching an article to travel back and forth to Kars over a period of four years. "It snows so much there," he said, "and I love snow. But I also felt this depressing loneliness there, this kind of misery born from the horrifying absence of a future. There was a real epidemic of girls committing suicide at the time, but that happened in Batman, another Kurdish town 200 kilometers south of Kars that is a bastion of Turkish fundamentalism. It made the national and international news, and it's still a mystery to me why they committed suicide." MAUREEN FREELY, an American journalist and novelist who grew up in Istanbul and has known Pamuk since childhood, took it upon herself to translate Snow into English. "It's a kind of endgame, a three-day version of Turkish politics," she told me, speaking on the phone from her home in Bath, England. "It's all there - the succession of military coups and people pulled into prison and spewed out many years of torture later. And apart from a few people who keep the records, it's just denied and denied and denied." Freely was translating Snow when Chechen rebels took over the musical comedy theater in Moscow. "What I saw on tape was disturbingly close to what Pamuk had written about in his novel, with people marching on stage and nobody knowing what to make of them," she said. Although his novel pushes Turkish politics to a level of absurdity, Pamuk, according to Freely, wrote accurately about "a society held together by violence, in which the people in power have the ability to make people who have been violently treated collude with the violence and refrain from talking about it. In Pamuk's novel, that silence takes the form of the falling snow that is present throughout the book. By the time the book comes to an end, the city decides the coup has never taken place." It is no accident, according to Freely, that Pamuk set the novel in a formerly Armenian city, whose history can still only be written about in Turkey by way of insinuation. The day before I called her, Freely told me she had been speaking to a Turkish friend who said that Snow made her feel depressed and sad about her country. "Strangely," Freely said, "sitting and translating the book in Bath, England, I just wanted to travel to Kars. Despite my political concerns about Turkey, it appealed to me because of the human warmth that Pamuk evokes. There's this tiny detail at the end of the novel when it turns out that the Kurdish maid at the local hotel is still giving soup to the detective. They are simultaneously turning each other in and feeding each other - like a big, warm, treacherous family." Pamuk's international reputation has come to protect him against a government crackdown, but even so his publishers were somewhat worried when Snow was due to come out in Turkey. Pamuk is against militarism and fundamentalism of any kind. While Kemalists felt he was being too pro-Islam, Islamic groups were equally displeased with Pamuk's book. "It took my breath away to see how many types of people he chose to insult at once," Freely told me. "Yet although he examines how extremist groups on both poles of the political spectrum operate within a given power structure, he is most damning about his own generation of left-wing artists and radicals, who have come to very absurd nothings." "When I read it," Prof. Jale Parla of Istanbul Bigli University told me, "I thought 'this is it, he's in trouble.' The book was simply ignored by literary critics and intellectuals - perhaps because it is directed very straightforwardly against the military regime and its interference with democracy. Other novelists would still be interrogated for making half the comments that Pamuk made." GRAPHIC: 5 photos: The iconoclast. 'Problems of identity used to be only Turkey 's problem; now they're the world's. 'Life in Istanbul. Personal history often parallels national history in Pamuk's work. Street scene. At a certain point, Pamuk broke with the realism and political themes of other Turkish novelists. Pamuk's view. He defines himself as 'a Western writer working in a semi-non -Western cultural climate.' A traditional neighborhood in Istanbul. 'I am much more optimistic about the future of Turkey than I was several years ago.' (Credit: Sinan Akyuz) LOAD-DATE: June 9, 2004 ---------------- The Times (London) May 29, 2004, Saturday What lies beneath Bel Mooney SNOW. BY ORHAN PAMUK. Faber. ?16.99; 436pp. ISBN 0 571 21830 X. Pounds 13.59 (p&p ?2.25). 0870 1608080 Turkey's most acclaimed novelist begins Snow (translated by Maureen Freely) with four epigraphs, which are as four signposts at a crossroads, turned by a mischievous urchin, leaving the traveller unsure of the right direction. Their authors -Browning, Stendhal, Dostoevsky and Conrad -flag Orhan Pamuk's immersion in Western culture. And their meanings are kaleidoscopic, teasing us with simultaneous propositions invoking religion, politics, and anti democratic intellectual rigour, as well as the conflicts and contradictions that are inevitable when we look at other cultures with Western eyes. All these themes are played out -and with -in that ironic tragicomic style which puts Pamuk firmly at the centre of the postmodern European narrative which looks back to Sartre as well as Borges. Yet although his dispassionate intelligence cannot resist toying with reader and characters alike, this novel achieves a genuinely tragic dimension. In 1992 a poet known as Ka returns from political exile in Germany to visit his hometown on the Armenian border, ostensibly to report on the forthcoming municipal elections, and also the spate of female suicides among Muslim women who have over-enthusiastically embraced Islamicist fervour and chosen to cover their heads in defiance of the secular state. He is trapped in the rundown city by a blizzard, the snow of the title becoming a metaphor for spiritual loneliness as well as the blurring of the outlines of certainty, in life and in art. Later we learn that Ka will be murdered four years on, and that the narrator who embarks on a quest to establish the truth of what happened is none other than Pamuk. The writer has produced a novel of profound relevance to the present moment. The core debate between the forces of secularism and those of religious fanaticism within modern Turkey is conducted with subtle, painful insight into the human weakness that can underlie both impulses. LOAD-DATE: May 31, 2004 --------------------------- Irish Independent May 29, 2004 NEW FROM THE IMPAC WINNER SnowBy Orhan Pamuk Translated by Maureen FreelyFaber & Faber, Euro 25.08 Gerry Dukes Orhan Pamuk came to international prominence when his novel My Name is Red won the IMPAC Award in 2003. The new novel Snow has proved to be controversial in his native Turkey (he currently lives in Istanbul) where it has sold over100,000 copies. A poet and political exile who prefers to be known as Ka, returns from Frankfurt toIstanbul after 12 years to attend his mother's funeral. He decides to extend his stay inTurkey by revisiting the city of Kars near the mountainous border with Armenia, a city he had not been to for 20 years. He procures a valid press card and sets off on a three-dayjourney by bus. He arrives in Kars just ahead of road closures caused by blizzards. His ostensible reason for being there is to report on the "suicide epidemic" that has struckheadscarf-wearing young Muslim girls in the city and on the upcoming municipal electionsthat seem set to be won by Muslimists. Just after his arrival, as access to the city is blocked, a coup is carried out by a loose combine of soldiers, secret police and a theatre company. The object of the coup is,apparently, to block the political progress of the Muslimist factions - of which there arequite a few. In the midst of this turmoil, mayhem and generalised murderousness, Ka, a withdrawnpoet with a small reputation, finds love and confusion as well as 19 poems that 'come' to him like the ineluctable descent of snowflakes. Pamuk frames his narrative by inserting himself into the novel as he researches Ka's timein Kars, reconstructing the events by reference to the poet 's notebooks compiled after he had gone back to Germany where he struggled to order his 'inspired' poems into asemblance of coherence and meaningfulness. The green notebook in which he inscribed the poems disappeared after the poet's violent death in the streets of Frankfurt four years after his return. Thus, at a stroke, Pamuk absolves himself from providing textualevidence for the quality of Ka's experience which is merely claimed as disruptive and devastating. The novel has some virtues, particularly in its presentation of the ethnic and political fragmentation of contemporary Turkey. The casual disclosure of institutionalised snooping and spying by agencies running divergent agendas, the tacit acceptance of police brutality and mindlessness, contrive to underpin the stereotype of Turkey as a former 'frontline' state (to use a misleadingAmericanism) in dire need of reformation. Whatever about the virtues, the vices of the novel compromise its readability. At too many points too many characters deliver hectoring stump speeches that grate and impede and contribute little to the readers' understanding. At many points the novelist's histrionicsseem to slide into hysteria and his central character, the poet Ka, seems merely amouthpiece for ideological concerns that are, finally, extrinsic to the book. Gerry Dukes is MIC Research Fellow, LOAD-DATE: May 29, 2004 ---------------------- The Guardian (London) - Final Edition May 29, 2004 Saturday Review: Fiction: Frozen assets: James Buchan enjoys a poet's vision of Anatolia, but misses the poetry: Snow by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely 436pp, Faber, ?16.99 James Buchan Orhan Pamuk's new novel is set in the early 1990s in Kars, a remote and dilapidated city in eastern Anatolia famed less for its mournful relics of Armenian civilisation and Russian imperial rule than for its spectacularly awful weather. Snow, " kar " in Turkish, falls incessantly on the treeless plains and the castle, river and boulevards of Kars, which the local scholars say takes its name from " karsu " (snow-water). In this novel, the city is cut off from the world and also, to an extent, from normal literary reality by three days of unremitting snow. Written, the reader is told, between 1999 and 2001, Snow deals with some of the large themes of Turkey and the Middle East: the conflict between a secular state and Islamic government, poverty, unemployment, the veil, the role of a modernising army, suicide and yet more suicide. Pamuk's master here is Dostoevsky, but amid the desperate students, cafes, small shopkeepers, gunshots and inky comedy are the trickeries familiar from modern continental fiction. The result is large and expansive, but, even at 436 pages, neither grand nor heavy. Pamuk's hero is a dried-up poet named Kerim Alakusoglu, conveniently abbreviated to Ka: Ka in kar in Kars. After many years in political exile in Frankfurt, Ka returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. He is then commissioned by an Istanbul newspaper to write an article about the municipal elections in Kars and investigate a succession of suicides by women and girls in the city. In his role as journalist, Ka trudges through the snow interviewing the families of the girls. He learns that they are committing suicide because of pressure by the college authorities to take off their headscarves in class. (Compulsory unveiling succeeds just as well as compulsory veiling, which is not very well.) It soon emerges that Ka is not greatly interested in headscarves but has come to fall in love with his old Istanbul schoolmate, Ipek, who has ended up in Kars and is separated from her husband. Meanwhile, his lyric gift returns to him with a force bordering on incontinence, and he is forever plunging into tea houses to get his latest poem down in a green notebook. Another narrator, called Orhan Pamuk, tells the story not from the notebook, which is lost or stolen, but from notes in Ka's handwriting that he finds four years later in the poet's flat in Frankfurt. The book is full of winning characters, from Ka himself to Blue, a handsome Islamist terrorist with the gift of the gab, an actor-manager and his wife who tour small Anatolian towns staging revolutionary plays and coups de main , and Serdar Bey, the local newspaper editor, who has a habit of writing up events and running them off his ancient presses before they occur. There are many fine scenes, including one where a hidden tape records the last conversation between a college professor in a bakery and his Islamist assassin. Yet there are literary judgments that some readers will question. The first is to omit Ka's poems. The green book has been lost or stolen and what remain are Ka's notes on how he came to write his 19 poems in Kars and how they might be arranged on the crystalline model of a snowflake. That is quite as dull as it sounds: really, in a book so expansive and light, the only dull passages. Incidentally, what verse there is in the book, copied from the wall of the tea-shop, is worth reading. One senses that Ka is a poet visiting Kars because the poet Pushkin visited Kars (on June 12 and 13 1829). Pamuk also decides to stage his two narrative climaxes as theatre. The first of these, in which soldiers fire live rounds into the audience from the stage of the National Theatre in Kars during a live television broadcast, is a fine job of writing and translating, but the effect is the same as with the descriptions of Ka's poems. The second literary layer makes the matters at issue both fainter and less persuasive. Pamuk likes to undermine and destabilise each character by introducing a degenerate counterpart: not merely Ka/Pamuk, but Ipek and her almost-as-beautiful sister Kadife, the two Islamist students Necib and Fazil, and so on. This playfulness or irony may be a response to a literary dilemma. To use a European literary form such as the novel in Turkey is, in an important sense, to ally oneself with European notions of individualism, liberty and democracy that even when they are upheld (rather than breached) are meaningless to traditional Muslims. Liberty in Islam is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise. Pamuk knows that as well as anybody and dramatises it in a raucous scene in which a group of leftists, Kurds and Islamists gather in a hotel room to write a letter to the Frankfurter Rundschau. He also anticipates his critics by having Serdar Bey accuse Ka in the Border Gazette of being so "ashamed of being a Turk that you hide your true name behind the fake, foreign, counterfeit name of Ka". In fact, the best sentences in the book are those entirely without any playfulness, or indeed any artistry, such as this one, where Ka remembers the almost permanent state of military coup d'etat of his Istanbul childhood: "As a child he'd loved those martial days like holidays." A more serious challenge to novelists in Turkey, Iran and the Arab world is that the events of September 11, the Moscow theatre attack and Abu Ghraib are both more romantic and more desperate than even Dostoevsky could have dreamed up and written down. James Buchan is the author of A Good Place to Die , a novel set in modern Iran. To order Snow for ?14.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Orhan Pamuk appears at the Guardian Hay Festival on Monday May 31. See www.hayfestival.com for details. LOAD-DATE: May 29, 2004 ----------------- SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON) May 30, 2004, Sunday A taste of Turkish despair By DAVID ROBSON Snow by Orhan Pamuk tr by Maureen Freely Faber, pounds 16.99, 436 pp pounds 14.99 ( pounds 2.25 p&p) 0870 155 7222 AT THE START of Snow, Orhan Pamuk quotes Stendhal: "Politics in a literary work are like a pistol-shot in a concert - crude but impossible to ignore." It is a maxim which his book neatly illustrates. Politics are everywhere in Snow and, most of the time, they are crude and two-dimensional. But the novel has proved impossible to ignore in Turkey, where it has infuriated Islamists and Westernised Turks alike. Pamuk has hitherto been an acquired taste in the West; but this sprawling, emotionally charged story, with its flashes of black comedy, could well secure him the readership he deserves. The year is 1992 and the setting is Kars, a snow-bound town on the Armenian border. Ka, the main character, is a poet and one-time political agitator. He has come to Kars for two reasons: to track down a former lover and to write an investigative newspaper article about a spate of suicides among young women in the town. The suicides seem unrelated, but Ka glimpses an emerging pattern. The women involved are Muslims and all, in one way or another, are victims of the increasingly fierce climate in which traditional Muslim values are being challenged and defended. The wearing of headscarves proves the catalyst. Ka, who has spent 10 years living in Germany, knows where he stands on the issue, confessing that he "could never feel sexually attracted to a woman in a headscarf". Others are less flippant. The head of a college who has tried to ban pupils from wearing head scarves gets a bullet in the head. Then a stage revival of an old pre-war Turkish classic, My Fatherland or My Scarf, degenerates into open mutiny, with soldiers firing on crowds and revolution sweeping the town. To a Western reader, the logic of events will be as foreign as the cock-fights which seem to be the main after-dark entertainment in Kars. But in the excellent, sardonic Pamuk, they have a first-rate guide to the social tensions of provincial Turkey. The tempo of the narrative is quite slow: think of a leisurely stroll through a bazaar rather than a mad rush through Tesco's. But it retains its hold over the reader; and in the endless snow-storms swirling around the town, Pamuk has found an attractive metaphor for the muddle and obscurity in which political debate is so often wreathed. LOAD-DATE: May 30, 2004 -------------------- The Observer May 30, 2004 Review: BOOKS: FICTION: More than a winter's tale: In this complex, affecting novel about a poet returning from exile to Turkey, Orhan Pamuk illuminates the many voices in his native land SARAH EMILY MIANO SNOW By Orhan Pamuk Faber ?16.99, pp436 'EVERY LIFE is like a snowflake,' whose forms appear identical from afar, but are determined by any number of mysterious forces, making each one singular. This metaphor lies at the centre of Orhan Pamuk's profound new novel, Snow , a Dostoyevskian political thriller: 'How much can we ever know about love and pain in another's heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?' These questions haunt the poet Ka, who has returned to Istanbul in 1992 for his mother's funeral, after living as an exile in Frankfurt for more than a decade. But the story begins as he travels to a Turkish border town called Kars on a journalistic assignment from the secularist newspaper the Republican , to cover the municipal elections and an apparent suicide epidemic among the Muslim women there. Ka is disheartened by the changes he has seen in Istanbul, and hopes to recapture his childhood farther afield, but with an ulterior motive: he has heard that a former classmate, the beautiful Ipek, has separated from her husband, and he wants to win her heart. This novel is as much about love as it is about politics. In Kars, a blizzard shuts down the roads; the city can only hint of the old days in 'sad postcard memories'- empty squares, decrepit Russian and Armenian buildings; it seems like 'the end of the world'. He stays at the Snow Palace Hotel where Ipek lives with her father and sister, and manages to weave his way into their lives with its compulsive TV-viewing, religious disagreements and political entanglements. As he investigates the suicides of the 'headscarf girls ' he has fascinating encounters with the women's families, the editor of the newspaper, the police and various politicos. The people are divided by loyalties to the Turkish state and the rising Islamist parties, by religion and atheism. Ka, like Pamuk himself, is from a middle-class family in Istanbul; and as an educated, westernised Turk, everyone considers him a non-believer; yet he sees God in both the snow and his own poems, which come to him on a cloud of divine inspiration. During a performance in the National Theatre, when Ka recites his first new poem in years, there is a military coup in which many pupils from the Islamic religious high school are killed. Some believe it is a stand against Kurdish nationalism and an attempt to keep the 'religious fanatics' from winning the elections. But two actors have a hand in the coup, and what begins as a staged event kicks off a terrible chain of events: the arrest and persecution of religious leaders and Islamist candidates, the murder of Kurds, the torture and intimidation of schoolboys. The citizens watch the action on their television screens, while Ka looks for happiness with Ipek, though it is always just beyond them. Pamuk's protagonist is a man of melancholy and secrets in a sea of other characters who are tossed about by uncertainties. An Islamist student warns Ka: 'I'd like you to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.' So the players in the story, including Ka, are cast in a shadow of indeterminacy - which makes the novel even more compelling. Still, Pamuk manages to give voice to everyone involved: reactionaries, terrorists, liberals, fundamentalists. A militant Islamist tells Ka that their people have been entranced by the West because 'we've forgotten our own stories'. Pamuk suggests that his country can only rediscover itself through storytelling. So he makes the call even as he answers it, with a political allegory that provides an historical vision of his society. The account takes the form of a meticulously constructed snowflake in which nothing is out of place, and where revelation and concealment occur in impeccable order. To order Snow for ?14.99, plus p&p, call the Observer Books Service on 0870 836 0885 LOAD-DATE: May 31, 2004 --------------------- Kirkus Reviews June 1, 2004 SNOW Internationally acclaimed Turkish writer Pamuk (My Name is Red, 2001, etc) vividly embodies and painstakingly explores the collision of Western values with Islamic fundamentalism. An omniscient narrator, identified only on the penultimate page, tells the story of Kerim Alakusoglu, a 40-ish poet known as Ka who returns to Turkey from political exile in Germany. Ka travels to the remote provincial town of Kars in "the poorest, most overlooked corner of Turkey" near the Armenian border, where a seemingly endless snowfall persists, a rash of recent suicides by young women stirs political and ethnic debate--and Kee is reunited with his beautiful former schoolmate Ipek, now estranged from her husband. Pamuk distributes conflicting commitments to Muslim traditions and secular, Westernized concepts in such compellingly realized characters as Ipek's "radical" sister and sometime actress Kadife, her "terrorist" lover Blue, Ipek's unctuous husband Mukhtar (a mayoral candidate in Kars's upcoming municipal elections), brutal military police official Z. Demirkol, and National Theatre luminary Sunay Zaim, who appears to be staging his own martyrdom in an adaptation of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy that will feature Kadife's onstage protest against Islam's suppression of women's rights. This richly detailed tale is in effect a dialectic made flesh by a thrilling plot ingeniously shaped to climax with the aforementioned theatrical production and to coincide with the narrator's revelations of Ka's last hours in Kars, which ironically consummate the flurry of poetic creativity released in him by his experiences there. The novel's meanings inhere memorably in the controlling title metaphor, which signifies cleansing, silence, sleep, obliteration, "the beauty and mystery of creation," and the organizing principles for Ka's late poems, the last of which he entitles "The Place Where the World Ends." An astonishingly complex, disturbing view of a world we owe it to ourselves to better understand. Publication Date: 08/22/2004 Publisher: Knopf Stage: Adult ISBN: 0-375-40697-2 Price: $26.00 Author: Pamuk, Orhan LOAD-DATE: May 28, 2004 ----------------- The Guardian (London) - Final Edition June 1, 2004 G2 at Hay: The A4 challenge: The task was simple: come on to the G2 bus and fill a sheet of A4 paper. But how would the stars of Hay fare when confronted with a blank page? Here we publish the results : Orhan Pamuk Orhan Pamuk From Istanbul From a very young age, I knew I was not alone: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double. I cannot remember where I got this idea or how it came to me. It must have risen out of a web of rumours, misunderstandings, games and fears. But in one of my earliest memories, it is already clear how I've come to feel about my ghostly other. When I was five, I was sent for a short time to live in another house. At the end of one of their many stormy separations, my parents arranged to meet in Paris and it was decided that my older brother and I should stay behind in Istanbul, in separate houses. My brother remained in the heart of the family with our grandmother in the Pamuk Apartments, in Ni-anta. But they sent me to stay with my aunt in Cihangir. Hanging on the wall in this house, where I was treated with great kindness, there was a picture of a small child. Every once in a while, my aunt or uncle would point at the child inside the small white frame and smile, saying, "Look! That's you." The sweet, doe-eyed child in the picture did look a bit like me, it's true. He was even wearing the cap I wore sometimes when I went outside. But I still knew I was not the boy in the picture. (In fact, it was a kitsch reproduction of a "cute child" that someone had brought back from Europe.) Still, I could not help wondering - was this the Orhan who lived in that other house? Except that now I, too, was living in another house. It was almost as if I'd had to move here before I could meet my twin, but I was not at all happy to make his acquaintance. I wanted to go back to my real home in the Pamuk Apartments. Whenever they told me that I was the boy in the picture on the wall, I'd feel my mind unravelling; my ideas about myself, my picture, the picture that looked like me, the boy who looked like me, and the other house would get all mixed up and all I wanted was to be at home again, surrounded by my family. My wish came true and soon I returned to the Pamuk Apartments. But the ghost of that other Orhan in that other house somewhere in Istanbul never left me. Orhan Pamuk is the author of Snow and My Name is Red. LOAD-DATE: June 1, 2004 --------------------- Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia) June 26, 2004 Saturday Rejoice in a read for all seasons Yaron Lifschitz ART, that most fragile of human endeavours, is under threat. Besieged by the asinine puerilities of reality television, undermined by the inane generalisations of politicians and prostituted in pursuit of celebrity, decent art is having a hard time. But every time I doubt the power of human expression to meaningfully grapple with just how complicated it is to be alive today; along comes a work of such truth and beauty that after encountering it, I sit stunned and thankful. Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow, is one of these works. It isn't perfect and it isn 't especially easy. But it is magnificent. It is an old-style novel with more than a glance to Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Conrad. Its themes are impossibly large -- the dance of faith and doubt, the power of the human heart, the complex relationships between individual lives and history. The novel's central character, Ka, is a poet who returns from exile to an isolated border town in 1992. The town has suffered a spate of young women committing suicide and also is the home of an astonishingly beautiful former classmate of Ka's. It's snowing and soon the entire town is sealed off from the outside world. At a performance in the theatre, the stage is overtaken by revolutionaries who fire into the audience. This heralds the start of a short-lived coup. Over the next three days Ka will fall hopelessly in love, play intimate roles in people's lives and deaths and write poems which after many fallow years suddenly come to him. He will also talk. He will listen to all sides of politics and religion. He will hear opinions. He will watch as a meeting of counter-revolutionary leaders he has assembled degenerates into a farce of informers, conversation and opinions. He will hear a precis of an Islamic science-fiction novel and be touched by the confessions of a young student. The plot of Snow is, like many old-world novels, basically simple. But the issues, the reflections, the contradictions and insights extend far beyond the story of a poet in a snowbound and slightly crazy town. The story is set in Turkey. Many of the debates are about the rise of "political Islam" and its conflicts with Western "atheism" -- debates that are now of utmost importance. Apparently the novel inflamed both religious and non-religious Turks on its publication, and it is easy to see why. There is a merciless honesty in the way Pamuk portrays his characters. They are all highly articulate, they all get their say. Somehow the characters are simultaneously stereotypes (the inflamed student sublimating sexual passion into religious heat) and real people. Ka, listening to an argument, is silenced "because he agreed with everything both men said". There are no simple solutions. Is it poverty, ignorance, history or God that inspires belief? Is it pride or fear or depression that causes the suicides? In the swirl of talk, patterns emerge and refract. Every political question has a correlative of the heart and every emotional state is mirrored in the weather, the course of events and back in the talk. Characters become possessed by the souls of those they have lost (including the narrator), situations become metaphors for themselves and even the narrator injects himself into the story as a character. Somehow a small border town and a simple love story become totemic for the current political situation in Iraq and beyond, for the power of art, for the hope of, or in, humanity. Pamuk infuses his story with a startling literary playfulness. Ka finds himself in a town called Kars. Kar is a Turkish word for "snow". The narrator is Pamuk, an old friend of Ka's, who almost gets dragged into doubling Ka's life. There are at least two of everything and difference and sameness are locked into the dance of what Benjamin calls the primal erotic relationship between distance and closeness. Friends, brothers, rivals, ideological opponents and lovers are as individually intricate as snowflakes and as impossibly dense as a blizzard. This is Pamuk's brilliance -- his ability to break the novel as the child of 19th-century colonisers and remake it into an absolutely articulate medium for these troubled times. There are weaknesses. Ka is perhaps too passive, the character of Ipek (Ka's love interest) could be better drawn and the absence of the poems that Ka writes during the book leave the story a little unfinished. It is also a longish book. But there is a marvellous touch throughout. Humour and tragedy go hand in hand. The museum commemorating the Armenian genocide in Kars, for instance, confuses tourists because it commemorates the Turkish victims and the Armenian perpetrators. On the border of civilisations, snowed in, the grotesque and the ironic become, like everything else, hopelessly entangled. Snow is nothing short of a necessary novel for our times -- scary, prescient, and full of humanity. Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (Faber, $29.95) Yaron Lifschitz is artistic director of Circa ------------------ The New Leader July 1, 2004 The poet and the terrorists; Snow; Book Review Lorentzen, Christian Snow By Orhan Pamuk Translated by Maureen Freely Knopf. 448 pp. $ 26.00. THE CITY OF KARS rests on a mile-high plateau at the edge of Turkey's mountainous northeastern frontier. A regional capital, it was a crucial stop on the silk road for much o fits tumultuous history. During a series of wars between the Ottoman and Russian empires in the late 19th century it changed hands, and after World War I it became part of a short-lived independent Armenian republic overtaken by the Bolsheviks. The arrival of Kemal Ataturk's Army then resulted in the bloody expulsion of most of its population, prompting the Bolsheviks to return it to Turkey as a goodwill gesture. For a time the number of the city's residents had dwindled to less than 10,000. Today's poor, provincial Kars, rich in architecture left by the various imperial powers, is the wintry setting of Orhan Pamuk's deftly layered new novel. Written between 1999 and the end of 2001, it tells the story of a showdown between Islamist and secular extremists vying for the city's soul. Kars is seen through the eyes of an outsider, Kerim Alakusoglu, known as Ka, a 37-year-old poet and former radical Leftist born in Istanbul who recently returned from more than a decade in Germany. His encounter with the city exposes his own crisis of isolation, artistic inactivity and spiritual lethargy. An Istanbul newspaper has sent him to investigate a string of suicides by young women that has coincided with the banning of headscarves at the local Institute of Education, but it is the presence of Ipek Yildiz, an unrequited love from his student days, that has really drawn him here. Snow is part political thriller, part love story, and its twin plots converge with an intricate, tragic symmetry. Pamuk, the author of six previous novels (four of them translated into English), graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, lives in Istanbul and is by far Turkey's most renowned novelist. He has even attracted the notice of President George W. Bush, a statesman little known for his literary insights. Speaking before a NATO gathering in Istanbul this June, Bush hailed Pamuk for building a "bridge between cultures" and went on to quote the author: "What is important is not a clash of parties, civilizations, cultures, East and West ... [but to realize] that other peoples in other continents and civilizations [are] just like you." Although culture clash may not be "what is important," Pamuk's work is in fact pervaded by a doomed sense that it may be inevitable--a symptom of the human condition that makes each side "just like" the other. He has repeatedly explored the implications of Turkey's position at the East-West nexus, often setting his works in the Ottoman past, as in The White Castle (1990) and My Name is Red (2001). In the process, he has gained a reputation as a practitioner of magic realism. The only magic at play in his new and thoroughly contemporary book is Ka's poetry, recharged by his reunion with Ipek and a blizzard that has sealed Kars off from the rest of the country. The falling snow is a symbol whose value is in flux throughout the novel. At first it grants a sense of silence and purity, nudging the atheist toward an unfamiliar faith in God; later it comes to seem "tiring, irritating, terrorizing." The book's structure is a protracted reworking of Shakespearean drama, along precisely plotted slopes of civic upheaval, romance, betrayal, and revenge. The narrator, a friend of Ka's whose name happens to be the same as the author's, has painstakingly recreated a handful of days down to each conversation. Two theatrical performances that erupt in violence punctuate Ka's visit, and threaten to exacerbate the suffering in Kars. TELLING the story at a remove of four years, in the wake of his hero's assassination in Germany, Pamuk explains that he has reconstructed the events around the drafting of Ka's last, lost collection. The poems, in the manner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," are visions that seem to descend on Ka from an external source and must be transcribed immediately or lost. Tension mounts as Ka walks about Kars, interviewing people about the suicides, wooing Ipek, and stealing away into teahouses to jot down verses in his green notebook. The secularists he meets blame the burgeoning fundamentalist Prosperity Party--favored in the upcoming municipal elections--for turning innocent teenagers, including the suicide girls, against the policies of the state and their moderate parents. "This is the work" a journalist tells Ka, "of the international Islamist movement that wants to turn Turkey into another Iran. " On the other side, he meets a series of embittered, desperate men and a legion of hopeful, idealistic youth in their thrall. These Islamists have put up posters that read, "HUMAN BEINGS ARE GOD'S MASTERPIECES, AND SUICIDE IS BLASPHEMY"--but some of them are not above murder. Early on, Ka and Ipek witness the shooting of the director of the Institute of Education. Pamuk provides a transcript of the victim's conversation with his killer, one of several powerful, lengthy dialogues that lend the novel its philosophical heft. The validity of the assassin's outrage is clear. Yet just as subtly and deliberately rendered is the psychosis, born of poverty and nourished by religious fanaticism, that has driven him so far over the edge--or left him so vulnerable to manipulation--that he could take a stranger's life. The police set out to find the killer, hauling in Ka and another of his old friends, Muhtar, the Prosperity Party's candidate for mayor, who also happens to be Ipek's ex-husband. Ka and Muhtar had been romantic and literary rivals at the university in Istanbul, as well as cohorts in Leftist activism. Ka gained fame as a sort of Turkish T.S. Eliot, Muhtar got the girl. Muhtar seems a defeated man, divorced and unpublished (his pious poems, in "pure Turkish," are to Ka's ears laughably flat; one senses here that Pamuk may be satirizing some of his own rivals). Muhtar explains that his conversion was an escape from drunken despair. Watching the police torture him, Ka senses that his old nemesis is too ineffectual and insufficiently cruel to have orchestrated the crime. The real mastermind might be Sheikh Efendi, who holds court among the city's unemployed men and its youths, or Blue, a terrorist hiding in Kars who has taken as his mistress Ipek's sister, Kadife. A boy from the religious high school, Necip, is infatuated with her as well and enlists Ka to deliver a batch of love letters to her. Unlike many of the devout, who view Ka as an "oatmeal-hearted pseudo-European liberal," Necip approaches Ka with respect and curiosity. He asks Ka about atheism and writing, and confesses an aspiration to move to Istanbul and become the world's first Islamist science fiction writer. The innocence and naivete of the teenager lead Ka to confide to him that "The snow reminds me of God." The passage Ka reads from a draft of Necip's novel recycles the trope of the double prominent in many of Pamuk's works. It seems in part a self-parody. The boy is eager to embrace a Western phenomenon--science fiction--but determined to do so on his own terms. A critique frequently leveled at magic realists, especially those from outside the West, holds that they have appropriated the form of the novel without appreciation for its roots in the realism of Flaubert and James. They have instead produced epics based on native folklore or pop culture. Necip's ambitions point in that direction; Pamuk has reached further, by painting his characters lavishly and plucking from Shakespeare and the English poets, instead of relying on fantastic devices. Like magic realism and science fiction, in Pamuk's scheme Islamism is a form of escapism from the frustrations of economic hardship and isolation, but a destructive one. Blue, the most charismatic and sinister Islamist, hints that his anti-Western views stem from a few alienating years spent as an immigrant worker in Germany. He toys with that grand escapist idea, martyrdom. A few men in Kars would like nothing better than to serve Blue his martyrdom. Their unlikely leader is the vaudevillian Sunay Zaim, a rabid nationalist in league with renegade secret service agents. He is bent on stamping out political Islam in Kars, even if only for a few days. His acting career in ruins, Sunay is terminally iii and has a death wish of his own. During a staging of a little known 1930s Kemalist farce, My Fatherland or My Head Scarf, Sunay's henchmen turn their guns on the crowd. They co-opt the police, cancel the elections, and impose martial law. This coup, capped by another play-within-the-novel, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, an ur-Hamlet of sorts, is to be his swan song. And to secure his place in history, he intends to bring a few notorious Islamists down with him. THE POLITICAL maelstrom gives Ka the chance to play the level-headed hero in a town full of hotheads. But it is also a distraction from his burgeoning love affair with Ipek. Like her younger sister, Ipek possesses an arresting beauty that makes Ka sound as much the schoolboy as his new friend Necip. A marriage proposal springs from his mouth early in the novel, and she greets it, and his declarations of love, with skepticism. Ka's pursuit of her is a shedding of the ascetic cocoon of his Frankfurt exile. She embodies an idea of Turkey for him--Westernized yet retaining a provincial grace--and a last chance to seize happiness in life. She is more complex than she looks, however. Beneath her physical radiance lurk emotional scars and potent secrets. Their inevitable revelation propels the courtship down a calamitous course. Ka's notebooks reveal that after the journey to Kars he began the study of snow, "and one of his discoveries was this: Once a six-pronged snowflake crystallizes, it takes between eight and 10 minutes for it to fall through the sky, lose its original shape, and vanish; when with further inquiry, he discovered that the form of each snowflake is determined also by the temperature, the direction and strength of the wind, the altitude of the cloud, and any number of mysterious forces, Ka decided that snowflakes have much in common with people... Individual existences might look identical from afar, but to understand one's own eternally mysterious uniqueness one had only to plot the mysteries of his or her own snowflake" Ka's conclusions are born of poetic meditation on human problems. For all the talk of God and politics in this novel, its real concerns are the choices and chances that accumulate in an individual life. Pamuk has matured beyond the obsessive doubling of his earlier work; the poet Ka and the terrorist Blue stand at two extremes of a spectrum of sensitivity. The rest grope for meaning and act out their notions in moments of compassion and outbursts of cruelty. Pamuk has mined classical tragedy and the modern thriller to construct a somewhat outlandish plot, but these time-honed contrivances never crowd out his characters. Every voice is sounded out, each story told with candor, style and sympathy. Few novels these days are at once so spacious, contemplative and laden with intrigue. Pamuk's is a rare and powerful performance. IAC-CREATE-DATE: September 13, 2004 LOAD-DATE: September 14, 2004 ----------------- Library Journal Reviews July 15, 2004 Thursday Snow Marc Kloszewski Pamuk, Orhan . Knopf. Aug. 2004. c.448p. ISBN 0-375-40697-2. $26. F Upon returning to his home in secular Turkey, a poet named Ka discovers two things that will change his life: Ipek, the girl he loved as a child, still lives in the city of Kars, and the community has been stunned by a rash of suicides of zealously religious girls who refused to remove their head scarves while in public. With an investigator's eye, Ka seeks out information about the tragedies from all sources, eventually leading to the man at the eye of the storm - "Blue," a charismatic Islamite who will not let the message that these girls carried be silenced. While in Kars, the normally reticent Ka dares to approach "happiness"; where once he suffered terrible writer's block, his poems now flow effortlessly, and his new-found love appears to love him back, but the figure of Blue and the deep waters in which Ka has immersed himself threaten his promising future. Like Pamuk's previous My Name Is Red, this story is thick with detail concerning the country's background; it does take some time to introduce all the characters. Once everyone is in place, however, the novel picks up and ultimately is a worthwhile read for those interested in a closer look at the hot topics of religion, its devout followers, and what arises from such passions. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/04.] - Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA LOAD-DATE: July 9, 2004 ------------------ Publishers Weekly Reviews July 19, 2004 Monday SNOW Orhan Pamuk, trans. from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. Knopf, $26 (448p) ISBN 0-375-40697-2 A Turkish poet who spent 12 years as a political exile in Germany witnesses firsthand the clash between radical Islam and Western ideals in this enigmatically beautiful novel. Ka's reasons for visiting the small Turkish town of Kars are twofold: curiosity about the rash of suicides by young girls in the town and a hope to reconnect with "the beautiful Ipek," whom he knew as a youth. But Kars is a tangle of poverty-stricken families, Kurdish separatists, political Islamists (including Ipek's spirited sister Kadife) and Ka finds himself making compromises with all in a desperate play for his own happiness. Ka encounters government officials, idealistic students, leftist theater groups and the charismatic and perhaps terroristic Blue while trying to convince Ipek to return to Germany with him; each conversation pits warring ideologies against each other and against Ka's own weary melancholy. Pamuk himself becomes an important character, as he describes his attempts to piece together "what really happened" in the few days his friend Ka spent in Kars, during which snow cuts off the town from the rest of the world and a bloody coup from an unexpected source hurtles toward a startling climax. Pamuk's sometimes exhaustive conversations and descriptions create a stark picture of a too-little-known part of the world, where politics, religion and even happiness can seem alternately all-consuming and irrelevant. A detached tone and some dogmatic abstractions make for tough reading, but Ka's rediscovery of God and poetry in a desolate place makes the novel's sadness profound and moving. Agent, Andrew Wylie. (Aug.) Forecast: Pamuk's reputation - bigger outside the U.S. than in - enjoyed a boost with 2001's My Name Is Red. This timely, thoughtful and demanding book may see it grow further. LOAD-DATE: July 22, 2004 ------------------ The Guardian (London) - Final Edition July 24, 2004 Saturday Review: Fiction: Into the darkness: The Impac winner, a grim tale of torture and deprivation is still a joy to read. By Maureen Freely: This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by Linda Coverdale 195pp, New Press, ?14.99 Maureen Freely On July 10 1971, 1,000 Moroccan soldiers were herded into trucks and taken to the palace of Skhirat, where King Hassan II was celebrating his 42nd birthday. Upon arrival, their commanding officers instructed them to find and kill him. Almost 100 guests lost their lives in the ensuing bloodbath, but the king survived. Those deemed responsible were dispatched to Kenitra, a prison known for its harsh conditions. However, most of those imprisoned were unwitting and unwilling participants in the coup and many had not fired a shot. On a sultry August night two years later, 58 of them were again herded into trucks and taken to the remote desert hellhole of Tazmamart; here they were thrown into underground cells 10ft long and 5ft wide, with ceilings so low they were unable to stand, and with just enough food and water to keep them lingering on the edge of death for years. Each tomb had an air vent and a tiny hole in the floor that served as the lavatory. They were crawling with cockroaches and scorpions the men could hear but not see. There was no medical attention, no exercise, and no light. The only time they were allowed out was to bury one of their friends. Thirteen years would pass before the outside world found out that Tazmamart existed. It would take another five years of international campaigning to shut it down. There were only 28 survivors. By 1991, most had lost up to a foot in height. Survivors were warned not to talk to the western press, but in Tahar Ben Jelloun the authorities have an enemy more formidable than 1,000 foreign journalists. Novelist, essayist, critic and poet, winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt and the 1994 Prix Maghreb, Jelloun was born in Fez in 1944 and emigrated to France in 1961. This Blinding Absence of Light , for which he and his excellent translator have won this year's Impac prize, is based on the testimony of a former inmate of Tazmamart, and it defies any expectations you might have built up from the story above. It refuses the well-meaning but tired and ultimately dehumanising conventions of human rights horror journalism; it is not a political tract. Although it unmasks the liars, killers and torturers responsible for Tazmamart, it refuses to dwell on them. Although it is told in the first person, it is not an autobiography. Although it is technically a novel, it is a novel stripped, like its subject, of all life's comforts. What we're left with is Salim's voice, a voice all the more magnificent for being draped in darkness. Some have found echoes of Beckett in the lucid, pared-down prose, and certainly there is something Beckettian about his limited environment and studied hopelessness. But that he has renounced hope for a higher purpose is clear from the opening lines: "For a long time I searched for the black stone that cleanses the soul of death. When I say a long time, I think of a bottomless pit, a tunnel dug with my fingers, my teeth, in the stubborn hope of glimpsing, if only for a minute, one infinitely lingering minute, a ray of light, a spark that would imprint itself deep within my eye, that would stay protected in my entrails like a secret." This is the language of Islamic mysticism. Salim is not religious when he arrives in Tazmamart, but his situation is the real version of the spiritual hell that Islamic mystics describe in metaphor. He escapes from his torments by following in their footsteps, imagining his way as far into his mind as his slowly decaying body will allow. He knows his reverie is over when he can smell the stench. The narrative follows a winding and treacherous path: inspired solitary departures end in unspeakable degradation. Horrible deaths alternate with inspired collective efforts to stay alive. Karim becomes the talking clock to give a shape to their endless night. Ustad sings them verses from the Qur'an. One man recounts the plots of every film he's ever seen, another invents games to play with imaginary cards. But do not approach this book if you want your heart to be warmed. The most disturbing scene comes when Salim is released to an airy room with a comfortable bed. This is not a tribute to the human spirit, but one man's attempt to illuminate another man's truth. For there are two intelligences at play here - Salim's and the author's. The voice of Tazmamart is never imprisoned by its jail. It is free to travel anywhere, and it travels light. It makes revelations of grave importance, but never gravely. It is, despite its dark materials, a joy to read. Maureen Freely is the translator of Orhan Pamuk's Snow (Faber). To order This Blinding Absence of Light for ?12.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. LOAD-DATE: July 28, 2004 --------------- Vanity Fair August 2004 under cover; A powerful novel delves deep into the head-scarf furor. megan o'grady The debate over Muslim women's right to wear head scarves has lately been making headlines in Europe, but it has raged for decades in Turkey, where scarves are banned from schools-despite the fact that the majority of women opt to wear them. Now the subject of a novel by Istanbul-based author Orhan Pamuk -whose 2002 thriller, My Name Is Red, won him an enthusiastic American audience-it's a hot wire to divisions within Turkish society. Snow (Knopf) is set in Turkey's wintry hinterland, in the aftermath of tragedy: a wave of suicides among teenage girls banished from the classroom for refusing to bare their heads. The deaths shatter the town's uneasy equilibrium: The education director is gunned down in a cafe; a military crackdown on Islamists ensues, and a journalist who witnessed the murder finds himself embroiled in the investigation. Astonishingly timely as the book is, it was a real-life suicide epidemic in southern Turkey in the early nineties that likely inspired Pamuk. A deft melding of political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir, his tortuously plotted novel is forever confounding our expectations. Snow has angered religious and secular alike in Pamuk's own country, and will no doubt prove provocative this side of the Bosporus as well. GRAPHIC: pop politics From George W. Bush's folksy musings on the war against terror to the surging popularity of American Idol, no pop-culture stone is left unturned in Sore Winners (Doubleday), John Powers's bitingly sharp analysis of the characters that define politics in post-9/11 America. Powers infuses his examination of everything from the religious zeal of John Ashcroft to Martha Stewart's fall from grace with a clever, unabashedly liberal voice. He assuredly navigates the reader through both the major (Saddam's capture) and minor (Joe Millionaire) events that shaped our media-soaked culture over recent years, a time in which, Powers charges, Bush cast aside Clinton-era optimism and "offered a stark vision of life that possesses enormous visceral power."-sarah haight ; HEAD START A pro-Islamist protest in Istanbul, May 2003. ; Reuters. Still life: JEFF HARRIS. LOAD-DATE: November 16, 2004 ---------------- Harper's Magazine August 1, 2004 New books; Book Review Leonard, John On the next to last page of Orhan Pamuk's SNOW (Knopf, $ 26)--as if Nabokov and Rushdie had taken their circus act on the road, of Carlos Fuentes were Anatolian instead of Aztec, or Milan Kundera remembered how to laugh--a young student at a Turkish religious high school admonishes a novelist named "Orhan Pamuk": "If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away." And yet, of course, it is this solemn boy, whose name is Fazil, and his best friend, Necip, who is shot to death before he can publish his science fictions, and the girls they love, who are suspended from school for refusing to remove their head scarves--it is these passionate, talkative, and pious young people, as pure of heart as they are self-righteous, who monopolize our attention. In the northern city of Kars, near the border with Armenia, God is real to them even if He is not to the secular intellectual and blocked poet Ka--the old friend Pamuk is supposed to be writing this book about--who has come by bus from Istanbul, in a blizzard, to investigate an epidemic of suicides. Yes, a poet named Ka in a city named Kars. And kar means "snow" in Turkish. But having just returned for his mother's funeral after twelve years of exile in Germany following the 1980 military coup, Ka is really looking for love, roots, meaning, and his muse. Snow is not only a silence inside, reminding him of God; it also makes him feel at home in the world. So what if these true-believing students accuse him of atheism? So what if the newspaper reports his behavior a day in advance, and a night at the theater turns into Marat/Sade, and the gorgeous Ipek won't go to Frankfurt with him? Suddenly, he is writing poems again. Indeed, poems seem to seize or occlude him, like embolisms or a fit. He must retire immediately to a teahouse. Meanwhile, prisoners are tortured in red and yellow rooms. A minister of education is assassinated by a fundamentalist nut. A terrorist fresh from Bosnia coaches disaffected students. The Party of God may win the municipal elections. And so when the snow cuts Kars off from the rest of the country, the army, the police, and a very Brechtian repertory theater troupe stage a coup, a parody of 1980, that gives a whole new meaning to politics as performance. When they aren't watching television, everyone in Snow is telling everyone else a story, as in The Arabian Nights or in "the way it seemed the heroes told their stories to the authors of the European novels." This is playful, postmodern Pamuk, the author of The White Castle and My Name Is Red, who nods in passing at Oedipus, Robespierre, Stendhal, Mallarme, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Conrad. But in its sendup of romantic poetry, political theater, and the anthropological relationship between Marxism-Leninism and anti-Western nationalism, Snow is also written by the man who got into trouble for supporting the rights of Kurds and opposing Iran's fatwa on Rushdie. And now this third Pamuk, more serious about faith than about poetry, makes fun of intellectuals like himself even as he acknowledges the bull's-eye on his back. From the Golden Horn, with a wicked grin, the political novel makes a triumphant return. Such novels are what Maureen Howard has been writing all along--about love and work, class and violence, literature and womanhood; the lacework bog of Irish America, the Potemkin bohemias of delirious New York, the family secrets of sex and money, the botched experiments of marriage and children, art and history as magnetic compass points, writing and teaching as a calisthenics of moral intelligence. THE SILVER SCREEN (Viking, $ 24.95) is the third in her projected quartet of fictions on a calendar grid. After the winter of discontent and expiation in A Lover's Almanac (1998), and the complicated Easter bunnies of redemption and renewal in Big As Life (2001), now this long hot summer in Hollywood, New England, and El Salvador. If you're still wondering who Artie's real father was, The Silver Screen will tell you. But you need never even have heard of Artie to enjoy this interrogation of the way we tell ourselves stories, mythologizing our ordinary laves, on big screens (Singin' in the Rain) and small ones (television documentaries), in books by Dante, Donne, and Chekhov, in photographs by Georgia O'Keeffe and Walker Evans, in testimony to federal agents and congressional committees, in Ovid and Goldilocks, in Augustine and Freud. And when we aren't making stories and excuses, we're making clocks and guns. Isabel Mahler quits her career in silent movies to return to Rhode Island to marry insurance salesman Tim Murphy and to mother Joe, their son, who becomes a Jesuit priest; Rita, their daughter, who becomes a physical therapist; and Gemma, the girl next door, who goes into the redwoods with Ansel Adams and comes out with a Barcelona retrospective of her photographs. "Bel" was Tinker Bell to these children, taking them on excursions to such "magic arcades and pavilions" as Mark Twain's house in Hartford and the Melville Museum in New Bedford. So when the music of the spheres turns out to be a Sousa march, do they blame her for having been too thrilling--Joe, because of his loss of faith after the murder of Archbishop Romero; Rita, because of the lovelessness that led her into the Witness Protection Program; Gemma, because of her feelings of fraudulence and her ridiculous kimono? "How were we caught? What, what is it has happened? What is it that has been happening that we are living the way we are? The children are no longer the way it seemed they might be." Some catechism. Throughout this brilliant novel, there is quite a lot of the Mexican Day of the Dead, of paper skeletons and sugared skulls. Gemma apostrophizes Bel's ghost: "I dad not want you to be over, like silent movies or the Keith Circuit, Like beauty, like instruction, like belief." But history, that myth-muncher, kills us all. The best we can hope for, after the strut and fret, may be this comfort: "We do not play to an empty house." Every one of Ward Just's fourteen novels has been political. But they've also been historical and anthropological, as we follow men, money, and power from Chicago east, like Theodore Dreiser. And romantic and mournful and abashed, as if Scott Fitzgerald went out on the town while has Dorian Gray rotted in an attic. And as quiet as they are disquieting, like the bullet-riddled skull in the study of the Freudian psychiatrist in AN UNFINISHED SEA SON (Houghton Mifflin, $ 24). If Just in has fiction often telescopes time--decades suggested in sinister ellipses, gnomic haikus, mordant witticisms--here he confines himself mostly to a single season. In the summer of 1954, nineteen-year-old Wilson Ravan loses two fathers, finds a vocation, falls in Love, and is almost fired from has job at a Chicago tabloid newspaper ("a carnival of love nests, revenge killings, slumlords, machine graft, and Communists deep in the apparatus of state and national government") because he arrives at work still wearing dancing shoes from a North Shore debutante ball the night before. I don't want to tell you who dies, or why, except that, as in Orhan Pamuk and Maureen Howard, history is the real killer. Wilson hasn't entered the University of Chicago yet, but he is as much a victim of the Bataan Death March, the Taft-Hartley Act, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons as any of the adults, I'd rather point to the frozen pond where has businessman-father pretends to play ice hockey on winter afternoons, as if he were back at college at Dartmouth; the herd of deer, moving at night across the golf course fairway; the jazzmen in the smoky Chicago dives winking at the white boys; the tabloid reporters poised at their typewriters, as if the machine "were a small animal or the skin of a woman ... birds building nests one twig at a time"; Aurora, the girl whose voice has the timbre of an oboe; and surprisingly affecting cameo appearances by Adlai Stevenson and Marlon Brando. Somehow, more like Camus than Fitzgerald, these characters rise from depths to surface--from a hand of pinochle to the baby-blue helmets of the United Nations, from a brick through a window to Van Gogh's ear, from John O'Hara to Othello--with the defining gestures of shadow puppets, a kind of frozen Winter Palace theater from which we are lucky to escape alive. What is once again remarkable about this writer are the graceful figure-eights he skates around has bone-deep knowledge of the worst about us, our Calibans and Brothers Grimm. IAC-CREATE-DATE: August 16, 2004 LOAD-DATE: August 17, 2004 --------------- The New York Times August 10, 2004 Tuesday Late Edition - Final A Blizzard of Contradictions in Modern Turkey By RICHARD EDER SNOW By Orhan Pamuk Translated by Maureen Freely. 426 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26. In his last novel, ''My Name is Red,'' the great and almost irresistibly beguiling Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk devised a breathtaking image for the schism in his country's soul between Westernization and the traditional values of Islam. Set in the 16th century, ''Red'' presents the schism as the incursion of Renaissance painting -- representational, three-dimensional and with an individualist vision -- into the sultan's court. There the flat, stylized and impersonal grace of the traditional miniaturists is upheld as a matter of religion; and Western perspective is abhorred, since, for instance, it could make a nearby dog bigger than a far-off mosque. The implications go way beyond art. In Mr. Pamuk's pyrotechnics of mystery, murders, eroticism and glittering colors, art is war and civil war among humanity's embattled religious and historical values. ''Snow,'' translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely, deals with the same schism but its setting is political. It is a novel of lesser scope than its grand and magical predecessor and more narrowly focused, although it is enriched by the author's same mesmerizing mixes: cruelty and farce, poetry and violence, and a voice whose timbres range from a storyteller's playfulness to the dark torment of an explorer, lost. All this finds voices through characters whose tactile immediacy fades imperceptibly into a fog of ambiguousness and contradiction. Often we don't know where we are, only to realize that this is exactly where we are: in Mr. Pamuk's vision of a Turkey unable to know itself. The fight has gone on too long and run too deep: a schism not of two distinct sides but of two sides existing within a single consciousness, one that is both the nation's and the author's. Educated abroad, trained in Western literature and culture, he is caught in the entwined roots of tradition and modernity, each choking the other. Culturally and politically Mr. Pamuk is a Westerner, but he is shattered to see his beliefs embodied in the methods used by the heirs of Kemal Ataturk who, grown dictatorial and often corrupt, have tried to force their secular code upon a vast Islam-bred rural and urban underclass (no turbans, fezzes or head scarves). In an epigraph he quotes Dostoyevsky's sardonic rendering of Russia's own modernizers: ''Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people.'' Ka, the protagonist of ''Snow,'' could not bear the consequences if the popular will turned out to be fundamentalist. He is not so much the author's alter ego as his emissary to the wilder, zanier shores of a dilemma that by now is more than his own and Turkey's. It shows itself these days in a number of countries, including the one where the United States has engaged itself so chaotically. Trying to democratize, that is, yet most likely unwilling to accept the likely failure that would follow an unlikely success. A blocked poet and onetime radical, Ka returns from Germany after 12 years' exile to get back in touch with his country. A newspaper assignment takes him to a town near the Georgian border to investigate a rumor, mostly exaggerated, about a wave of schoolgirls who killed themselves when ordered to remove their head scarves. In his picaresque wanderings through the streets, symbolically blurred and isolated under a weeklong blizzard, he goes from one encounter to the next. Some are sinister, some alluring, some surreal. A dog, a charcoal-colored match for the German overcoat Ka proudly wears, persists in following him around as if to mock his Westernizing vanity. Each meeting is a dissonance, a clue to a puzzle he can't make out. He finds a vicious paramilitary killer who claims to be upholding Ka's own civilized values against the prospect of a Turkish Iran. There is an old Communist who tolerates a daughter's head scarf as a rebellion against the establishment, and a newspaper editor who publishes as past events those that are still to take place. And -- partly a magical-realist touch and partly an acid satire on the press -- publication seems to make them take place. Ka is moved to anguish by Necip, a young fundamentalist of surpassing sweetness who is afraid he will lose his faith (though he's killed before he can). He is chilled and infuriated by Blue, a lethal yet childlike underground activist. Most extravagantly, and it is the novel's garish, extended climax, he becomes involved with Sunay, a theater impresario and former leftist who now seems to work on behalf of the military ultras pledged to the secular Ataturk tradition. Sunay organizes a crude anti-Islamic vaudeville that incites a near-riot. This provides the excuse for the local army garrison to mount a minicoup and arrest, torture or kill Islamists and Kurds. Controlling it all, the impresario glories in having achieved a supreme work of art, one whose dramatic culmination will be his own death onstage. Art, its vanities and its detachment from consequences, is one of the author 's targets. But what marks Mr. Pamuk and his targets is that he stands alongside them to receive his own lethal arrows. And he does it with odd gaiety and compassion. Ka wanders through the town's murderous chaos receiving tidy inspiration and producing 19 poems of exactly 36 lines each. He is a fool of time, but his creator is tender and funny with his fools. Ka is doomed finally to betray, and so is the marvelous woman he has a besotted and arousingly depicted affair with; each in a different way is an innocent. Even the symbols get affectionate treatment. Cutting off the town, the blizzard may stand for the isolation from any universal truth or value; one that history seemingly requires by history while it conducts its contorted affairs. The snow, though, is of surpassing beauty and hauntingly rendered. For Mr. Pamuk beauty does not redeem the tragic horrors begotten by human passions and obstinate memory. Neither do the horrors diminish it. LOAD-DATE: August 10, 2004 ---------------------- The Economist August 14, 2004 U.S. Edition Problems of identity; Turkish fiction New novels from two leading Turkish writers ORHAN PAMUK is the leading contemporary interpreter of Turkish society to the western world: his novels, now invariably translated into English, explore the dilemmas and divisions of a land that is both east and west, Islamist and secular, rich and poor, ancient and modern, and much more besides. Some of his earlier explorations of Turkish identity have been hard going, not eased by their translators. But his latest novel, "Kar" or "Snow", the first to be translated by Maureen Freely, an American raised in Istanbul, is one of his most accessible. Set in the 1990s in the bleak north-eastern city of Kars, the novel is an account of the tensions between Turkey's urban secularist elite and their long-derided (and vastly underestimated) Islamic-minded opponents. It is also a tragic love story, a thriller and, more broadly, a dark journey into familiar Pamuk territory: faith, identity, betrayal and solitude. The hero is a washed-out poet, Kerim Alakusoglu, who insists on calling himself Ka. After years as a political refugee in Frankfurt, he returns to Istanbul for his mother's funeral. Egged on by a university friend at the doggedly pro-secular Cumhuriyet ("Republic") newspaper he travels to Kars to write about the municipal elections there (which are sure to be won by an Islamist candidate). The plot unfolds over three days during which Kars is cut off from the rest of the world by an unremitting snowstorm (the book might have been titled "Ka in Kar in Kars"). In that time, there is a mini coup in which hundreds of Islamists and Kurds are rounded up, brutally tortured and killed. Ka sets out to investigate a rash of suicides by female students barred from attending local schools because they refuse to remove their headscarves-an inflammatory symbol, insist the secularists, of Islamic militancy. But is it? One of the achievements of "Snow" is to look beyond the tired arguments about why so many Turkish women cover their heads. In the case of Kadife, a central character, it is to gain the affection of a charismatic Islamist militant leader, not out of religious conviction. Readers looking for a less intense taste of Turkey can turn to "The Saint of Incipient Insanities", the first novel written in English by Elif Shafak, an established writer with award-winning Turkish novels under her belt, who has been attacked for reviving Ottoman words, for her fascination with religion, and now for "betraying" her motherland by writing in English. Ms Shafak has woven a tragi-comic tapestry of quirky and lovable 20-somethings struggling to find themselves in America. Omer, an agnostic Turk; Abed, a pious Muslim Moroccan; and Piyu, a guilt-wracked Catholic Spaniard, are housemates studying for various degrees at a Boston university. Omer falls in love with Zarpandit, an American with an inexplicable urge to kill herself. Through their conversations over dinner and their encounters in their one hard-pressed bathroom, the characters challenge each other's views on religion, politics, nationality and gender. Zarpandit, the American, feels the most alienated of all. Mr Pamuk was educated in English at an elite Istanbul private school; Ms Shafak was born in France and raised in Spain. Their books are as much a voyage of discovery for themselves as they are insiders' insights of Turkey. Both seek to shatter stereotypes. Unlike Mr Pamuk, though, Ms Shafak does it with ironic humour and warmth. In one of the funniest scenes in her latest book, Abed's newly arrived (and devoutly Muslim) mother offers "round platters of sugar skulls" and "trays of werewolf claws" to inebriated guests at a Halloween party. Ms Shafak is well set to challenge Mr Pamuk as Turkey's foremost contemporary novelist. LOAD-DATE: August 13, 2004 ----------------------- The New York Times August 15, 2004 Sunday Orhan Pamuk: 'I Was Not A Political Person' By Alexander Star. Alexander Star is the senior editor of The New York Times Magazine. ALEXANDER STAR: In your novel, Turkey is a somewhat surreal country, where secular nationalists and theocrats compete to impose what seem to be equally dubious ideas of how to force people to be free. Is this the Turkey you know? ORHAN PAMUK: Well, that gap between my character's consciousness and the country's poetic reality is perhaps the essential tension of my novel. I wanted to go and explore both worlds and write about them as they are -- the Westernized intellectual's worldview coming to terms with the poorest, most forgotten and perhaps most ignored part of the country. The most angry part, too. STAR: A key concern in ''Snow'' is the desire of many Muslim women to wear headscarves to school -- an issue that raises delicate questions about where you draw the line between, say, the tolerance of religion and the imposition of religion. The current Turkish government has, controversially, attempted to assist the graduates of religious schools. Do you feel that is a legitimate cause for them? PAMUK: Look, I'm a writer. I try to focus on these issues not from the point of view of a statesman but from the point of view of a person who tries to understand the pain and suffering of others. I don't think there is any set formula to solve these problems. Anyone who believes there is a simple solution to these problems is a fool -- and probably will soon end up being part of the problem. I think literature can approach these problems because you can go into more shady areas, areas where no one is right and no one has the right to say what is right. That's what makes writing novels interesting. It's what makes writing a political novel today interesting. STAR: And yet your novel expresses a lot of anxiety over whether it's possible to fully understand the misery and humiliation of people living in unfamiliar circumstances. PAMUK: Spiritually and morally, I am close to my central character. As he goes to the poorest sections of Turkish society, he falls into the traps of representation -- talking in the name of the others, for the most poor. He realizes these issues are problematic. In fact, they may sometimes end up being immoral: the problem of representing the poor, the unrepresented, even in literature, is morally dubious. So in this political novel, my little contribution -- if there is any, I have to be modest -- is to turn it around a bit and make the problem of representation a part of the fiction too. STAR: How did you come to write a political novel? PAMUK: I was not a political person when I began writing 20 years ago. The previous generation of Turkish authors were too political, morally too much involved. They were essentially writing what Nabokov would call social commentary. I used to believe, and still believe, that that kind of politics only damages your art. Twenty years ago, 25 years ago, I had a radical belief only in what Henry James would call the grand art of the novel. But later, as I began to get known both inside and outside of Turkey, people began to ask political questions and demand political commentaries. Which I did because I sincerely felt that the Turkish state was damaging democracy, human rights and the country. So I did things outside of my books. STAR: Such as? PAMUK: Write petitions, attend political meetings, but essentially make commentaries outside of my books. This made me a bit notorious, and I began to get involved in a sort of political war against the Turkish state and the establishment, which 10 years ago was more partial to nationalists. Anyway, I said to myself, Why don't I once write a political novel and get all of this off my chest? STAR: Did you have trouble publishing ''Snow'' in Turkey? How was it received by Islamists and others? PAMUK: Before the publication of the book I told my friends and my publisher that I was finishing an outspoken political novel. Shall we show this to lawyers? And they said, No, no, no, now that Turkey is hoping to get in touch with Europe and now that you're nationally -- internationally -- ''famous,'' you don't need to do that. O.K. And after some time I gave my publishers the book. Here is the book, I said. And a week later they called me and said they'd read the book, loved the book, but they wanted my permission to show it to a lawyer. They were worried that the public prosecutor might open a case, or confiscate the book before its publication. The first printing was 100,000 copies. They were essentially worried about the economic side of the thing. For example, they hid the book in a corner, so if it were confiscated, they could keep some copies for themselves. But none of these pessimistic things happened. In fact, the country seriously discussed the book. Half of the political Islamists and people who backed the army attacked me. On the other hand, I survived. Nothing happened to me. And in fact it worked the way I hoped it would. Some of those radical Islamists criticized the book with very simplistic ideas, such as ''You're trying to describe Islamists but you have to know that an Islamist would never have sex with a woman without getting married.'' On the other hand, more liberal Islamists were pleased that at least the harassment they had been exposed to by the Turkish Army is mentioned. STAR: When George Bush was in Istanbul recently for the NATO summit, he referred to you as a ''great writer'' who has helped bridge the divide between East and West. Citing your own statements about how people around the world are very much alike, he defended American efforts to help people in the Middle East enjoy their ''birthright of freedom.'' Did you think he understood what you meant? PAMUK: I think George Bush put a lot of distance between East and West with this war. He made the whole Islamic community unnecessarily angry with the United States, and in fact with the West. This will pave the way to lots of horrors and inflict cruel and unnecessary pain to lots of people. It will raise the tension between East and West. These are things I never hoped would happen. In my books I always looked for a sort of harmony between the so-called East and West. In short, what I wrote in my books for years was misquoted, and used as a sort of apology for what had been done. And what had been done was a cruel thing. STAR: Is the novel as a form something you think is alive and well in the Middle East or the non-Western world more broadly? Or do you feel you're doing something rather unusual? PAMUK: No, the art of the novel is well. It's surviving. It has lots of elasticity. I'm sure it will continue to live in the West, in the United States and Europe. But it will have a very strange and new future in countries like China and India, where now there is an unprecedented rise of the middle classes. Legitimizing the power of these new middle classes creates problems of identity both in China and in India. This involves their nationalism when they are faced with the distinct identity of Europe and the West, and their Occidentalism when they are faced with the resistance of their poor people. I think the new modern novel that will come from the East, from that part of the world, will again raise these tensions of East-West modernity and the slippery nature of these rising middle classes in China and India. And also in Turkey, of course. STAR: In ''Snow,'' the radical Islamist Blue remarks at one point that the best thing America's given the world is Red Marlboros. Would you agree with that? PAMUK: I used to smoke them a lot when I was young. We distribute our personal pleasures in our characters. That's one of the joys of writing fiction. LOAD-DATE: August 15, 2004 ----------------- The New York Times August 15, 2004 Sunday Headscarves To Die For By Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood's most recent book is ''Oryx and Crake,'' a novel. SNOW By Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Maureen Freely. 426 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26. This seventh novel from the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk is not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times. In Turkey, Pamuk is the equivalent of rock star, guru, diagnostic specialist and political pundit: the Turkish public reads his novels as if taking its own pulse. He is also highly esteemed in Europe: his sixth novel, the lush and intriguing ''My Name Is Red,'' carried off the 2003 Impac Dublin Literary Award, adding to his long list of prizes. He deserves to be better known in North America, and no doubt he will be, as his fictions turn on the conflict between the forces of ''Westernization'' and those of the Islamists. Although it's set in the 1990's and was begun before Sept. 11, ''Snow'' is eerily prescient, both in its analyses of fundamentalist attitudes and in the nature of the repression and rage and conspiracies and violence it depicts. Like Pamuk's other novels, ''Snow'' is an in-depth tour of the divided, hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul. It's the story of Ka, a gloomy but appealing poet who hasn't written anything in years. But Ka is not his own narrator: by the time of the telling he has been assassinated, and his tale is pieced together by an ''old friend'' of his who just happens to be named Orhan. As the novel opens, Ka has been in political exile in Frankfurt, but has returned to Istanbul after 12 years for his mother's funeral. He's making his way to Kars, an impoverished city in Anatolia, just as a severe snowstorm begins. (Kar is ''snow'' in Turkish, so we have already been given an envelope inside an envelope inside an envelope.) Ka claims to be a journalist interested in the recent murder of the city's mayor and the suicides of a number of young girls forced by their schools to remove their headscarves, but this is only one of his motives. He also wants to see Ipek, a beautiful woman he'd known as a student. Divorced from a onetime friend of Ka's turned Islamist politician, she lives in the shabby Snow Palace Hotel, where Ka is staying. Cut off from escape by the snow, Ka wanders through a decaying city haunted by its glorious former selves: there are architectural remnants of the once vast Ottoman Empire; the grand Armenian church stands empty, testifying to the massacre of its worshipers; there are ghosts of Russian rulers and their lavish celebrations, and pictures of Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic and instigator of a ruthless ''modernization'' campaign, which included -- not incidentally -- a ban on headscarves. Ka's pose as a journalist allows Pamuk to put on display a wide variety of opinions. Those not living in the shrunken remains of former empires may find it hard to imagine the mix of resentful entitlement (We ought to be powerful!), shame (What did we do wrong?), blame (Whose fault is it?) and anxiety about identity (Who are we really?) that takes up a great deal of headroom in such places, and thus in ''Snow.'' Ka tries to find out more about the dead girls but encounters resistance: he 's from a bourgeois background in cosmopolitan Istanbul, he's been in exile in the West, he has a snazzy overcoat. Believers accuse him of atheism; the secular government doesn't want him writing about the suicides -- a blot on its reputation -- so he's dogged by police spies; common people are suspicious of him. He's present in a pastry shop when a tiny fundamentalist gunman murders the director of the institute that has expelled the headscarf girls. He gets mixed up with his beloved's former husband, the two of them are arrested and he witnesses the brutality of the secularist regime. He manages to duck his shadowers long enough to meet with an Islamist extremist in hiding, the persuasive Blue, said to be behind the director's murder. And so he goes, floundering from encounter to encounter. In ''Snow,'' translated by Maureen Freely, the line between playful farce and gruesome tragedy is very fine. For instance, the town's newspaper publisher, Serdar Bey, prints an article describing Ka's public performance of his poem '' Snow.'' When Ka protests that he hasn't written a poem called ''Snow'' and is not going to perform it in the theater, Serdar Bey replies: ''Don't be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens. . . . Quite a few things do happen only because we've written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about.'' And sure enough, inspired by the love affair he begins with Ipek and happier than he's been in years, Ka begins to write poems, the first of them being ''Snow.'' Before you know it, there he is in the theater, but the evening also includes a ridiculous performance of an Ataturk-era play called ''My Fatherland or My Head Scarf.'' As the religious school teenagers jeer, the secularists decide to enforce their rule by firing rifles into the audience. The twists of fate, the plots that double back on themselves, the trickiness, the mysteries that recede as they're approached, the bleak cities, the night prowling, the sense of identity loss, the protagonist in exile -- these are vintage Pamuk, but they're also part of the modern literary landscape. A case could be made for a genre called the Male Labyrinth Novel, which would trace its ancestry through De Quincey and Dostoyevsky and Conrad, and would include Kafka, Borges, Garcia Marquez, DeLillo and Auster, with the Hammett-and-Chandler noir thriller thrown in for good measure. It's mostly men who write such novels and feature as their rootless heroes, and there's probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she's likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would. Women -- except as idealized objects of desire -- have not been of notably central importance in Pamuk's previous novels, but ''Snow'' is a departure. There are two strong female characters, the emotionally battered Ipek and her sister, the stubborn actress Kadife. In addition, there's a chorus: the headscarf girls. Those scrapping for power on both sides use these dead girls as symbols, having put unbearable pressure on them while they were alive. Ka, however, sees them as suffering human beings. ''It wasn't the elements of poverty or helplessness that Ka found so shocking. Neither was it the constant beatings to which these girls were subjected, or the insensitivity of fathers who wouldn't even let them go outside, or the constant surveillance of jealous husbands. The thing that shocked and frightened Ka was the way these girls had killed themselves: abruptly, without ritual or warning, in the midst of their everyday routines.'' Their suicides are like the other brutal events in the novel: sudden eruptions of violence thrown up by relentless underlying forces. The attitudes of men toward women drive the plot in ''Snow,'' but even more important are the attitudes of men toward one another. Ka is always worrying about whether other men respect or despise him, and that respect hinges not on material wealth but on what he is thought to believe. Since he himself isn't sure, he vacillates from one side to another. Shall he stick with the Western enlightenment? But he was miserable in Germany. Shall he return to the Muslim fold? But despite his drunken hand-kissing of a local religious leader, he can't fit in. If Ka were to run true to the form of Pamuk's previous novels, he might take refuge in stories. Stories, Pamuk has hinted, create the world we perceive: instead of ''I think, therefore I am,'' a Pamuk character might say, ''I am because I narrate.'' It's the Scheherazade position, in spades. But poor murdered Ka is no novelist: it's up to ''Orhan'' to act as his Horatio. ''Snow'' is the latest entry in Pamuk's longtime project: narrating his country into being. It's also the closest to realism. Kars is finely drawn, in all its touching squalor, but its inhabitants resist ''Orhan's'' novelizing of them. One of them asks him to tell the reader not to believe anything he says about them, because ''no one could understand us from so far away.'' This is a challenge to Pamuk and his considerable art, but it is also a challenge to us. LOAD-DATE: August 15, 2004 --------------- The Miami Herald August 15, 2004 Sunday F1LA EDITION INTOTHE STORM; A TURKISH POET RETURNS HOME TO FIND HIMSELF IMMERSED IN A COMPLICATED MIX OF POLITICS, RELIGION AND PASSION; FICTION / SNOW SNOW. Orhan Pamuk. Knopf. 448 pages. $26. BY ANDREW FURMAN In a world ever more riven between East and West, Turkey -- located geographically and politically between the Middle East and Europe -- has emerged as a prominent player on the world scene. With its secular democratic government presiding over an Islamic majority, the country serves as a touchstone by which the world measures the pulse of these competing movements. All of which makes the ambitious political novel by Turkey's most prominent novelist a satisfying contribution to our otherwise low-cal summer literary menu. In the broadest sense, Snowrepresents a frontal assault on Stendhal's famous denunciation of political novels -- ''Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert'' -- which serves as one of the book's epigrams. Orhan Pamuk succeeds admirably in engaging with political ideas and currents while simultaneously attending to the generic demands of the novel. The story revolves around Ka, an impassive Turkish poet living in exile in Frankfurt who returns home for his mother's funeral and confronts his home nation's percolating crises and his own personal demons. Pamuk constructs a somewhat clunky but effective plot apparatus. Ka, intrigued by a rash of suicides among Islamic girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves to school, accepts a journalistic assignment to the remote outpost of Kars to report on the phenomenon. He also hopes to woo Ipek, a woman of intoxicating beauty he remembers from his university days, who now lives in Kars in the Snow Palace Hotel. Kars clings to a tenuous existence by virtue of its processed cheese, but was once a prosperous mountain city along the trade route between the Russian and Ottoman empires. Pamuk evokes in lush detail the defunct Baltic buildings that remain -- the Armenian churches, Seljuk castles, and abandoned mansions -- while also describing the decidedly less opulent teahouses, dairy shops and shanties. Each building has its own story of the various empires and ideologies that have wrested over Turkey's soul, and rarely does a building along Ka's way escape the deft attention of our narrator (the identity of whom is one of the novel's minor mysteries). Almost immediately upon Ka's arrival, events conspire to transform him into an active participant in a pitched battle over the city. First, the director of the Institute for Education, the man responsible for barring head-covered girls from the classrooms, is assassinated by an Islamic extremist. Then, aided by a snowstorm that effectively isolates the city, a militaristic wing of the government stages a bloody coup to tamp down the surging popularity of the Islamic movement. Both sides seek out the enigmatic Ka for their own tactical purposes, which brings our hero in contact with an assortment of colorful characters. The handsome but crippled Blue, a radical political Islamist of mythic stature, is among the most memorable. A composite of any number of modern fundamentalist leaders, given his curiously familiar admixture of charisma, sexual charm and outward gentleness, he inveighs upon Ka not to write about the ''suicide girls,' ' for fear of the erroneous impression of Islam it would give the world. ''Girls who commit suicide are not even Muslims!'' he bewails. Ka's ambivalent allegiances and emotional vulnerability in the wake of his mother's death make him the perfect vehicle through which Pamuk can explore the competing lure of religious fundamentalism, secular nationalism and cosmopolitan intellectualism. And Pamuk trenchantly evokes the moral ambiguity of the timely scenario he constructs -- the head-scarf controversy currently rages in France -- rather than seeking to advance any illusory moral platitude. Various sides have their say in often disconcertingly convincing terms. The coup leader, Sunay, makes a credible case for secular militarism when he accosts Ka for the intellectual hypocrisies that allow violent fundamentalists like Blue to thrive. ''No one who's even slightly westernized can breathe free in this country unless they have a secular army protecting them,'' he argues, ''and no one needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they're better than everyone else and look down on other people. If it weren't for the army, the fanatics would be turning their rusty knives on the lot of them.'' Yet, Ka (and Pamuk) recognize that the leveling force of western secularism can be every bit as oppressive as fundamentalist Islam. Hande, a minor character, speaks convincingly against the head-scarf edict: ''Sometimes I can conjure up a girl walking into school with her hair flying all around her . . . I can even imagine the smell of the hallway and the clamminess of the air. Then I look through the pane of glass that separates the classroom from the hallway and I see that the girl is not me but someone else, and I start to cry. . . . What scares me is the thought of never being able to return to the person I am now, and even forgetting who that person is.'' Sunay's identity as a stage actor turned military coup leader and the role that theater plays as the coup reaches its final bloody crescendo is the only aspect of the plot that strains credulity. However, the convergence of Sunay's theatrical and political ambitions advances one of the primary themes of the novel, which is Ka's effort to carve out a contemporary existence defined by authentic emotive and intellectual responses in a world rife with poseurs across the political and artistic spectrum. Ka had planned to embrace an apolitical life as an exiled poet. Yet such an existence proves sterile. He writes his best poetry while up to his neck in politics, while in the thrall of the lovely Ipek. The social realm, dangerous and duplicitous as it may be, Pamuk seems to suggest, cannot be excised from the realm of high art. One might as well try to remove politics from the novel. Andrew Furman is chair of the Department of English at Florida Atlantic University. LOAD-DATE: August 15, 2004 ------------------ Publishers Weekly August 23, 2004 Outspoken Turk by Wendy Smith At an early age, I decided that I would not write anything political," says Orhan Pamuk. This is a surprising comment, coming from an author well known in his native Turkey for his forthright condemnation of the death sentence issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989 and of the Turkish government's brutal repression of Kurdish separatists during the 1990s. It's especially surprising since his latest novel, Snow (Fiction Forecasts, July 19), published by Knopf this month, grapples with the politically charged subject of Islamic fundamentalism, telling the story of a poet visiting a remote town on Turkey's eastern border where there has been a rash of suicides among female students forbidden to wear head scarves in school. But it's also true that Pamuk is better known to readers of fiction for a series of novels that, while they often explore the tension between traditional Islamic values and the Westernizing policies of the modern Turkish state, are just as notable for their complex, modernist narrative structures and their concern with such existential matters as the nature of consciousness. >From The White Castle in 1990 through The Black Book and The New Life to My Name Is Red in 2001 (two earlier novels remain untranslated), English-speaking critics have noted the social and political backdrop of Pamuk's work, but have been more struck by its brilliant imagery and literary erudition. "Snow is my first deliberately political novel," the writer acknowledges by telephone from his home in Istanbul. "When I started writing fiction some 30 years ago, I had seen that the best authors of previous generations had destroyed their talent to serve a country, to get politically involved, or to make a moral command. But 20 years later, after I had established myself as an author both inside and outside Turkey, I was critical not only of the war the Turkish state waged against the Kurdish guerrillas, but also of its position on human rights and freedom of expression. I published some articles, most of them outside Turkey because I couldn't publish them at home then, and I began to get a bit notorious for making political comments outside my books. I said to myself, 'Why don't I once write a political novel and get it out of my system?' " Snow, however, is no didactic polemic. Pamuk allows the young women who choose to wear head scarves, and the fundamentalist men who incite them, to speak powerfully for themselves; they may not convince Ka, the poet, but he is moved by them. "One of the pleasures of writing this novel," Pamuk comments, "was to say to my Turkish readers and to my international audience, openly and a bit provocatively, but honestly, that what they call a terrorist is first of all a human being. Our secularists, who are always relying on the army and who are destroying Turkey's democracy, hated this book because here you have a deliberate attempt by a person who was never religious in his life to understand why someone ends up being what we or the Western world calls an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist. It is a challenge and a duty of literature to understand the passions of anyone, to try to enter the spirits of people, which various taboos forbid us to understand." It's clear from the writer's fervent tone that this last sentence forms a crucial portion of his artistic credo, but--characteristically--he does not leave it unchallenged in Snow. "How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart?" asks a character called Orhan Pamuk (one of the novel 's many sly, postmodern touches), and his real-life namesake does not have a definitive answer. "In the 1950s and '60s, people hoped that they would understand everything by writing a political novel," he goes on. "Here I am saying, 'Well, I bowed my head in an attempt to understand the underdog, but there are limits. Beware the claims to understand all: it's a political mistake. ' I have joked in Turkey, and let me continue my joking here, that this is my first and last political novel; it should only be done once in life!" Pamuk's last book, a memoir of his youth entitled Istanbul, was published last year in Turkey. The writer is currently going over the English version with Maureen Freely (who also translated Snow); Knopf expects to release it in spring 2005. Pamuk is ruefully aware that "something is always lost in translation; it breaks one's heart so much. And most of the time it's not the translator's fault, it's the language's fault. I feel sometimes that I am trapped in Turkish, which is hard to translate." At least in English, which he speaks fluently, he can make adjustments with Freely: "When something is untranslatable, when we understand that this pure beauty, this little flower, will not pass and will be damaged in translation, we sometimes try to invent new things as a sort of consolation: not the original flower, but a new flower." PW wonders if the writer who has so frequently depicted conflict between Islam and the West in his fiction sees any hope for the resolution of this conflict in the real world, where it has assumed crisis proportions. "Not when the likes of Bush or the arrogant Turkish ruling elite try to solve the tensions between conservative Islam and modernity with bombs," he replies. "That is a dead end. But I am an optimistic person. I think that these guys who try to modernize or Europeanize or westernize the rest of the world by force, they will disappear. Globalization will continue, I see that as a positive thing, but peacefully, with mutual understanding among tribes and peoples and nations." LOAD-DATE: August 26, 2004 ------------------ The New York Sun August 25, 2004 Wednesday RECENT FICTION By BENJAMIN LYTAL "Snow" (Alfred A. Knopf, 426 pages, $26) opens like a political novel, but its characters's disagreements eventually spin out a world of their own, fairly far away from CNN. The hardships of change, in and out of faith, are omnipresent. A blizzard blocks all the roads out of the Turkish border town of Kars, creating a perfect storm for Orhan Pamuk's themes. Like dancers in the round, the citizens of Kars debate every angle of social and religious controversy. Mr. Pamuk is regularly compared to Calvino or Borges; he has written several books about mysterious texts. But here his muster of characters - there is the paterfamilias ex-communist, the irresistible terrorist, the feminine dictator - and their sometimes spellbinding speeches remind me more of something like "Hard Times." And this novel of fatalism in politics is actually more about the difficulty in communicating meaning across borders than the difficulty in finding meaning. "Snow" is written in a casually reflexive prose of pillowy explanations. Ka, a poet exiled in Frankfurt, finds himself in Kars. He's officially writing an article about a suicide trend among girls who insist on wearing headscarves to school, but he readily admits that he's really there to find a Turkish wife: specifically, Ipek, a beauty from Ka's radical school days who is now separated from Muhtar, a former leftist rebel and poet who has turned to political Islam. Ka becomes lost in the new categories of secularism vs. Islam. He tries not to pick sides, and when pressed he insists that he only wants happiness, a new thing for him. But his happiness depends not only on Ipek, but on the feeling that he has found God - "the desolation and remoteness of the place hit him with such force that he felt God inside him." And this same inspiration gives Ka poems for the first time in four years. Ka's poems, which he pauses to write at regular intervals, seem for a while to be the guarantor of Mr. Pamuk's novel. As local turmoil distracts him from taking any definitive moral action, we learn from the narrator that Ka is stopping at regular intervals to write poems. These poems promise to make everything that happens in Kars, which is like a snake eating its own tail, matter. But that is not quite the case. "It isn't enough to be a poet," muses Ka, "that's why politics still casts such a shadow over our lives." As the narrator gradually reveals, the poems are lost, and the novel we are reading is a careful reconstruction of events based on Ka's diaries. We are left only with the title of the volume, "Snow," and the knowledge that staring off into the snow was Ka's great blank escape from whatever was happening around him. LOAD-DATE: September 2, 2004 --------------------- National Post (f/k/a The Financial Post) (Canada) August 28, 2004 Saturday A bluffer's guide: Too busy to read the hot books? Here's a cheat sheet to help you talk about them like you have. Dan Rowe, National Post SNOW by Orhan Pamuk - - - It's not surprising that Margaret Atwood began her New York Times review of Snow with this line: "This seventh novel from the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk is not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times." Snow is, after all, a novel set in 1990s Turkey about, in a very basic way, the Islamic fundamentalist reaction to the policies of a secularist regime. Pamuk spins this tale through Ka, an exiled poet who returns to his snow-ridden, isolated Turkish home town of Kars, in part to report on the growing numbers of teenage girls who are committing suicide because they don't want to adhere to the state's ban on headscarves in school -- an essential subject matter if ever there was one. And topicality aside, Snow is just a fine piece of fiction. The winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2003 for My Name is Red, Pamuk handles this story deftly in two respects. His writing and plotting are tremendous. And his handling of the political issue of fundamentalism is better still. Despite her overwrought construction, Laurel Maury gets it right in her San Francisco Chronicle review: "Snow will make you feel the arguments surrounding fundamentalism as a situation of murky grays, where the only thing black is the night, and the only thing white is the snow." All Pamuk does is show both the Islamists and the secularists in his novel as having pangs of doubt. In the end, they are faithful to their cause, but not quite with the fervour and totality that many journalists and commentators would have us believe. This, then, is yet another example of where fiction is infinitely more truthful than the bromides and broadsides which make up the news and op-ed pages. Most of all, it is reassuring that Pamuk has taken up these serious, modern issues in Snow. Far too often, novelists in these parts -- musicians, actors, and other artists are guilty, too --seem to shy away from engaging in current events in such a straightforward and artful way. And when they do tackle big topics, it tends to be gimmicky. For the more daring writers like Pamuk, there is even more compelling territory to cover. "A more serious challenge to novelists in Turkey, Iran and the Arab world," writes James Buchan in The Guardian, "is that the events of September 11, the Moscow theatre attack and Abu Ghraib are both more romantic and more desperate than even Dostoevsky could have dreamed up and written down." LOAD-DATE: August 28, 2004 --------------- The Gazette (Montreal) August 28, 2004 Saturday Pamuk describes modern Turkey, with all its tensions ERIC ORMSBY, Freelance SNOW By Orhan Pamuk Translated by Maureen Freely Knopf, 428 pages, $38 The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has what Wallace Stevens called "a mind of winter." His new novel brims with memorable characters but the principal personage of the book is the snow. Snow seals off the bleak city of Kars, in southeastern Turkey, where the action takes place; the snow is beautiful, for it hides both the depressing ugliness of a forsaken city and its convoluted past. But it also confers a kind of deathbed isolation on the city and its inhabitants; it may be a sign from God, as one of the characters exclaims, but it is a chill and estranging sign. As in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, the snow allows Pamuk to cast events and characters into high relief. In so doing, Pamuk creates a swarming microcosm of contemporary Turkey, from old-guard Kemalists fiercely upholding secularism to teenage girls tormented over whether to don the hijab, to fiery yet furtive radical Islamists plotting a takeover and a return to the glory days of the Caliphate. Kerim Alakusoglu, who prefers to be called "Ka" for short, is a disaffected poet newly returned from self-imposed exile in Germany; on the pretext of investigating a rash of suicides by young girls, ostensibly over the wearing of the hijab, he travels on behalf of a staunchly secularist newspaper to Kars to interview the grieving families and unravel the mystery. In fact, he is hoping to kindle a romance with the beautiful and coquettish Ipek, an old flame who has recently divorced. Once in Kars, Ka finds himself stranded by the blizzard and embarks on a series of encounters through which Pamuk seeks to portray virtually every face of present-day Turkey: corrupt and shifty bureaucrats, militarists, teachers and actors, feminists veiled and unveiled, poets, firebrands, zealots and time-servers, slog or slip through the icy alleyways of the snowbound city of Kars. Pamuk is superb at evoking this miserable place, which at varying periods has been under the heel of the Ottomans, the Russians, the Armenians and even the British: "... the old decrepit Russian buildings with stovepipes sticking out of every window, the thousand-year-old Armenian church towering over the wood depots and the electric generators, the pack of dogs barking at every passerby from a 500-year-old stone bridge as snow fell into the half-frozen black waters of the river below." His portrayal of Ka, by contrast, is strangely shifting. The poet is at one moment a thoroughly worldly figure, conniving to get the evasive Ipek into his bed, and at another he is kissing the hands of the local saint and fawning on his favours. He is consistent only in his self-absorption, finding inspiration for his poems in the unlikeliest circumstances, during a police interrogation or a massacre at a crowded theatre. Given the narcissism of most poets, he becomes most believable only at such erratic moments. Part of the vagueness of this portrayal is due, I suspect, to Pamuk's desire to echo Kafka's novel The Castle. In that masterpiece, the snow is all-pervasive, too, and the protagonist is identified only as K. (pronounced "ka" in German). Like K., Ka finds himself increasingly entangled in inexplicable snafus amid inhospitable surroundings. There is something a bit schematic about all this, and it extends even to the choice of Kars as a location: the Turkish word for "snow" is kar. Only Pamuk's skill at realistic description and his sense of place keep the novel from collapsing under its own heaped-up drifts of symbolism. With its vowel harmony and intricate system of word-building, Turkish is the most musical of languages and the translator has succeeded admirably in suggesting its cadences to an English reader; the translation reads beautifully. Pamuk is a wonderful writer but, in my opinion, his new novel doesn't succeed entirely as fiction. Too many odd characters tend to pop up like unexpected rabbits out of a conjuror's hat, and too often, the characters appear to be mere mouthpieces for divergent views. As a glimpse of present-day Turkey, however, with all its terrific inner tensions and smothering conflicts, vividly encapsulated as though in a snowy Petri dish, Pamuk's novel will come as a startling revelation to many Western readers. Eric Ormsby is a Montreal poet and director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. LOAD-DATE: August 28, 2004 --------------- The Washington Post August 29, 2004 Sunday Final Edition Winter's Tale Reviewed by Ruth Franklin SNOW * By Orhan Pamuk. Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely Knopf. 426 pp. $26 "Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore," Stendhal wrote. This line serves as one of the epigraphs to Snow, Orhan Pamuk's mysterious, moving and -- yes -- political new novel, which includes a scene where guns are shot into a theater audience. Firearms notwithstanding, there is nothing crude about Pamuk's subtle work. The author of seven previous novels, he has taken as his great subject the tensions between West and East, religious and secular, in his native Turkey. His most recent novel, My Name Is Red, was an ingenious, tightly crafted tale of murder among miniaturists -- artists who illuminate manuscripts -- in 16th-century Istanbul, for which he at last garnered much-deserved recognition in the United States. Snow, which takes place in the present day, may be Pamuk's most topical novel yet. Ka, a poet from Istanbul, has returned to his native country for a visit after 12 years in exile in Germany. When Snow begins, he is on a bus en route to Kars, a mountain city in the "poorest, most overlooked corner of Turkey," at the former border of the Ottoman and Russian empires. An old friend at an Istanbul newspaper has asked him to report on the impending municipal elections as well as an epidemic of suicide among teenage girls, the latest of whom is one of the "head-scarf girls," a group of young women who have been barred from the secular university for covering their hair. In hope of reuniting with Ipek, a beautiful former classmate who now lives in Kars, Ka agrees. Kars is a tightly wound knot of tension between secular and religious forces, and Ka's investigations lead him into encounters with all the major players, including the charismatic Blue, an "infamous Islamist terrorist" who is in hiding after issuing a death threat against a talk-show host who insulted the Prophet Muhammad; Necip, a pious student who hopes to become the world's first Islamist science-fiction writer; and Ipek's sister, Kadife, the leader of the head-scarf girls. These forces come to a head on Ka's first evening in Kars, when an acting troupe stages a classic play called "My Fatherland or My Head Scarf." At the play's climax, the heroine rips off her scarf and burns it, and the religious youths in attendance begin to riot. Soldiers storm the stage, opening fire and killing a number of the audience members. This is the briefest possible introduction to Snow's elaborate plot, which works its way by twists and turns through numerous digressions, dialogues and genres. Pamuk's work is reminiscent of the great storytelling classics -- The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio's Decameron or Jan Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa, with their bawdy comedy, intricate design and mystical overtones. At times Ka plays the traditional role of the trickster: In one brilliant sequence, he negotiates a statement of unity between the city's Islamist, Kurdish and socialist leaders for the sole purpose of luring Ipek's father out of the hotel where they live, so that he can make love to her. Elsewhere he is compared to a dervish: During his few days in Kars, he regains his inspiration for the first time in four years, and poems come to him as if dictated by a higher power. The poems that Ka writes in Kars turn out to be governed by a "deep and mysterious underlying structure" similar to that of a snowflake, and the same is true of the novel itself. The deeper you read, the more the symmetries multiply. Nearly every character has a double, down to the narrator himself, who is eventually revealed to be a novelist friend of Ka's named Orhan, telling Ka's story after his death based on information gleaned from his notebooks. All these mirror images add up to create a dizzying effect, which is deepened by the snow that begins to fall on the first page of the novel and does not let up until nearly the end. Practically a character in its own right, it blankets the mean streets of Kars, shutting Ka and Ipek together in their hotel, casting its strange light in unexpected places and closing the roads to all traffic in or out, so that the city becomes a strange hothouse of nervous activity and revolutionary unrest. This disorientation is surely Pamuk's intention. But even after the novel has come to its wrenching conclusion, the atmospheric haze is difficult to dispel. Snow has none of the tautness of My Name Is Red; its action moves thickly, at times impenetrably. Clarity is not enhanced by a tone that at times jerks wildly from knowing sophistication to faux naivet?. This is a shock after the elegant control of My Name Is Red, and the non-Turkish-reading reviewer is inclined to blame the translator, who is new to Pamuk's work. Nevertheless, Pamuk's gift for the evocative image remains one of this novel's great pleasures: Long after I finished this book, in the blaze of the Washington summer, my thoughts kept returning to Ka and Ipek in the hotel room, looking out at the falling snow. * Ruth Franklin is assitant literary editor of the New Republic. LOAD-DATE: August 29, 2004 ---------------- The Baltimore Sun August 29, 2004 Sunday FINAL Edition A disorienting account of the Turkish dilemma; Books Alane Salierno Mason SOURCE: Special to the Sun Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, Alfred A. Knopf, 432 pages, $26. Snow is not the first thing that comes to mind when most Westerners think of Turkey. Americans are most likely to have encountered only the country's Mediterranean coast, bikini-clad and by boat. So it is disorienting from the first to enter a novel set in a provincial eastern Turkish city in a heavy snowstorm -- only the first of the disorientations a reader should experience in Snow by Orhan Pamuk, hailed by one critic as "the sort of author for whom the Nobel Prize was invented." At the time of the publication of his first novels to be translated into English, Pamuk was described as "Turkey's foremost novelist." The author note in Snow describes him as "one of Europe's most prominent novelists." Herein lies the central dilemma of modern Turkey and of Snow, a highly literary fable of the struggle of an essentially European intellectual and social elite to understand, control or make peace with those elements of the country that are bitterly anti-European. Ka is a poet who has been living in exile in Germany for some 20 years. When he returns, the radicals are no longer socialists but Islamists, and he wavers between sympathy for their religious devotion -- as he begins himself to feel stirrings of belief in God -- and fear of their hostility to him and everything he represents as a secular, Westernized intellectual. The beautiful leading women in Snow are symbolic of the soul of a nation: Ipek, bareheaded, independent, generally modern in her attitudes, separated from an Islamist politician; and Kadife, the leader of a group of girls barred from school for wearing headscarves as a symbol of religious devotion -- or political protest, or personal independence. One of these "headscarf girls" has committed suicide, part of a wave of female suicides; and as with all symbols, the meaning of this most intensely individual and anti-social of all acts is up for grabs, and vulnerable to political manipulation. Snow reminds Ka of God and the book's narrator of the divine uniqueness of every individual. Yet as several characters point out, "individuality" is also a kind of idol used by the West to denigrate more communally minded philosophies. Snow -- by closing off all roads to the outside world -- provides cover for a military coup that turns from ludicrous theater to real violence aimed at preventing an Islamist democratic victory in the local elections. (The elite's sense of guilt that their freedoms are propped up by unsavory means is a strong theme here.) Snow also represents the timeless accumulation of historical events that has turned a vibrant, diverse city into a depressed backwater where everyone's goal is to be like everyone else. A single snowflake also provides the structure for the book of poems Ka writes in the course of the novel, and which then goes missing, making this a book about a missing book -- one of several postmodern sleights of hand that some readers will adore and others find irritating. The terrorist named Blue who is a media creation; the empty chamber of a gun that is actually full; politics as theater / theater as politics; pairings in which people are obsessed with other, more vibrant people, their "originals"; an unreliable narrator trying to piece a story together from other texts; the poems that don't exist and the Islamist sci-fi novel that is plotted but not written -- these elements make Snow a kind of brainteaser about authenticity and the nature of reality. The romance at the center of the book is not especially convincing as love story, yet it is potent as allegory when Ka discovers, to his heartbreak, that both sisters -- not only Kadife, whom he respects, but Ipek, whom he adores -- are secret lovers of Blue. If you're reading Pamuk's work as European literature, Snow is probably not the first of his books to read, but as a kind of postmodern journalism of modern Turkey -- a pained report from the psychological border between East and West -- it is highly worthwhile. Alane Salierno Mason is a senior editor at W.W. Norton & Co. and founding editor of www.wordswithout borders.org, an online magazine devoted to international literature. LOAD-DATE: August 31, 2004 ---------------- The New Yorker August 30, 2004 ANATOLIAN ARABESQUES; A modernist novel of contemporary Turkey. JOHN UPDIKE Orhan Pamuk's new novel, "Snow" (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely; Knopf; $26), abounds with modernist tracer genes. Like Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past," it bares its inner gears of reconstituted memory and ends by promising its own composition. Its hero, a poet, goes by the name of Ka, a hard-to-miss allusion to Kafka's K., the hero of "The Castle." Its setting, the forlorn provincial city of Kars-though kar means "snow," Kars is an actual place, in Turkey's northeastern corner, near Armenia; it was destroyed by Tamerlane in 1386 and occupied by Russia off and on in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-suggests, in four hectic days during which the city is snowbound, the mountainous, debate-prone microcosm of Thomas Mann's sanatorium in "The Magic Mountain," with a lethal whiff of Dostoyevsky's unnamed "our town" in "The Possessed." The airy spirit of postmodernism also haunts the shadows and spiral staircases of Pamuk's intricate narrative. Like Italo Calvino, Pamuk has a passion for pattern-making; he maps Kars as obsessively as Joyce did Dublin and marshals the nineteen poems that Ka writes there into the form of a diagrammatic snowflake. Not that "Snow" doesn't flow, with suspense at every dimpled vortex. Like Raymond Queneau, Pamuk is gifted with a light, absurdist touch, spinning out farcical plot developments to the point of implying that any plot, in this indifferent and chaotic universe, is farcical. He is attracted to the unreal reality, the false truth, of theatrical performance, and "Snow," in its political aspect, pivots on two nights of performance at the Kars National Theatre, in which illusion and reality are confoundingly entwined. The comedy of public events, where protest and proclamation rapidly age into melodramatic cliche, overlays certain tragic realities of contemporary Turkey: the poverty of opportunity that leads unemployed men to sit endlessly in teahouses watching television; the tension between the secularism established by Kemal Ataturk in the nineteen-twenties and the recent rise of political Islam; the burning issue of women's head scarves; the cultural divide between a Westernized elite and the theistic masses. In its geography, Turkey straddles Europe and Asia; its history includes a triumphant imperial episode under the Ottoman sultans and, after long decline, a secular, modernizing revolution under Ataturk. Tradition there wears not only the fez and the turban but the uniform of the Islam-resistant Army. Ka, a forty-two-year-old, unmarried Istanbul native who for twelve years has lived as a political exile in Germany, comes to Kars, which he briefly visited twenty years ago, in order to investigate and report on, for a friend's newspaper, a local epidemic of suicide among young women, and to look up a university classmate, the beautiful Ipek, who, he has learned, is separated from her husband, Muhtar. Muhtar, another old acquaintance, is running for mayor; this election is one of the threads that are all but buried in the subsequent days beneath a veritable blizzard of further complications and characters. The Anatolian venue, its deteriorating architecture poetically redolent of former Armenian and Russian inhabitants, is populated by Turks whose names have, to an American reader, a fairy-tale strangeness: Ipek, Kadife, Zahide, Sunay Zaim, Funda Eser, Guner Bener, Hakan Ozge, Mesut, Fazil, Necip, Teslime, Abdurraham Oz, Osman Nuri Colak, Tarkut Olcun, and (Ka's full name, which he suppresses) Kerim Alakusoglu. In his temporary role of journalist, Ka is given access to a succession of local viewpoints, ranging from that of the deputy governor (who tells him, "If unhappiness were a genuine reason for suicide, half the women in Turkey would be killing themselves") and the benign religious teacher Sheikh Saadettin Efendi to that of the outlaw terrorist Blue and Ipek's sister, the scarf-wearing Kadife, who in the end proposes that women commit suicide to show their pride: "The moment of suicide is the time when they understand best how lonely it is to be a woman, and what being a woman really means." Early in Ka's visit, Ipek tersely sums up the situation for him: "The men give themselves to religion, and the women kill themselves." When he asks why, she responds with "a look that told him he would get nowhere by pressing her for quick answers." But the question, in the course of more than four hundred pages, pales beside more vividly animated issues: Ka's revived ability to write poems; his tortuous campaign to persuade Ipek to marry him and join him in the marginal existence of an exiled Turkish poet in Frankfurt; his debates with several young students (Necip, Fazil) at the Kars religious high school over whether or not he and other Europeanized Turks are inevitably atheists; and, in the most farcical-tragical twist of plot, a violent Kemalist (pro-secular, anti-political-Islamist) coup in the snowbound municipality, engineered from the stage by the veteran itinerant actor Sunay Zaim. Ka, who on his first day in Kars witnesses the assassination of an education official who had forbidden head scarves, becomes increasingly involved in many-sided intrigues and shuttles back and forth like the hero of a thriller; but he is not believable as such, possessing, as he does, a preoccupying ear for the poems being dictated to him by a higher power and a constant concern with his own uncertainties. Does he believe in God or not? Is happiness worth having? He decides, after an ecstatic interlude with Ipek, that "the greatest happiness in life was to embrace a beautiful, intelligent girl and sit in a corner writing poetry." But even this unexceptional conclusion melts away under his doubts: he foresees that in Frankfurt a "crushing, soul-destroying pain would eat away at their happiness." And the handsome Blue, whose main terrorist activity seems to be seducing women, assures him, "People who seek only happiness never find it." Dithering, reflective Ka, the embodiment of Turkish ambivalence, is, we learn, a Gemini. He acquires a neartwin (this author has a weakness for near-twins, for men who interpenetrate each other, like the seventeenth-century Italian slave and his Muslim master in "The White Castle," or like Necip and Fazil in this novel) when "Orhan the novelist" takes on an increasingly voluble first-person voice and presence. Orhan, it turns out, has travelled to Kars to investigate the adventures of his friend Ka four years after they occurred. The narrative's subtext emerges as a sophisticated and esteemed writer's aporia-his bafflement-in the face of his nation's backwardness, superstition, and misery. What do Ka's inner states-the bliss of intermittent inspiration, the romantic dreams of erotic conquest, his intense nostalgia for a sheltered childhood, his flitting sense that Islam is correct and God does exist-have to do with the world's economic and political facts? His is the social class that left Islam to the servants and welcomed military coups, with their cozy curfews and radio-broadcast martial music. When Ka's friend and rival Muhtar is beaten by the police, "Ka imagined that Muhtar had found redemption in this beating; it might have released him from the guilt and spiritual agony he felt at the misery and stupidity of his country." The only lines that are quoted from Ka's nineteen suddenly inspired poems run: Even if your mother came down from heaven to take you into her arms, Even if your wicked father let her go without a beating for just one night, You'd still be penniless, your shit would still freeze, your soul would still wither, there is no hope! If you're unlucky enough to live in Kars, you might as well flush yourself down the toilet. The unlucky, however, protest: during a political meeting that pathetically, comically, endearingly struggles to frame a statement for the Frankfurter Rundschau, a passionate young Kurd cries, "We're not stupid, we're just poor!" He goes on, "When a Westerner meets someone from a poor country, he feels deep contempt. He assumes that the poor man's head must be full of all the nonsense that plunged his country into poverty and despair." The author himself, arriving at what he terms "perhaps . . . the heart of our story," asks: How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend's difficult and painful life: How much can he really see? Thus the aesthetic and private passions so crucial to Ka double back, in a way, upon politics. Empathy knits a society together as well as enables works of imagination. But do the rich and powerful, having once imagined their way into the shoes of the less fortunate, change course and renounce all they have, as both Buddha and Jesus advised? And would it do enough good if they did? Is not conflict, between classes and nations both, often between groups that understand each other all too well? They compete for the same prize, the same land, the same control of resources. Pamuk's conscience-ridden and carefully wrought novel, tonic in its scope, candor, and humor, does not incite us, even in our imaginations, to overthrow existing conditions in Turkey. When the Kars coup occurs, the enthusiasm among unemployed youths leads to the dry authorial comment "They seemed to think that last night's events marked the beginning of a new age, in which immorality and unemployment would no longer be tolerated; it was as if they thought the army had stepped in expressly to find them jobs." Such realistic fatalism, and the poet's duty "to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art" and to believe that "life had a secret geometry," drains "Snow" 's ideological contests of blood. We could care less, but not much less. Ka has a drifting, ghostly presence that becomes exasperatingly mired in the role of negotiator, schemer, man of action; it wasn't clear, at least to this reader, what his decisive action, for which he suffers in the end, was. Nor is his love for Ipek, beautiful and wise as she is conjured to be, very involving. The lovers' exchanges have an enigmatic bleakness, traceable perhaps to Hemingway: "I learned everything they taught us about Islam, but then I forgot it. Now it's as if everything I know about Islam is from The Message-you know, that film starring Anthony Quinn." Ka smiled. "It was showing not long ago on the Turkish channel in Germany-but, for some strange reason, in German. You're here this evening, aren't you?" "Yes." "Because I want to read you my poem again," said Ka, as he put his notebook into his pocket. "Do you think it's beautiful?" "Yes, really, it's beautiful." "What's beautiful about it?" "I don't know, it's just beautiful," said Ipek. She opened the door to leave. Ka threw his arms around her and kissed her on the mouth. Maybe-though Maureen Freely's translation is fluent and lucid throughout-it reads better in Turkish. If at times "Snow" seems attenuated and opaque, we should not forget that in Turkey, insofar as it partakes of the Islamic world's present murderous war of censorious fanaticism versus free speech and truth-seeking, to write with honest complexity about such matters as head scarves and religious belief takes courage. Pamuk, relatively young as he is, at the age of fifty-two, qualifies as that country's most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize, and the near-assassination of Islam's last winner must cross his mind. To produce a major work so frankly troubled and provocatively bemused and, against the grain of the author's usual antiquarian bent, entirely contemporary in its setting and subjects, took the courage that art sometimes visits upon even its most detached practitioners. LOAD-DATE: August 30, 2004 ----------------- Times-Picayune (New Orleans) September 5, 2004 Sunday Across the divide; Religious debates bog down this promising European-style novel that explores Turkish history By Kevin Rabalais, Contributing writer SNOW By Orhan Pamuk Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely Alfred A. Knopf, $26 Every once in a while, a foreign writer appears -- seemingly from out of nowhere -- and catches the attention of the English-reading world. We often assume that this sudden arrival indicates a new voice in world literature, namely that the writer is young. Because of this, we find it difficult to imagine that he had been working for years in his own language. There was that "arrival" of Vladimir Nabokov, who after the 1955 publication of "Lolita" suddenly became an international sensation, though he had been writing for more than three decades, mostly in his native Russian before turning to English to show us native speakers the true meaning of language skills. More recently, before he died of a heart attack while driving, critics forecast German writer W.G. Sebald as a future Nobel Prize winner. At the time, only two of his books had appeared in English translation. Orhan Pamuk, whose novel "My Name is Red" received the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, is such a writer -- a critic's darling, if you will. Since the 1991 English translation of "The White Castle," Pamuk has been compared to everyone from Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann to Jorge Luis Borges. His novels are steeped in a highly European literary tradition and also flooded with Ottoman history and Islam, a unique combination. Pamuk's most recent novel, "Snow," a political and religious thriller set in his native Turkey, begins after Ka, a poet of some international renown, attends his mother's funeral in Istanbul. Though not involved in politics, Ka has spent the past 12 years in exile in Germany, where he fled after being tried for a political article he did not write. At least this is what the narrator, a childhood friend of Ka's who reconstructs the poet's story from various sources, tells us in the beginning. After the funeral, Ka travels by bus to Kars, a once-important city where he spent much of his childhood. "Being on the borders of two empires now defunct, the Ottoman and the Russian, the mountain city also benefited from the protection of the standing armies each power had in turn placed in Kars for that purpose." Much of Pamuk's work, and "Snow" in particular, resides in this type of in-betweenness, both cultural and religious. In Kars, Ka plans to use his press pass to cover the municipal elections and also write about "the head-scarf girls" -- students who began committing suicide after they were barred from the classroom for refusing to remove their headscarves. Or, as one character says, girls barred "for flaunting this symbol of political Islam." Everything in Kars is political, and religion is politics. Those opposed to the banning fear that the girls will be turned into slaves of the West, while others claim that their removal allows equality and respect. The real reason for Ka's visit, however, is to see his former classmate, the beautiful Ipek, recently divorced. The two meet in a cafe. Over coffee, while reassembling the years they've been apart, they witness the attempted assassination of the director of the Institute of Education, the man who had initiated the ban. Afterwards, when snow forces the local government to close off the city from the rest of the world for three days, Ka finds himself descending into the terrorist organization responsible for the assassination attempt. The group's leader, Blue, believes that Ka is an agent of freedom returned from the Godless West to tempt the oppressed. What follows is part thriller, part political manifesto in the tradition of Dostoevsky's "Demons." Unfortunately, however, the ideas in "Snow" -- particularly the long and numerous religious debates -- often seem to be Pamuk's primary concerns. Because of this, the characters frequently disappear behind the dialogues, falling short of our expectations for them as individuals in command of their actions. From the opening passage, a dreamlike tone quietly arises, giving the novel a detached voice. This is at times poetic but also logical in a narrative told from the point of view of someone who continually reminds us how he received his information and that he was not present during Ka's visit to Kars. But these detachments continuously call to question the authenticity of the narrator's perceptions. Combined with the long religious dialogues, this often makes for slippery reading. Pamuk, whose works have now been translated into more than 20 languages, has attained rare status among literary writers. His highly praised intellectual novels have become international bestsellers. "Snow" will frustrate many simply because of its abundant references to a culture we know too little about. But the experience of reading Pamuk, who has indeed inherited from all the writers with whom he has been compared, is like nothing else in contemporary literature. That alone explains much of the fuss. . . . . . . . Kevin Rabalais is co-editor of "Novel Voices" (Writer's Digest Books), conversations with award-winning American novelists. LOAD-DATE: September 5, 2004 ---------------- The Denver Post September 5, 2004 Sunday FINAL EDITION Clashes in the Middle East culture at issue In "Snow," Islamic beliefs battle Western influences John Freeman Special to The Denver Post Earlier this summer, the European court of Human Rights upheld the Turkish government's decision to ban head scarves in schools. It was a victory for the state but unlikely to put an end to controversy. One need only pick up Orhan Pamuk's mournful new novel, "Snow," to understand how divisive an issue this is in Turkey. Set between 1999 and 2001, Pamuk's tale revolves around the suicides of three teenage Muslim girls. Islamic clerics blame their deaths on the government because it punished the girls for wearing head scarves. Secularists argue that the girls were just depressed and did what teenagers sometimes do when engulfed by sadness. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle, and that's what the novel 's hero, a Turkish poet named Ka, looks for when he travels by bus to the remote border village of Kars. His trip echoes a journey made in 1829 by the Russian poet Pushkin, and as it turns out, Ka is an even less faithful reporter than his Russian counterpart. He is distracted by an unrequited crush he nurses for a woman he barely knows. As a former exile born to money in Istanbul, he is also desperately aware of his outsider status in this provincial town. Reading "Snow" can be a disjunctive experience, then, because the reader's attention and Ka's attentions are so often at odds with one another. While tensions ratchet upward toward a revolution, Ka drifts through town in a somnolent haze, dazzled by a heavy snowstorm. As the flakes drift down, muffling gunshots across town, cries for help, Ka wanders into tea rooms to jot down poems before they dissolve like snowflakes on his jacket sleeve. Maintaining distance, obviously, is his forte. As the novel progresses, however, Ka is forced out of the amniotic bath of his artistic remove. He witnesses an Islamic hit placed on a government minister. Knowing that he must maintain at least the pretense of journalism to remain in Kars, Ka interviews the families of the head-scarf girls, as they are called, the boys who became infatuated with them and the Islamic leaders inflamed by their deaths. With the help of a philosophical young boy, Ka visits a dashingly mysterious Islamic fundamentalist named Blue. Like many other characters in this book, Blue wants an Islamic Turkey, and he's willing to do what it takes to make that happen. Alternating between the snowstorm's hush and philosophical conversations that are reminiscent of Dostoyevsky's great novels, "Snow" proves a surprisingly gripping read. And a timely one, too, given France's ruling on head scarves and events in the Mideast. Pamuk has claimed in interviews he is not a political writer, but he will have difficulty defending that position with "Snow," which dramatizes many of the issues facing the Middle East today including the separation of church and state, poverty, the role of the military, women's freedoms, modernization and the influence of the West. Unfortunately, the book's compelling side drama of a writer struggling to remain apolitical is nearly occluded by all these sociological and political points of interest. It's a burden Pamuk, who won the IMPAC Prize for his novel "My Name is Red" labors under to a certain degree. To non-Turks, his books are first and foremost windows into Turkish culture. In time, it would be nice to have the pleasure of reading "Snow" not simply as the political novel it certainly is, but as a work of art. John Freeman is a writer in New York. ----------------------- Snow By Orhan Pamuk; translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely Knopf, 400 pages, $26 LOAD-DATE: September 7, 2004 ------------------ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution September 5, 2004 Sunday Home Edition East, West meld in acid 'Snow' DIANE ROBERTS SOURCE: For the Journal-Constitution FICTION REVIEW Snow. By Orhan Pamuk. Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. Knopf. $26. 448 pages. The verdict: Turkish Alice down a rabbit hole. Nations, being arbitrary political constructs, have their contradictions and paradoxes. But few are more paradoxical than Turkey: the westernmost part of Asia, the easternmost part of Europe, where Roman emperors built churches that Ottoman emperors turned into mosques, a country of Muslims in whose 20th-century revolution women were ordered to take off, rather than put on, the veil. The work of the distinguished Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, winner of several international literary prizes, embodies the rich creative tension between the Occidental and the Oriental, the secular and the sacred, cable TV and the call of the muezzin. It's as if Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Naguib Mahfouz and Scheherazade all got together to collaborate. Ka is a not-very-productive poet from Istanbul, living in exile in Germany. He returns to Turkey for his mother's funeral, then decides to travel to the far-off border city of Kars, lately notorious as the place where a series of devout girls have committed suicide, supposedly because they were forbidden to wear head scarves in school. In addition, Kars is the home of Ka's old flame, Ipek. Ka cherishes romantic notions that he and Ipek might fall in love and get his creative juices flowing again. While he's at it, he figures he'll write something for the Istanbul newspapers about the "headscarf girls." But Kars, stuck in a corner of Turkey that has been controlled at different times by Armenians, Russians and Kurds, isn't merely on the border of disputed territories but on the border between past and present, the magical and the real. Once Ka checks into Kars' Snow Palace Hotel, he walks through the looking glass into a topsy-turvy world where strict Islamists watch Mexican TV soap operas, young men martyr themselves over a girl's hair and the local paper prints the news before it happens. Pamuk slyly and expertly plays with stereotypes --- the tortured poet, the Muslim militant, the mysterious woman --- in a setting that always threatens to topple over into the symbolic. No one is what he or she seems, at least during the great snow that keeps falling and cuts the city of Kars off from the 21st century itself. Pamuk himself is a character in the novel, relating the story of his friend Ka the way you would a long, off-the-wall fairy tale, narratively doubling back on himself with wry digressions and philosophical deconstructions of love, predestination and history. "Snow" is witty and, like the fiction of Kundera, Calvino or Borges, unapologetically intellectual. "Snow" is clever; it's acidly funny, too. Pamuk is an equal opportunity satirist, skewering the politics both of the westernized Turks and the Islamists. One of Ka's old friends, Ruhi, works "as a test subject in a study measuring the effectiveness of an advertising campaign for a new type of lamb pastrami pizza marketed to Turkish workers in the lowest income bracket." In the New Life Pastry Shop, a fundamentalist lectures the head of the Kars Institute of Education on women and the Quran before he shoots him: "As the American Black Muslim professor Marvin King has already noted, if the celebrated film star Elizabeth Taylor had spent the last twenty years covered, she would not have had to worry so much about being fat. She would not have ended up in a mental hospital. . . . Why are you laughing, sir?" Ka is on a quest. He wants to win the gorgeous but elusive Ipek, he wants to solve the mystery of the "headscarf girls" and penetrate the enigma that is Kars itself. Ka is also a Turkish Alice down a rabbit hole, where he learns to believe many more than six impossible things before breakfast. Such as that the difference between the Islamists and the secularists isn't always clear. And that language itself wields not mere aesthetic power but can act like a spell or a curse, directing the course of events. Kars doesn't simply veer between the magical and the real; it is, like Looking Glass Land, a place of inversions. The snow that keeps falling is at once natural and supernatural: It covers up the tracks of assassins and muffles the sound of gunfire, and it turns provincial Kars into an enchanted city where anything is possible. The Border City Gazette, the local daily, isn't just a small-town rag; it seems to predict, even shape, the news. Serdar, the owner-editor-publisher, runs a story that says Ka will give a public reading of a new poem, well before Ka even thinks of writing one. Later, the paper reports a murder before it happens. Time in Kars is out of joint. Or maybe it takes a different, nonlinear shape. "Snow" is in some ways more fable than novel. Ka, Ipek, the would-be revolutionary Blue are characters reported rather than felt: The reader remains at arm's length from all of them. But Pamuk keeps you engaged throughout the intricacies of his story. It is, as he points out himself, like a snowflake, more beautiful and complex the closer you look. Diane Roberts teaches English at the University of Alabama. LOAD-DATE: September 5, 2004 ---------------- Newsweek September 6, 2004 U.S. Edition An Empire Of Stories By Malcolm Jones HIGHLIGHT: Turkey's tortured history inspires two fine novels Turkey is a novelist's dream, or perhaps a land dreamed by a novelist. A border country between Europe and the Middle East, it has for centuries been so many things to so many people--Christians, Muslims, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds and, of course, Turks--that it has become a place where fantasies and realities collide like tectonic plates. Everybody has a story, and, as two new novels set in Turkey demonstrate in their radically varying tales, every story is startlingly unique. In "Birds Without Wings," Louis de Bernieres tackles a piece of Turkish history with the same vigor that he used to sketch World War II Greece in "Corelli's Mandolin." But this is a darker book, with nothing like its predecessor's central love affair to soften its tragedy. Near the novel's beginning, de Bernieres introduces Philothei, his fictional village's most beautiful woman, about whom one character says she "reminded you of death," because to look upon her was to know that "everything decays away and is lost." Like Eskibahce, the village she inhabits, Philothei is notable for nothing but her beauty; both are doomed. By the end of "Birds Without Wings," Eskibahce has been decimated by World War I and its aftermath. What had been a patchwork paradise of ethnicities--Greeks, Turks and Armenians--is gone, sacrificed for modern Turkey, forged by the ruthless, charismatic Kemal Ataturk out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks have been exiled, the Armenians slaughtered. Those who remain are too impoverished and war-weary to know what hit them. De Bernieres takes his cues from Tolstoy--his characters' stories are always played out against the scrim of history. The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is more a Kafka man. "Snow" takes place in the 1990s in the far-eastern Turkish village of Kars. And while the story, packed with nationalists, socialists and militant Islamists, has a superficial currency, its reality is dreamlike. Snow falls for most of the novel, isolating the town, where a poet, called Ka, has come to investigate a series of suicides by teenage Muslim girls who refuse the secular government's order to remove their headscarves. Artistically blocked for years, Ka, a Westernized sophisticate, suddenly begins to write poetry again. He falls in love so deeply that he begins to betray everything--even his own scruples--to preserve his happiness. Because he believes in nothing beyond his own desire, he is marked for tragedy. De Bernieres is so inventive--celebratory but never sentimental--that he is the more beguiling of the two novelists. But Pamuk is the more profound. At the end of "Snow," a young man says to the narrator, "I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away." By refusing to condescend to his characters--by just showing them, not explaining them--Pamuk endows even the most reprehensible figures with dignity. Like de Bernieres, Pamuk never generalizes. In their indelible novels, every tragedy wears a different face. LOAD-DATE: August 31, 2004 ---------------------- Detroit Free Press September 12, 2004 Sunday 0 EDITION Novel has action, insight, wit for serious reader Review by Charles Matthews Haunting and edgy, Orhan Pamuk's "Snow" is a novel by a writer who takes the novel seriously, as a vehicle for exploring ideas and examining the predicament of the world. It's a book with action and intrigue, witty insights and lively characters, but it's also a work with a moral and symbolic complexity that makes most contemporary fiction look thin and inconsequential. The protagonist is a poet known as Ka (the initials of his full name, which he dislikes), who has returned to Turkey after 12 years of exile in Germany. A friend who works for an Istanbul newspaper persuades Ka to write a story about the numerous suicides by teenage girls that have taken place in the remote city of Kars, in eastern Turkey near the border with Armenia. Ka accepts the assignment when he hears that an old girlfriend, Ipek, now lives in Kars. Ka winds up snowbound in Kars, which is the nexus of all manner of ethnic, religious and political tensions. The suicides, for example, seem to be provoked by the secular government's attempt to ban head-scarves -- Ka is told that the girls, devout Muslims, killed themselves in protest. But the Muslims issue their own denunciations of suicide as a sin, adding to the enigma that is Kars, which has an other-side-of-the-looking-glass quality to it. It's a place where the newspaper often goes to press with reports of events that haven't happened yet. (Ka reads a poem at a public meeting, even though he hadn't planned to and hadn't even written the poem, in part because the newspaper has already printed a story about the reading.) It's also a place where a theatrical production turns deadly because the rifles carried on stage contain live ammunition. Ka witnesses an assassination, interviews an Islamist terrorist, becomes the object of police suspicion and falls deeply in love with Ipek, all of which serves to bring him to life for the first time in many years: He begins writing poetry with a new fervor. (Cunningly, Pamuk never lets us read any of Ka's poems.) Fittingly, Ka's name echoes that of Kars, the city that vivifies him but also puts his life in jeopardy. Moreover, the Turkish word for snow is "kar" -- the book's original title, and no doubt one of the many nuances lost in translation. But the name also suggests Kafka's protagonist known as K. -- pronounced "ka" in German. And there is something Kafkaesque about Ka's experiences, even before he goes to Kars: Though "he had never been very much involved in politics," Ka had fled Turkey after the military coup of 1980, to avoid going to jail "for a hastily printed political article he had not even written." Politics has a way of swallowing up the uncommitted, and isolation turns places like Kars (and many others around the globe) into political vortices. "Snow" is the seventh book by a writer who evidently believes, like the great novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, that fiction can make a difference -- morally and politically. He even courts comparison to such writers, beginning his book with epigraphs from Conrad, Dostoyevsky and Stendhal, a daunting company to say the least. But he shares with them a vision of human beings shaped by external forces they can't control and by interior drives that they choose not to control. This is serious fiction for serious readers. CHARLES MATTHEWS writes for the San Jose Mercury News. LOAD-DATE: September 12, 2004 ------------------ Entertainment Weekly September 17, 2004 Snow Gilbert Cruz SNOW Orhan Pamuk Novel (Knopf, $ 26) Orhan Pamuk does not hold back. In his seventh novel, the Turkish author addresses Love, Religion, Politics, and many other big-letter themes as he dissects the ideologies that threaten his native land. Ka, a 42-year-old poet who has not written in many years, returns to Turkey after years of political exile. Ostensibly there for his mother's funeral, Ka journeys to the border town of Kars to investigate a rash of suicides by Muslim girls banned from school for wearing their head scarves, while also planning to convince Ipek, an old crush, to run away with him. A proxy for Turkey itself, Ka is torn between Islam and atheism as he experiences a streak of poetic inspiration he attributes to God. Crammed with empathetic characters fervent in their beliefs, Snow abounds with political intrigue while remaining lushly tragic at heart. A-- --Gilbert Cruz GRAPHIC: COLOR PHOTO LOAD-DATE: September 10, 2004 --------------------- The Weekend Australian September 18, 2004 Saturday All-round Country Edition BOOKS BEHIND THE NEWS SOURCE: MATP Uneasy marriage of East and West TURKEY drew back from the brink of making adultery a crime, fearful it would jeopardise its chances of being admitted to the EU, whose members will decide that issue on October 6. The complexity of life in modern Turkey is the stuff of best-selling Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's new novel, Snow. Christopher Hitchens, in The Atlantic Monthly noted Turkey is "physically and historically, the 'bridge' between East and West" and that with his previous novel, My Name is Red, Pamuk "himself became a kind of register of this position". The new book deals with the trials of Kerim Alakusoglu, who returns from Germany to live in Kars, on the Turkish-Armenian border, a place shaken by an epidemic of suicides by young girls distraught at not being allowed to wear the Muslim veil. Poverty is ever-present and other voices include Kurdish separatists, political Islamists and secularists. Pamuk said in Ankara's Turkish Daily News: "When an author in the West writes about the ordinary elements of life -- the pain, the sorrow, the happiness he sees around him, it is characterised as a story of humanity. But when an author from a country on the periphery does the same thing, he is perceived as having voiced ethnic problems." * Crescent and Star by Stephen Kinzer (Saint Martin's Press, $30). Acclaimed journalist's view. * The Emergence of Modern Turkey by Bernard Lewis (Oxford Uni Press, $65). By a respected academic. LOAD-DATE: September 17, 2004 From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:19:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:19:47 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] WETA-FM Alert Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 09:13:18 -0500 From: ronkean at juno.com To: checker at panix.com Cc: ronkean at juno.com Subject: Re: WETA-FM Alert On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 05:47:00 -0500 (EST) Premise Checker writes: > This is the first alert I've ever sent out. I realize that the economics > of broadcasting is driving the proposed format change from classical > (which played no classical music during "rush" hour) to all news, as > though another all-news station were needed. I suspect that the > licensing regulations distort the economics here. I agree that economic forces operate on both public broadcasters and commercial broadcasters. Broadcasting has been set up as a government monopoly in that the government by law owns or controls the wavelength spectrum in the first instance, and then the government doles out broadcast licenses to broadcasters on a first-come first-served basis, not by leasing to highest bidders. The annual license fees are typically far less than the economic value of those licenses to commercial broadcasters. The conventional wisdom holds that there is a shortage of broadcast spectrum in areas of concentrated population, and indeed there are only about 100 channels of AM broadcast spectrum, about 100 for FM, and a few dozen for TV. Signals carry about 50 miles (except for AM at night, which can carry 500 miles), so each major city in effect has its own set of channels, though cites which are less than 100 miles apart, e.g. Baltimore and Washington, and Baltimore and Philadelphia, have to avoid sharing channels to avoid interference. The point I am getting at has to do with the controversy over satisfying diverse tastes, such as a taste for classical music or for bluegrass music. Apparently advertising to bluegrass listeners is not profitable enough that any commercial station in Washington can afford to play bluegrass. And we are seeing that even the one public non-profit FM station which had been playing some bluegrass is not finding that 'profitable' enough to continue. Since the licenses are already doled out at a very low cost, the question is whether the lack of bluegrass can be blamed on spectrum shortage, or more generally on the cost of broadcasting in a larger sense. WETA-TV stops broadcasting on channel 26 each night at about 2 AM. Its broadcasts continue for several hours on their parallel digital channel, and on the cable feed. Apparently, WETA-TV thinks that it's not worth the cost of electricity to run the channel 26 analog transmitter after 2 AM. Commercial TV stations, on the other hand, run their transmitters 24 hours per day, filling the wee hours with infomercials or with network news which generally repeats the same stories over and over again hourly. There is new technology coming which will greatly multiply the number of available channels for TV and radio. Satellite radio has appeared which allows banks of channels to be heard nationally. With a national audience, would it be profitable to play bluegrass and classical music on satellite radio? But there is more coming - digital radio should be able to multiply to number of channels in the AM and FM bands. Digital radio on cable (using the existing TV cable systems) should be able to provide hundreds of channels. Then there is the internet. As far as I can tell, the prognosis is good for accommodating diverse tastes in broadcast content. Ron Kean [Ron later added that the Sirius satellite radio website has a full time bluegrass channel and XM seems to have a weekend bluegrass schedule. Of course, what I want is to be able to get any 78 rpm recording of classical music at any time. I think there are 100-200,000 of them but have never seen any good estimates.] [I'm taking my annual Lenten break from forwarding articles again this year. It's a vice to spend so much time doing this. So I'll be off the air for forty days and forty nights from Ash Wednesday until Easter.] From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:21:22 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:21:22 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: Sex and the scientist Message-ID: Sex and the scientist http://education.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5121225-111763,00.html 5.2.8 [I'm taking my annual Lenten break from forwarding articles again this year. It's a vice to spend so much time doing this. So I'll be off the air for forty days and forty nights from Ash Wednesday until Easter.] Susan Greenfield's grand passion is popularising science, so it's not surprising if she calls the president of Harvard a 'toerag' and appears in Hello! says John Crace John Crace Two things almost everyone knows about Susan Greenfield. She wears mini-skirts and she's a scientist. The problem for Greenfield is the order in which they are ranked, for her appearance often attracts bigger headlines than her work. There aren't that many women working in science in the first place, so when a woman scientist is as comfortable in the pages of Hello! as in a peer-reviewed journal, and has patented a look in designer rock-chick chic, then it's safe to assume that some kind of statement is being made. So first things first. Yes, she is wearing a mini-skirt, yes, she is concerned about whether she should put on some lipstick for the photographs and, yes, she is looking just great anyway. Greenfield maintains that her appearance is separate to her identity as a scientist. "The most important thing is that I should remain true to myself," is a frequent refrain in our conversation and she affects a battle-hardened je ne regrette rien attitude towards everything in her past. But you suspect it's not that straightforward. Greenfield is as savvy a media player as she is an academic, and you can't help feeling there's a conscious trade-off at work. If science is her passion, then popularising science is her grand passion and in a world that measures popularity by column inches, then pretty much anything goes. You can't fault the logic: you can't get your ideas across if nobody listens and if the easiest way to grab people's attention in the first place is on the strength of your appearance, then so be it. You might lose a few, you might look a prat now and again, but overall you'll be in profit. It's a formula that has served her well so far. Aside from the day jobs as Fullerian professor of physiology at the department of pharmacology at Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, she's picked up the Michael Faraday Medal from the Royal Society, a CBE and life-peerage from the present government, has written a report on women in science for Patricia Hewitt, and happily trots the globe in the democratisation of science. Last summer she was in Adelaide as "speaker in residence" - the perfect job for someone who scarcely draws breath between sentences - and last month she was mixing it with the great and the good at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Apart from a round-robin email she received from the caring, sharing Sharon Stone, the biggest name she ran up against was Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, who was recently reported as saying that women were genetically incapable of good science. On the way up in the lift to her office, Greenfield laughingly described Summers as "that toerag", but she is rather more measured once the tape is running. Though the underlying sentiment remains the same. "I was chairing a meeting on 'Gender and the Brain'," she says, "and it was only natural that Summers's comments were discussed. A colleague of his apologised on his behalf and asked if I would like to meet him later that week. "We had a good conversation where he rather moderated the position he was reported to have taken. He admitted he was wrong to have spoken out on a subject on which he had no expertise, and I was able to point out that even if we could agree on what was meant by 'good at science' there was no gender-based, genetic bio-determinism involved. There are issues about why women are under-represented in science but these are best explained by socialising factors." This encounter epitomises the pay-off for Greenfield. No matter how good a scientist she may be, there was not a cat in hell's chance of her getting a one-to-one with Summers so quickly, unless she had the requisite public profile and the media clout. But it does have its professional downsides. Last week, Greenfield was accused of dumbing down science by selling the rights to the Royal Institution's Christmas lectures to Channel 5 rather than offering them back to the BBC. The tension between Greenfield and some of her peers has been going on for years and shows no sign of diminishing - not least because it's hard to fight a battle when your enemies refuse to identify themselves. Last year, two fellows were quoted as saying they would resign if Greenfield were elected to the Royal Society - just the latest in a long line of anonymous detractors. "It's hard to engage with it all," she admits, "because you're never quite sure who or what you're dealing with. Everyone is always quite nice to me in person and then I hear I'm being criticised behind my back, though the criticisms are always fairly vague. Rather than explaining why and where my science is weak, they restrict themselves to general value statements with no evidence to back them up." Just what Greenfield has done to upset so many people is hard to work out. Research on the brain and consciousness is generally regarded as rather left-field and does not attract large grants, so it can't be about the money. What's more, within the neuroscientific community, her views are fairly mainstream. There's no grand theory of consciousness, there's no grand design on creating artificial intelligence; just standard, uncontroversial scientific theory. "We don't even know what questions we ought to be asking about consciousness," she points out, "let alone understand how it may be composed. So how can you build artificial intelligence if you don't know what to leave in or leave out? My understanding is that there are degrees of consciousness: a rat is less conscious than a foetus is less conscious than an adult - and an adult may be more or less conscious at different times of the day. This hypothesis means that you have a route to better understanding consciousness by measuring the network assembly of neurons in the brain." Last month Greenfield won a ?1m research grant from the US-based John Templeton Foundation to head the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind - a multi-disciplinary team of academics from pharmacology, human anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, theology and philosophy. It's ground-breaking stuff, as it's the first time that science and the humanities have combined in this way and it's no coincidence that Greenfield has been one of its architects. If you're looking to award a grant in an obscure area, who better to give it to than a respected academic with a high media profile: that way you're guaranteed a public return for your cash. It's equally in character that the centre's work has already been hyped out of all recognition, with lurid speculation about torturing religious zealots. Greenfield shrugs non-committally. "I'm used to the media getting things wrong," she says, "but I understand its agenda is to sell papers. The reality is rather more dull. Researchers will be applying a mildly uncomfortable chilli paste to volunteers to determine how people react to pain and what difference the power of belief might make." As with much of Greenfield's work on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the research is large part blue-skies, big picture with a touch of the short-term practical thrown in. "Within two years we might be able to give some answers to what a belief means in brain terms - and how it can affect your immune system, but the longer-term question of how beliefs can change a subjective state will certainly take a great deal longer." If, indeed, they are ever answered. Greenfield insists she only gets satisfaction from seeking answers to the big questions, but it's hard to resist the notion that there's something masochistic about working on problems to which you'll almost certainly never get a definite answer. People have spent thousands of years trying to make sense of consciousness and may well be not much further on several thousand years hence, and no one seriously believes a cure for Alzheimer's is anything but a distant dream. Greenfield's willingness to continually put her head above the media parapet also verges on the masochistic. For if the problem isn't her science, then you have to conclude it's personal. Is it because she's a woman? Or because she's successful? Or because she's just a little bit too loud for some academics' liking? Or some combination of the three? "I don't have the same scientific background as many of my peers," she says, "so perhaps my face doesn't quite fit. I studied classics at school, psychology as an undergraduate, and only switched to science as a postdoc. So there are huge gaps in my scientific training - [physics and chemistry are the two biggest casualties] - and I still have a great deal of sympathy with the media and politicians who like their science in black and white, rather than academics who prefer to restrict themselves to shades of grey. This doesn't mean you compromise the evidence: you just explain it clearly and simply." This isn't something that many scientists are good at doing, which is why Greenfield has made it her life's work. "Only last week I got a letter from a schoolgirl saying, 'girls like me need women like you'," she says. And as my hour comes to an end, someone from Canadian radio is waiting outside in the corridor. The science sales show never ends. The CV Name: Susan Greenfield Age: 54 Job: Fullerian professor of physiology, professor of pharmacology, Oxford University; director, Royal Institution of Great Britain Other honours : Michael Faraday medal, 1998; honorary fellow of Royal College of Physicians, 1999; CBE, 2000; life peerage, 2001 Publications: Journey to the Centre of the Mind, 1995; Private Life of the Brain, 2000; 100 Things To Do Before You Die, 2004 Likes : Jo Malone bubble bath Dislikes : socks and sandals on men Separated : with one step-child From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:22:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:22:39 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Signs of Awareness Seen in Brain-Injured Patients Message-ID: The New York Times > Science > Signs of Awareness Seen in Brain-Injured Patients http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/science/08coma.html 5.2.8 By BENEDICT CAREY Thousands of brain-damaged people who are treated as if they are almost completely unaware may in fact hear and register what is going on around them but be unable to respond, a new brain-imaging study suggests. The findings, if repeated in follow-up experiments, could have sweeping implications for how to care best for these patients. Some experts said the study, which appeared yesterday in the journal Neurology, could also have consequences for legal cases in which parties dispute the mental state of an unresponsive patient. The research showed that the brain-imaging technology, magnetic resonance imaging, can be a powerful tool to help doctors and family members determine whether a person has lost all awareness or is still somewhat mentally engaged, experts said. "This study gave me goose bumps, because it shows this possibility of this profound isolation, that these people are there, that they've been there all along, even though we've been treating them as if they're not," said Dr. Joseph Fins, chief of the medical ethics division of New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Fins was not involved in the study but collaborates with its authors on other projects. Other experts warned that the new research was more suggestive than conclusive, and that it did not mean that unresponsive people with brain damage were more likely to recover or that treatment was yet possible. But they said the study did open a window on a world that has been neglected by medical inquiry. "This is an extremely important work, for that reason alone," said Dr. James Bernat, a professor of neurology at Dartmouth. Dr. Bernat said findings from studies like these would be relevant to cases like that of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman with brain damage who has been kept alive for years against her husband's wishes. In that case, which drew the attention of Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature, relatives of Ms. Schiavo disagreed about her condition, and a brain-imaging test - once it has been standardized - could help determine whether brain damage has extinguished awareness. The patients in question have significant brain damage. Three million to six million Americans live with the consequences of serious brain injuries, neurologists said. An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 of them are in what is called a minimally conscious state: they are bedridden, cannot communicate and are unable to feed or care for themselves, but they typically breathe on their own. They may occasionally react to instructions to blink their eyes or even reach for a glass, although such responses are unpredictable. By observing behavior in a bedside examination, neurologists can determine whether a person is minimally conscious or in a "persistent vegetative state" - without awareness, and almost certain not to recover. In the study, a team of neuroscientists in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., used imaging technology to compare brain activity in two young men determined to be minimally conscious with that of seven healthy men and women. In a measure of overall brain activity, the two groups were vastly different: the two minimally conscious men showed less than half the activity of the others. But the researchers also recorded an audiotape for each of the nine subjects in which a relative or loved one reminisced, telling familiar stories and recalling shared experiences. In each of the brain-damaged patients, the sound of the voice prompted a pattern of brain activity similar to that of the healthy participants. "We assumed we would get some minimal response in these patients, but nothing like this," said Dr. Nicholas Schiff, an assistant professor of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan and the study's lead author. The two men showed near-normal patterns in the language-processing areas of their brains, Dr. Schiff said, suggesting that some neural networks "could be perfectly preserved under some conditions." Although the number of patients studied was very small, the specificity and intricacy of the patterns made it all but impossible that the results were a fluke, said Dr. Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional MRI Research Center at Columbia University Medical Center and the study's senior author. One of the two minimally conscious men lay still in a brain-imaging machine while his sister recounted his toast at her wedding and recalled times playing together as children. Although his eyes were closed, the researchers found that visual areas of his brain were active, suggesting that he might have been producing images, Dr. Hirsch said. "We do not know for sure what is happening in this man's head, but if he were imagining things at the sound of his sister's voice, that would suggest some connection to emotion," Dr. Hirsch said. Since the study was completed, Dr. Hirsch said, the team has run the same kinds of tests on seven similar brain-injury patients, with similar results: the language processing networks in their brains display seemingly normal patterns upon their hearing the voice of a loved one. The government has provided financing for the team to conduct a larger study of mental activity in minimally conscious people. A better understanding of brain patterns in minimally conscious patients should also help cut down on misdiagnosis by doctors, Dr. Fins said. He said one study had found that as many as 30 percent of patients identified as being unaware, in a persistently vegetative state, were not. They were minimally conscious. Moreover, mental states can change over time, and some patients have almost completely recovered function after being thought vegetative. Brain imaging would be one way to track these changes, and even link them to efforts at treatment. Doctors have no cure for either a minimally conscious or persistently vegetative state. "The most consequential thing about this is that we have opened a door, we have found an objective voice for these patients, which tells us they have some cognitive ability in a way they cannot tell us themselves," Dr. Hirsch said. The patients are, she added, "more human than we imagined in the past, and it is unconscionable not to aggressively pursue research efforts to evaluate them and develop therapeutic techniques." From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:23:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:23:42 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be 'Evil' Message-ID: The New York Times > Health > Mental Health & Behavior > For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be 'Evil' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/health/psychology/08evil.html 5.2.8 By BENEDICT CAREY Predatory killers often do far more than commit murder. Some have lured their victims into homemade chambers for prolonged torture. Others have exotic tastes - for vivisection, sexual humiliation, burning. Many perform their grisly rituals as much for pleasure as for any other reason. Among themselves, a few forensic scientists have taken to thinking of these people as not merely disturbed but evil. Evil in that their deliberate, habitual savagery defies any psychological explanation or attempt at treatment. Most psychiatrists assiduously avoid the word evil, contending that its use would precipitate a dangerous slide from clinical to moral judgment that could put people on death row unnecessarily and obscure the understanding of violent criminals. Still, many career forensic examiners say their work forces them to reflect on the concept of evil, and some acknowledge they can find no other term for certain individuals they have evaluated. In an effort to standardize what makes a crime particularly heinous, a group at New York University has been developing what it calls a depravity scale, which rates the horror of an act by the sum of its grim details. And a prominent personality expert at Columbia University has published a 22-level hierarchy of evil behavior, derived from detailed biographies of more than 500 violent criminals. He is now working on a book urging the profession not to shrink from thinking in terms of evil when appraising certain offenders, even if the E-word cannot be used as part of an official examination or diagnosis. "We are talking about people who commit breathtaking acts, who do so repeatedly, who know what they're doing, and are doing it in peacetime" under no threat to themselves, said Dr. Michael Stone, the Columbia psychiatrist, who has examined several hundred killers at Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center in New Hampton, N.Y., and others at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, where he consults and teaches. "We know from experience who these people are, and how they behave," and it is time, he said, to give their behavior "the proper appellation." Western religious leaders, evolutionary theorists and psychological researchers agree that almost all human beings have the capacity to commit brutal acts, even when they are not directly threatened. In Dr. Stanley Milgram's famous electroshock experiments in the 1960's, participants delivered what they thought were punishing electric jolts to a fellow citizen, merely because they were encouraged to do so by an authority figure as part of a learning experiment. In the real world, the grim images coming out of Iraq -the beheadings by Iraqi insurgents and the Abu Ghraib tortures, complete with preening guards - suggest how much further people can go when they feel justified. In Nazi prisoner camps, as during purges in Kosovo and Cambodia, historians found that clerks, teachers, bureaucrats and other normally peaceable citizens committed some of the gruesome violence, apparently swept along in the kind of collective thoughtlessness that the philosopher Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evil. "Evil is endemic, it's constant, it is a potential in all of us. Just about everyone has committed evil acts," said Dr. Robert I. Simon, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School and the author of "Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream." Dr. Simon considers the notion of evil to be of no use to forensic psychiatry, in part because evil is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, shaped by political and cultural as well as religious values. The terrorists on Sept. 11 thought that they were serving God, he argues; those who kill people at abortion clinics also claim to be doing so. If the issue is history's most transcendent savages, on the other hand, most people agree that Hitler and Pol Pot would qualify. "When you start talking about evil, psychiatrists don't know anything more about it than anyone else," Dr. Simon said. "Our opinions might carry more weight, under the patina or authority of the profession, but the point is, you can call someone evil and so can I. So what? What does it add?" Dr. Stone argues that one possible benefit of including a consideration of evil may be a more clear-eyed appreciation of who should be removed from society and not allowed back. He is not an advocate of the death penalty, he said. And his interest in evil began long before President Bush began using the word to describe terrorists or hostile regimes. Dr. Stone's hierarchy of evil is topped by the names of many infamous criminals who were executed or locked up for good: Theodore R. Bundy, the former law school student convicted of killing two young women in Florida and linked to dozens of other killings in the 1970's; John Wayne Gacy of Illinois, the convicted killer who strangled more than 30 boys and buried them under his house; and Ian Brady who, with his girlfriend, Myra Hindley, tortured and killed children in England in a rampage in the 1960's known as the moors murders. But another killer on the hierarchy is Albert Fentress, a former schoolteacher in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., examined by Dr. Stone, who killed and cannibalized a teenager, in 1979. Mr. Fentress petitioned to be released from a state mental hospital, and in 1999 a jury agreed that he was ready; he later withdrew the petition, when prosecutors announced that a new witness would testify against him. At a hearing in 2001, Dr. Stone argued against Mr. Fentress's release, and the idea that the killer might be considered ready to make his way back into society still makes the psychiatrist's eyes widen. Researchers have found that some people who commit violent crimes are much more likely than others to kill or maim again, and one way they measure this potential is with a structured examination called the psychopathy checklist. As part of an extensive, in-depth interview, a trained examiner rates the offender on a 20-item personality test. The items include glibness and superficial charm, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, proneness to boredom and emotional vacuity. The subjects earn zero points if the description is not applicable, two points if it is highly applicable, and one if it is somewhat or sometimes true. The psychologist who devised the checklist, Dr. Robert Hare, a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said that average total scores varied from below five in the general population to the low 20's in prison populations, to a range of 30 to 40 - highly psychopathic - in predatory killers. In a series of studies, criminologists have found that people who score in the high range are two to four times as likely as other prisoners to commit another crime when released. More than 90 percent of the men and a few women at the top of Dr. Stone's hierarchy qualify as psychopaths. In recent years, neuroscientists have found evidence that psychopathy scores reflect physical differences in brain function. Last April, Canadian and American researchers reported in a brain-imaging study that psychopaths processed certain abstract words - grace, future, power, for example - differently from nonpsychopaths. In addition, preliminary findings from new imaging research have revealed apparent oddities in the way psychopaths mentally process certain photographs, like graphic depictions of accident scenes, said Dr. Kent Kiehl, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale, a lead author on both studies. No one knows how significant these differences are, or whether they are a result of genetic or social factors. Broken homes and childhood trauma are common among brutal killers; so is malignant narcissism, a personality type characterized not only by grandiosity but by fantasies of unlimited power and success, a deep sense of entitlement, and a need for excessive admiration. "There is a group we call lethal predators, who are psychopathic, sadistic, and sane, and people have said this is approaching a measure of evil, and with good reason," Dr. Hare said. "What I would say is that there are some people for whom evil acts - what we would consider evil acts - are no big deal. And I agree with Michael Stone that the circumstances and context are less important than who they are." Checklists, scales, and other psychological exams are not blood tests, however, and their use in support of a concept as loaded as evil could backfire, many psychiatrists say. Not all violent predators are psychopaths, for one thing, nor are most psychopaths violent criminals. And to suggest that psychopathy or some other profile is a reliable measure of evil, they say, would be irresponsible and ultimately jeopardize the credibility of the profession. In the 1980's and 1990's, a psychiatrist in Dallas earned the name Dr. Death by testifying in court, in a wide variety of cases, that he was certain that defendants would commit more crimes in the future - though often, he had not examined them. Many were sentenced to death. "I agree that some people cannot be rehabilitated, but the risk in using the word evil is that it may mean one thing to one psychiatrist, and something else to another, and then we're in trouble, " said Dr. Saul Faerstein, a forensic psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. "I don't know that we want psychiatrists as gatekeepers, making life-and-death judgments in some cases, based on a concept that is not medical." Even if it is used judiciously, other experts say, the concept of evil is powerful enough that it could obscure the mental troubles and intellectual quirks that motivate brutal killers, and sometimes allow them to avoid detection. Mr. Bundy, the serial killer, was reportedly very romantic, attentive and affectionate with his own girlfriends, while he referred to his victims as "cargo" and "damaged goods," Dr. Simon noted. Mr. Gacy, a gracious and successful businessman, reportedly created a clown figure to lift the spirits of ailing children. "He was a very normal, very functional guy in many respects," said Dr. Richard Rappaport, a forensic psychiatrist based in La Costa, Calif., who examined Mr. Gacy before his trial. Dr. Rappaport said he received holiday cards from Mr. Gacy every year before he was executed. "I think the main reason it's better to avoid the term evil, at least in the courtroom, is that for many it evokes a personalized Satan, the idea that there is supernatural causation for misconduct," said Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist in Newport Beach, Calif., who examined the convicted serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, as well as Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were convicted of murdering their parents in Beverly Hills. "This could only conceal a subtle important truth about many of these people, such as the high rate of personality disorders," Dr. Dietz said. He added: "The fact is that there aren't many in whom I couldn't find some redeeming attributes and some humanity. As far as we can tell, the causes of their behavior are biological, psychological and social, and do not so far demonstrably include the work of Lucifer." The doctors who argue that evil has a place in forensics are well aware of these risks, but say that in some cases they are worth taking. They say it is possible - necessary, in fact, to understand many predatory killers - to hold inside one's head many disparate dimensions: that the person in question may be narcissistic, perhaps abused by a parent, or even charming, affectionate and intelligent, but also in some sense evil. While the term may not be appropriate for use in a courtroom or a clinical diagnosis, they say, it is an element of human nature that should not be ignored. Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of psychiatry at Creedmoor who works with Dr. Stone, said she was skeptical of using the concept of evil but realized that in her work she found herself thinking and talking about it all the time. In 11 years as a forensic examiner, in this country and in Europe, she said, she counts four violent criminals who were so vicious, sadistic and selfish that no other word could describe them. One was a man who gruesomely murdered his own wife and young children and who showed more annoyance than remorse, more self-pity than concern for anyone else affected by the murders. On one occasion when Dr. Hegarty saw him, he was extremely upset - beside himself - because a staff attendant at the facility where he lived was late in arriving with a video, delaying the start of the movie. The man became abusive, she said: he insisted on punctuality. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:26:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:26:58 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: When Is a Doctor Too Old? Or Too Young? Message-ID: The New York Times > Health > Essay: When Is a Doctor Too Old? Or Too Young? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/health/08essa.html 5.2.8 By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. Look closely at the top of your doctor's head the next time you get a chance. Do those odd gray hairs worry you at all? Do they speak to you of wisdom and experience? Or do they remind you it may be time to leave the old fool for a source of more up-to-date care? In Britain, the National Health Service imposes draconian limitations on physicians wishing to work after age 65, and essentially forbids work after 70. The policy is clearly intended to guard the population from doddering idiots, but some may argue it squanders the best talents instead. We know all about dog-years and cat-years. No expert yet has come up with an estimate for doctor-years. How old do doctors really become, after 10 years in practice, or 50? Can we safely drag wrinkled, elderly frames around like tortoises, knowing that at work we are relatively immortal? Or should we retire while still chronologically young but, in doctor-years, obsolesced beyond repair? I once had two colleagues who graduated from medical school over 40 years apart. The young one was fresh out of training, the old one heading for retirement. Watching the two of them at work was one of the best possible lessons in the passage of medical time. The old doctor had taken care of some patients for decades. The intermittent half-hours they spent together had coalesced over the years into tight, loyal partnerships. The young one had never taken care of a patient for more than a couple of years before saying goodbye and moving on. The old doctor had learned medicine from a set of principles that were almost antique, as the drugs and tests of successive decades were replaced by newer, better models. The young one was fully versed in the newest tests and drugs, and had only a passing acquaintance with the historic standbys. The old doctor, although reasonably conversant with computers, was a hesitant typist who preferred paper charts, prescriptions, textbooks and journals to computerized medical records and cyberliterature. The young doctor played the computer keyboard like an organist at a Wurlitzer. Doctor and patient often plumbed the Internet for information together. Patients could take home freshly printed data analyses to study for themselves. So which one of these doctors did the better job? As far as I was concerned, they were in a dead heat. The old doctor, warm and informal, loved many long-term patients deeply, sometimes to the extent of forgetting they were patients, not friends. Just as you might avoid mentioning a friend's weight problem, drinking habits or bad breath, delicate issues were sometimes let slide in a culpably unprofessional way. The young doctor never let anything slide. Still, the atmosphere in that office was formal and more than a little chilly. Nothing smoothes the rough edges of medical care like some mutual affection - a lesson the young doctor had yet to learn. The old doctor used tests and medications fluently - up to a point. Some of doctor's habits were admittedly outmoded. Still, the years had left behind a certain supple flexibility of practice: after witnessing enough changing fashions in medical care, a doctor generally learns that most "best practices" are evanescent. The young doctor chose tests and treatments based on the premise that there was a single right way to do things. That doctor had yet to learn that absolute trust in any drug or treatment is often a major mistake. The old doctor stored important details about patients in memory, and nowhere else. The doctor's hesitantly typed notes recording office visits were brief and old-fashioned - a few sentences at most, difficult for anyone else to interpret. The young doctor remembered little about each patient from visit to visit, but typed volumes, and was a big fan of medical software that supplies preformed phrases, sentences and paragraphs - the results of an entire physical exam, for instance - at the click of the mouse. Sometimes the mouse clicked just a little too quickly and erroneous information crept into the charts. Insurance reviewers occasionally confused the old doctor's terse notes with incompetence. Patients occasionally complained bitterly about the young doctor, deploring that habit of pounding the computer keyboard for the duration of their visit and never once looking them in the eye. Both doctors, learning of these misunderstandings, were mortified and furious. Colleagues who had to wade through charts belonging to either one just tore their hair. In some ways, the young pup was much too young for the work, and the old dog much too old. In other ways, each was just right, and would never be better. Does the practice of medicine have a natural life span? Every doctor, every patient (and every insurer) would probably answer differently. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:29:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:29:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Atheism and children by Natalie Angier Message-ID: Atheism and children by Natalie Angier Center for Inquiry Metro New York - Natalie Angier lecture http://www.cfimetrony.org/natalie.html [I'm taking my annual Lenten break from forwarding articles again this year. It's a vice to spend so much time doing this. So I'll be off the air for forty days and forty nights from Ash Wednesday until Easter.] Thank you, and it's an honor to be speaking here at the Ethical Culture Society, in what I understand to be the Ceremonial Hall. According to my beloved American Heritage Dictionary, ceremonial means "formal or ritual," and though I don't go in for terribly many rituals, I did start the holiday season with the ritual viewing of the atheist's favorite Christmas movie, "Coincidence on 34th Street." This is also the time of year, of course, when Jesus invariably screws up and commits some sort of felony. How else to explain why so many people seem to find him in jail? You see? This is what happens when they flush people like me out of our foxholes. And because I'm here to talk about raising healthy, 100 percent guaranteed god free children, I will happily give full credit for the aforementioned remarks, and all that is to follow, to my eight-year-old daughter, Katherine. Yes, this is an atheist's idea of responsible parenting. Can you see the horns growing out of the top of my head? Actually, last night I was reading in the New England Journal of Medicine about a condition in which people grow these horn-like projections from the top of their head, benign tumors called cylindromas. And just to show you how ecumenical the condition can be, in some cases, the doctors wrote, the cylindromas may "coalesce to form a hat-like growth, giving rise to the term `turban tumor.'" But seriously. I'm here to talk about why my husband and I are raising our daughter as an atheist. The short, snappy answer is, We don't believe in god. The longer, self-exculpating answer that is the theme du noir is, We believe it is the right thing to do. First, let me talk a little bit about why I use the term atheist rather than a more pastel-inflected phrase like agnostic or secular humanist, or the latest offering, Bright. Now when it comes to any of the mainstream deities proposed to date, I am absolutely atheistic. I can understand the literary and metaphoric value of any number of characters from mythology and religion. During this last election, we all felt like Sisyphus, we pushed that boulder and pushed and pushed, and we were just about at the top of the mountain, well, you know the rest. Or maybe we were Prometheus, with the vulture forever pecking away at our liver, or Job, or the dry run for the Lazarus bit. Yet however legitimate it may be to view any of our religious books as we would the works of Shakespeare or Henry James , I don't take them seriously as descriptions of how the universe came to be or how any of us will re-be in some posthumous setting, or what god is or wants or whines about. So I am an unalloyed atheist by the standards of the mainstream sects. Nevertheless, what of the hugeness of the universe, and of the possibility that there are other universes beyond this one, or even that the universe in some sense desires to know itself, and that we are the I and the eyes of the universe? This idea has philosophical appeal, and it certainly offers me some inspiration, a belief that we have a moral imperative, if you will, to understand the universe to the furthest extent our brains can manage. I was moved recently by a letter I read in "Freethought Today," published by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. It was a response to some questions by a Navy ensign, from none other than Albert Einstein. "I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one," Einstein wrote. But rather than be billed as a "professional atheist," Einstein added, "I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being." So, yes, of course, humility in the face of cosmic grandeur is always warranted; but let us not forget that Einstein sought to the very end of his long life to honor that grandeur by seeking to understand it, bit by bit, with his weak little intellect. How much better, in my view, is that approach, of humility crossed with an unslakable curiosity to delve the majesties of nature; over the sort of hooey humility that we benighted and defeated "liberals" are supposed to be mastering, that preached by the evangelical superstar John Stott, who, according to David Brooks, does not believe that "truth is something humans are working toward. Instead, Truth has been revealed." As Stott writes: "It is because we love Jesus Christ [that] we are determined...to bear witness to his unique glory and absolute sufficiency. In Christ and in the biblical witness to Christ God's revelation is complete; to add any words of our own to his finished work is derogatory to Christ.'' Just as Lewis Black said on "The Daily Show" about the proposal that gays should be barred from teaching, "Well, there goes the school play!" so with Stott we can bid the NSF, the NIH, MIT goodbye. Who needs Heisenberg's uncertainty or Einstein's relativity when we've got two ox, two mules and the nativity? Oy vey, these are values? These and a subway token won't get you on the subway. And so, to me, atheism means what it says - without god or gods, living your life without recourse to a large chiaroscuro of a supreme being to credit or to explain or to excuse. Now I'll be the proud mother and say that my daughter understands this. A couple of days ago, in preparation for this talk, I was interviewing her, asking her a few questions about how she viewed her heathen heritage. First I asked her if she believed in god. She crinkled up her nose at me like I had mentioned something distasteful, like spinach and liver, or kissing a boy, and said, No! I asked her if she was sorry she'd been raised as an atheist, and she said no, she liked it. I asked why. First, she said, you don't have to waste Sundays going to pray. Also I'd rather do things myself than have somebody else do them for me. If somebody gets sick, I wouldn't just pray to god he or she gets better, I would try to buy some medicine for them, to help them get better. Oh, I liked that answer. I couldn't help it. This sounded to me like, what do you call it, a value system. She also said that she likes to see things for herself before believing in them. If a friend told me, guess what, I've got a flying dog, I'd say, can I see it. Katherine said she has friends who claim they've seen god. One of her close friends told her she's seen bright lights in the middle of the night that she knows were signs from Jesus. So Katherine asked her if she could do a sleepover, to check out the light for herself. Oh, you'd never see it, her friend replied. Only people who believe in god can see it. As Richard Dawkins has said, "With religion, there's always an escape clause." Admittedly, Katherine is lucky. She lives in a very liberal community, Takoma Park, Maryland, which went 91.8% for Kerry; and a lot of other kids, she told me, share her views about god. A couple of times she's been told she's going to go to hell - or, as she phrased it, the opposite of heaven; she's remarkably curse-averse - but she says she doesn't care because she doesn't believe in either destination anyway. But in some places in the United States, it's extremely tough to be an atheist, even fatal. Last October, in Taylor, Michigan, a former Eagle Scout shot another man to death because, he said, the man was "evil; he was not a believer." We all know the sort of tolerance they teach in the Boy Scouts and Eagle Scouts of America, of course. No gays allowed - guess you don't expect them to be very good at pitching tents and tying knots, right? - and no atheists. They kicked out Darrell Lambert, a model scout if there ever was one, because he refused to say he believed in God, remember? At which point, I'm proud to say, my husband, who was a boy scout and an eagle scout and learned many skills as a scout and had earned many patches and badges, decided to send back his eagle scout medal to the Boy Scouts of America; and he wrote a beautiful essay about his decision for the Washington Post. The director of public affairs at the organization sent him an answer, saying, We accept your decision, but we hope that someday, you will come to be more open-minded in your views. So, what advice do I have for nonbelievers trying to raise their children in a rigidly religious, small town environment? Move. I kid you not. I went to high school in a small Michigan town, very religious, lots of baptists, also lots of drunk drivers, and believe me, they were the worst four years of my life. Move to a big city in just about any state, or move to a medium-sized city in a blue state, move to Takoma Park, or move to Canada if you can stay awake. Move to a university town. Because there are plenty of secularists out there, oh yes. Sure, we've been told repeatedly, we've been beaten practically comatose, with the notion that we live in an extremely religious country. We've all read the statistics on how people would elect as president a member of any other oppressed group - a woman, a Jew, a Muslim, even that very same gay person they'd rather not see in their schools and certainly not at the wedding altar - before they'd vote for an atheist. Anywhere from 90 to 95 percent of Americans say they believe in god. But how meaningful are these statistics? Are they any more reliable than the poll result I saw recently, apocryphal I hope, which showed that 55% of American Christians believed Noah to be a relative of Joan of Arc? As John Horgan pointed out in Sunday's New York Times, a Harvard University study has found that the number of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown sharply over the past 10 years, to as many as 39 million, twice the number of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Episcopalians combined. Yes, the secularists are out there, but they tend to prefer large cities and other places with an active cultural and intellectual life. Which brings me to why I think raising a child as an atheist, or a committed secularist, is the right thing to do, and should be done without apology, indeed with pride. I'm a science writer. I'm fond of evidence, and I'm a serious devotee of the scientific method, and the entire scientific enterprise. Let me tell you, scientists as individuals can be as petty, insecure, vain, arrogant and opinionated as the rest of us. The myth of the noble, self-sacrificing scientist should never have been allowed to grow beyond the embryonic stem cell stage, and most scientists will tell you as much. But science as a discipline weeds out most of the bluster and blarmy, because it asks for proof. "One of the first things you learn in science," one Caltech biologist told me, "is that how you want it to be doesn't make any difference." This is a powerful principle, and a very good thing, even a beautiful thing. This is something we should embrace as the best part of ourselves, our willingness to see the world as it is, not as we're told it is, nor as our confectionary fantasies might wish it to be. Science is also extraordinarily unifying. You go to a great lab or to a scientific meeting, and you will see scientists from around the world, talking to each other and forming international collaborations. This is something we should be proud of, even if we ourselves are not scientists - that our species, our collective minds, our heads knocked together, are capable of making sense of the universe. So to me, this, more than anything, is what being an atheist means, an ongoing devotion to exploration, a giving of pride of place to evidence. And much to my dismay, religion often is at odds with the evidence-based portrait of reality that science has begun, yes, only just begun, fleshing out. The biggest example of this is in the ongoing debate over evolution. This is like Rasputin, or the character from the horror movie Halloween - it refuses to die. The statistics are appalling. This year, according to the Washington Post, some 40 states are dealing with new or ongoing challenges to the teaching of evolution in the schools. Four-fifths of our states. According to a recent CBS poll, 55 percent of Americans believe that god created humans in their present form - and that includes, I'm sorry to say, 47 percent of Kerry voters. Only 13 percent of Americans say that humans evolved from ancestral species, no god involved. Only 13 percent. The evidence that humans evolved from prehominid primates, and they from earlier mammals, and so on back to the first cell on earth some 3.8 billion years ago is incontrovertible, is based on a Himalayan chain's worth of data. The evidence for divine intervention is, to date, non-existent. Yet here we have people talking about it as though they were discussing whether they prefer chocolate praline ice cream or rocky road, as though it were a matter of taste. To me, this borders on being, well, unethical. And to me, instilling in my daughter an appreciation for the difference between evidence and opinion is a critical part of childrearing. So when I tell my daughter why I'm an atheist, I explain it is because I see no evidence for a god, a divinity, a big bearded mega-king in the sky. And you know something - she gets that. She got it way back when, and I think once you get it, it's pretty hard to lose it. People sometimes say to me, jokingly or otherwise, just you wait. She's going to grow up and join a cult, be a moonie or a jew for jesus. But in fact the data argue against it. The overwhelming majority of people who join cults, more than three-quarters, were raised as one or another type of Christian, including Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, the works; and no greater percentage of atheists than in the general population. I'm sure Katherine will figure out a way to drive me nuts some day, but I don't think the Rahjneeshi route is it. Ah, but what of values, of learning the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? What about tradition, what about ritual, what about the holidays that children love so much? How will a child learn to be good without religious training? Well, damn. Do you really need formal religion to teach a child to be good, to be honest, to try not to hurt other people's feelings, to care about something other than yourself? These are all variants on the golden rule, and there is nothing more powerful, in my experience, than sitting down with your kid and saying, how would you feel if somebody did that to you? There is a growing body of scientific research that demonstrates we are by nature inclined to cooperate, to trust others, even strangers, to an extraordinary degree. Even strangers we can't see, over the internet, and even strangers that we'll never meet again. None of this owes anything to the ten commandments. Which of those commandments tell you to help a stranger who looks lost, or jump into a river to help saving a drowning kid, or donate blood, maybe even a kidney or a slice of liver? Sure, people also do terrible things, scam you, betray you, steal from you, on and on. But sheesh, Rush Limbaugh was and for all I know still is a junkie, and priests abuse choir boys, and on and on. I've talked to Katherine about the struggles we all go through, a desire to hurt others, to get revenge. She wrote a book report recently in which she talked about wanting to get revenge on people who do bad things to her, but that, alas, it's not always easy. And when I saw that, whoa, we had a mother of a conversation. About how the two most powerful human impulses are love and revenge, and how one is a great strength that we should nurture, and the other one is a natural feeling, and we all have it, but we must fight against it with everything we can muster. Because when we don't, we get wars, wars that can go on for years, for centuries, and we reviewed the story of Romeo and Juliet, which she loves, and that got to her, I think, that made it come alive. And as one who believes strongly in peace, I've taken her on march after march, before the Iraq war, during the republican convention. I had her miss her first day of third grade this year, so she could participate in a ceremony downtown, the reading of the names of people who have died in the Iraq war. She read the names of the children. I know I'm sounding pious here, and I'm sorry about that, but these are just some of the examples of things I've tried to do to make her a good person, to give her a sense of meaning larger than herself. And yes, we celebrate the holidays. We buy and decorate a Christmas tree, light the menorah, our house is encrusted with lights, including a big peace sign. I've told Katherine about how Christmas predates jesus, and how people have long felt the need, in the darkest, coldest time of the year, to battle the blackness with lights, music, family, the evergreen tree to symbolize life, and, oh, yes, presents. None of this seems like hypocrisy to me. It's common sense. It is magic, it is ours, and godness has nothing to do with it. I'd like to make one final point, an admission of the biggest challenge we faced when we decided to go the godfree route: what to talk about when you talk about death. For a while, Katherine was terrified about death. We'd be driving along in the car, and all of a sudden she'd start screaming in the back seat. What's wrong, what's wrong? We'd ask, thinking we had to pull over for a medical emergency. I've just been thinking about death! She'd cry. I don't want to just disappear! To die forever and that's all, that's the end. This happened a few times, each time, out of nowhere, she'd start to wail. We'd tell her whatever we could to comfort her, that she will live a long, long time, and that they're inventing new drugs that will, by the time she grows up, help her live even longer, a couple of hundred years, who knows; she'd live until she was pig-sick of it. And we'd tell her that nothing really disappears, it just changes form, and that she could become part of a dolphin, or an eagle, or a cheetah, a praying mantis. She'd have none of it. She knew she wouldn't be aware of her new incarnation. She knew she probably wouldn't remember her life as Katherine, and that loss of self she found impossibly sad. As do I, the loss of her, the loss of myself. As do all of us. Learning how to die is one of the greatest tasks of life, and it's one that most us never quite get the hang of, until we realize, whoops, not much of a trick here, is there. Not much of a choice, either. Still, I didn't go with the stories, of the angels, of the harps, the eternal reciting of that old Monty Python routine, o lord you are so big, so absolutely huge. We're all really impressed her, Lord, I can tell you that." And lately Katherine seems to have gotten past those terror jags. She hasn't had an outburst for the past year or two. I don't know the answer to fear of death, surprise surprise. But I find it interesting that religious people, who talk ceaselessly of finding in their religion a larger sense of purpose, a meaning greater than themselves, at the same time are the ones who insist their personal, copyrighted souls, presumably with their 70-odd years of memory intact, will survive in perpetuity. Maybe that's the real ethic of atheism. By confronting the inevitability of your personal expiration date, you know there is a meaning much grander than yourself. The river of life will go on, as it has for nearly 4 billion years on our planet, and who knows for how long and how abundantly on others. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and we, as matter, will always matter, and the universe will forever be our home. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:32:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:32:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Matthew Parris: Ignore the vanity of the Bushites, America's might is draining away Message-ID: Matthew Parris: Ignore the vanity of the Bushites, America's might is draining away http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1065-1451138,00.html January 22, 2005 [I'm taking my annual Lenten break from forwarding articles again this year. It's a vice to spend so much time doing this. So I'll be off the air for forty days and forty nights from Ash Wednesday until Easter.] WHAT TIME is it for America? If the Boston Tea Party was first light and the Gettysburg Address dawn, where between the sunrise and sunset of empire is the United States now? To judge from his inauguration speech on Thursday, President Bush thinks it is about time for morning coffee: much to be proud of but big tasks -- maybe the proudest of all -- still ahead. To end tyranny on Earth is no small ambition. Gerard Baker, the US editor of The Times, ("Don't believe the doubters: America's decline and fall is a long way off yet") strikes a slightly more sanguine note. "A presidential inauguration is a chance for America to remind the world who is boss," he smiles, "to demonstrate that the United States is the inheritor not only of Greece's glory, but of Rome's reach" -- but Gerard would not himself go so far: he shares American anxieties about the rise of the Asian superpowers. He is confident, though, there are tremendous reserves of energy and potential still bubbling beneath the surface. "I would not bet on America's eclipse just yet," he concludes. For his America, I guess, it is around lunch. An afternoon's work is still ahead. I think it's about half past four. For America-2005-Iraq, think of Britain-1899-Boer War. Ever-heavier burdens are being loaded upon a nation whose economic legs are growing shaky, whose hegemony is being taunted and whose sense of world mission may be faltering. "Overcommitted?" is the whisper. Not that you would hear it in the din of drums and trumpets. More display is made in the spending of an inheritance than in its quiet accumulation, and the perfumed blossoms of July and August are heaviest after the nights have already begun to draw in. Like economic booms or summer solstices, empires have a habit of appearing at their most florid some time after their zenith has passed. Of the rise and fall of nations, history tends to find that the era of exuberance occurs when the underlying reasons for it are beginning to weaken. There is a time lag between success and swagger. "It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind," wrote Edward Gibbon in his autobiography. It was at Miami airport, on August 17, 2004, as I stood musing for two hours in the aliens queue for fingerprints, while contradictory instructions were aimed at confused passengers by incompetent officials (and two security men started body-searching each other) that the idea that for America the rot was setting in first started to my mind. In more ways than were betrayed by the battle between Lycra and human flesh being waged across the massive bums of the women I saw, America 2005 is overstretched. The neoconservative Right dreams about the prospect of a big new US military intervention in Iran, or perhaps Syria, but who stops to ask whether Washington has the troops for such an adventure? The aim would have to be regime change, and that needs ground forces. Simply "taking out" Iranian nuclear installations from the air would enrage and reinforce Iran's Islamist reactionaries, and scupper whatever pro-Western reformist movement there may be. The invasion would have to take place at the same time as maintaining the occupation of Iraq. This shows no signs of reducing its call on American forces, materiel or money. The Pentagon's efforts may even have to be stepped up after the Iraq election: this newspaper among many has called for unstinting and open-ended US commitment to Iraqi security. Whether or not you believed Tony Blair when he claimed that American Forces were in urgent need of help from our Black Watch Regiment before Christmas, you can see that as deaths mount and anarchy continues in Iraq, no US president can be thinking in terms of deploying troops away from that country for operations elsewhere. In 1995, 13.7 per cent of American troops were deployed abroad. Today it is some 27 per cent. America has more than 350,000 troops abroad. They are in (among other places) Ascension Island, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Diego Garcia, Djibouti, Egypt, Germany, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Kosovo and South Korea. In at least a handful of these places it is fair to say that the country in question would collapse without them. I am no military analyst, but it seems reasonable to observe that in pursuit of US foreign and military policy, US defence forces are being pushed fairly hard. It is fanciful for the Left to fear, or the Right to hope, that at the flick of a switch President Bush can create large new arenas of American military engagement. And, worryingly from the longer-term point of view, many of the more significant commitments among that list look like stalemates from the military point of view. No realistic president should see reason to hope that "mission accomplished" can soon be declared in the Balkans, Afghanistan or Iraq. America (and often Britain) is bogged down in such places. At the same time, I sense, America's need for brute force as a substitute for moral suasion may be increasing. Mr Bush said "freedom" 27 times in his speech. John F. Kennedy could be more sparing with the word because the idea behind it shone so brightly for America then, and for the world. Across Africa in the past century, US foreign policy goals, which included the peaceful dissolution of the British Empire, were advanced without the firing of a shot -- or the expenditure of more than the few dollars needed to fund American propaganda. Arguments are cheap, and America had the best arguments, the best visions, and the best tunes. Deservedly or undeservedly, America has lost the tune. Just as happened for Britain during the Boer War, something has gone unaccountably off-key. We British won that South African war in the end by sheer, bloody force; and America will not be "defeated" in Iraq, or, I suppose, anywhere else. But as armaments are increasingly substituted for arguments, the strain grows. Eventually fatigue sets in. There is a notion, as beloved of the European Left as of the yee-hah Right, that America's pocket is bottomless, its Armed Forces countless, its weaponry infinite, and the only possible constraint upon its Government is the will of the people. Europeans speak as though for Washington cost is just not a consideration. This is not true of any empire or nation and has never been true of America; but it is less true today than at any time since the end of the Second World War. For the truth is that the US is in relentless relative decline as an economic power in the world. The years after the Second World War (the years of the Marshall Plan), when the economies of most of its competitors had been wrecked while its own was growing strongly -- were the noontide of American muscle. The Cold War, because its central narrative was that of a mortal threat from a Soviet giant of equal power, diminished the appearance of American strength, but the narrative was false. The collapse of the rival giant has exaggerated America's apparent strength because it has so much more economic muscle than any single rival. But for many decades America's share of the world's economic output has been in decline. Think of a see-saw. America at one end is now easily outweighed by any substantial grouping at the other, and most of those powers are on friendly terms with each other. America's modesty in 1945 understated its muscle, just as Bushite vanity overstates it today. He has over-reached. His country is overstretched, losing economic momentum, losing world leadership, and losing the philosophical plot. America is running into the sand. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:33:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:33:56 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Victor D. Hansen: Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old Message-ID: VDH's Private Papers::Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson012605.html [I'm taking my annual Lenten break from forwarding articles again this year. It's a vice to spend so much time doing this. So I'll be off the air for forty days and forty nights from Ash Wednesday until Easter.] January 26, 2005 Stories of Imperial Collapse Are Getting Old by Victor Davis Hanson New Criterion The [6]most recent doom-and-gloom forecast by Matthew Parris of the London Times would be hilarious if it were not so hackneyed. After all, Americans long ago have learned to grin any time a British intellectual talks about the upstart's foreordained imperial collapse. And as in the case of our own intelligentsia's gloominess, it is not hard to distinguish the usual prophets' pessimistic prognostications from their thinly-disguised hopes for American decline and fall. But this country is now in its third century and assurances that the United States is about through are getting old. In the early 20th century the rage was first Spengler and then Toynbee who warned us that our crass consumer capitalism would lead to inevitable spiritual decay. Next, the Hitlerians assured the Volk that the mongrel Americans could never set foot on German-occupied soil, so decadent were these Chicago mobsters and uncouth cowboys. Existentialism and pity for the empty man in the gray flannel suit were the rage of the 1950s, as Americans, we were told, had become depressed and given up in the face of racial inequality, rapid suburbanization, and the spread of world-wide national liberationist movements. In the 1960s and 1970s we heard of the population bomb and all sorts of catastrophes in store for the United States and the world in general that had unwisely followed its profligate paradigm of consumption; yet despite Paul Ehrlich's strident doomsday scenario, the environment got cleaner and the people of the globe richer. And then came the historian Paul Kennedy, who, citing earlier Spanish and English implosions, "proved" that the United States had played itself out in the Cold War, ruining its economy to match the Soviet Union in a hopeless arms race-publishing his findings shortly before the Russian empire collapsed and the American economy took off (again). In the Carter `malaise years,' we were warned about the impending triumph of `Asian Values' and the supposed cultural superiority of Japan, Inc., which would shortly own most of whatever lazy and ignorant Americans sold them-before the great meltdown brought on by corruption, censorship, and ossified bureaucracies in Asia. Currently Jared Diamond is back with [7]Collapse, another grim tale from the desk of a Westwood professor, full of remonstrations about social inequality and resource depletion that we have come to expect from the rarified habitat in which tenured full professors thrive. All that disenchantment is the context in which Matthew Parris now warns us that our military is overstretched and our economy weak-despite the fact that our gross domestic product is larger than ever and the percentage of it devoted to military spending at historic lows, far below what was committed during WWII, Korea, or Vietnam. The American military took out Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam with a minimum of effort, and what followed was far better for both the long-suffering victims and the world at large. The difficult postbellum reconstruction in Iraq is costly and heartbreaking, but so far after September 11 we have lost fewer troops in 3 years of fighting that we did in one day during the Bulge or at Normandy. While Parris decries our slow decline, the United States alone will soon have the world's only anti-ballistic missile system and the forward basing presence to preempt would-be nuclear rogue states before they imperil Americans. Europeans may brag of soft power, but in the scary world to come let us hope that they can bribe, beg, lecture, or appease Iranians, North Koreans, Chinese, and others to appreciate the realities of their postmodern world that has supposedly transcended violence and war. It is true that Americans are worried about high budget deficits, trade imbalances, a weak dollar, and national debt; but we are already at work to rectify these problems, convinced that the correctives are not depression and chaos, but rather a little sobriety and sacrifice in what has been a breakneck rise in the standard of living the last 20 years, prosperity unmarked in the history of civilization. Better indicators of our health are low unemployment, low inflation, low interest rates, along with high worker productivity and innovation. Hollywood movies, New York books, Silicon Valley software and gadgetry, Pentagon arms, the English language, and popular culture show no signs of fading before French film, London publishing, Indian I-pods, Chinese aircraft carriers, the global preference for Mandarin or burquas for bare-navels and Levis. Parris cites the rise of other economies; but they, not us, have the real problems ahead. The EU does not assimilate very well its immigrants-in contrast, more come to the US every year than to all other countries combined. Enormous apartheid communities of Muslims, full of simmering resentment, reside outside Parris and in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Germany, not in Detroit and New York. European socialism is facing a demographic nightmare; and soon budget shortfalls to pay for its utopian agenda will be made worse once the United States begins to withdraw its 50-year subsidy of the continent's defense. History suggests that atheism and secularism are not indicators of strength but of apathy and aimlessness. The United States-not Europe, Russia, or China-- is a religious community, and, pace Michael Moore, without the fundamentalist extremism of the Middle East and reactionary Islam. China and India are the new tigers, but their rapid industrialization and urbanization have created enormous social and civic problems long ago dealt with by the United States. Each must soon confront environmentalism, unionism, minority rights, free expression, community activism, and social entitlements that are the wages of any citizenry that begins to taste leisure and affluence. China is fueled by industrious laborers who toil at cut-rate wages for 14 hours per day, but that will begin to moderate once an empowered citizenry worries about dirty air, back backs, inadequate housing, and poor health care. The infrastructure of generations-bridges, roads, airports, universities, power grids-are well established and being constantly improved in the United States, and so there is a reason why a European would prefer to drink the water, get his appendix out, or drive in San Francisco rather than in Bombay, Beijing, Istanbul-or Paris or Rome. Nowhere in the world is the rule of law as stable in the United States, which is the most transparent society on the globe and thus the most trusted for investors and entrepreneurs-no surprise given its hallowed Constitution and Bill of Rights. Parris notes the presence abroad of thousands of American troops, but does not ask whether any other country has, or will have, the air or sea lift capacity to project such power, force that allowed American ships and helicopters to save thousands after the tsunami when Europe's lone Charles de Gaulle was nowhere to be seen. China and India, for all their robust economies, have neither the ability to help victims of mass disasters nor citizenries wealthy or generous enough to give hundreds of millions to strangers abroad. All civilizations erode, but few citizenries are as sensitive to the signs of decay as Americans, who constantly innovate, experiment, and self-critique in a fashion unknown anywhere else. When we develop a class system based on British aristocratic breeding, accent, and social paralysis, or sink into a multicultural cauldron like the endemic violence of an India or Africa, or cease believing in either God or children like an Amsterdam or Brussels, or require the state coercion of a China to maintain harmony, or become a racialist state such as Japan, then it is time to worry. But we are not there yet by a long shot. References 6. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1065-1451138,00.html 7. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670033375/qid=1106575755 From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:36:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:36:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Theodore Dalrymple: The Specters Haunting Dresden Message-ID: Theodore Dalrymple: The Specters Haunting Dresden City Journal Winter 2005 http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_urbanities-dresden.html The foundations of Hitler's bunker were uncovered during the building frenzy in Berlin that followed the reunification of Germany. An anguished debate ensued about what to do with the site, for in Germany both memory and amnesia are dangerous, each with its moral hazards. To mark the bunker's site might turn it into a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis, resurgent in the East; not to mark it might be regarded as an attempt to deny the past. In the end, anonymous burial was deemed the better, which is to say the safer, option. Nowhere in the world (except, perhaps, in Israel or Russia) does history weigh as heavily, as palpably, upon ordinary people as in Germany. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, the disaster of Nazism is still unmistak- ably and inescapably inscribed upon almost every town and cityscape, in whichever direction you look. The urban environment of Germany, whose towns and cities were once among the most beautiful in the world, second only to Italy's, is now a wasteland of functional yet discordant modern architecture, soulless and incapable of inspiring anything but a vague existential unease, with a sense of impermanence and unreality that mere prosperity can do nothing to dispel. Well-stocked shops do not supply meaning or purpose. Beauty, at least in its man-made form, has left the land for good; and such remnants of past glories as remain serve only as a constant, nagging reminder of what has been lost, destroyed, utterly and irretrievably smashed up. Nor are the comforts of victimhood available to the Germans as they survey the devastation of their homeland. Walking with the widow of a banker through the one small square in Frankfurt that has been restored to its medieval splendor, I remarked how beautiful a city Frankfurt must once have been, and how terrible it was that such beauty should have been lost forever. "We started it," she said. "We got what we deserved." But who was this "we" of whom she spoke? She was not of an age to have helped or even to have supported the Nazis, and therefore (if justice requires that each should get his desert) it was unjust that she should bear the guilty burden of the past. And Germans far younger than she still bear it. I went to dinner with a young businessman, born 20 years after the end of the war, who told me that the forestry company for which he worked, and which had interests in Britain, had decided that it needed a mission statement. A meeting ensued, and someone suggested Holz mit Stolz ("wood with pride"), whereupon a two-hour discussion erupted among the employees of the company as to whether pride in anything was permitted to the Germans, or whether it was the beginning of the slippery slope that led to . . . well, everyone knew where. The businessman found this all perfectly normal, part of being a contemporary German. Collective pride is denied the Germans because, if pride is taken in the achievements of one's national ancestors, it follows that shame for what they have done must also be accepted. And the shame of German history is greater than any cultural achievement, not because that achievement fails to balance the shame, but because it is more recent than any achievement, and furthermore was committed by a generation either still living or still existent well within living memory. The moral impossibility of patriotism worries Germans of conservative instinct or temperament. Upon what in their historical tradition can they safely look back as a guide or a help? One young German conservative historian I met took refuge in Anglophilia--his England, of course, being an England of the past. He needed a refuge, because Hitler and Nazism had besmirched everything in his own land. The historiography that sees in German history nothing but a prelude to Hitler and Nazism may be intellectually unjustified, the product of the historian's bogus authorial omniscience, but it has emo- tional and psychological force nonetheless, precisely because the willingness to take pride in the past implies a preparedness to accept the shame of it. Thus Bach and Beethoven can be celebrated, but not as Germans; otherwise they would be tainted. The young German historian worked for a publishing house with a history lasting almost four centuries, but its failure to go out of business during the 12 years of the Third Reich cast a shadow both forward and backward, like a spectral presence that haunts a great mansion. The impossibility of patriotism does not extinguish the need to belong, however. No man is, or can be, an island; everyone, no matter how egotistical, needs to belong to a collectivity larger than himself. A young German once said to me, "I don't feel German, I feel European." This sounded false to my ears: it had the same effect upon me as the squeal of chalk on a blackboard, and sent a shiver down my spine. One might as well say, "I don't feel human, I feel mammalian." We do not, and cannot, feel all that we are: so that while we who live in Europe are European, we don't feel European. In any case, can a German feel European unilaterally, without the Portuguese (for example) similarly and reciprocally feeling European rather than Portuguese? From my observations of the French, they still feel French, indeed quite strongly so. Nearly half a century after the Treaty of Rome, they can't be said to like the Germans; to think otherwise is to mistake a marriage of convenience for the passion of Romeo and Juliet. A common European identity therefore has to be forged deliberately and artificially; and one of the imperatives for attempting to do so is the need of Germans for an identity that is not German (the other, which dovetails neatly, is the French drive to recover world power). And since the Germans are very powerful in Europe, by weight of their economy, their need to escape from themselves by absorbing everyone into a new collective identity will sooner or later be perceived in the rest of Europe as the need to impose themselves-- as a return to their bad old habits. New identities can indeed be forged, but usually in the crucible of war or at least of social upheaval: not, in the context, an inviting prospect. On no city does history weigh heavier than on Dresden. It is 60 years in February 2005 since the bombing that forever changed the basis of the city's renown. Overnight, the Florence of the Elbe became a perpetual monument to destruction from the air, famed for its rubble and its corpses rather than its baroque architecture and its devotion to art. And then came communism. You meet people in Dresden who, until a few years ago, knew nothing but life under Hitler, Ulbricht, and Honecker. Truly the sins of their fathers were visited upon them, for they brought neither the Nazis nor the communists to power, and there was nothing they could do to escape them. For such people, the sudden change in 1990 was both liberation and burden. Avid to see a world that was previously forbidden them, they took immediate advantage of their new freedom to visit the farthest corners of the globe, the more exotic the better. But the liberation brought with it a heightened awareness of the man-made desert of their own pasts, seven-eighths of their lives, truly an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Never was Joy's grape burst more decisively against veil'd Melancholy's palate fine. A decade and a half, and untold billions of deutsche marks and euros later, Dresden is still incompletely Westernized. Its unemployment rate is three times that of Germany as a whole, so high in fact that all the city dwellers I met believed the official figures to be manipulated downward, for propaganda purposes: it being inconceivable to them, as the result of long and incontrovertible experience, that any government would tell the truth about anything. And while some parts of the city have taken on the feverish vulgarity that for so many people in the modern world is the manifestation, prerequisite, and only meaning and value of freedom, others still have that disintegrating deadness peculiar to communism, where paint flakes and stucco crumbles, where stale smells always linger in stairwells, and electric light casts a yellowing gloom the color of cheap paper that has aged. Not all Dresden was bombed, of course; on the banks of the Elbe there are still the magnificent villas of the haute bourgeoisie. Some of them have been bought and restored by rich "Wessis," as the inhabitants of the former West Germany are still, not altogether affectionately, known; but others remain unrestored, uninhabited, and deteriorating, at night appearing unlit, like the set of a Gothic horror movie. One expects bats or vampires to emerge. For more than 40 years, they were the homes of Dresden "workers of the brain" (to use communist terminology), but such was their dilapidation that, immediately after reunification, they were declared unfit for habitation according to the standards of the West, and their residents moved elsewhere. To the moral complications of a Nazi past were added those of a communist past, the greatest of which was an awareness of just how widespread the practice of denunciation had been. On some estimates, a sixth of the population of the former German Democratic Republic were Mitarbeiter--collaborators with the secret police, the Stasi--and had spied upon and denounced their neighbors, friends, relatives, and even spouses. Once the archives opened and people could read their security dossiers for themselves, they discovered in many cases that those to whom they had relayed their private thoughts had relayed them in turn to the Stasi, in return, practically, for nothing except the informer's satisfaction of being on the right side of the powerful. Those whom people had thought were their best friends turned out to be the very ones whose denunciation had resulted in their otherwise inexplicable failure to gain promotion in their work, sometimes for decades. Such discoveries were not conducive to a favorable or optimistic view of human nature or the trust upon which a secure social life is built. The GDR, founded on a political theory that made a fetish of human solidarity, turned everyone into an atom in the asocial ether. The destruction of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945, by the Royal Air Force, and on the following two days by the U.S. Army Forces, necessitated the rebuilding of the city, with only a small area around the famous Zwinger restored to its former glory. Dresden had been all but destroyed once before, by the armies of Frederick the Great (if Frederick was enlightened, give me obscurantism); but at least he replaced the Renaissance city recorded in the canvases of Bellotto by a baroque one, not by a wilderness of totalitarian functionalism whose purpose was to stamp out all sense of individuality and to emphasize the omnipresent might of the state. The bombing of Dresden was a convenient pretext to do what communists (and some others) like to do in any case: the systematization of Bucharest during Ceausescu's rule, or the replacement of the medieval city of Ales, 25 miles from my house in France, by mass housing of hideous inhumanity on the orders of the communist city council, being but two cases in point. Despite this, the communists made use of the destruction of Dresden for propaganda purposes throughout the four decades of their rule. The church bells of the city tolled on every anniversary of the bombing, for the 20 minutes that it took the RAF to unload the explosives that created the firestorm that turned the Florence of the Elbe into a smoking ruin as archaeological as Pompeii. "See what the capitalist barbarians did," was the message, "and what they would do again if they had the chance and if we did not arm ourselves to the teeth." Needless to say, the rapine of the Red Army went strictly unmentioned. But the bombing caused some unease in Britain even at the time. Was it justified? The issue of the war, after all, was by then hardly in doubt; and, in any case, both the ethics and efficacy of bombing civilian areas had been questioned, not only by left-wing politicians and George Bell, bishop of Chichester, but by the air-force commanders themselves. A debate has simmered ever since, occasionally coming to a boil, as when a statue commemorating the head of the RAF's Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, was unveiled in London in 1992 or, more recently, when the Queen paid a state visit to Germany and failed to utter an apology for the bombing. I don't think any decent, civilized person can look at pictures of Dresden after the bombing without being overcome by a sense of shock. The jagged ruins of walls emerging from fields of rubble, as far as the eye can see or the camera record, are a testament, of a kind, to human ingenuity. Only the long development of science and knowledge could have achieved this. As for the funeral pyres of bodies, piled up with their legs and arms emerging from the mass, or the corpses of the people boiled alive in the fountains in which they had taken refuge . . . one averts not only one's eyes, but one's thoughts. Yet the idea sometimes propounded by those who seek to condemn the bombing as an atrocity equal to, and counterbalancing, Nazi atrocities--that Dresden was some kind of city of the innocents, concerned only with the arts and having nothing to do with the war effort, cut off from and morally superior to the rest of Nazi Germany--is clearly absurd. It is in the nature of totalitarian regimes that no such innocence should persist anywhere; and it certainly didn't in Dresden in 1945. For example, the Zeiss-Ikon optical group alone employed 10,000 workers (and some forced labor), all engaged--of course--in war work. Nor had Dresden's record been very different from the rest of Germany's. Its synagogue was burned down during the orchestrated Kristallnacht of November 1938; the Gauleiter of Saxony, who had his seat in Dresden, was the notoriously brutal and corrupt Martin Mutschmann. The bombing saved the life of at least one man, the famous diarist Victor Klemperer, one of the 197 Jews still alive in the city (out of a former population of several thousand). He and the handful of remaining Jews had been marked down for deportation and death two days after the bombing; in the chaos after the bombing, he was able to escape and tear the yellow star from his coat. Eighteen years after the end of the war, in 1963, the pro-Nazi historian David Irving published his first book, The Destruction of Dresden. In those days, he was either less pro-Nazi than he later became or more circumspect--the memory of the war still being fresh--but it was probably not entirely a coincidence that he devoted his first attention to an event that Churchill suspected might be a blot on the British escutcheon. However, Irving--later a leading Holocaust denier, who lost a famous libel suit against a historian who exposed him as such--clearly accepted in 1963 that there had been a Nazi genocide against the Jews, and he ended his book with an admission that the bombing (which he called "the biggest single massacre in European history") was "carried out in the cause of bringing to their knees a people who, corrupted by Nazism, had committed the greatest crimes against humanity in recorded time." There were faint signs of Irving's later acceptance of the Nazi worldview in this book, though they probably went unnoticed at the time. Describing the state of medical services in Dresden after the bombing, he mentioned that "a vast euthanasia-hospital for mentally incurables" was transformed into a hospital for the wounded, without any remark upon the very concept of a "euthanasia-hospital for mentally incurables": an institution that by itself would be sufficient to negate one meaning of his ambiguous description of Dresden in a chapter heading as "The Virgin Target." (Did he mean that it had never yet been attacked, or that the city was an innocent virgin?) Of course, it would be absurd to pretend that the bombing of Dresden was conducted in order to put an end to the evil of its "euthanasia-hospital," however vast, or to rescue Victor Klemperer from certain death. Among other motives for bombing, no doubt, was the need to demonstrate to the advancing Russians the tremendous firepower of the West, despite its relative weakness in land armies. Irving's book was influential, however, precisely because he hid, or had not yet fully developed, his Nazi sympathies. It achieved its greatest influence through Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut's famous countercultural antiwar novel, published six years later, which makes grateful acknowledgment of Irving's book, whose inflated estimate of the death toll of the bombing it unquestioningly accepts. Vonnegut, an American soldier who was a prisoner of war in Dresden at the time of the bombing, having been captured during the land offensive in the west, writes of the war and the bombing itself as if it took place in no context, as if it were just an arbitrary and absurd quarrel between rivals, between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, with no internal content or moral meaning-- a quarrel that nevertheless resulted in one of the rivals cruelly and thoughtlessly destroying a beautiful city of the other. But Vonnegut, to whom it did not occur that his subject matter was uniquely unsuited to facetious, adolescent literary experimentation, was writing an antiwar tract in the form of a postmodern novel, not a historical reexamination of the bombing of Dresden or of Germany as a whole. The problem that has bedeviled any such re-examination is fear that sympathy for the victims, or regret that so much of aesthetic and cultural value was destroyed, might be taken as sympathy for Nazism itself. The difficulty of disentangling individual from collective responsibility for the evils perpetrated by the Nazi regime is unresolved even now, and perhaps is inherently unresolvable. True, Hitler was immensely popular; on the other hand, he never won a majority of the votes in anything that resembled a free election, and public enthusiasm in dictatorships cannot be taken entirely at face value (in his diaries, Klemperer himself veers between thinking that most Germans were Nazis and that the enthusiasm was bogus and more or less forced). The Germans entered into the spirit of violence and denunciation with a will, but on the other hand intimidation was everywhere. A witness to the burning of the Dresden synagogue on Kristallnacht who was overheard publicly to liken it to the worst times of the Middle Ages was seized by the Gestapo and taken away: an object lesson to all those who saw or learned about his fate. And those who say that Nazism was the inevitable consummation of German history, inherent in all that had gone before, must explain why so many German Jews (my grandfather among them, a major in the imperial German army during the Great War) were deeply and patriotically attached to both the country and its culture, and why so many of them were so blind for so long. Their lack of foresight is surely as eloquent as the historian's hindsight. By the end of the war, 600,000 Germans had been killed by the bombing campaign, and a third of the population rendered homeless. Yet when the war was over, none among the many millions affected could express his grief and despair openly, for to have done so would have rendered him open to the charge of Nazi sympathies. The East Germans could toll the bells for Dresden each anniversary of the bombing only because the government enforced the myth that all the Nazis originated from, and were now located in, West Germany. But normal, personal, unideological grief was not permitted. W. G. Sebald, an expatriate German author who lived in England, where he died in a car crash in 2001, pointed out a curious lacuna in German literature of memoirs or fictional accounts of the bombing and its aftereffects. Millions suffered terribly, yet there is hardly a memoir or a novel to record it. Anything other than silence about what they experienced would have seemed, and still would seem, indecent and highly suspect, an attempt to establish a moral equivalence between the victims and perpetrators of Nazism. Foreigners, such as the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman, could write about the sufferings of the Germans immediately after the war, but not the Germans themselves. Victor Gollancz, a British publisher of Polish-Jewish origin who could not be suspected in the slightest of Nazi sympathies and who had spent the entire 1930s publishing books warning the world of the Nazi peril, wrote and published a book in the immediate aftermath of the war called In Darkest Germany, in which he drew attention to the plight of the Germans living (and starving) among the ruins, which he observed on a visit there. To the charge that the Germans had brought it all on themselves and deserved no less, he replied with a three-word question: "And the children?" His book was furnished with many affecting pictures, perhaps the most poignant among them that of the comfortably attired Gollancz lifting the foot of a little German boy to demonstrate his pitiful footwear to the camera. But for several decades, it was impermissible for Germans to allude publicly to their own sufferings of the period, much of which must have been innocent, unless it be considered that all Germans were equally guilty ex officio, as it were. No doubt the impermissibility of publicly expressed complaint, and therefore of resentment, was a powerful stimulus of the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, into which the Germans in the West threw their potentially resentful energies after the war, for lack of anywhere else to direct them. But this left a legacy of deep emptiness that all the reflective Germans I have met seem to feel. Perhaps it explains also the German longing to travel, greater than that of any other nation I know. In the last few years, best-selling books have begun to appear in Germany to record the suffering of the Germans during and after the war. Is this dangerous self-pity an implicit national self-exculpation? Or is it a sign of health, that at last Germans can approach their own past unencumbered by the psychological complexes bequeathed to them by their parents and grandparents? As I walked through Dresden, I lamented the loss of an incomparable city, while thinking how difficult it must be to be a German, for whom neither memory nor amnesia can provide consolation. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:37:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:37:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Simon Jenkins: A windmill I won't tilt at Message-ID: Simon Jenkins: A windmill I won't tilt at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1059-1449680,00.html January 21, 2005 [I'm taking my annual Lenten break from forwarding articles again this year. It's a vice to spend so much time doing this. So I'll be off the air for forty days and forty nights from Ash Wednesday until Easter.] It is the 400th anniversary of Don Quixote, a more important work than all of Einstein's theories A PICTURE of a battered warrior sits on my desk. I found it in a Bloomsbury print shop many years ago. He sits thin and sad on an ass, his helmet broken, his armour gone. He arrives home late at night to be greeted with joy and relief by his loving household. He has returned from knight errantry, to recover his reason and die. He is my icon. This month we celebrate two anniversaries. One is of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905), a great work of Western civilisation. The other is Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605), also a great work of Western civilisation. The first is greeted with BBC specials, colour supplements, postage stamps and a United Nations Year of Physics. The other, at least outside Spain, is being ignored. Which merits the bigger salute? I have no quarrel with Einstein. The mobsters of Big Science have declared him master of the Universe. His brain was measured and his shoes embalmed. Women wrote him letters wanting to have his babies. His thoughts are installed in Newton's temple and not found wanting. Einstein is cool. But if Einstein had not existed, physics would sooner or later have invented him. I am sure of that. His theory of relativity was an understanding of nature. It lay over the cosmic horizon, awaiting discovery by the first genius to pass its way. Einstein was its Columbus. Not so Miguel de Cervantes. He surveyed the landscape of post-medieval Europe and asked, but where is Man? He grasped at valour, love, loyalty, triumph and mortification and, like his contemporary, Shakespeare, compressed them in a human frame. He told a tale like no other man. If Cervantes had not existed, he could not have been invented. There would be a hole in the tapestry of Europe. Few English people read Don Quixote, probably because they think they know it already. We have heard of his fantasies and ordeals, of his poor horse and loyal squire, Sancho Panza, "not rich but well-flogged". We know of the tilting at windmills and ludicrous deeds to impress his yearning for the matchless Dulcinea del Toboso. The man is mad and not of our time. That is not the half of it. In 1605 there was also the publication of the full text of Hamlet. Quixote and Hamlet are often compared, though rarely by the chauvinist British. They share ghosts and demons, passion and honour, and they use plays within plays as metaphors. They both lead us over the bridge from the Middle Ages to introspection and the modern era. But Quixote is the more inventive, funnier, sadder, the loftier mind and the better conversationalist. His dialogues with Sancho, the knightly believer and the doubting servant, are among the most enchanting in literature. Cervantes lived his character. He fought the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, the culminating struggle of medieval Europe. He lost his left hand, was enslaved in Africa and imprisoned in Spain. His plays were failures. His life was a mess. Yet in just a few months of 1605 he wrote a book which soared beyond its time. The two parts of Don Quixote are as different as thesis and antithesis. The Don of the first part is the true fantasist, sated on fusty old texts. He sets out to re-enact the rules of chivalry, to defend justice and love in a sinful world. He battles with windmills, sheep and innkeepers' daughters. In his great essay on the Don, Carlos Fuentes talks of "art giving life to what history has killed". Part II breaks step with the past. The Don hears tell of his own exploits, indeed of his own book. Already he has chastised Sancho for thinking him unaware that Dulcinea is not a great beauty. He knows that she is a vulgar village girl, but she is the nobler for it. "Come Sancho," he cries, "it is enough for me to think her beautiful and virtuous . . . I paint her in my imagination as I desire her." A million Spanish women cheer. We are no longer sure who is poking fun at whom. Who are we to legislate between dream and reality? We are players and audience alike in the charade. Hence the Don leaps up from a puppet show and decapitates the model soldiers, to stop them arresting a lover and his princess as they escape to freedom. He then richly compensates the puppeteer for this "debt of honour". In the last chapter comes the final synthesis. The dying Quixote renounces the "dark shadows of ignorance" that came from reading "my detestable books on chivalry". He regrets only that he has no time to read "other books that can be a light to the soul". Don Quixote is supposedly the most popular novel in history. The Don was worshipped by Sterne, Goethe, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Melville. Two years ago his saga was voted the best novel of all time by the world's "hundred top writers". Millions have come to regard Quixote as a friend for life. Like Cervantes, they have slaved in the galleys at Lepanto and emerged with only their dreams to live for. Like Quixote they have hoped beyond hope and loved beyond love. All of us sometimes see windmills as giants, and giants as windmills. Everyone has a knight errant within them, guiding his lance and turning the most humble career into a noble crusade. Like Quixote we long to leap on life's stage, to warm Mimi's frozen hand or stay Othello's dagger. We imagine that frump in the Tube as the matchless Dulcinea, at least until Tottenham Court Road. Somehow I shall survive without Einstein. I can drive spaceship Earth without knowing the workings of the atom. But I cannot do without my icon. I raise my glass to the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, Don Quixote of La Mancha, as he trots across the plain of life in search of self-fulfilment. He knew that reason would triumph, but he also knew that reason was not enough. Quixote's epitaph ran: "It was his great good fortune to live a madman and die sane." Amen to that. simon.jenkins at thetimes.co.uk From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:41:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:41:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Robert S. Byonton: Righting Copyright: Fair Use and "Digital Environmentalism" Message-ID: Robert S. Byonton: Righting Copyright: Fair Use and "Digital Environmentalism" BOOKFORUM | feb/mar 2005 http://www.bookforum.com/boynton.html Who owns the words you're reading right now? if you're holding a copy of Bookforum in your hands, the law permits you to lend or sell it to whomever you like. If you're reading this article on the Internet, you are allowed to link to it, but are prohibited from duplicating it on your web site or chat room without permission. You are free to make copies of it for teaching purposes, but aren't allowed to sell those copies to your students without permission. A critic who misrepresents my ideas or uses some of my words to attack me in an article of his own is well within his rights to do so. But were I to fashion these pages into a work of collage art and sell it, my customer would be breaking the law if he altered it. Furthermore, were I to set these words to music, I'd receive royalties when it was played on the radio; the band performing it, however, would get nothing. In the end, the copyright to these words belongs to me, and I've given Bookforum the right to publish them. But even my ownership is limited. Unlike a house, which I may pass on to my heirs (and they to theirs), my copyright will expire seventy years after my death, and these words will enter the public domain, where anyone is free to use them. But those doodles you're drawing in the margins of this page? Have no fear: They belong entirely to you. While it was once believed that Marxism would overhaul notions of ownership, the combination of capitalism and the Internet has transformed our ideas of property to an extent far beyond the dreams of even the most fervent revolutionary. Which is not to say that anything resembling a collectivist utopia has come to pass. Quite the opposite. In fact, the laws regulating property--and intellectual property, in particular--have never before been so complex, onerous, and rigid. Copyright protection has been growing in fits and starts since the early days of the Republic. In 1790, a copyright lasted for fourteen years and could be renewed once before the work entered the public domain. Between 1831 and 1909, the maximum term was increased from twenty-eight to fifty-six years. It was extended several more times during the twentieth century until 1998, when the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act added twenty additional years (to both existing and future intellectual property), increasing copyright protection to seventy years after the death of an author. Some of the most significant changes in intellectual property law took place in the Copyright Act of 1976, after which it was no longer required to register one's work in order to protect it. Anything "fixed in a tangible medium"--e-mail messages, those doodles in the margins of this magazine--automatically became copyrighted. Recent laws--like the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which increased protection of copyrighted material on the Internet, and the Sonny Bono Act--have elevated intellectual property's status to such a degree that many courts and corporations often treat it in virtually the same way as they do physical property. This is a category mistake, and one explicitly forbidden according to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.'' Unlike Europe, whose laws center on the "moral rights" of the author to control his creation, American copyright law has always had the strictly utilitarian goal of providing just enough incentive for someone to create. Copyright is a bargain: The government grants a limited right to profit from your intellectual property in exchange for your agreement to give the public limited access to it during that period (such as the "fair use" right of a teacher to make class copies of an essay), and, eventually, for it to lapse into the public domain. But as copyright terms lengthened and intellectual property became a larger part of American industry, the logic of incentive has been overshadowed by the logic of reward, the thinking being that if my work continues to have value, why shouldn't I profit from it for as long as I want? "In our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains subservient to the value of creativity," writes Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig in his most recent book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. "Yet the current debate has this turned around. We have become so concerned with protecting the instrument that we are losing sight of the value." But if we have fallen into what New York University communications professor Siva Vaidhyanathan calls "the property-talk trap," it has had the unintended effect of mobilizing citizens by demonstrating the stake we all have in the debate over how intellectual property should be considered. Once an arcane part of the American legal system, intellectual property law is now at the center of major disputes in the arts, sciences, and politics. People are increasingly aware of the role intellectual property plays in their everyday lives; they bump up against it every time they discover they can't print a passage from an e-book or transfer a song from their computer to their iPod. These days, it is not uncommon to hear people casually conversing about legal concepts like "fair use" and the "first sale doctrine." Much of this awareness results from the well-publicized lawsuits the Recording Industry Association of America has brought against music downloaders. This is unfortunate, because it has created the impression that those in favor of liberalizing copyright law condone the theft of intellectual property. Leaving aside questions about the appropriate legal remedies for, and the economic implications of, downloading, taking copyrighted material for which one has not paid is simply illegal. The fact that illegal downloading is a mass phenomenon indicates that our intellectual property laws aren't working in much the same way that the speakeasies of the '20s and '30s pointed out the irrationality of Prohibition. Neither downloading nor drinking, however, made the activities more legal. It is in more common--and only marginally illegal--pursuits that ordinary citizens are realizing they have a legitimate stake in the debate over the scope of copyright law. As the price of digital video cameras and editing software plummets, the number of people who sync home movies to music, splice together clips from favorite television shows, and even produce documentaries has soared. TiVo and other digital video recorders have made it possible to trade programs over the broadband Internet connections that are finding their way into homes across the country. Young fathers are practically required to transplant images of their newborns into great works of art by way of Photoshop. In December 2004, Google announced "Google Print," a project to bring millions of easily searchable, digitized books to the Internet. The project, which has already begun and may take a decade to complete, will further heighten awareness of our vexed relationship to intellectual property. After digitizing the entire holdings of Stanford and the University of Michigan libraries (as well as sections of the libraries of Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library), Google Print will search the texts of these books--although one will only be able to read the entire text of those works whose copyright has lapsed and are therefore in the public domain. As for copyrighted titles, one will be able to search their text for names and key phrases but won't be allowed to read the books themselves (a function like Amazon's helpful, but similarly limited, "Search inside this book" service). Instead, one will be directed to a library or bookstore where the book can be located. As amazing an effort as Google Print is (creating nothing less than a virtual "universal library of knowledge"), its logical goal--giving readers full access to the entire contents of that library--will be undercut by our intellectual property laws. It is an inherently unstable situation, and it is only a matter of time before someone (Amazon? Random House?) develops software to link this vast cache of literature to a convenient print-on-demand service (for which the hardware already exists). When it becomes possible to hold an inexpensive, physical copy of one of Google's digitized titles in one's hands--but only if it was first published prior to 1923 and is therefore in the public domain--people will begin to understand the implications of having something so obviously beneficial (universal access to universal knowledge) tethered to laws from another era. Google Print may be the Trojan Horse of the copyright wars. * * * While a range of copyright-infringing technologies has been changing the way we interact with our culture, critics of excessive copyright protection have been forging a coalition to demand that the law be brought more in line with the capabilities of these technologies. The challenge is considerable. Individual intellectual property rights are often in conflict with one another, and the only groups with a common interest in the direction of such laws are those corporations who want to lock up culture in perpetuity (or "forever minus a day," as former Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti once suggested). Even following the twists and turns of the debate is difficult, since negotiations are seldom held in public. "This cultural war is almost invisible," writes David Bollier in Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture. "It is happening quietly and incrementally--in rulings by distant courts, in hearing rooms on Capital Hill and obscure federal agencies, in the digital code that Hollywood and record labels surreptitiously implant into DVDs and CDs." One of the most suggestive responses to this dilemma has come from Duke University law professor James Boyle, who, in his landmark book Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (1996), diagnosed the problem succinctly. "What we have right now is an exponentially expanding intellectual land grab, a land grab that is not only bad but dumb, about which the progressive community is largely silent, the center overly sanguine, and the right wing short-sighted." Boyle's subsequent work is an extended plea that we value the public domain. "Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property,'' he writes. Boyle is one of the founders of "digital environmentalism," the movement that is fashioning a new understanding of what the public domain--the "commons," as Boyle and others have called it--might be. The great achievement of the environmental movement, from which Boyle draws inspiration, was its ability to convince a swath of the population--consumers and industrialists alike--that they all had a stake in this thing called "the environment," rather than just the small patch of land where they lived. Similarly, digital environmentalists are raising our awareness of the intellectual "land" to which people ought to feel entitled. Digital environmentalism is a two-pronged movement, with one group raising the awareness of the cultural stakes of intellectual property among everyday citizens, and the other pressing for legislative and legal change. The difference between the two is one of emphasis, with each participating in the battles of the other. Neither are anarchists or utopians; rather, both perceive of themselves as conservatives in the traditional sense of the term. "The point is not that copyright and trademark law needs to be overthrown," writes Bollier. "It is that its original goals need to be restored. Individual creators need to be empowered more than ever. The volume and free flow of information and creativity need to be protected. The public's rights of access and use must be honored. We must strike a new balance of private and public interests that takes account of the special dynamics of the Internet and digital technology." For those in the legal camp, the central event of recent years was Eldred v. Ashcroft, the 2002 Supreme Court case that challenged the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Appearing before the court, Lessig argued that perpetually extending the term of copyright violated the Constitution's stipulation that copyright exist for only "a limited time.'' The court rejected Lessig's position by a vote of seven to two, holding that while the extension was perhaps unwise on policy grounds, it was still within Congress's constitutional authority. A second legal challenge, which Lessig brought in 2004, went nowhere. Developments on the legislative front have been, if anything, more discouraging. Laws that strengthen copyright and increase penalties for infringement are introduced, and reintroduced, in Congress every year. In 2004, the Induce Act, a bill so broadly drawn that it would have held manufacturers of TiVo and iPods legally responsible if their customers used them for infringing copyright, died in committee, but it is only a matter of time before a similar piece of legislation passes. The cultural prong of digital environmentalism has had somewhat more success. Represented by writers like Bollier, Vaidhyanathan (Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System), Kembrew McLeod (Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity), and others, they all advocate the path of activism and resistance. Working within existing law, they propose that artists and authors aggressively exercise their intellectual property rights in the face of threats and legal challenges from overbearing copyright holders. Bollier, for one, perceives the work of digital environmentalists as benefiting from the momentum generated by legal challenges like Lessig's. "Acts of civil disobedience against the antisocial, personally intrusive claims of copyright law have only grown since the Eldred ruling, in part because of it," he writes. Their premise is that, like a muscle, intellectual rights grow stronger only when exercised. "For the most part, we don't need any new legislation. Fair use is a great solution, but for it to have any real impact on our culture we need to vigorously and confidently (though not carelessly) employ this legal doctrine in daily life," writes McLeod. The problem, they contend, is less the laws than the lawyers. Lawyers representing copyright holders encourage their clients to limit access to their intellectual property as much as possible. "The lawyers tell us 'You may gaze upon and buy the products of American culture,'" Bollier writes in Brand Name Bullies. "'But don't be so na?ve as to think that you can actually use them for your own purposes. We own them.'" And the lawyers representing creators (artists, writers, and filmmakers, for example) who want access to copyrighted material for their work have decided that the transaction cost of boldly exercising fair-use rights is simply too high. Their primary goal is to avoid confrontation, even when they know that the outcome--should the case come to court--would favor their clients. The strategy of the cultural digital environmentalists is twofold. First, they challenge the lawyers at cultural institutions, whether they are book publishers, Internet providers, or movie distributors. Second, they spread the word about how poorly the current intellectual property system balances the rights of individuals and society. This tactic has given birth to the genre of the "copyright horror story." These are tales of intellectual property laws run amok: The artist who receives a cease-and-desist letter from the Vatican for using an image from the Sistine Chapel in a collage titled "The Sistine Bowl-Off." The company that was sued for devising software to teach tricks to a robot dog. McDonald's claim to own phrases like "Play and fun for everyone" and "Hey, it could happen." An Adobe e-book of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that bears a warning forbidding one to read it aloud. In telling such stories, digital-environmentalist writers are trying to do for intellectual property what muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens did for corrupt governments and Eric Schlosser did for fast food: Go behind the curtain to reveal how something we take for granted--in this case, the cultural commons--really works. "We, as citizens, own these commons. They include resources that we have paid for as taxpayers and resources that we have inherited from previous generations," Bollier writes in his previous book, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth. "They are not just an inventory of marketable assets, but social institutions and cultural traditions that define us as Americans and enliven us as human beings." Some copyright horror stories read like science fiction, depicting life in an anticommons in which everything is owned: letters of the alphabet, familiar phrases, and popular songs like "God Bless America" and "Happy Birthday" (which won't enter the public domain until 2030). And like the best science fiction, these stories pose a serious question: To what extent do we already live in such a place? Is our world an intellectual property version of The Matrix where, despite the illusion of freedom, we are little more than digital sharecroppers, licensers of a culture we mistakenly assume is ours? The science-fiction metaphor helps explain a tension central to the intellectual property wars. We do, in a sense, live in the space between two competing realities: According to the letter of the law, intellectual property is well protected, but legitimate access to it (by artists, parodists, critics) is guaranteed. In practice, however, our rights to access are ambiguously drawn and, as a result, prohibitively expensive to exercise. The difference in views between the commons and the anticommons is one of perspective. Can an artist who spends a fortune in legal fees successfully defending his legitimate fair use of a copyrighted image really be said to have won? "Fuck fair use," Lessig is fond of saying. "Fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create." * * * The line between science fiction and reality is often difficult to discern, as exhibited by the case of the college student who received trademark #2,127,381 for the phrase "freedom of expression." Fortunately, the student was Kembrew McLeod, who applied for it in order to make a point. McLeod, now professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, is no stranger to using media pranks to exploit the absurdities of the system. In fact, he even once sold his soul in a glass jar on eBay. McLeod may be the most optimistic of the digital environmentalists. "We can fight back and win, especially because many recent court decisions have upheld free-speech rights in the age of intellectual property," he writes. Getting people to exercise those rights is another issue. "The problem is that many individuals and companies either don't know this or don't want to take a risk." McLeod's and Bollier's books are full of inspirational stories of those who have taken such risks and successfully faced down the corporations who have improperly used their copyrights, such as artist Tom Forsythe (creator of "Food Chain Barbie"), who was awarded $1.8 million in legal fees after Mattel pursued an "unreasonable and frivolous" suit against him. In September 2003, a group of Swarthmore College students posted on the Internet damning copies of internal memos written by employees of Diebold, the largest producer of electronic voting machines. The memos detailed various security flaws in Diebold's machines, and it wasn't long before the students received cease-and-desist letters demanding that they remove the memos from their websites. Although Diebold withdrew its legal threats in the wake of bad publicity, the students sued the company for falsely accusing them of copyright infringement. On September 30, 2004, a judge agreed that Diebold had deliberately misrepresented its copyright claims and awarded the students legal fees and damages. This past summer, director Robert Greenwald made "fair use" of a substantial amount of Fox News footage in order to document its conservative bias in his documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. Fox grumbled about the movie but never sued Greenwald for copyright infringement. In 2004, underground hip-hop artist DJ Danger Mouse edited together the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album with selections of the Beatles' White Album to produce The Grey Album. Despite a flurry of cease-and-desist letters from EMI/Capitol (which owns the copyright to The White Album), over 170 websites continued to host The Grey Album in support of DJ Danger Mouse's right to create. It went on to become one of the most frequently downloaded independent albums of all time. The Boston Globe called it "the most creatively captivating" album of the year. If anything, Bollier's "bullies" and McLeod's "bozos" are their own worst enemies. "As we look back twenty years from now, Mattel and other businesses like Fox News may ironically be remembered as some of the greatest promoters of fair use," writes McLeod. "Virtually every time these companies try to step on freedom of expression? in court they end up expanding the parameters of fair use in case law, and they also intensify the backlash against this kind of behavior." Recent stirrings in legal theory may give some comfort to the activist wing of digital environmentalism. Taking for granted the fact that the problem is less the letter of intellectual property law than the spirit in which it is interpreted, Richard Posner, a federal appeals judge and prolific legal theorist, and others have suggested some ways to remedy this problem. Foremost among them is the doctrine of "copyright misuse." In his California Law Review article "Fair Use and Statutory Reform in the Wake of Eldred," Posner argues that it is more valuable, and feasible, to strengthen fair-use practices than to lobby for new copyright laws. The problem with the current system, according to Posner, is that copyright owners systematically make improperly broad claims to their rights. The book, DVD, or baseball-game broadcast that comes with a notice stating that no part of the work may be copied without permission is, in fact, in violation of the doctrine of fair use (for which one doesn't need permission). Posner argues that when a copyright holder affixes a warning on copies of his work that "grossly and intentionally exaggerates the copyright holder's substantive or remedial rights, to the prejudice of publishers of public-domain works, the case for invoking the doctrine of copyright misuse" has been made. The copyright misuse doctrine is attractive for a number of reasons. It is a flexible approach to protecting the public-policy goals underlying copyright law (promoting "the progress of science and useful arts") without having to pass new laws every time a technical innovation--radio, movies, television, copy machines, VCR, the Internet--creates a new set of challenges for copyright holders. And it is especially valuable to users of copyright because it is "one of the only copyright-limiting doctrines that arise from actions taken by the copyright holder," writes Kathryn Judge in her Stanford Law Review article "Rethinking Copyright Misuse." Aside from the possibility of being sued, the primary problem for those who want to make fair use of copyrighted material is the uncertainty of their position; while the law seems to support them, their backers and/or insurers may deem the cost of exercising their rights excessive. The doctrine of copyright misuse might provide a mechanism for a creator to address that uncertainty. For example, employing the principle of copyright misuse, an artist who believes he has a legitimate right to make fair use of a copyrighted work can proactively challenge a copyright holder who he believes is protecting his work more broadly than required by copyright law. While such a maneuver wouldn't necessarily guarantee that the artist will prevail (he might of course be wrong), copyright misuse is one way the claims of the copyright holder might be tested without enduring an expensive lawsuit. Copyright misuse isn't as satisfying as a Supreme Court victory or the passing of a new set of intellectual property laws. And it isn't clear that it is robust enough to protect fair use in the way that Posner and others want it to. But perhaps by bolstering the practices of everyday people it will help reclaim a familiar cultural landscape. Because in the end, the goal of digital environmentalism is quite modest: a world in which, as McLeod writes, the digital future looks "a lot like the analog past." Robert S. Boynton is director of New York University's magazine journalism program. His new book, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft, is being published this month by Vintage. FREE CULTURE: HOW BIG MEDIA USES TECHNOLOGY AND THE LAW TO LOCK DOWN CULTURE AND CONTROL CREATIVITY BY LAWRENCE LESSIG. NEW YORK: PENGUIN. 345 PAGES. $25. [17]BUY NOW BRAND NAME BULLIES: THE QUEST TO OWN AND CONTROL CULTURE BY DAVID BOLLIER. HOBOKEN, NJ: WILEY. 320 PAGES. $25. [18]BUY NOW SHAMANS, SOFTWARE, AND SPLEENS: LAW AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE INFORMATION SOCIETY BY JAMES BOYLE. CAMBRIDGE, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 288 PAGES. $20. [19]BUY NOW FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION?: OVERZEALOUS COPYRIGHT BOZOS AND OTHER ENEMIES OF CREATIVITY BY KEMBREW MCLEOD. NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY. 384 PAGES. $25. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:43:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:43:30 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Recapturing Kansas Message-ID: In These Times: Recapturing Kansas http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/print/recapturing_kansas/ By Emily Udell January 12, 2005 How did conservatives win the heart of America? That is the question Tom Frank explores in his bestselling book What's the Matter with Kansas?, an incisive analysis of the Republican transformation of traditional economic populism into the Great Backlash. Frank's book, which has become a post-election touchstone for progressive pundits, looks beyond the red state/blue state paradigm to explain how the mirage of "moral values" issues ("God, guns and gays") has subverted public dialogue about economic issues and convinced working class Americans to vote against their economic self-interest. Frank--who is also the author of The Conquest of Cool and One Market Under God, founder and editor of the Chicago-based magazine The Baffler, and a contributing editor for Harper's--recently spoke with In These Times and its affiliated radio show "[3]Fire on the Prairie," from his home in Washington, D.C. Can you give some historical background for what you call the "Great Backlash"? What I mean by that term is populist conservatism. It's this angry right-wing sensibility that speaks in--or pretends to speak in--the voice of the working class. It got its start, more or less, in 1968, with the candidacy of George Wallace. The issues that the Backlash has embraced have changed a lot over the years. In the early days it was pretty much racist. Today, you have the same angry, hard-done-by sensibility, but it's attached to different issues - the most famous being abortion, and, in this latest election, gay marriage. The Great Backlash has a way of thinking about the people vs. the elite, which is one of the classic hallmarks of populists. According to your standard populism--your left-wing variety--it's working people against owners, or blue collar against white collar. It's about social class. According to the Backlash, it's basically everybody against what they call the "liberal elite," who they generally identify by their tastes and fancy college educations. But it's an amorphous term, they'll apply it to anybody they feel like. It's not a solid sociological category. Nonetheless, it's extremely powerful. And conservatives throw this idea around all the time, basically unchallenged by liberals or by the left. Do you think the traditional values of the left have as much appeal as the cultural values of the right? And is there a motivation besides just winning for Democrats to adopt a real values stance? As you wrote in your book, where is the soft money in that? I think they definitely have as much appeal as the right-wing values. One of the most interesting things about the right-wing movement that's so powerful today is that is borrows--or steals, if you will --so much of its language and its blueprint from the old left. The stereotype of liberals as these high-hat blue bloods, these effete, devitalized weaklings is straight out of your proletarian literature of the '30s. Only back then it was a description of rich people. I think the values of the left still have power. But something has become apparent to me since I moved to Washington, D.C. [from Chicago]. There is this aversion, bordering on hatred, for the left, especially among Democrats. People who dominate discussions in Democratic circles despise the left, and there is no way in hell they are going to embrace the values of the left. You can try to explain to them how they need to do it for strategic purposes or in order to win elections, [but] it doesn't matter. The Democratic centrists got their way [in the 2004 presidential election], they got their candidate, they got their way on everything, and they still lost. And who gets the blame? It's going to be the left. Is there a danger that Democrats could manipulate the language of economic populism (like the conservatives manipulate the language of culture) but still pander to big business? You mean could they do this in a disingenuous fashion? Of course they could. But I don't think it would play very well. When you're talking about economic populism, you're talking about bread and butter issues. The Republicans have the advantage in that their populism is a matter of fantasy. And so their voters don't really care that they never gain any ground on their populist issues. Because they don't really expect to. If the labor movement had more traction in this country, then would the Democrats be more inclined to embrace traditional populist values? There's no question about that. The problem is that unions have been beaten pretty badly. There's always hope. Back in the '30s, the labor movement just came out of nowhere, and had its great organizing drives. And it did it more or less by itself, not with a lot of help from the Democratic Party. The funny thing was that when that happened, it was in the middle of a depression. ... ordinarily that's a very difficult time to be organizing people and they really captured this cultural position where it was very attractive to join a union. In your book you examine the debate over "authenticity"--do you propose to abolish this pursuit to identify the needs and values of the "real" American or to redefine what a "real" American is? I think we have to play the game of authenticity. The first step is recognizing that the conservatives have been doing it for a long time, and they've been doing it without any effective answer from our side. Authenticity is an incredibly powerful commodity in our day and age. There is this sort of culture of soft suburban liberals who are very into authenticity. But in their minds, authenticity is the stuff you read about in travel magazines, whereas Middle America is this horrible, plastic monstrosity that you're supposed to flee from. The Republicans have just reversed that. The Middle American in his Chevy going to McDonald's - that's authentic. They've captured this idea of all-American authenticity, and it has to be challenged. But you can't challenge it by saying American culture is hollow and conformist and stupid. That's not going to work. So you'd rather say something like the real American has two jobs and no healthcare? The Republicans are incredibly vulnerable in many ways. Both in terms of culture and their brand positioning, and in terms of the contradictions between what they say and what they do. Between this world of all-American, regular people that they imagine and the world that they give us, like you just said, where people have to work two jobs to stay afloat, [is a wide gap]. Hammer that contradiction. Unrestrained free-market capitalism is not the friend of average Americans. It's not the friend of tradition and of small town values. It's quite the opposite. It's the great destroyer. But where are you going to find somebody in American politics to make an argument like that? One of the things that you document in your book is how anti-abortion activists identify themselves with figures in the anti-slavery movement. And I read in another interview that you attended a party during Republican convention where people were putting Purple Heart band-aids on their clothes. You talk about how it would be really easy to poke holes in these various assertions that are made by conservatives. But if we can't even address these obvious contradictions.... The Purple Heart band-aids--those were given out at a party sponsored by Grover Norquist's group Americans for Tax Reform. The idea being that if a liberal gets one, than a Purple Heart is a joke. Everybody at the party had these on, and they thought it was so funny. And the party was being held at the New York Yacht Club. You couldn't ask for a more perfect set piece for what Republicans are about--they were toasting tax cuts, making fun of Purple Heart winners, at the New York Yacht Club! In your epilogue you wrote, "Encouraging demographic self-recognition and self-expression through products is, similarly, the bread and butter not of leftist ideology but of consumerism." What kind of arguments specifically do Democrats and leftists have to make to distinguish their ideology from a consumer ideology so as not to be blamed for the crap that's out there in the media? That's a very hard question to answer. The problem comes when [populist conservatives] pin people's disgust with the culture around them on free-floating liberalism. And it just ain't so. Just before I got on the phone with you, I was reading that Clear Channel is in trouble with the FCC for some indecency infringement. Now Clear Channel is not a bunch of liberals! Fox is another [example]--run by conservative Rupert Murdoch, the same man that brings you Fox News. Fox is consistently the most offensive TV network, the one that's willing to stoop the lowest in search of the most outrageous program. Market values go hand in hand with that sort of thing. This argument is something that instinctively makes sense, and if you just made it you'd find it would resonate with people. But Democrats are very afraid to make arguments like that about the free market. They don't want people thinking that they're some kind of radicals. And also they don't want to lose the funding from the business community. And this year that was so critical to them, they almost raised as much as W. So how do Democrats make the argument? They just have to bite the bullet and try it. We've got to do something new. But they're not going to do anything unless they're pushed, unless there are forces on the ground making them do something. And it's our job to stir up those forces. Have you heard any stories from people who've said that they've given your book to conservative relatives or friends? I have gotten some amazing letters--especially from people in Kansas. I got one the other day from someone that I met when I was out there, and she said that her dad and her brother totally fit the description of backlash personality type. She said that they will, when they're sitting around the dinner table, say things like, "Someday liberal blood is going to have to be shed. That's the only way this is going to end." What's your next project? I think I'm going to write about what the Democrats have to do. Don't you think that's the thing? ______________________________________________________________________ Emily Udell is the advertising director at In These Times. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:46:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:46:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Humanist: Intellectual Treason Message-ID: Intellectual Treason http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/printarticle.php?id=1217_0_34_0_C 5.1.7 by Meera Nanda [I'm taking my annual Lenten break from forwarding articles again this year. It's a vice to spend so much time doing this. So I'll be off the air for forty days and forty nights from Ash Wednesday until Easter.] Meera Nanda uncovers an extraordinary coalition that is undermining science The second-term election victory of George Bush - and India's own experience with Hindu nationalist BJP rule, off and on, through the last decade - captures a dangerous moment in world history. We are witnessing the world's first and the world's largest liberal constitutional democracies, officially committed to secularism, slide toward religious nationalism. By voting out the BJP and its allies in the last election, the Indian voters have halted this slide, at least for now - a heartening development, compared to the virtual take-over of America by Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists. The question that interests me in this electoral route to faithbased governance is how this counterrevolution is actually accomplished, or to put it differently, how the spirit of secularism gets subverted, without any formal abrogation of secular laws. Unless we understand the ideological mechanism of this sacralisation of politics, we will not be able to combat the ongoing coups against secularism under nominally secular democracies. As a student of the history and philosophy of science, I have been watching with concern how modern science itself perhaps the single most powerful force for secularisation is being recoded as sacred, either as affirming the Bible or the Vedas, or as lower knowledge of dead matter, in need of spiritualisation. As an oldtime partisan of the Enlightenment and scientific temper, I have been watching with concern as my fellow intellectuals and activists, in the United States and India, who identify themselves with social justice, antiimperialism, womens rights and sustainable development, have themselves paved the way for reenchantment or resacralisation of science. Many of the Hindutva arguments for Vedic science find a resonance with the fashionable theories of alternative sciences and postcolonial studies. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the impression that postmodernist and multiculturalist critics of modern science are rediscovering and restating many of the arguments Hindu nationalists have long used to assert the superior scientificity of Hindu sacred traditions. George Orwells doublethink bears an uncanny resemblance to the wellknown Hindu tendency to eclectically combine contradictory ideas by declaring them to be simply different paths or names of a shared enterprise, as is the case with the amorphous grabbag of Hindu myths, mysticism and philosophy, known as the Vedas. Recall how doublethink worked in 1984: Words came to mean their opposites: war meant peace, freedom was slavery, and ignorance strength. History was endlessly revised to make the present look like a confirmation of eternal, unchanging truths. Words, representations, facts ceased to mean what they appeared to be saying. Shorn of any definite and contestable meanings, words began to be used interchangeably, hybridised endlessly, without any fear of contradictions. Under BJP rule, superstitions started getting described as science. Hindu nationalists started invoking science in just about every speech and policy statement. But while they uttered the word science which in todays world is understood as modern science they meant astrology, or vastu, or Vedic creationism, or transcendental meditation or ancient humoral theory of disease taught by Ayuerveda. This was not just talk: state universities and colleges got big grants from the government to offer postgraduate degrees, including PhDs in astrology; research in vastu shastra, meditation, faithhealing, cowurine and priestcraft was promoted with substantial injections of public money. Nearly every important discovery of modern science was read back into Hindu sacred books: explosion of nuclear energy became the awesome appearance of God in the Bhagvat Gita; the indeterminacy at quantum level served as confirmation of Vedanta; atomic charges became equivalent to negative, positive and neutral gunas, or moral qualities; the reliance of experience and reason in science became the same thing as reliance on mystical experience, and so on. Contemporary theories of physics, evolution and biology were wilfully distorted to make it look as if all of modern science was converging to affirm the New Age, mindovermatter cosmology that follows from Vedantic monism. Evidence from fringe sciences was used to support all kinds of superstitions, from vastu, astrology, quantum healing to the latest theory of Vedic creationism. Science and Vedas were treated as homologues, as just different names of the same thing. Orwells Big Brother wouldve felt right at home! Another sign of doublespeak was this: On the one hand, the BJP and its allies presented themselves as great champions of science, as long as it could be absorbed into the Vedas, of course. On the other hand, they aggressively condemned the secular and naturalistic worldview of science the disenchantment of nature as reductionist, Western or even Semitic and therefore unHindu and unIndian. Science yes, and technology yes, but a rationalmaterialist critique of Vedic idealism no that became the mantra of Hindutva. Why this overeagerness to claim the support of science? There is a modernising impulse in all religions to make the supposedly timeless truths of theology acceptable to the modern minds raised on a scientific sensibility. Scientific creationism among Christian and Islamic fundamentalists is an example of this impulse. But while Christian fundamentalists in America indulge in creationism primarily to get past the constitutional requirement for a separation of church and state, in India it is motivated by ultranationalism, Hindu chauvinism and the nationalist urge to declare Hinduisms superiority as the religion of reason and natural law over Christianity and Islam, which are declared to be irrational and faithbased creeds. Contemporary Hindu nationalists are carrying on with the neoHindu tradition of proclaiming Hinduism as the universal religion of the future because of its superior holistic science (as compared to the reductionist science of the West.) Besides, it is easier to sell traditions and rituals, especially to urban, upwardly mobile men, if they have the blessings of Englishspeaking scientific gurus. Granted, this business of Vedic science had been going on before anyone had ever heard the word postmodern. But this Hindu nationalist appropriation of science has found new sources of intellectual respectability from the postmodernist, antiEnlightenment turn taken by intellectuals, most radically in American universities, but also in India. What do I mean by postmodernism and how did it play out in India? Postmodernism encompasses a wide variety of theoretical discourses, touching on everything from literature and history to architecture. What unites them is a suspicion of universal knowledge. Modern science, being the ideal type of such knowledge, naturally became a target of postmodernist critics. Sure, there were many critics of this universal science, including prominent scientists themselves before the advent of postmodernism, but their criticisms were leveled at the abuses of science, not at its logic. As disillusionment with the militaryindustrial complex grew in the West in the wake of the Vietnam war and civil rights struggles, the topdown model of development in India led to a radical critique of science, in which its claims to objectivity and universality were questioned. In India wellknown public intellectuals Ashis Nandy, Vandana Shiva, Shiv Vishvanathan, Claude Alvares and others condemned modern science as being innately barbaric, violent and even genocidal because of its reductionism and its imposition of western interests and values in collusion with westernised Indian elite. But the critique of science and technology that emerged out of the socalled Delhi school of science studies was not limited to uses or abuses of science: it questioned the content and methodology of science as we know it. No one can deny that there are alternative, culturedependent descriptions of nature: the world is full of a vast variety of such descriptions. Given this diversity, can we not say that modern science provides us a closer, a more approximate representation of nature which is more adequately supported by evidence and logic? Not so, according to its critics, because the standards of truth and falsity are also relative to the form of life of a culture. To quote two leading theorists of the social constructivist school: the labels true and false are simply different names for cultural preferences. The grand conclusion of this school of thought is that all ways of knowing are at par because all are culturally embedded attempts to understand brute reality. There is only one reality, different cultures approach it differently, each of which is rational in its own context. (If you replace culture with caste in this statement, you get the golden rule of Hinduism that all paths to truth are different only in name) Social constructivists do not deny that modern science has discovered some truths about nature that are universally valid Newtons law of gravity for example. But even these universals are seen as products of the JudeoChristian and masculine assumptions of Western cultures. To paraphrase Sandra Harding, one of the best known proponents of feminist standpoint epistemology, other cultures are capable of producing alternative universals of their own. Which cultures universals get universalised and which ones are consigned to the status of ethnosciences, is not decided by superior explanatory power, but by superior political power. Wellknown scholars including Andrew Ross and David Hess wrote books arguing that the line between accepted science and heterodox sciences of cultural minorities is an arbitrary construct reflecting cultural and ideological interests of those in power. Dipesh Chakrabarty, a subaltern historian, expressed the sentiment well when he wrote that reason is but a dialect backed by an army. Presenting India as source of alternative universals that could heal the reductionism of western science became the major preoccupation of Indian followers of science studies. Vandana Shiva wrote glowingly of Indian views of nondualism as superior to western reductionism. Ashis Nandy declared astrology to be the science of the poor and the nonwesternised masses in India. Prayers to smallpox goddesses, menstrual taboos, Hindu nature ethics which derive from orthodox ideas about prakriti or shakti, and even the varna order were defended as rational (even superior) solutions to the cultural and ecological crises of modernity. All this fitted in very well with western feminist and ecologists search for a kinder and gentler science. Prominent feminist theorists (led by Carolyn Merchant and Evelyn Keller) condemned the separation of the subject from the object as a sign of masculine and dualist JudeoChristian thinking. The history of modern science was rewritten to decry the progressive secularisation or disenchantment of nature as a source of oppression of nature and women. This naturally created an opening for eastern cultures, especially India, where such secularisation of nature is frowned upon by religious doctrines and cultural mores. In the recent literature on Hindu ecology, the most orthodox philosophies of Hinduism, including Advaita Vedanta, where vitalistic ideas of lifeforce (shakti, Brahman) are embodied in all species through the mechanism of karma and rebirth, began to be presented as more conducive to feminist and ecological politics. The deep investment of these philosophies in perpetuating superstitions and patriarchy in India was forgotten and forgiven. The critics went further: They argued that if, in the final analysis, all representations of nature are cultural constructions, then different cultures and subcultures should be permitted to construct their own representation of nature. To judge other cultures from the vantage point of modern science, as the Enlightenment tradition demanded, amounted to an act of epistemic violence against the other, as Gayatri Spivak called it. This became the foundation of what is called postcolonial theory, which argued that leading lights of the Indian Renaissance such as Nehru, Bankim Chandra and Ram Mohan Roy were mentally colonised because they were seeing India through western conceptual categories. Any change that challenged Indias unique cultural gestalt, as Nandy liked to call it, was to be resisted. All told, preservation of cultural meanings took priority over validity. Objectively false cosmology of the other was not to be challenged because it gave meaning to peoples lives. Any demand for selfcorrection of local knowledges was routinely decried as a rationalist witchhunt. The alternative to universalism was that of critical traditionalism or borderland epistemologies. Cultures should be encouraged to create an eclectic mix of different and even contradictory ways of knowing. One need not reject modern science altogether, but rather selectively absorb it into the Indian gestalt: Contradictions were not to be questioned and removed, but rather celebrated as expressions of difference. The picture of science that social constructivism offers is tailormade for the doublespeak of Vedic science. All the major conclusions of science studies culturally different but equally rational paths to truth, equation of universalism with colonialism and totalitarianism, penchant for eclecticism and hybridity, and the condemnation of disenchantment of nature end up restating the fundamental assumptions which the nationalist neoHindus have always used to assert the superior scientificity of Hindu metaphysics and mysticism. Postmodern prophets who promise us a kinder gentler science do indeed face backward to the spiritsoaked metaphysics of orthodox Hinduism, which has, in fact, inhibited the growth of reason, equality and freedom in India. While the Abrahamic religions are wary of epistemological relativism out of the fear of relativising the Word of God revealed in the Bible or the Koran, Brahminical Hinduism (and Hindu nationalism) thrives on a hierarchical relativism to evade all challenges to its idealistic metaphysics and mystical ways of knowing. Rather than accept the naturalistic and empirical theories of modern science as contradicting the Vedantic philosophy which they actually do Hindu nationalists simply declare modern science to be true only within its limited materialistic assumptions. They do not reject modern science (who can?) but merely treat it as one among the many different paths to the ultimate truth, which is known only to the Vedic Hinduism. By enshrining relativism as a source of empowerment of the weak, social constructivist theory has unintentionally provided intellectual respectability to the strategy of hierarchical inclusivism which is the timetested method of Hindu apologetics. Let me, very briefly, give some examples of this convergence between supposedly emancipatory postmodernist deconstruction of science and the clearly reactionary, chauvinistic doublespeak of Vedic science. For starters, take attempts to decolonise modern science: by viewing nature through local conceptual categories of women, nonwestern people and other cultural minorities, Hindu nationalists see themselves as a part and parcel of this postcolonial enterprise. They justify developing a science in accord with the Vedic cosmology as an attempt to decolonise the Hindu mind of western, Semiticmonotheistic influences. Indeed, scholaractivists sympathetic to the Hindu worldview, including Rajiv Malhotra and Koenard Elst routinely cite the writings of Ashis Nandy, Ronald Inden and even Gayatri Spivak as allies in a shared project of understanding India through Hindu categories. Like the postmodernist supporters of ethnosciences, they do not deny that modern science has discovered some truths about nature. But they declare them to be lowerlevel truths, because they merely deal with dead matter, shorn of consciousness. Notwithstanding all pious declarations of the death of the Newtonian world view of matter obeying mechanical laws, the fact is that any number of rigorous, doubleblind tests have failed to show any signs of disembodied consciousness or mindstuff in nature: matter obeying mindless laws of physics is all there is. But in the Vedic science discourse, the overwhelming evidence for adequacy of matter to explain the higher functions of mind and life are set aside as a result of knowledge filtration by westerntrained scientists. Take the example of the emerging theory of Vedic creationism (which updates the spiritual evolutionary theories of Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda). Its chief architects, Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, claim that Darwinian evolutionary biologists and mainstream biologists, being products of the western ontological assumptions, have been systematically ignoring and hiding evidence that supports the theory of devolution of species from the Brahman through the mechanism of karma and rebirth. All knowledge, they claim, parroting social constructivism, is a product of interests and biases. On this account, Vedic creationism, explicitly grounded in Vedic cosmology is as plausible and defensible as Darwinism, grounded on the naturalistic and capitalist assumptions of the western scientists. Vedic creationism is only one example of decolonised science. More generally, Hindu nationalists routinely insist on the need to develop a science that is organically related to the innate nature, svabhava or chitti of India. Indias chitti, they insist, lies in holistic thought, in keeping matter and spirit, nature and god together (as compared to the Semitic mind which separates the two). Hindu nationalists have been using this purported holism of Hinduism as the cornerstone of their argument: any interpretation of modern science that fits in with this spiritcentered holism is declared to be valid Vedic science while naturalistic, mainstream interpretations are discarded as western. The overwhelming enthusiasm for Rupert Sheldrakes occult biology (which builds upon the failed vitalistic theories of Jagdish Chandra Bose) and the near unanimous recasting of quantum mechanics in mystical terms are examples of the kind of critical traditionalism and hybridity sanctioned by postmodernists. But it gets worse. As is well known, Hindu nationalists have been keen on proving that the landmass of India was the original homeland of the Aryans and therefore the cradle of all civilisation. Vedic Aryans, on this account, were the authors of all natural sciences which then spread to Greece, Sumeria, China and other major civilisations in antiquity. To substantiate these claims, all kinds of modern scientific discoveries are read back into the Rig Veda, the most ancient of all Vedas. But such boastful claims raise the question of methodology. How did our Vedic forebears figure out the speed of light, the distance between the sun and the earth and why did they code it into the shape and size of fire altars? Similar questions arise for the more general claims that are basic to Hindu metaphysics, namely that there is a higher realm of ultimate reality (Brahman) that cannot be assessed through sensory means. How did our Vedic forbears know it exists and that it actually determines the course of evolution of species, and makes the matter that we all are made of? How can you experience what is beyond all sensory knowledge? But even more important for the claims of scientificity of the Vedas, how do you test the empirical claims based upon that experience? Here one finds an incredibly brazen claim for relativism and the cultureboundedness of rationality. Because in Hinduism there are no distinctions between the spirit and matter, one can understand laws that regulate matter by studying the laws of the spirit. And the laws of spirit can be understood by turning inward, through yoga and meditation leading to mystical experiences. Supporters of this mysticismasscience argue that all science gains its coherence from within its own culturally sanctioned assumptions; modern science puts an artificial limit on knowledge as only that knowledge which can be accessible to senses. Within Hinduism however, it is as rational and scientific to take the nonsensory seeing that is mystical and other meditative practices as empirical evidence of the spiritual and natural realm. This purported scientificity of the spiritual realm, in turn, paves the way for declaring occult New Age practices like astrology, vastu, and quantum healing and even yagnas as scientific within the VedicHindu universe. This defence of parity (i.e. equal rationality) of the Vedic method of nonsensory, mystical knowing is fundamentally a social constructivist argument: it assumes that all sciences are valid for a given community that shares a fundamental metaphysics. Long ago, Julien Benda wrote in his La Trahison De Clercs, that when intellectuals betray their calling that is, when intellectuals begin to exalt the particular over the universal, the passions of the multitude over the moral good then there is nothing left to prevent a societys slide into tribalism and violence. Postmodernism represents a treason of the clerks which has given intellectual respectability to reactionary religiosity. With the best intentions of giving marginalised social groups especially if they were women and if they belonged to the nonwestern world the right to their own ways of knowing, western academics, in alliance with populist Third Worldist intellectuals, have succeeded in painting science and modernity as the enemy of the people. Rather than encourage and nurture a critical spirit toward inherited traditions, many of which are authoritarian and patriarchal, postmodernist intellectuals have waged a battle against science and against the spirit of the Enlightenment itself. As the case of Vedic science in the service of Hindu nationalism in India demonstrates, this misguided attack on the Enlightenment has only aided the growth of pseudoscience, superstitions and tribalism. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:47:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:47:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Natl Geog: Animal-Human Hybrids Spark Controversy Message-ID: Animal-Human Hybrids Spark Controversy http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0125_050125_chimeras.html Maryann Mott January 25, 2005 [I'm taking my annual Lenten break from forwarding articles again this year. It's a vice to spend so much time doing this. So I'll be off the air for forty days and forty nights from Ash Wednesday until Easter.] Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras--a hybrid creature that's part human, part animal. Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003 successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were reportedly the first human-animal chimeras successfully created. They were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish before the scientists destroyed the embryos to harvest their stem cells. In Minnesota last year researchers at the Mayo Clinic created pigs with human blood flowing through their bodies. And at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains. Scientists feel that, the more humanlike the animal, the better research model it makes for testing drugs or possibly growing "spare parts," such as livers, to transplant into humans. Watching how human cells mature and interact in a living creature may also lead to the discoveries of new medical treatments. But creating human-animal chimeras--named after a monster in Greek mythology that had a lion's head, goat's body, and serpent's tail--has raised troubling questions: What new subhuman combination should be produced and for what purpose? At what point would it be considered human? And what rights, if any, should it have? There are currently no U.S. federal laws that address these issues. Ethical Guidelines The National Academy of Sciences, which advises the U.S. government, has been studying the issue. In March it plans to present voluntary ethical guidelines for researchers. A chimera is a mixture of two or more species in one body. Not all are considered troubling, though. For example, faulty human heart valves are routinely replaced with ones taken from cows and pigs. The surgery--which makes the recipient a human-animal chimera--is widely accepted. And for years scientists have added human genes to bacteria and farm animals. What's caused the uproar is the mixing of human stem cells with embryonic animals to create new species. Biotechnology activist Jeremy Rifkin is opposed to crossing species boundaries, because he believes animals have the right to exist without being tampered with or crossed with another species. He concedes that these studies would lead to some medical breakthroughs. Still, they should not be done. "There are other ways to advance medicine and human health besides going out into the strange, brave new world of chimeric animals," Rifkin said, adding that sophisticated computer models can substitute for experimentation on live animals. "One doesn't have to be religious or into animal rights to think this doesn't make sense," he continued. "It's the scientists who want to do this. They've now gone over the edge into the pathological domain." David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University, believes the real worry is whether or not chimeras will be put to uses that are problematic, risky, or dangerous. Human Born to Mice Parents? For example, an experiment that would raise concerns, he said, is genetically engineering mice to produce human sperm and eggs, then doing in vitro fertilization to produce a child whose parents are a pair of mice. "Most people would find that problematic," Magnus said, "but those uses are bizarre and not, to the best of my knowledge, anything that anybody is remotely contemplating. Most uses of chimeras are actually much more relevant to practical concerns." Last year Canada passed the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which bans chimeras. Specifically, it prohibits transferring a nonhuman cell into a human embryo and putting human cells into a nonhuman embryo. Cynthia Cohen is a member of Canada's Stem Cell Oversight Committee, which oversees research protocols to ensure they are in accordance with the new guidelines. She believes a ban should also be put into place in the U.S. Creating chimeras, she said, by mixing human and animal gametes (sperms and eggs) or transferring reproductive cells, diminishes human dignity. "It would deny that there is something distinctive and valuable about human beings that ought to be honored and protected," said Cohen, who is also the senior research fellow at Georgetown University's Kennedy Institute of Ethics in Washington, D.C. But, she noted, the wording on such a ban needs to be developed carefully. It shouldn't outlaw ethical and legitimate experiments--such as transferring a limited number of adult human stem cells into animal embryos in order to learn how they proliferate and grow during the prenatal period. Irv Weissman, director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine in California, is against a ban in the United States. "Anybody who puts their own moral guidance in the way of this biomedical science, where they want to impose their will--not just be part of an argument--if that leads to a ban or moratorium. ... they are stopping research that would save human lives," he said. Mice With Human Brains Weissman has already created mice with brains that are about one percent human. Later this year he may conduct another experiment where the mice have 100 percent human brains. This would be done, he said, by injecting human neurons into the brains of embryonic mice. Before being born, the mice would be killed and dissected to see if the architecture of a human brain had formed. If it did, he'd look for traces of human cognitive behavior. Weissman said he's not a mad scientist trying to create a human in an animal body. He hopes the experiment leads to a better understanding of how the brain works, which would be useful in treating diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. The test has not yet begun. Weissman is waiting to read the National Academy's report, due out in March. William Cheshire, associate professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic's Jacksonville, Florida, branch, feels that combining human and animal neurons is problematic. "This is unexplored biologic territory," he said. "Whatever moral threshold of human neural development we might choose to set as the limit for such an experiment, there would be a considerable risk of exceeding that limit before it could be recognized." Cheshire supports research that combines human and animal cells to study cellular function. As an undergraduate he participated in research that fused human and mouse cells. But where he draws the ethical line is on research that would destroy a human embryo to obtain cells, or research that would create an organism that is partly human and partly animal. "We must be cautious not to violate the integrity of humanity or of animal life over which we have a stewardship responsibility," said Cheshire, a member of Christian Medical and Dental Associations. "Research projects that create human-animal chimeras risk disturbing fragile ecosystems, endanger health, and affront species integrity." Photograph: Chimera An ancient Etruscan statue of a chimera found in north-central Italy. The mythic beast had a lion's body, serpent's tail, and goat's head. Photograph by James P. Blair, copyright National Geographic Society From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:50:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:50:11 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Telegraph: Our tangled wartime web Message-ID: Our tangled wartime web http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;sessionid=35IIMNDIOOXRBQFIQMGCM5OAVCBQUJVC?xml=/arts/2004/12/19/bohol19.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/12/19/bomain.html Monday 31 January 2005 Max Hastings reviews The Deceivers by Thaddeus Holt It is a curiosity of the 1939-45 conflict that, while the British produced few top-class field commanders and made lots of strategic mistakes, the machinery created by Churchill and his senior officers for directing the war effort was superior to that of any other nation. It was imaginative, flexible, kept all parties "in the picture", and gave full play to unusual people and ideas. Nowhere was this more conspicuous than in the exploitation of deception. From an early stage, British generals - notably Wavell - perceived the importance of misleading the enemy about allied capabilities and intentions. The first flowering of the deceivers' art took place in the desert. Its begetter was the brilliant maverick Colonel Dudley Clarke. A bachelor gunner officer born in the Ladysmith garrison during the 1899 siege, Clarke conducted a guerilla campaign with the War Office, in support of his consequent claim to wear the South Africa medal. Malcolm Muggeridge described him as "a sharp little man with bright, quick eyes". Clarke's early military career was exotic, and included a spell as a pilot in the First World War, which caused him further to annoy the War Office by affecting RFC wings on his tunic. He can claim to have introduced the names of both the commandos and the Special Air Service to the British Army. In the desert under Wavell, he developed techniques for confusing the enemy about British plans, which influenced operational policy for the balance of the war. He was chiefly responsible for misleading the Germans about where Montgomery's main thrust would come at Alamein. The most notable hiccup in Clarke's career came at the end of 1941, when in an excess of enthusiasm he disguised himself as a woman and attempted to dally with German agents in Madrid, an exploit which ended with his arrest by the Spanish police, fury among the British intelligence services, and a request to Lord Gort, governor of Gibraltar, that he should interview the offender and establish that he was sane. This episode cost Clarke a reprimand from Auchinleck, Wavell's successor, but did no lasting harm to his career in the Mediterranean. Clarke is only the most notable of the characters portrayed by Thaddeus Holt in this meticulous, encyclopaedic history of wartime deception. Here also is Colonel John Bevan, the stockbroker who became head of the "London Controlling Section" which devised the vital deception plans for D-Day, who exploited his impeccable establishment connections to conduct a notably unconventional war. Here is Wing-Commander Dennis Wheatley, the popular novelist, who made himself an invaluable social emissary and documentary drafter for Bevan. Ewen Montague was a barrister in naval uniform who wrote the best-selling post-war book and film The Man Who Never Was about the LCS operation to deceive the Germans about the 1943 Sicilian invasion using false plans attached to a uniformed corpse which was then launched into the sea off Spain to be found by German sympathisers, as indeed it was. Holt describes Montague mercilessly as "self-satisfied, self-important and treacherous" - the last, because of his chronic disloyalty to Bevan. Peter Fleming, the celebrated gentleman travel-writer, followed Wavell to India to run Eastern deception operations, but these seldom came to much. Operations in that theatre were overwhelmingly dominated by the Americans, not much interested in deception. The Japanese high command paid little attention to its own intelligence service, staffed by officers so dense that they often failed to notice Fleming's laboriously planted documents and exotic stunts. Fleming emerges from Holt's account as an upmarket boy scout. Yet Fleming's words best identify a key element in deception, which lay at the heart of British success and relative American failure. "It is impossible, or at least highly dangerous, to attempt to tell a lie," he wrote, "until you know what the truth is." Success requires that the high command should tell the deceivers everything about its real intentions, as - for instance - MacArthur in the Pacific never would. It also demands the orchestration of false wireless traffic and captured enemy agent reports in the most subtle and sensitive fashion. American handling of "turned" agents was in the hands of the FBI. Its director, Edgar Hoover, was suited neither to subtlety nor to co-operation with other services. The British deceivers, by contrast, became the intimates of their masters. Bevan enjoyed ready access to Churchill and Alan Brooke. Dennis Wheatley wrote: "had Johnny Bevan asked the Chiefs of Staff for a couple of divisions to play with, they would have given them to him without argument". Thaddeus Holt, an Alabama lawyer who once served as a Deputy Under-Secretary of the US Army, has produced a masterly study. The author explains the nature of deception, which demands constant psychological study of "the customer" - the enemy's intelligence service. First it was necessary to provide the Germans with a much exaggerated view of Allied capabilities by creating fictitious formations and deployments; then to direct the enemy's attention to possible alternative targets for Allied forces. To succeed, it was not enough to make the enemy think wrongly. He must be provoked into acting wrongly, or rather rightly from the Allied viewpoint. Much sensational rubbish is written about wartime intelligence. Holt displays exemplary moderation and judgment. The Italians, oddly enough, possessed abler intelligence staffs than the other Axis powers. The Germans and Japanese were much readier to believe reports from "turned" agents run by MI5 and the "XX Committee" than information fed to them through false wireless traffic, to which much allied effort was devoted. It is seldom possible to assess the success of a given deception scheme conclusively, says the author, save for the most famous of all, "Fortitude", which kept the German 15th Army in the Pas de Calais for vital weeks after D-Day in Normandy. Yet unease about threats to the Balkans and Norway, diligently fostered by the deceivers, kept the Germans in constant uncertainty until late 1944, when the war's endgame became so obvious that strategic deception was no longer plausible. Holt does his best to show that American commanders overcame initial scepticism, and grew to recognise the importance of deception. In truth, however, deception was a British triumph, of which Thaddeus Holt has produced a worthy celebration. Max Hastings's latest book is 'Amageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45' (Macmillan). BOOK INFORMATION The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War Thaddeus Holt Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ?30, 1,148pp ISBN 0297848046 From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:56:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:56:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Law Notes -- Home Page Message-ID: Law Notes -- Home Page http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/ [This is an excellent source of a literalist reading of American law. [Exercise: Why is this sort of thing so often rudely dismissed? Do not say what is wrong with the views. I'm asking a different question. [This is best viewed just by clicking on the URL.] APPONO ASTOS "If you make yourselves sheep, the wolves will eat you." -- Benjamin Franklin Law Notes (Common Law Ramblings and other neat stuff relating to personal sovereignty. U.S. Flag [1]Play National Anthem [2]CD ERRORS [3]OVERVIEW [4]FOUNDATION [5]EXAMPLE [6]Jurisdiction [7]Procedure [8]Jury [9]Essays [10]Miscellaneous [11]Law Humor? [12]Other links [13]Challenge to Larry Becraft You never learned this in law school! _________________________________________________________________ OVERVIEW If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. Thomas Jefferson, 1816. This is a good place to start. You will find lots of good stuff in plain English that is not taught in law school. Warning: If you are an idealistic sort of person who tends to side with freedom for the people, then this site may be your government's worst nightmare, especially after you read about [15]jury duty, what the [16]legal difference is between being one of the people of the country and one of the citizens, and why we pledge allegiance to the [17]Republic instead of a democracy. FOUNDATION New to this site? Just start at the top and read everything in this section. Wise men are instructed by reason; Men of less understanding, by experience; The most ignorant, by necessity; The beasts by nature. Letters to Atticus[?], Cicero [19]Language and Dictionaries Which English language do you speak? [20]People or citizen? Which one are you? [21]Bill of Rights All rights are available to the People of the U.S. But only some rights are granted as privileges to Citizens of the U.S. [22]Sovereignty -- notes and case law [23]Republic vs. democracy -- Do you know the difference? The [24]Army knows! [25]California Admission to Union -- a Republic, not a democracy. [26]Court -- the substantive definition [27]Court of Record -- 4 1/2 substantive requirements to qualify Also, see [28]Nisi Prius Court -- a court of no record, by prior agreement [29]Court etiquette -- some unwritten rules [30]Habeas Corpus -- What it really is [31]Confirmatio Cartarum, Requires officials to accept Magna Carta as the common law [32]Magna Carta -- Foundation of liberty [33]Interpretation of Magna Carta and Confirmatio Cartarum JURISDICTION [35]Jurisdiction Some history and theory [36]Internal Revenue Code says the Internal Revenue Code is not law. [37]Who and What is the IRS? -- background info [38]California Vehicle Code Sec. 17460 -- Vehicle Code is a contract. [39]California Vehicle Code Sec. 15210 -- Vehicle code defers to federal definitions. Driver's License not needed to [40]travel privately, when not engaged in commerce [41]Resident -- by claiming you are a resident you enter interstate commerce jurisdiction [42]Nisi Prius Court -- a court of no record, by prior agreement PROCEDURE [44]Court Papers are letters to the court in a special "court" format. [45]Notice and Request -- Your first reaction to your adversary; points to include [46]Notice and Request -- Example [47]What do you do when you are in front of a judge? [48]Dismissal for Failure to State a Claim -- judge may not dismiss case [49]Petition for Discretionary Review -- A judge's advice about form [50]Elements of Strategy -- for conducting a court case [51]Press Release -- How to do a press release [52]Preserve error for appeal [53]The Forgotten Trial -- how to handle the penalty phase [54]The common law of access to governmental records -- F.O.I.A. failed? Try this. JURY [56]Handbook for Jurors--Must read before accepting jury duty. [57]Jury Nullification -- an "unreviewable and unreversible power" [58]Article -- The Intriguing Doctrine of Jury Nullification [59]Article -- A form of Civil Protest Grows in the Jury Rooms [60]Letter -- Why unanimity among twelve jurors? [61]Jury Tampering -- Educating jurors is not jury tampering. [62]Titles of Nobility -- A jury of peers, members of the peerage, would be one of these people [63]Jury Nullification -- Buy this book! [64]The trial of William Penn -- Landmark case confirmed the power of the jury and freedom of religion ESSAYS [66]Common law background from before 1176 [67]Clinton should not be impeached because... [68]Declaration of Independence -- analysis of style [69]Origins of the Electoral College -- explanation and history [70]Electoral College -- Mathematical proof Electoral College prevents dictatorship "Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." 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Over 2000 pages of mostly honest information about our Constitution. (Common Law removed from index). [84]Limited Immunity -- for public officials Opinions about the Elian Gonzalez fiasco: 1. from the [85]People or 2. from the [86]government [87]14 Federal Ethics -- for federal employees. [88]The trial of Jesus -- a 20th Century judge's critique [89]Man too smart for police force -- Does this reveal the real problem? [90]Act of Confederation--The original United States of America, before the present day Constitution [91]Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787 [92]Words of Encouragement for those honorably in jail because they tried to exercise their rights. [93]Arsenic and the nobility [94]CIA discloses what it considers inconceivable [95]Government surveilance: An exciting new export Solon on social justice; and other [96]gems of wisdom [97]Wire taps? -- The paranoids were right: Yep, they're listening [98]Spy Interactive -- What's happening behind 2-way interactive TV [99]Black Programs -- It is now officially OK to lie to the public [100]General Smedley Butler -- He declined offer in 1932 for dictatorship of U.S. [101]Newstates of America -- Proposed new constitution for U.S.A. -- bye bye freedom [102]Cicero -- Power and Law are mutually contentious [103]Gun Control Books -- Gun control research resources [104]Columbine High School Massacre -- Victim's commentary [105]Death by government -- In the 20th century more people murdered by their own governments than killed by all other unnatural causes combined. [106]Lawyers -- Are they really needed? See this survey [107]Lawyers -- Opinion by H. L. Menchen [108]Attorney's License requirement and Oath of Office--No attorney fulfills this requirement. [109]13 Famous lawyers -- All but one never went to law school [110]Disciples' Destinies -- The prices they paid for their idealism. [111]Countries bombed -- by the U.S. since World War II Found? Could this be the REAL [112]Supreme Court of the United States? [113]Buffalo Hunting the way the government likes it LAW HUMOR? [114]Review of proposed Declaration of Independence" -- by Management Analyst to the British Crown [115]Response to Long Form Census -- Depends on what the definition of "is" is. [116]Bicycle Law: Worthy of Judicial Notice. [117]Judgment--before the ACLU was established [118]Fair Fee--for services rendered [119]How to be a blazing success as an interior decorator [120]Baked Chicken Recipe Risky, but good! [121]Comments? References 1. http://www.1215.org/x/midi/nanthem.mid 2. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/cderrors.htm 3. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/index.html#overview 4. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/index.html#foundation 5. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/example/index.html 6. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/index.html#jurisdiction 7. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/index.html#procedure 8. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/index.html#jury 9. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/index.html#essays 10. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/index.html#misc 11. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/index.html#humor 12. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/links.htm 13. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/becraft.htm 14. http://www.terrisfight.org/ 15. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/#jury 16. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/pvc.htm 17. 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http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/constitution/conmain.html 83. http://www.gpoaccess.gov/constitution/index.html 84. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/immunity.htm 85. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/elian.htm 86. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/kidnap.htm 87. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/fedethic.htm 88. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/jesustrial.htm 89. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/cop104.htm 90. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/artconf.htm 91. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/nword.htm 92. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/courage.htm 93. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/arsenic.htm 94. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/angleton.htm 95. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/bigbro.htm 96. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/solon.htm 97. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/wiretap.htm 98. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/spyinteractive.htm 99. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/lieing.htm 100. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/smedley.htm 101. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/newstate.htm 102. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/cicero.htm 103. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/gunbooks.htm 104. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/columbine.htm 105. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/deathbygov.htm 106. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/ffflap.htm 107. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/lawyers-hlmenchen.htm 108. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/oath.htm 109. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/lawyers.htm 110. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/disciple.htm 111. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/usbomber.htm 112. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/court999.htm 113. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/buffhunt.htm 114. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/direview.htm 115. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/is.htm 116. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/bicycle.htm 117. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/judgment.htm 118. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/fairfee.htm 119. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/misc/irsdeco.htm 120. http://www.chrononhotonthologos.com/lawnotes/chickenrecipe.htm 121. mailto:x at 1215.org From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 21:58:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:58:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Am. Psychologist: Genes, Race, and Psychology in the Genome Era Message-ID: Special Issue: Genes, Race, and Psychology in the Genome Era (January, 2005). American Psychologist- the journal of the American Psychological Association (APA) [I'm taking my annual Lenten break from forwarding articles again this year. It's a vice to spend so much time doing this. So I'll be off the air for forty days and forty nights from Ash Wednesday until Easter.] Authors Warn of Inaccuracies and Explore Thorny Issues Concerning the Use and Measurement of Race in Health and Social Science Research As More Is Learned about the Human Genome The Gene-Environment Interaction is what must be studied; but should the study of race be thrown out altogether? Website - Highlights of each article summarized at: http://www.apa.org/releases/race.html PDF file - Introduction [4p.] at: http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/amp6015.pdf Press release: WASHINGTON - New and sophisticated methods for studying the relationship between human genetic differences, the environment, health and behavior, all made possible by the completion of the Human Genome Project, have made traditional race-based measurements of human differences obsolete, according to numerous authors writing in a special issue of the American Psychologist devoted to Genes, Race, and Psychology in the Genome Era. "...In a series of articles, leading researchers discuss racial health disparities and the controversial area of intelligence, while also carefully outlining specific instances and ways in which researchers should measure or use race. According to the authors, such research requires a careful examination of both environmental and genetic factors, as well as conceptually sound and methodologically rigorous measures of race at a level not yet universal in all research The special issue also looks at the construct of race in the 21st century, as well as the historical use of the construct in science, including issues of new genetic markers for race vs. self-reported race, racial vs. ancestral identity, racial disparities, and the interaction between genes and the environment. In separate articles, other authors discuss the long-standing and controversial examination of race and intelligence. The backdrop for each of the articles is the high expectation that the completion of the Human Genome Project will lead to dramatic advances in our understanding of health and behavior....." January 2005 American Psychologist Lead Author and Contact Information Genes, Race, and Psychology in the Genome Era: An Introduction Norman B. Anderson and Kim J. Nickerson, American Psychological Association Email Race and Ethnicity in the Genome Era: The Complexity of the Constructs Vence L. Bonham, Esther Warshauer-Baker, and Francis S. Collins, National Institutes of Health Email Race as Biology Is Fiction, Racism as a Social Problem Is Real: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on the Social Construction of Race Audrey Smedley, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Brian D. Smedley, Institute of Medicine Email The Meaning of Race in Psychology and How to Change It: A Methodological Perspective Janet E. Helms, Maryam Jernigan, and Jackquelyn Mascher, Boston College - Email In the Eye of the Storm: Race and Genomics Research and Practice Vivian Ota Wang, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health and Stanley Sue, University of California, Davis -Email Intelligence, Race, and Genetics Robert J. Sternberg, Elena L. Grigorenko, and Kenneth K. Kidd, Yale University Email Under the Skin: On the Impartial Treatment of Genetic and Environmental Hypotheses of Racial Differences David C. Rowe (Deceased), University of Arizona. Dr. Joseph Rodgers made final revisions to this article. Email Race and IQ: Molecular Genetics as Deus ex Machina Richard S. Cooper, Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine Email The Use of Race Variables in Genetic Studies of Complex Traits and the Goal of Reducing Health Disparities: A Transdisciplinary Perspective Alexandra E. Shields, Georgetown University, Michael Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Harvard University, Patricia A. King, Georgetown University Law Center, Caryn Lerman, University of Pennsylvania, Rayna Rapp, New York University, and Patrick F. Sullivan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Email Genes, Environment, and Race: Quantitative Genetic Approaches Keith E. Whitfield and Gerald McClearn, Pennsylvania State University Email Race and Genetics: Controversies in Biomedical, Behavioral, and Forensic Sciences Pilar Ossorio, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Troy Duster, New York University Email Special Issue: Genes, Race, and Psychology in the Genome Era (January, 2005). American Psychologist- the journal of the American Psychological Association (APA) Authors Warn of Inaccuracies and Explore Thorny Issues Concerning the Use and Measurement of Race in Health and Social Science Research As More Is Learned about the Human Genome The Gene-Environment Interaction is what must be studied; but should the study of race be thrown out altogether? Website - Highlights of each article summarized at: http://www.apa.org/releases/race.html PDF file - Introduction [4p.] at: http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/amp6015.pdf Press release: WASHINGTON - New and sophisticated methods for studying the relationship between human genetic differences, the environment, health and behavior, all made possible by the completion of the Human Genome Project, have made traditional race-based measurements of human differences obsolete, according to numerous authors writing in a special issue of the American Psychologist devoted to Genes, Race, and Psychology in the Genome Era. "...In a series of articles, leading researchers discuss racial health disparities and the controversial area of intelligence, while also carefully outlining specific instances and ways in which researchers should measure or use race. According to the authors, such research requires a careful examination of both environmental and genetic factors, as well as conceptually sound and methodologically rigorous measures of race at a level not yet universal in all research The special issue also looks at the construct of race in the 21st century, as well as the historical use of the construct in science, including issues of new genetic markers for race vs. self-reported race, racial vs. ancestral identity, racial disparities, and the interaction between genes and the environment. In separate articles, other authors discuss the long-standing and controversial examination of race and intelligence. The backdrop for each of the articles is the high expectation that the completion of the Human Genome Project will lead to dramatic advances in our understanding of health and behavior....." January 2005 American Psychologist Lead Author and Contact Information Genes, Race, and Psychology in the Genome Era: An Introduction Norman B. Anderson and Kim J. Nickerson, American Psychological Association Email Race and Ethnicity in the Genome Era: The Complexity of the Constructs Vence L. Bonham, Esther Warshauer-Baker, and Francis S. Collins, National Institutes of Health Email Race as Biology Is Fiction, Racism as a Social Problem Is Real: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on the Social Construction of Race Audrey Smedley, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Brian D. Smedley, Institute of Medicine Email The Meaning of Race in Psychology and How to Change It: A Methodological Perspective Janet E. Helms, Maryam Jernigan, and Jackquelyn Mascher, Boston College - Email In the Eye of the Storm: Race and Genomics Research and Practice Vivian Ota Wang, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health and Stanley Sue, University of California, Davis -Email Intelligence, Race, and Genetics Robert J. Sternberg, Elena L. Grigorenko, and Kenneth K. Kidd, Yale University Email Under the Skin: On the Impartial Treatment of Genetic and Environmental Hypotheses of Racial Differences David C. Rowe (Deceased), University of Arizona. Dr. Joseph Rodgers made final revisions to this article. Email Race and IQ: Molecular Genetics as Deus ex Machina Richard S. Cooper, Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine Email The Use of Race Variables in Genetic Studies of Complex Traits and the Goal of Reducing Health Disparities: A Transdisciplinary Perspective Alexandra E. Shields, Georgetown University, Michael Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Harvard University, Patricia A. King, Georgetown University Law Center, Caryn Lerman, University of Pennsylvania, Rayna Rapp, New York University, and Patrick F. Sullivan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Email Genes, Environment, and Race: Quantitative Genetic Approaches Keith E. Whitfield and Gerald McClearn, Pennsylvania State University Email Race and Genetics: Controversies in Biomedical, Behavioral, and Forensic Sciences Pilar Ossorio, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Troy Duster, New York University Email From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 22:00:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 17:00:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Globe: "Brain Fingerprints" May Offer Better Way to Detect Lying Message-ID: "Brain Fingerprints" May Offer Better Way to Detect Lying http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/07/0705_wirelies.html Patricia Wen The Boston Globe July 5, 2001 [Note date. What's the current situation?] Former CIA agent Aldrich Ames easily fooled lie-detector tests, concealing his work as a Russian spy. But could he have duped a "brain fingerprinting'' exam, which probes what people know by checking their electrical brain waves? Nanny Louise Woodward passed a polygraph, denying that she killed a Newton baby in her charge, though she was later convicted of the crime. Suppose she had put her head in a brain-scanning machine that measures deceit in blood flow patterns? Then there's John and Patsy Ramsey, who insist lie-detector tests clear them of any role in the death of their 6-year-old girl. But what would happen if a computerized video machine taped their facial expressions for signs of dishonesty? As polygraphs become increasingly controversial, sparking a cottage industry on how to "beat" the test, scientists are hunting for new high-tech ways of solving the most ancient of human dilemmas: How do you tell if someone is lying? "I believe it's only a matter of time before we have much better lie-detectors," said Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard University psychology professor who is studying the brain scans of liars. "The science of this is only going to get better." Rather than measure signs of stress, such as blood pressure and heart rate, as polygraphs do, many of the new techniques try to get inside the brain itself. They measure things such as brain waves and cerebral blood flow, which people cannot control--at least not yet. And they're making headway: A judge even admitted some brain-testing results as evidence in an Iowa murder case last March while polygraph evidence is still inadmissible. Beyond the courtroom, intelligence agencies have been quick to recognize the value of a better truth-detector. The CIA, scandalized by discoveries of double-crossers within its ranks, is funding much of the lab work, along with science foundations. The FBI and other law-enforcement groups are hiring some of these scientists as consultants, and asking them to train staff in new techniques. Although these researchers are confident their technology may prove more accurate than today's polygraphs, they are quick to point out there will never be a magic box that discerns truth with 100 percent accuracy, and all these devices should be seen as supplements to old-fashioned gumshoe work. "There's no such thing as 100 percent certainty," said Paul Ekman, a psychology professor from the University of California who pioneered the study of deceit-detection through fleeting facial expressions. "That's why I'm not eager to see my work be used in criminal court cases." Advanced Lie-Detectors Within a Decade? Kosslyn of Harvard shares these concerns. "More advanced lie-detectors could be out within the next decade, but the big question is, how will they be used?" he said. Iowa-based neuroscientist Lawrence Farwell, however, is eager to see his "brain fingerprinting" work get into more courtrooms, convinced as he is that it has a near-perfect accuracy rate. His method focuses on a specific electrical brain wave, called a P300, which activates when a person sees a familiar object. The subject wears a headband of electrodes and faces a computer screen, which flashes photos. This technique provides a potential window into someone's past visual experience. If a person looks at random pictures of weapons, without activating a P300 wave, these objects are presumably unknown to him. But if the murder weapon is shown, and a P300 wave activates, then the person clearly has some experience with that weapon. "This technique is used to see if they have the information stored in their brain or not," said Farwell, a Harvard graduate who now runs Brain Wave Science in Fairfield, Iowa. "All of this relates indirectly to lie detection." Of course, for the P300 to be truly incriminating, the prosecutor would have to show that the tested person didn't see that murder weapon in some other innocent way, such as in media accounts or by being a bystander. His "brain fingerprinting" helmet of electrodes is currently available within the CIA, Farwell said, though he doesn't know if or how often it's used. However, Farwell knows some strategies for using P300 to detect moles. A US agent suspected of being a spy for Cuba, for instance, could be shown objects known only to Cuban undercover agents, something as simple as a job-related paper form or the "contact" person. Farwell's lie-detection technique won a modest legal victory this past March, when an Iowa judge ruled there was enough scientific basis to admit "brain fingerprinting" results as evidence in the case of Terry Harrington, a convicted murderer trying to win a new trial. Farwell showed that Harrington did not have a P300 wave when showed key parts of the crime scene, but did emit the P300 wave when shown scenes from his alibi, suggesting he was unfamiliar with the crime. After reviewing evidence from all sides, however, the judge did not grant a new trial, though Harrington is appealing. Harvard psychology professor Kosslyn also focuses on the brain in his study of deception, but he uses brain-scanning equipment to see what areas receive intense blood flow during questioning. While his work has not yet been completed, preliminary results show that different regions of the brain light up when people tell the truth or lie. Further, he believes different regions are activated depending on the type of lie. His data so far, he said, show the anterior cingulate, located near the front of the brain and associated with conflict resolution, is often activated during lies. When lies are spontaneous--making it up on the spot, as opposed to a fiction created over a period of time--the back part of the brain associated with visualization is also lit up. Kosslyn said he believes that is related to the fact that the spontaneous liar has to visualize whether quick fibs make sense or not. Focus on Smirks and Eye Flutters Beyond the brain, tiny alterations in facial expressions, from smirks to eye flutters, are the focus of work at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. Piggy-backing on the work of psychologist Eckman, neuroscientist Terry Sejnowski is convinced that specific expressions suggest deception, though they are often imperceptible to the untrained eye. He is trying to link computers with video cameras, which would be able to record someone's face during testimony and see if it's truthful. Not everyone is thrilled about this new generation of lie-detectors. Mark Zaid is a Washington attorney representing 11 people who say they were unfairly rejected for federal law-enforcement jobs when they failed a mandatory polygraph. While some polygraph advocates put its accuracy rate at 90 percent, Zaid is among those who say the polygraph, in use since the 1920s, is hardly better than a coin-toss. He says future lie-detectors may be no different. "It's possible that new brainwave machines will say if someone is lying or not, but now, I don't buy it," he said. Yet, even a Massachusetts plaintiff in Zaid's case, who works in local law-enforcement, said he keeps an open mind that someday a better lie-detector will come along. This man, who asked to remain anonymous, said he feels today's polygraph is faulty and gave him a "false positive" when asked about past drug use. But he knows from his own job that the mere presence of a polygraph can be useful in questioning. Back in 1995, for instance, police had no evidence linking Susan Smith to the drowning of her two young sons. While she claimed the boys were abducted by a carjacker, she had three polygraphs showing signs of deception. Police kept the focus on her. Later, she admitted she let the car roll into a South Carolina pond, and the bodies of her two boys were found in the water. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 22:02:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 17:02:17 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Please Take My Advice Message-ID: Please Take My Advice The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.11 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i23/23a01401.htm 5 books for professors who want to improve their teaching By THOMAS BARTLETT A perennial complaint about higher education -- repeated at conferences, in articles, and in university corridors across the country -- is that professors are not taught how to teach. As a result, many colleges in the last few years have pushed to prepare graduate students for leading a classroom. A number of recent books also offer teaching dos and don'ts. Here are five of the most notable: _________________________________________________________________ Letters to a Teacher (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004) Sam Pickering, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut and a prolific essayist who has written 17 books. He was the inspiration for Robin Williams's character in the movie Dead Poets Society. _________________________________________________________________ Unlike most professors who write books about teaching, Sam Pickering doesn't like to give advice. He doesn't like to take advice, either. In fact, he is suspicious of the whole business of telling other people what to do. "For me to advise you would be arrogant," he writes in the introduction. So in lieu of exhortations, Mr. Pickering offers a series of warm and amusing reflections on the teaching life. Some of the funniest moments come when he is describing interactions with his students. He writes of how he once told a student that she needed to learn civility. "The girl looked puzzled. 'Civility?' she answered. 'What's that? I'm not an English major.'" Mr. Pickering's opinions on education are often surprising and willfully contrarian. "It is not important for everyone to write well," writes the English professor who teaches writing. "Writing poorly does not exclude a person from the pleasures of the bed -- or boardroom." As for core curricula, the professor could not care less. "One course does not a historian make," he writes. "If a child despises math, why must he take three math courses in college? On the other hand, if he loves math why not let him take all math courses?" When Mr. Pickering does break down and offer some advice, it is usually gentle and cloaked in humor. "Parents will say dreadful things to you," he writes. "Do not let them burrow under the skin and get into your bloodstream. If you have to respond, go into your office alone, shut the door, and quote Tennessee Williams, preferably a terse, ripe phrase, something like 'Screw you' or 'Kiss my ass.' Afterward open your door, chuckle, step into the hall, and smile like the sunrise." Mr. Pickering receives letters from professors all the time asking him to reveal his teaching secrets, as if there were a formula for classroom success that he's been keeping to himself all these years (he started teaching at Connecticut in the late 1970s). This book is sure to inspire more such letters despite the professor's reservations about his reputation as the Great Teacher. "I don't want to be a guru," says Mr. Pickering. Too late. _________________________________________________________________ The Art of Teaching (Oxford University Press, 2004) Jay Parini, a professor of English at Middlebury College. He has written five books of poetry, six novels, and three biographies, and is a frequent contributor to The Chronicle Review. _________________________________________________________________ Jay Parini has been teaching for three decades. And yet he still asks himself the same basic questions before each class. "Will I make sense? Will the students respond in sympathetic ways? Will I look and sound like an idiot? Is my face well shaved? Is my fly unzipped? Will I make it through 50 or 60 minutes without feeling like a complete idiot?" That's OK, he writes, because such questions indicate that he is "still trying to find the right way to present the material." In this collection of essays, Mr. Parini writes about finding your teaching voice, balancing teaching and personal life, and what to wear in the classroom. "As a college teacher, it pays to think of clothing as a rhetorical choice, and to dress accordingly," he writes. He wrote the book, he says, because he was concerned that there is not enough discussion about good teaching in higher education. "What I'm really shocked by is that young teachers coming out of graduate school have rarely given a second thought to teaching," says Mr. Parini. In one essay, he encourages young teachers to state their goals clearly at the beginning of a course: "Make sure that on your syllabus you let the students know exactly what is required of them: how many papers, how long, when they are due, and so forth." He also tells young teachers to "make your viewpoint known, to students and your colleagues. And don't be afraid to change your mind as needed." Mr. Parini thinks of teaching as performance art. He writes about the importance of selecting the right "mask" for the classroom. "Most of us are left to blunder our way toward a teaching voice that serves us, and our students, well," he writes. "Unconsciously, we adopt different masks, noticing (or failing to notice) their usefulness." Instead, according to the professor, the mask should be a conscious choice, one that complements the material being taught. For instance, as a young professor, Mr. Parini would pace the classroom "like a caged animal" and fling chalk at the blackboard. Eventually, he writes, he came to realize that that was not the right mask for him. Mr. Parini says he hopes The Art of Teaching will be useful to other teachers, but he doesn't have any illusions about having said everything there is to say on the subject. "I doubt that any book can teach you how to teach," he says. "What it should do is get you thinking about the important issues." _________________________________________________________________ I'm the Teacher, You're the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) Patrick Allitt, a professor of history at Emory University. Mr. Allitt has written several books on religious history. _________________________________________________________________ What Patrick Allitt has written is closer to an expos? than an advice book. I'm the Teacher, You're the Student is exactly what its subtitle suggests: an account of a university semester in the classroom. The book begins with Mr. Allitt preparing his course and ends with the grading of final exams. In between he worries about nearly everything, fretting about what -- if anything -- his students are learning and whether the sport coat he wears to class looks silly. Mr. Allitt, who leads teaching workshops at Emory, is not shy about criticizing his own teaching -- nor does he hesitate to let loose on lazy students. He quotes examples of poor student writing at length and then skewers them mercilessly. Some students confuse the economist John Kenneth Galbraith with the scientist Edward Teller; others can't tell the difference between novels and nonfiction books. And they write sentences like this: "Many did not survive the harsh journey west, but they still trekked on." While these examples always amuse, it is hard not to cringe slightly for the students whose writing is ridiculed. Mr. Allitt changed the names to protect the not-so-innocent but "all the examples are real" he wrote in an e-mail message. (When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr. Allitt was teaching aboard a cruise ship. A professor's life isn't so bad, eh?) "I find most writing on education rather boring, because of the high degree of abstraction many authors use," the professor says in his e-mail message. He wrote an account of daily academic life "in the hope that other teachers would find my experiences comparable to some of their own." For the nonteacher, the book offers some insight into the frustration that can overcome even the best professors. Mr. Allitt detests whining students (e.g., those who ask for deadlines to be extended or those who shamelessly grade-grub) and after he recounts several such episodes, it is easy to see why. Overly emotional students also annoy the professor. Throughout the book, tears are shed over seemingly trivial incidents. Each time Mr. Allitt follows the same procedure: He hands the weepy student a roll of toilet paper and waits quietly for the waterworks to subside. Despite his frustrations and complaints, it is obvious that Mr. Allitt cares about his students. By e-mail, he says he hoped to show that being a teacher "is a wonderful job but also a difficult one." _________________________________________________________________ The Joy of Teaching: A Practical Guide for New College Instructors (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) Peter Filene, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mr. Filene has written several books, including a novel, Home and Away. He has won six teaching awards. _________________________________________________________________ How do you write a lecture, create a syllabus, or lead a discussion? In this book, Peter Filene covers the basics. He wrote it, he says, with freshly minted professors in mind. "I figured that new teachers in particular had very little luxury to entertain lots of theoretical discussion," he says. The book is brief (a little more than 150 pages) but it packs in lots of advice. In his chapter called "Constructing a Syllabus," Mr. Filene tells teachers not to cram too much into one semester. "In a survey of the English novel, for example, you can't imagine leaving out Tom Jones,Vanity Fair, and Middlemarch. Then again, can your students really read 2,280 pages in three weeks and also write that five-page midterm essay?" he writes. Mr. Filene suggests making a list of all the topics that need to be covered in the course and matching them with the number of classes. If there are more topics than days, start winnowing the list. "Engage in cold-blooded self reflection," he writes. "Did you emphasize [a certain topic] because it's the most important? Or because you wrote your dissertation on it and feel underprepared to teach the other sections of your subject?" In his chapter on encouraging discussion in class, Mr. Filene recommends handing out a list of questions in advance. He also suggests making sure students feel welcome to contribute to discussions. "The sooner you start this process, the less inertia you will need to overcome," Mr. Filene writes. At times the professor's advice seems pat ("To communicate effectively, good teachers present their ideas with clarity") and, in one chapter, he cites a 1987 study of teaching methods (couldn't he find anything more recent?). Still, he addresses nuts-and-bolts questions that more highfalutin books on pedagogy might overlook. _________________________________________________________________ Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (Yale University Press, 2003) Gerald Graff, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Graff has written numerous books, including Beyond the Culture Wars. _________________________________________________________________ Professors and students don't know how to talk to each other. They might as well be speaking different languages. In fact, that's exactly what they're doing according to Gerald Graff; he dubs the two tongues "Intellectualspeak" and "Studentspeak." To overcome this, professors need to do a better job of explaining what the mysterious world of academe is all about. And what it is all about is argument -- or so argues Mr. Graff. The problem is that the kind of argument that goes on in classrooms seems different from the kind that goes on everywhere else. But really it's not, according to the professor. He writes that "a more conversational view of argumentation can demystify academic writing" and make students feel less like outsiders. Sometimes that means altering the subject matter. "My maxim is, start with where students are," Mr. Graff says. "Students who might be hard to get fired up about Plato or Shakespeare turn out to be surprisingly smart about popular music or sports." What is important, he contends, is teaching students the habits of thought that lead to convincing arguments. And those skills "can be used to move them back to Plato." This semester Mr. Graff and his wife, Cathy Birkenstein-Graff, a lecturer in English, are co-teaching a freshman composition course. While it may come as a surprise that a well-known professor would be teaching a course that most English instructors do their best to avoid, Mr. Graff says he finds the class invigorating. "Being forced to explain yourself to undergraduates, I would argue, helps your research," he says. Mr. Graff and Ms. Birkenstein-Graff are finishing a textbook on argumentative writing, which is scheduled to be published this year. While Mr. Graff's ideas apply to all disciplines, he is particularly concerned with the teaching of writing. He writes that professors "need to disabuse ourselves of the widespread myth that academia and intelligibility don't mix." From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 22:04:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 17:04:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Online Textbooks Fail to Make the Grade Message-ID: Online Textbooks Fail to Make the Grade The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.2.11 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i23/23a03501.htm [I'm taking my annual Lenten break from forwarding articles again this year. It's a vice to spend so much time doing this. So I'll be off the air for forty days and forty nights from Ash Wednesday until Easter.] Students prefer handling pages the old-fashioned way By SCOTT CARLSON Richmond, Va. While buying books for her marketing class this fall, Caitlyn F. Atwood, a senior at the University of Richmond, found herself a little low on cash, having already shelled out $500 for books for other courses. When she heard about an option to buy her textbook for half price -- an electronic edition that can only be read online -- she decided to try it. "I regret that," she says bluntly, sitting outside of her marketing class after a two-hour test. "With my other books I can go to the library, but with this I always have to be in front of a screen." And she has found that it is not always easy to find an available computer during crucial points in the semester, like right before midterms and finals. Online textbooks are in their infancy, but Ms. Atwood's experience, other anecdotal evidence, and at least one survey suggest that publishers might have their work cut out for them as they push for a switch from print to pixels. In the past year, several major publishers have started promoting online versions of their textbooks, available for sale directly to students through the Internet. Publishers say that online textbooks offer conveniences, like text-searching tools, that students today are accustomed to using. And authors can quickly and easily produce new or updated editions of textbooks without having to wait for a print run. Moreover, publishers say, cheaper online versions are a response to the growing dissatisfaction of consumer advocates and students with the high cost of textbooks. But some consumer advocates say online textbooks are no bargain, and that students give up a great deal of freedom in going digital because of the many restrictions publishers put on e-books, such as use of copy-protection software. And when it comes to textbooks, many in the digital generation have old-fashioned tastes: Ms. Atwood and others say that online editions might be a useful supplement to paper versions, but there's nothing like being able to open a book and study -- even when there are no computers or power outlets around. "If I had the paper book, the online version would have been a good tool," Ms. Atwood says, noting that she would have used it, for instance, to look up definitions of words. Being chained to the computer, though, was not only an inconvenience but an impediment. "You tend to be distracted by the Internet," she says, "so I had to stay focused." e-Book Strategies With the rise of distance-education programs and online course materials, publishers seem to be betting that students will soon prefer online books, and are increasing their electronic output. Three major textbook publishers -- Pearson, Thomson, and McGraw-Hill -- announced new online textbook programs last year, all billed as cheaper alternatives to paper. In February 2004, Thomson announced its Advantage Series, which includes e-textbooks offered at half the price of paper books. Susan K. Badger, chief executive officer of Thomson Higher Education, says sales of the e-books have not been robust so far, but her company is preparing for a day when students prefer electronic texts. "We all feel like we need to be ready when the tipping point comes," she says. Pearson's program, called SafariX, has added about 300 online books to its catalog since announcing the program in April, and officials plan to have 1,000 available by the end of the year. (The company didn't start selling the books until September.) Since 2000, McGraw-Hill had been in the business of producing custom electronic books, cobbled together from articles and chapters of books, for specific classes and at the request of individual professors. In June, the company began producing electronic versions of its best-selling textbooks. It has about 200 books available for sale directly to students, and is adding 10 electronic books to its catalog every week. Because books are prepared in electronic form before they go to press, putting them online is relatively easy, says Ginny Moffat, the vice president of course content delivery for McGraw-Hill Higher Education. "In fact, some of our books are online before they are printed," she says. Meanwhile, some smaller textbook publishers have also gone digital. Atomic Dog Publishing, a small textbook company that published the marketing textbook used in Ms. Atwood's class, has a different business model: a hybrid of ink and bytes. Every paper textbook published by Atomic Dog -- which costs about half as much as comparable titles from major publishers -- comes with access to a free online version as a supplement. Students like Ms. Atwood can save even more by buying only the online version, but just 20 percent of Atomic Dog's customers take that option. Atomic Dog was started five years ago amid the euphoria of soaring Internet stocks and whiz-pow marketing strategies. Technology "was the golden calf that everyone danced around," says Mark A. Greenberg, chairman and CEO of Atomic Dog. A former vice president at mainstream publishing firms including HarperCollins and Prentice Hall, he was brought in to reorganize the Internet company and refocus it on selling old-fashioned content and paper, not just passwords. "We learned that you could beam this stuff from Jupiter, and if the content wasn't wanted by instructors, they weren't going to buy it," he says. Mixed Reviews Online textbooks combine the features of books, search engines, and course-management software like Blackboard and WebCT. Some online books are delivered as documents that users download to their computers, and some exist only on the Internet. Ms. Atwood logs into her marketing textbook from a Web browser with a user name and password. While reading the body of the text, she might come across a keyword highlighted in blue -- clicking on that, she brings up a definition in a window. In addition, by typing terms into a search box, she can quickly find chapters that mention those terms. The book includes photographs and diagrams, like any textbook would, but it also has animations and links to resources on the World Wide Web. As when using paper books, students can highlight portions of the text, add bookmarks to selected pages, or add notes about the reading. Each week Ms. Atwood's instructor, Dana-Nicoleta Lascu, an associate professor of marketing, assigns an online quiz through the textbook site. By logging into her own Atomic Dog account, Ms. Lascu can then track the progress of her students and alter her lectures as needed. Ms. Lascu, as it happens, is also the author of the marketing textbook used in her course. She says she found Atomic Dog after a book proposal with a mainstream publisher stalled. She was intrigued by the idea of publishing online -- enough to work with a small publisher. "It was a risk I was willing to take," she says. Thomas N. Duening, the director of entrepreneurial programs at Arizona State University, also sought out Atomic Dog because he and a co-author wanted to try publishing an online textbook. Mr. Duening is downright euphoric about online textbooks, going so far as to say that paper books, which have been around for hundreds of years, are a "passing fad." "In the near future, there is no way you can get away from offering things online," he says. "Kids today are learning to read online, learning to interact online. ... We're looking at where things are going." The future of online textbooks, however, is far from assured. Publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson would not discuss sales of online textbooks, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the current crop of college students are not jumping to buy them. Robert Collinge, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, is the author of a macroeconomics textbook that is featured online through Pearson's SafariX program. At the request of The Chronicle, he polled his students through an online discussion board: Have you bought, or would you ever consider buying, an online textbook for this course? Of the 20 students who responded, most said they weren't interested. "I refuse to buy an online textbook," wrote one student in a typical reply. "I prefer to have an actual hard copy of the book on hand to read whenever I want." Matthew I. Kyne, a sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering, was one of the few in Mr. Collinge's class who bought an online version. He had downloaded it to his laptop, and he said he liked it. But his motivations were unusual: He rides his bike 20 miles to campus every day. "If I don't have to carry a book, that's great," he says. "I would do it again for this type of class, but not for a physics class or a math class, where you have to work on problems out of the book. But if you are just reading, it's fine." Slow to Catch On Last year the National Association of College Stores released results of a survey of more than 4,000 students at 21 campuses across the country. Among students polled, 73 percent preferred buying textbooks in a traditional format, while only 11 percent preferred electronic versions. "Generally, our research shows that students seem to be very slow in embracing this," says Laura Nakoneczny, a spokeswoman for the association. However, she adds that electronic materials are used more frequently in elementary and secondary schools. "It could be that today's students, who were educated using traditional textbooks, aren't really embracing electronic books because the format is not familiar to them," she says. "And it could be that up-and-coming students could embrace them." But the association's study revealed habits among college students that could make marketing electronic books difficult. The study found that only 43 percent of students buy all of the required books for their courses. Many students borrow textbooks from a classmate or from a friend who has taken the class in the past. And more than 45 percent of the students surveyed said they keep their books for future reference, and among engineering, vocational, and science majors, as many as 60 percent save their books. Unlike paper books, many electronic books cannot be given to friends, sold to used-textbook dealers, or kept on shelves for later reading. Passwords for some online books expire within a year, and publishers have devised various mechanisms that prevent students from sharing passwords with friends or swapping downloaded versions of books on, say, peer-to-peer networks. For example, a downloadable electronic book published by McGraw-Hill "locks" itself to the computer on which it is installed. So a student who downloads a textbook to a dorm-room computer will not be able to read the book on computers at the library or at his or her parents' house. McGraw-Hill's online versions of books have limited numbers of "page views" -- that is, a reader can look at the pages of a book only so many times, generally four times the number of pages in the book. So in a 100-page book, a reader can look at one page 400 times, say, or all the pages four times. "We arrived at that figure after talking with professors," Ms. Moffat says. "They said, read it once, study for a mid-term, study for a final, and read it one more time. Four ought to be ample." But consumer advocates, who have rallied students to protest high prices on textbooks, find the intellectual-property protections on online books too limiting, even for a cheaper price tag. Compared with paper books, "you're giving up substantial numbers of rights in return for paying half the price," says Edmund M. Mierzwinski, the consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit watchdog group. "Heck, I would look at the page a lot more than four times if it were important," he says. "I think that's an extreme restriction on learning." No More Used Books? If electronic books catch on, Mr. Mierzwinski sees several advantages for publishers at the expense of consumers. "There will be no used digital books," he says. "So you're completely eliminating the used-book market and that form of competition." He says the move to digital will give publishers "a lot more control over the marketplace." "Once they control the market, once they have completely eliminated the secondary market, and once they have got students renting their books, what's going to stop them from raising the prices?" he asks. April Hattori, a spokeswoman for McGraw-Hill, says that students can always print pages that they want to archive. She adds that many students sell their books at the end of the semester, which is "equivalent" to subscribing to a book for a limited time. But the limitations of online textbooks could keep them from catching on in a major way, critics say. During the fall hurricane season, those limitations became clear in Ms. Lascu's class. The University of Richmond lost power for several days during one storm, and the handful of students in her class who had bought electronic books could not study for an upcoming test. Ms. Lascu changed the test to an open-book exam, and for the test, some of those students borrowed books owned by their peers. Mussie Assefaw, a junior who bought a paper version of Ms. Lascu's book, says he mainly reads the paper version but frequently refers to the online version to seek out key marketing terms or watch an animated graphic. His friend, Daniel B. Kim, who bought an online version, frequently borrows the paper version. Mr. Greenberg, of Atomic Dog, says that he is interested in using the online versions of his books for marketing leverage -- as a supplement and enhancement to paper textbooks, not the main attraction. He believes that is where the textbook market as a whole is going. "I think in the future you'll see some combination of classic print with digital resources," he says. "The real value of digitization is the interactivity, not the readability. ... It's silly to think that the book, as a printed item, is going to go away." From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 22:06:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 17:06:01 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Times: Authors in the front line: Martin Amis Message-ID: Authors in the front line: Martin Amis http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-531-1458940-531,00.html 5.2.6 On the streets of Colombia, young boys cripple or murder each other just for showing disrespect or for winning at a game of cards. Is the taste for violence opening up a wound that can never heal? Report: Martin Amis The newsprint edition carries accompanying photographs by Tom Craig 1. Exit wound For little Kevin, it was a bala perdida that almost did it: the stray bullet went in through his nape and came out through his brow. That was a year ago, when he was four. The incident took place a few yards from where we now sat, in a front room that felt like a car-less garage, with its damp cement floor, and a series - almost a pattern - of scorched light fixtures along its walls and ceiling. Kevin's grandmother runs a modest line in second-hand clothes; there was a stretched wire with some coat hangers on it, and a plastic bag stuffed with espadrilles and flip-flops. The family dog, small, frazzled and elderly, was still growling at us after half an hour, even while scratching its ear with a raised hind paw. Kevin was playing in the street when the car sped by (it never became clear to me what, if anything, the muchachos were trying to hit). At the hospital, his 20-year-old mother was told that Kevin had five minutes to live. They operated; and, after a five-day coma, a silent and unsmiling spell in a wheelchair, and a course of rehabilitation, Kevin seems to have re-emerged as a confident, even a stylish little boy. Kevin was deeply withdrawn for months; he responded only listlessly to other children, and was indifferent to adults. When he divided his toy soldiers into good guys and bad guys, the bad guys always won. What happened to Kevin was an accident: an accident in a very accident-prone city, but an accident. Another child, 10-year-old Bryan, will find it harder to gain the (in fact nonexistent) consolation of 'closure'. He was shot in the back by his best friend. Bryan's offence? It wasn't as if he threatened to take his football home - all he did was say he didn't want to play any more. Bryan now has a palsied gait (a slow, bobbing hop) and a face deprived of symmetry; and he looks blind too (though he isn't), because his gaze seeks nothing. Kevin, on the other hand, amiably complied when his grandmother, parting his hair and lifting his fringe, showed me the entry wound, the exit wound; they looked like vaccination scars. As we took our leave, the dog gave us an eloquent snarl: good riddance to bad rubbish. The dog, it seemed, had taken on the fear and distrust that ought to belong to Kevin. In the forecourt of the house opposite, a fully adult male (statistically quite a rarity in this neighbourhood) was closing up his house for the night; he stared at us with frank but nonspecific hostility, all the while rearranging the contents of his crimson running shorts. Some residents try to disguise it with fancy grilles and lattices, but most of the houses in non-downtown Cali are wholly encaged. The male adult across the street now proceeded to wall himself up in his personal penitentiary. In El Distrito, the boys rage all night and sleep all day (in their coffins and crypts); and at dusk they all turn into vampires. We always had to be out by five - but wait. There was still time to visit Ana Milena. Some years ago her sister had been paralysed after being shot in the throat by a neighbour; she died of depression and self-starvation in 1997. Seven years later, Ana broke up with her boyfriend. So he attacked her in broad daylight at a bus stop, stabbing her in the navel, the neck, and twice in the head. Their daughter (then nearly three) stood and watched, and hid her face. She still insists that her mother was hit by a car. Gang slang for a home-made gun is una pacha: a baby's bottle. The violence starts at once and never goes away. Kevin's scars are not at all disfiguring. He has an entry wound and an exit wound. His was easily the most hopeful story I heard in Cali. In general, you suspect, emotionally and psychologically there may be entry wounds, but there are no exit wounds. 2. La Esperanza Occupying about a quarter of Colombia's third city, Aguablanca (Whitewater) consists of about 130 barrios; each barrio has two or three gangs, and all the gangs are theoretically at war with all the others. What do they fight about? They don't fight about drugs (ecstasy and dope are popular, but the cocaine trade is an elite activity). They fight about turf (a corner, a side street); they fight about anything at all to do with disrespect (what might be called 'eyebrow' murders); and they fight about the fight that went before (venganza operates like a series of chain letters). Yet the main fuel of the murder figures, here as elsewhere, is the fantastic plenitude of weaponry. A home-made gun costs just over ?20, a hand grenade just over ?12 (a hand grenade is what you'll be needing if, for instance, you gatecrash a party and get turned away). 'Guns don't kill people. People kill people,' argued Ronald Reagan. You could take this line further, and say that people don't kill people either. Bullets kill people. In Cali they cost 50 cents each, and can be sold to minors individually, like cigarettes. Three teenage girls, acting as the representatives of a barrio called El Barandal (The Rail), advised us not to enter; but a couple of hundred yards down the road, at La Esperanza (Hope), we were casually welcomed. I asked what had made the difference, and our driver said that El Barandal was even poorer and dirtier and, crucially, fuller; there was more humiliation, more wrath, and more guns. Sara, the friendliest of the Esperanzans, had a different emphasis: 'Somos todos negros, y somos buena gente.' We're all black, and we're good people. And good people they would need to be. Every South American country has its own name for places like this. In Bogota the word is tugurio (hovel), but the Chilean version best evokes La Esperanza: callampa (mushroom). 'Whitewater' suggests a fast-flowing river, or rapids. The marshlands where the barrios sprouted up, in the 1980s, are now whitened by their own putrefaction. The endless ditch isn't deep enough to submerge the tubs and tyres that disturb its caustic mantle. Yet the egrets still consider it worth their while to paddle in it and peck in it; when they flap their wings you expect them to fly off on half-corroded stilts. The people here are desplazados, displaced peasants, mainly from the country's Pacific coast. Cali contains about 70,000 of the displaced. Some are pushed from the land by that irresistible modern force, urbanisation; others are fleeing what may be the final convulsions of a civil war that began in 1948. But here they are, with no money and no jobs. Colombia does not provide free health care or free education for its citizens; and the first explanation you reach for here is the enormous South American lacuna - taxation. Taxation, necessarily of the rich, is not enforced. To paraphrase the former president Lleras Camargo, Latin Americans have gone to jail for many strange reasons, but not one, in the whole continent, has ever gone to jail for tax fraud. Of the four houses I ducked into at La Esperanza, Sara's, counter-intuitively, was easily the worst. Your first step took you onto a nail bed of chipped, upward-pointing tiles on bare soil: this was clearly a work in progress, but for a moment it felt like a booby trap. Then a communal area, and a dorm of crushed cots. Then, finally, out towards the water, a kitchen-bathroom, with lots of exposed (and ingenious) plumbing, a hotplate, a heap of compost in the corner and a largely ornamental fridge with four eggs in its open door. A huge negress, already stripped to the waist, pushed past us and disappeared into a wooden wigwam. There came a gush of water and a burst of song. Outside, the ladies laugh, and playfully squabble about whose house is the prettiest. La Esperanza's lone shop has only a handwritten sign on its door, saying no fio (no credit), and sells only tobacco and starch, but the residents call it their supermercado. As for the rancid water, into which the barrio seems about to collapse - you just tell yourself, said Sara, that it's a nice sea view. Colombia has a foot in both of the two great oceans. It also straddles the equator. At noon, on a clear day, your shadow writhes around your shoes like a cat. We paid our visit on one of the cooler mornings (the clouds were the same colour as the water); and it was onerous to imagine the barrio under a sky-filling sun. Just back down the road, at the entry point to Aguablanca, the smell of the blighted canal, with its banks of solid rubbish, grips you by the tonsils. This smell is La Esperanza's future. 3. Stag night The classic venganza, in Cali gangland, is not a bullet through the head but a bullet through the spine. Some thought has gone into this. 'One month after the attack,' says Roger Micolta, the young therapist from Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), 'the victims ask me, 'Will I ever walk?' Two months after, they ask me, 'Will I ever f***?'' The answer to both questions is invariably no. So the victims not only have to live with their wound; they have to wear it, they have to wheel it: everybody knows that they have lost what made them men. At the municipal hospital in Aguablanca, at therapy time in the mid-afternoons, crippled innocents, like limping Bryan, are outnumbered by crippled murderers - by cripples who have done much crippling in their time. They go through interminable sets of exercises: pull-ups, sideways rolls. Girlfriends and sisters take hairbrushes to their legs, to encourage sensation. One young man, inching along the parallel bars, keeps freezing and closing his eyes in helpless grief. Another has a weight strapped to his ankle; he is watched by his mother, who reflexively swings her own leg in time with his. In the back room there is a storyboard used for psychosexual counselling. 'Lo mas frustrante: estar impotente. No poder sentir, no comprension, no tener ganas.' To be unable to feel, to understand, to have no desire. The MSF educational posters, too, rightly and aggressively zero in on the question of testosterone. A typical specimen shows a pistol with its shaft curling into a droop: 'To carry a gun doesn't make you a man.' Another shows a series of waistbands with the gun positioned behind the belt buckle and pointing straight downwards. In Cali, all the stuff you have ever read or heard about male insecurity, phallic symbols, and so on, is almost tediously verified, everywhere you look. Nearby, in the market streets, the shops are disconcertingly full of goods, essentials and nonessentials - cheap cameras, exercise gear, shower organisers (an item badly needed in La Esperanza). The armless, headless mannequins are faithful to the indigenous female type: high and prominent backsides, hefty breasts with nipples the size of drawer pulls. At the patisserie there is an elaborate cake representing a thonged muchacha. Another represents a penis. The testicles are hirsute with squiggles of chocolate; the blancmange-hued helmet bears a thin swipe of cream, appreciatively indicating the slit. A hen-night item, you might suppose. The inscription says 'Chupame, cari-o', in a toilingly decorative hand. Suck me, honey. There is no female form for it in Spanish - no cari-a. But you wonder. In Cali, maybe the tackle cake is meant for the stags. That night there was a cookout on a rooftop downtown. The guests were professionals, academics; there was music and some dancing - very chaste and technical. Yet even here a sexual trap door can open up beneath you. At one point a young woman began an innocent conversation with a handsome young guest, and after some joking in male undertones she was grinningly handed a paper napkin. The suggestion was that she would now be able to wipe away her drool. All the outer walls around us were topped by shards of glass, varying dramatically in size, shape and thickness. If glass-topped walls constitute a kind of architecture, then here we had it in its gothic phase. In Britain this form of crime prevention was a very frequent (and very stimulating) sight in my childhood - but not in my youth. Again and again you kept vaguely thinking: two or three generations, 40 or 50 years - that's how far back they are. Just now, Colombia seems to be poised to turn in the right direction. If there is a current theme in the evolution of South America, it appears to be this: the vested interests (very much including the United States) are tolerating an improvement in the calibre of the political leaders, with Kirchner in Argentina, Lula in Brazil, and now, perhaps, Uribe in Colombia. Beyond the silver-studded walls you could see an entire mountainside of lights. This was the callampa of Siloe, which, I am told, is roughly twice as violent as Aguablanca. 4. The central divide We were on the central divide of the dual carriageway, about 300 yards from one of the most decidedly no-go barrios. Three muchachos approached. When I offered Marlboros, I got two takers; they lowered their heads as they smoked, embarrassed by the fact that they didn't inhale. The third boy declined. He didn't say 'No fumo', he said 'No puedo fumar'. It wasn't that he didn't smoke. He couldn't smoke (much as he'd like to). Then he lifted his T-shirt and showed us why. His right shoulder, his right breast and his right armpit, where he had recently been shot, formed an unmade bed of bandages and brown sticky tape. He had recently been stabbed too, and with a vengeance. From his sternum to his navel ran the wound, not yet a scar, pink and plump, like a garden worm. He turned out to be a patient of Roger Micolta's (one of the less tractable). His name was John Anderson. This was by no means the first time he had been shot, nor the first time he had been stabbed. He was 16. Like everyone else, they were keen to be photographed, but first they had to go and get their weapon. After rooting around in a rubbish dump across the road, they returned with a sawn-off shotgun. John posed, with his flintlock, his knife wound (like an attempt at vertical seppuku), his stupidly wonky hairstyle, his trigger-happy stare. Abruptly you were struck by the thinness and inanity of it: an existence so close to nonexistence. It couldn't have been clearer that John Anderson had only weeks to live. To say this of human beings is to say both the best and the worst. They can get used to anything. 5. The less-crippled murderer And I got used to it too. You find yourself thinking: if I had to live in El Distrito, I wouldn't stay at Kevin's but at Ana Milena's, where they have cable TV and that nice serving hatch from the kitchen to the living room. And if I had to live in La Esperanza, I would gently but firmly refuse Sara's offer and try to buy myself into the place four houses along, where the guy has the fridge and the fan (and the 10 dependents). Similarly, I now found myself thinking: you know, this crippled murderer isn't nearly as interesting as the crippled murderer I interviewed the day before yesterday. And so it seemed. Raul Alexander was nothing much, compared to Mario. When we called, Raul was lying on his bed watching The Simpsons. In Kevin's house, in Ana's house, in Sara's house, there were never any young men. When there is a young man in the house, it's because he can't walk away from it. He will certainly be a cripple, and very probably a crippled murderer. With his buzz-cut hair and ingenuous little face, Raul looked like the kind of waiter you might grow fond of at a resort hotel. It sounds tactless, but the truth was that we were settling for Raul. We had hoped for Alejandro. He was the crippled murderer who couldn't get to sleep at night if he hadn't killed someone earlier that day. But we'd already skipped an appointment with Alejandro, more than once, and when we did appear his mother told us he had taken the dog to the vet. Was this a particularly savage Latino anathema, or just a weak excuse? I thought of the gang verb groseriar (no respetar). And it was a relief, in the end, to make do with Raul. Asked about his childhood, he described it as normal, which it seemed to be, except for a father who remained in situ well into Raul's teens. He started stealing car parts, then cars, then cars with people sitting inside them. 'One on Monday, one on Thursday.' Then he got competitive with a friend: there would now be six armed carjackings a day. He started stealing money that was on its way to or from shops, factories, banks. He did nine months in prison and emerged, predictably fortified. By now the bank deliveries were oversubscribed, with queues of blaggers in the street; so Raul started venturing within. These weekly capers were not to last. He did 30 months, came out for three days, and went back in for three years. During his last stretch, Raul killed a man, for the first time, he claimed: payback for a stabbing. Blooded, his bones made, Raul took a job in an office. That last sentence may look slightly odd to a non-Cale-o, but when someone around here says that they worked in an office or did 'office work', you know exactly what they did: they sat by a phone, on a retainer (?250 a month), and did targeted assassinations through an agent for a further ?100 a time. Boys who work in offices, incidentally, are not called 'office boys', so far as I know, but boys are valued in office work, because they are cheap, fearless and unimprisonable till the age of 18. Raul would have been in his twenties at this stage. John Anderson, though, for example - he may well have worked in an office. The most popular day for office murders in Cali is Sunday: that's when people are more likely to be found at home. Raul's downfall? By this point my faith in his veracity, or in his self-awareness, never high, began to dwindle. How did he tell it? He had some trouble with a guy who shot his cousin, a murder that a friend of his (Raul's) impulsively avenged. There was this consignment of marijuana. Raul circled and meandered, and it all seemed to come down to a problema, a poker game, a spilt drink - an 'eyebrow' venganza. We took our leave of Raul Alexander heartlessly early (one of us had to get to the airport), and filed through a sunny nook containing his wheelchair and his walking frame. When, minutes earlier, I asked him how many people he had killed, he pouted and shrugged and said: 'Ocho?' You thought: oh, sure. But even if Raul was dividing his score by two, or by 10, he was nothing much, compared to Mario. 6. Mario He, too, is lying on his bed - apparently naked but for a pale-blue towel spread over his waist. The reproductions on the wall of the adjacent sitting room - a wooden cottage near a waterfall, a forest with a white horse picked out by opalescent sunbeams - prompt you, in describing Mario, to seek the heroic frame. You think of the fallen Satan, hurled over the crystal battlements. Mario was once very radiant and dynamic; but he has made the journey from power to no power, and now he lies on his bed all day with his clicker and his Cartoon Network. Although the long legs are tapering and atrophying, Mario's upper body still ripples. The armpits, in particular, are unusually pleasing; they look shaved or bikini-waxed, but a glance at the half-naked relative in the kitchen, who has his hands clasped behind his head, confirms that the abbreviation is natural. Mario's trouble, his difficulty, begins with his face. With its close-set eyes divided by a shallow bridge, its very strong jaw (full of avidity and appetite), Mario's is the face of a mandrill. If you'd seen Raul Alexander coming for you, on the street, in a bar, or standing in your doorway, you would have tried to resist him, or reason with him, or reimburse him. If you'd seen Mario coming for you, in his prime, you wouldn't have done anything at all. As a seven-year-old, he hid under a cloth-covered table and listened while nine peasants, two of them women, killed his father. Mario is about 30 years old now: this would have happened during the period known as La Violencia (though there is barely a period of Colombian history that could not be so called). When he was 12 he made a start on his venganzas, killing the first of the nine peasants with a knife. He then went on to kill the other eight. Then he gravitated to Cali. That's who they are in Aguablanca, in Siloe: peasants, and now the children of peasants, drastically citified. After a spell in carjacking, then in kidnapping (a vast field), Mario was called up for military service. On his discharge he took his improved organisational skills and 'went to the woods', supervising the production and transfer of talco (cocaine) in rural Colombia and in Ecuador. This was itself a kind of military tour; your adversary was not the police but the army. Mario speaks of his time in the woods with fondness and awe. 'The cocaine came in blocks, all stamped - very pretty [muy bonita], how it shines [como brilla],' he says. 'Once I saw a whole room full of money.' He came back to Cali, equipped with discipline, esprit and (one imagines) a ton of pesos, and started 'enjoying life'. It is not hard to imagine Mario enjoying life: in a city full of terrifying men, he would have been universally feared. He took a job in an office, and in this capacity he killed about 150 people in six years. But that's a lot of venganza to be storing up, and in December 2003 they came for him in force. He was at a stoplight when four men on two motorbikes pulled up on either side of the car. Now Mario's sister served coffee - a profound improvement on the Tizer and Dandelion & Burdock you are usually offered in Colombia. (It seems deeply typical of Aguablanca that there is never any coffee; you trudge from place to place searching for a cup.) Time to go. I asked Mario to describe the difference between his first murder and his last, and he said: 'The first, with the knife? It was awful. I had bad dreams. I cried all day. I had paranoia. But the last time? Nada. You just think, 'And now I get paid.'' Mario called for his cloudy trophies, and lay half-immersed in them: his handgun (very heavy - to its wielder it must have the divine heaviness of gold), his x-rays (the lucent second bullet in the arched thorax), and his stainless police record (which cost him ?750). He also had his clicker, his clock, and, of course, his transparent wallet of urine, taped to the side of the bed. They are still after Mario, so it was double deliverance to get out of his house. When I thought about it later, though, it seemed to me that Mario, with his provenance, was entitled to his hate; and that the non-monstrous Raul, with his slight frame and his bellhop's smile, was the more representative figure - a leaf in the wind of the peer group. Machismo, in its Latin American mutation, has one additional emphasis, that of indifference - unreachable indifference. You felt that indifference very strongly with John Anderson, on the central divide. Any kind of empathy is not just enfeebling - it is effeminate. You have no empathy even for yourself. So it appears that the Aguablancans are playing a children's game - kids' stuff - of dare and taunt and posture, in which they all feel immortal. Except that the sticks and stones are now knives and guns and hand grenades. As you drive back into the heart of the city, you see boys - jugglers - performing for an audience that is sitting trapped in its cars. They are not juggling with clubs or oranges, but with machetes and brands of fire. 7. The return of death On my last day I went to the MSF exhibition of photographs and case histories. There were familiar names and faces: Ana Milena, little Kevin. On the night the exhibition opened, all the featured victims attended, except Edward Ignacio. Still recovering from his multiple panga wounds, Edward was shot dead earlier that day. From there to the cemetery in the middle of town, a small, crowded plot of land between the football ground and the busy Texaco. Its entrance was almost submerged by roadworks: a steamroller, a cement mixer, hillocks of hot tar. Tradesmen had gathered with soft drinks and ice cream. A storm was coming, and you could smell the moisture in the dust. The cemetery was more like a morgue than a graveyard, with the dead stacked into a series of thick blocks, each berth the size of a paving stone. Every panel had something written on it, at the minimum just the name and the year of interment, in Magic Marker; others were more elaborate, with framed photographs, poems, avowals ('yo te quiero'), figurines, crosses, hearts, angels. We had come with a woman called Marleny Lopez. Her husband was one of the few who had been buried in the earth. The tombstone gave his name and dates, Edilson Mora, 1965-1992. This was an engraver's error. Edilson was in fact 37 when he died, two years ago. He was playing dominoes with a policeman, and he won. This was perhaps survivable; but then the loser had to pay for the beers. Most of the other dates were shorter than Edilson's: 1983-2001, 1991-2003. On the whole they got longer as you moved deeper in and further back in time. Further back in time, too, the names ceased to be Anglophone. And so went Diesolina, Arcelio, Hortencia, Bartolome, Nieves, Santiago, Yolima, Abelardo, Luz, Paz... I returned from one of the back alleys and found myself in the middle of a burial service. There was a coffin, with four bearers, and over 100 people had come to mourn. This wasn't a gang slaying, a drive-by, a bala perdida. A woman had died of a heart attack at the age of 28: 1976-2004. What happened next happened suddenly. I had spent the recent days making believe that death didn't matter. Now a bill was presented to me. It was a chastisement to see the bitter weeping of the husband, the bitter weeping of the mother. It was a chastisement, long overdue, to see death reassuming its proper weight. Authors in the Front line In The Sunday Times Magazine's continuing series of articles, renowned writers bring a fresh perspective to the world's trouble spots. The international medical-aid organisation MSF has helped our correspondents reach some of these inhospitable areas. To donate to MSF, visit [3]www.uk.msf.org, or call 0800 200 222 From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 22:07:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 17:07:24 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Commentary: Arthur Waldron: Europe's Crisis Message-ID: Arthur Waldron: Europe's Crisis http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11902050_1 The great transatlantic European-American divorce, about which we have heard so much: is it really going to take place? A few months ago, from the other side of the Atlantic, it looked like a done deal. Seldom had the sheer weight of European opinion seemed so monolithically averse not only to American policies but to the American character, especially as represented by President George W. Bush. Before the November election, polls of the British parliament suggested that 87 percent of that body's members would have voted for John Kerry; among Tories, only 2 percent stated that they would be "delighted" by Bush's reelection. After the event took place, Le Soir of Brussels spoke for many in characterizing the reaction of European elites as "no longer about policy, but a matter of rage"--rage, the paper elsewhere went on to explain, over America's "anaesthetization by a detestable mixture of economic-financial interest groups, blind militarism, religious fundamentalism, and neoconservative propaganda." To be sure, this latest outburst of European America-loathing has roots, even deep roots. Readers of a certain age will remember the demonstrations in Britain of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, founded in 1957; the massive Europe-wide protests against the Vietnam war in the 1970's; or the hysteria over European deployment of Pershing-2 missiles in the early 1980's. Since the end of the cold war, the debate has shifted somewhat. Today one is more likely to hear, in tones of resignation, bafflement, or fury, that Europe and America are simply too different, in too many ways, for their one-time alliance of convenience to continue. "Many U.S. priorities concern traditional power politics," goes one line of argument (I am quoting Le Soir again), "while the European Union often seems to be groping after a more rule-governed world." Another line focuses less on political than on economic priorities: Europeans distrust markets and favor state intervention to maintain living standards and equalize incomes, while Americans want less welfare and more tooth-and-claw competition. ("Only Europe," pleaded the London Guardian, can provide a "viable counterpoint to the economic brutalism of the American way.") Most importantly, perhaps, Europeans see themselves as enlightened secularists while Americans are incorrigibly and benightedly religious--and some, like Bush, frighteningly so: "God's President," as the London Observer put it. And yet, no sooner had Bush been reelected than Europe seemed suddenly beset by second thoughts, even if they were not always presented as such. The single most momentous catalyst for this rethinking was an event that occurred on election day itself, November 2. This was the brutal murder in Amsterdam, in broad daylight, of Theo van Gogh, a quixotic provocateur who had just completed a short film, Submission, about the abuse of women under Islam. The film had so enraged Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, that he ambushed the filmmaker as he pedaled to work, cut his throat to the spinal bone with a meat cleaver, and then thrust into his chest a dagger to which was affixed a letter threatening the lives of others for insulting or blaspheming Islam. Most of those named in the note are still in hiding. To add irony to gruesomeness, two years earlier this same Mohammed Bouyeri, his impeccably tolerant and liberal views expressed in perfect Dutch, had been featured in the media as a shining model of the success of Holland's official multiculturalism. Now his connections to Islamists in Morocco were quickly traced, and continuing investigations disclosed an ever-larger network--including contacts in Belgium and neighboring states--indicating that he had not acted alone. All of Western Europe, it rapidly came to be said, faced a similar peril: as Britain's then Home Secretary David Blunkett warned on BBC television, al Qaeda "is on our doorstep, and threatening our lives." That such sentiments marked a change in European attitudes toward the threat of Islamic terrorism should be plain enough. Previously, many had either derided American concerns on this score or seemed to assume that they could avoid the threat simply by keeping their distance from Washington. Thus, the Islamist bombings of Spanish railways in March 2004 led not to a resolve on the part of Spaniards to redouble their efforts in the war against terror but, on the contrary, to the immediate ousting of their prime minister, who had brought the country into the American-led coalition in Iraq. In the Guardian, Polly Toynbee, in the course of dismissing Tony Blair as an American stooge, scoffed at the "breathtaking Pentagon nonsense about the nature of global terrorism, its causes and cures." After the murder of van Gogh, little more was heard along these lines. Suddenly--one could feel it happening--a whole state of mind seemed to disappear. If, as David Pryce-Jones rightly pointed out in the December 2004 Commentary, a kind of "fellow traveling" mentality had taken hold in Europe where the Islamist threat was concerned, it was now being generally acknowledged that one could not escape that threat, as the Spanish had attempted to do, by cutting ties with Washington; one could only escape it by defeating the terrorists. Of course, acknowledging reality is one thing; doing something about it is another. In the ensuing weeks, European governments moved rather quickly to increase numbers of police, to improve intelligence, to strengthen cooperation across borders, and to begin to confront the difficulties presented by the millions of Muslim immigrants whom their economies require for their survival. Suddenly respectable, even mainstream, became talk of identity cards, immigration controls, laws requiring imams to preach in the local language, and the need to come to grips with the sheer vacuity of what one Dutch politician decried as her country's longstanding creed of "passive tolerance," according to which newcomers of every kind were welcome and, facing no civic requirements or challenges of any kind, were simply invited to join in the general, non-conflictive fun. Has a line been crossed, then, or will momentary fright, having been met by spasmodic gestures of resolution, devolve into lethargy and accommodation? It is too soon to tell; but in the fleeting recognition that terrorism in Europe is not Washington's problem, and that Europeans cannot look to Washington to solve it for them, reality did intrude, and, if anything in life is certain, not for the last time. Nor is terrorism the only problem affecting Europe's general security that, like it or not, Europe alone is going to have to deal with. The present European Union, comprising 25 states (with 15 more hoping to join), faces unique strategic challenges. Already sharing a border with the newly expanded EU are Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Russia. If and when Turkey joins, Europe will include both it and Cyprus, another "Asian" state, and will then, by its own volition, be sharing borders with Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. In short, the new European Union is forming itself smack in the cockpit of geopolitical danger. At the same time, it lacks either the material or the diplomatic wherewithal to deal with this danger in a forceful or unified manner. As the crisis of freedom in Ukraine developed this past November and December, and as Polish President Aleksandr Kwasniewski and Solidarity hero Lech Walesa headed for Kiev, the stance of the French government was, as a French commentator aptly put it, one of "embarrassment." "It can scarcely be an accident," the English columnist Philip Stephens dryly observed in the Financial Times, "that France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schroeder have not missed the opportunity to keep quiet about Ukraine's orange revolution"--an event of far greater consequence for them, and for the European Union at large, than anything the United States may or may not be doing in Iraq. The plain fact is that, for 50 years, Europe enjoyed a privileged existence, relieved by the American deterrent of the need to defend itself against the Soviet Union. Those days are gone, but Europeans are only now beginning to understand what that means. "Europe is incapable of guaranteeing, on its territory, the security and freedom of movement of citizens and residents who wish to exercise their freedom of thought and free expression," lamented the French leftist paper LibE9ration after the van Gogh murder. To which might be added that it is also incapable of guaranteeing its territory against foreign threats. Unfortunately, many Europeans are still trapped in the old modes. A good example was a headline above a recent Financial Times editorial: "Iran's Deterrent: Only the U.S. Can Address Teheran's Nuclear Concerns." Can that really be the case? Is not Iran a good deal closer to Europe than to the United States--and are not the Europeans currently carrying out an initiative of their own vis-E0-vis Iran that, rightly or wrongly, excludes the United States? But there are other, more heartening signs as well. Just as terrorism has haltingly come to be addressed as a European problem, and not simply a byproduct of American incompetence or worse, so too are some Europeans beginning to contemplate defending themselves. The number of men under arms already exceeds that of the United States. The European Union has also started its own security program--so far, a minuscule one. Some 7,000 EU peacekeepers will go to Bosnia; a rapid-reaction force of 1,500, capable of moving on ten days' notice, is in the works. If the numbers are hardly impressive, that is partly because Europeans are not agreed among themselves about whether they really need a separate security organization. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, for example, the secretary general of NATO, sees "no need to reinvent the wheel." Nor is Europe necessarily willing to pay the freight. Currently, France spends $45 billion per year on defense, more than any other European country (the United Kingdom is next). The entire 25-member EU spends $208 billion. The United States alone spends $405 billion. But here is a place where, inadvertently (or perhaps I should say dialectically), Washington may be playing a helpful role. To reduce matters to their most basic, the security of Europe is no longer an indispensable security requirement of the United States. Of course Americans have values and sympathies, which may eventually add up to interests, but in the most hard-headed strategic terms, now that the USSR is gone, and with a home-based American ability to destroy any target in the world, the details of what happens eight or nine hours east by air from Washington will usually turn out to be of far deeper concern to Europe than to the United States. If we were to wake up one morning and learn that the EU buildings in Brussels and Strasbourg had been destroyed, we would surely be shocked, but we would not in any way be under direct threat ourselves. To this reality, too, more and more Europeans may at last be awakening. As in security, so in matters economic. At Lisbon in 2001 the European Union set the goal of becoming, by 2010, "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world." Recently, this project was labeled "a big failure" by none other than Romano Prodi, the outgoing European Commission president. With five years to go before the target date of 2010, the facts are thoroughly dispiriting. According to Gordon Brown, British chancellor of the exchequer, speaking early in 2004, "Eurozone" growth for the year would be half that of the U.S. and Japan. In the last three years, cumulative Eurozone growth was just 3 percent, compared with 5.5 percent for the U.S. and 6 for the UK. In fact the results proved far worse than Brown had predicted. Figures for the third quarter of 2004 show German and French growth at 0.1 percent. Structural unemployment, itself intimately related to European welfare policies, is imbedded in the system. In France, unemployment runs to 10 percent; in Belgium, it is at almost 9 percent in the relatively prosperous Flemish-speaking areas, 19 percent in French-speaking Wallonia, and an astonishing 22 percent in the capital city of Brussels. Germany, where an individual unemployed for more than a year can receive up to half his previous net wages for an unlimited period of time, has created a system unique in the world for discouraging the energetic search for work. Moreover, and despite the widespread unemployment, simply to fill existing jobs requires a net inflow of 1.5 million migrants a year. To bring European work-force participation to U.S. levels would require 17 million more jobs. Who is to perform those jobs, if not immigrants? Fertility rates make the future look even more ominous. In the United States, the average woman produces 2.06 children, just about replacement level; in the 25-nation EU, the average number of children is only 1.46, which means populations will shrink, more immigrants will be needed, and, as longevity increases, the young will be increasingly burdened by the old.^1 During a visit to China in October 2004, Jacques Chirac suggested that somehow his country and his continent could escape the need for internal reform by developing a privileged relationship with the "emerging superpower" of China. Whether or not the rise of China is inevitable--I have regularly expressed my own doubts about this^2--there is no denying that China is indeed growing. But how? Not by buying French grain, or by ordering a version of France's impressive high-speed train (the producer of which has gone bankrupt), or by buying French weapons. China, like India and the other economic powers of Asia, is growing by selling things. Exports constitute 20 percent of China's gross national product, and even its Asian neighbors are having trouble matching the bargain-basement prices made possible by Beijing's "disciplined" labor force. Great swaths of the American economy have already been laid low by Asian exports, Chinese in particular, and we are far better equipped to meet the challenge than are the Europeans. So the special relationship with China, which Paris has long pursued, is not going to save European manufacturing. If present trends continue, a far more likely prospect is that it will destroy it completely. When the smoke clears, we may well see an Asia much wealthier than before, a United States bruised but still standing--and a Europe that resembles something like the ruins of the Spanish empire. Whatever the sins of the United States, destroying the European economy is not among them. But denunciations of American capitalism remain legion in Europe, and the European has not yet emerged who will seriously engage the massive challenge posed to the continent by the growth of the Asian economies. In the meantime, the effects are already crashing over Europe like a storm tide. Is the economic situation then hopeless? My answer, perhaps surprisingly, is no. The continent still disposes of formidable material and human resources, and it is not a foregone conclusion that attempts to reform its internal problems and misdirections would fail. Europe already leads the United States in several dimensions critical to growth. It has a larger aggregate economy and far larger exports ($1,430 billion as against $986 billion), and, critically, its citizens enjoy much higher levels of educational skills. Thus, in a recent international study of mathematical achievement, Hong Kong ranked first, Finland second, the Netherlands fourth, Japan sixth, Canada seventh, Belgium eighth, France sixteenth, Germany nineteenth, Poland twenty-fourth--and the United States twenty-eighth. Mathematics is, of course, the key to future scientific and technical excellence, and in this area the Europeans are far ahead of us. Besides, if Europe is to be secure, it will have to reform its economy to support its military. So far, opportunism and complacency about the steadily declining economy have been the rule, but some influential figures are considering how to go about changing this, in the first place by acknowledging the magnitude of the impending crisis. An authoritative but little studied report by Michel Camdessus, former director of the International Monetary Fund, has put matters starkly: "We are engaged in a process of descent that cannot but lead us, if nothing is done, to a situation that, in a dozen years, will be irreversible." But it need not happen that way. Europe's current condition has identifiable causes, and if those can be addressed, the situation can be improved. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy, formerly the finance minister, and employment minister Jean-Louis Borloo have published a report estimating that by removing barriers to entry into business, France could create a million jobs. Wim Kok, the former Dutch prime minister, identifies the basic EU problem as "lack of commitment and political will," exemplified in the perennial flouting by core EU states like France and Germany of the Stability and Cooperation Pact intended to reduce deficits and keep European fiscal policies in alignment. Even Asian competition is on the agenda: in March, a European summit will discuss how to lift the competitiveness of the European economy without undercutting the "European model based on solidarity, and on compromise between employers and workers." It is easy to be amused by such small and wholly inadequate beginnings. It is easy to be amused by the actually existing European Union altogether, with its grandiose yet undistinguished buildings in Brussels and Strasbourg, its shameless feather-bedding and extravagant entertainment and conference budgets, side by side with its political haplessness, military weakness, book-length constitution, and reflexive habit of impotently wagging a finger across the Atlantic while ignoring Russia, China, the Middle East, and its own competing nationalisms and dysfunctional economies. But to be dismissive in this way may be to underestimate the depth, and the longevity, of Europe's determination to make something of itself as an entity. The project of unification did not emerge from some glass and steel office tower. It was forged in the fire of World War I, which was when most Europeans understood that they had to cooperate; and it was renewed in the aftermath of an even more catastrophic world war. Since then, however creepingly, the course has been set, and though the voyage has already been overlong, circuitous, and ridiculously costly, and will become more so, something like the destination may yet be reached. The issue is what Europe will look like at that point. Will it be vital, actively taking a role in the pressing issues of war, peace, and development, or will it be inwardly preoccupied and inert, effectively irrelevant to the broader world? For if the EU were actually able to pull off its planned integration with even partial success, and simultaneously resolve its besetting political and economic problems, its potential power could rather quickly be converted into real power. But then the same question would arise that has been hiding in plain sight all along: is it really in Europe's best interest to be seeking this power in order to balance and constrain--or overtake--the United States, as the French insist and as an inchoate consensus seems to believe today, or might not a rediscovery of what the estranged couple have in common be, in fact, a precondition for Europe's emergence from its current crisis? Here, too, there are some intriguing straws in the wind. To begin with, even amid the general consternation at the results of the American election, there were those in Europe who viewed things otherwise--who indeed saw positive lessons for Europe. In mid-November, the well-known French columnist Ivan Rioufol suggested that the reelection of George W. Bush should be regarded not as a fit of collective madness but rather as an understandable and appropriate demand by a majority of Americans that their liberal elites get back into line. Then he went further: The "conservative revolution" victoriously led by George Bush despite the predictions of the media could well be reproduced in France. In fact, the aspirations of Americans--values, religion, security--are not specific to their Anglo-Protestant culture. . . . France's political discourse, just like that of the American Left, only imperfectly reflects the preoccupations of its citizens. Who knows, in short, where the European Union could go if France were led by an international visionary like Ronald Reagan rather than by a petty nationalist like Jacques Chirac? We hear a great deal about European values, and how they differ from their inferior American counterparts. But in practice what we see in Europe day to day is a series of low-minded attempts by member states to use the EU for their own narrow purposes, or groups of states insisting on the indefinite postponement of pressing continental issues. These can never constitute a moral compass, let alone a direction forward. West European capitals today tend not to grasp the degree to which the world is moving toward the ideals of economic and political freedom. Central and East Europeans are miles ahead on this point, as has become clear with the rapid expansion of the EU and the emergence of ideological differences between what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld termed "old" and "new" Europe. Reactions to the Ukrainian crisis, as I have already suggested, underscored the difference; new Europeans instantly grasped its significance, old Europeans fell back into silence. As a letter writer to the Guardian observed, "Clearly it still only takes a growl from Russia for Western Europe to abandon all support for human rights on its eastern borders." One might add that it likewise takes only a growl from Beijing to silence any protest at Chinese actions which, if carried out far more gently by white people, would most certainly be labeled war crimes. The noble values of economic and political freedom, pioneered by Western Europe, are in low repute in Western Europe, though they are plainly what should serve as the EU's missing ideological cement. Recently I had a long chat with a Japanese ambassador about details of the alliance between our two countries. As we parted and he turned to shake hands, he said, "One more thing, Arthur. This is not about any of the things we discussed. It is about freedom." I can easily imagine similar words coming out of the mouth of a Polish or a Latvian or a Czech diplomat. But a French, German, or Italian one? After the November 2004 election, a German columnist wrote that "if there is one man capable of making a European feel truly European, it is not President Jacques Chirac of France or Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany. It is George W. Bush." He was not paying a compliment to the American President. Still and all, there may be more to his words than he intended. Some Europeans have chosen to forget what they were the first to teach the world, but Americans still remember and strive to live by it. Nor, on the grassroots level, are the two communities so different: to a recent survey asking whether the U.S. and Europe share enough common values to be able to cooperate on international problems, 70 percent of Americans answered yes, and so did 60 percent of Europeans. Sixty percent of both believed NATO was important to their security. What with its borders in flux and its membership growing, terrorism on the increase, and Washington ever more distant, the pressure on Europe to rise to its potential is far stronger today than at any point since the end of World War II. Historians have no right to be optimistic, but events and attitudes like those I have surveyed do sound to me like at least a basis for mutual rediscovery and cooperation, albeit with modalities redefined. It would be a fine historical irony if George W. Bush were to prove a catalyzing agent of this world transformation as well. Arthur Waldron is the Lauder professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He spent the second half of 2004 as a visiting professor of history at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. ^1 In Europe as in the United States, the economy and standard of living are kept afloat by borrowing. Jacques de la Rosi?re, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, recently declared France's public finances "not sustainable." ^2 See, for example, "The Chinese Sickness" in Commentary, July-August 2003. From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 22:10:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 17:10:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Policy Review: Stanley Kurtz: Demographics and the Culture War Message-ID: Stanley Kurtz: Demographics and the Culture War Policy Review, No. 129 http://www.policyreview.org/feb05/kurtz.html Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. We moderns have gotten used to the slow, seemingly inexorable dissolution of traditional social forms, the family prominent among them. Yet the ever-decreasing size of the family may soon expose a fundamental contradiction in modernity itself. Fertility rates have been falling throughout the industrialized world for more than 30 years, with implications that are only just now coming into view. Growing population has driven the economy, sustained the welfare state, and shaped modern culture. A declining population could conceivably put the dynamic of modernization into doubt. The question of the cultural and economic consequences of declining birthrates has been squarely placed on the table by four new books: The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It, by Phillip Longman; Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, by Ben Wattenberg; The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know About America's Economic Future, by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns; and Running On Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It, by Peter G. Peterson. Longman and Wattenberg concentrate on the across-the-board implications of demographic change. Kotlikoff and Burns, along with Peterson, limn the economic crisis that could come in the absence of swift and sweeping entitlement reform. Taken together, these four books suggest that we are moving toward a period of substantial social change whose tantalizing ideological implications run the gamut from heightened cultural radicalism to the emergence of a new, more conservative cultural era. New demographics rawing on these books, let us first get a sense of the new demography. The essential facts of demographic decline discussed in all four are not in doubt. Global fertility rates have fallen by half since 1972. For a modern nation to replace its population, experts explain, the average woman needs to have 2.1 children over the course of her lifetime. Not a single industrialized nation today has a fertility rate of 2.1, and most are well below replacement level. In Ben Franklin's day, by contrast, America averaged eight births per woman. American birth rates today are the highest in the industrialized world -- yet even those are nonetheless just below the replacement level of 2.1. Moreover, that figure is relatively high only because of America's substantial immigrant population. Fertility rates among native born American women are now far below what they were even in the 1930s, when the Great Depression forced a sharp reduction in family size. Population decline is by no means restricted to the industrial world. Remarkably, the sharp rise in American fertility rates at the height of the baby boom -- 3.8 children per woman -- was substantially above Third World fertility rates today. From East Asia to the Middle East to Mexico, countries once fabled for their high fertility rates are now falling swiftly toward or below replacement levels. In 1970, a typical woman in the developing world bore six children. Today, that figure is about 2.7. In scale and rapidity, that sort of fertility decline is historically unprecedented. By 2002, fertility rates in 20 developing countries had fallen below replacement levels. 2002 also witnessed a dramatic reversal by demographic experts at the United Nations, who for the first time said that world population was ultimately headed down, not up. These decreases in human fertility cover nearly every region of the world, crossing all cultures, religions, and forms of government. Declining birth rates mean that societies everywhere will soon be aging to an unprecedented degree. Increasing life expectancy is also contributing to the aging of the world's population. In 1900, American life expectancy at birth was 47 years. Today it is 76. By 2050, one out of five Americans will be over age 65, making the U.S. population as a whole markedly older than Florida's population today. Striking as that demographic graying may be, it pales before projections for countries like Italy and Japan. The United Nations estimates that by 2050, 42 percent of all people in Italy and Japan will be aged 60 or older. Can societies that old sustain themselves? That is the question inviting speculation. With fertility falling swiftly in the developing nations, immigration will not be able to ameliorate certain implications of a rapidly aging West. Even in the short or medium term, the aging imbalance cannot be rectified except through a level of immigration far above what Western countries would find politically acceptable. Alarmed by the problems of immigration and assimilation, even famously tolerant Holland has begun to turn away immigrants en masse -- and this before the recent murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, which has subsequently forced the questions of immigration and demography to the center of the Dutch political stage. In short, the West is beginning to experience significant demographic changes, with substantial cultural consequences. Historically, the aged have made up only a small portion of society, and the rearing of children has been the chief concern. Now children will become a small minority, and society's central problem will be caring for the elderly. Yet even this assumes that societies consisting of elderly citizens at levels of 20, 30, even 40 or more percent can sustain themselves at all. That is not obvious. Population decline is also set to ramify geometrically. As population falls, the pool of potential mothers in each succeeding generation shrinks. So even if, well into the process, there comes a generation of women with a higher fertility rate than their mothers', the momentum of population decline could still be locked in. Population decline may also be cemented into place by economics. To support the ever-growing numbers of elderly, governments may raise taxes on younger workers. That would make children even less affordable than they are today, decreasing the size of future generations still further. If worldwide fertility rates reach levels now common in the developing world (and that is where they seem headed), within a few centuries, the world's population could shrink below the level of America's today. Of course, it's unlikely that mankind will simply cease to exist for failure to reproduce. But the critical point is that we cannot reverse that course unless something happens to substantially increase fertility rates. And whatever might raise fertility rates above replacement level will almost certainly require fundamental cultural change. Why does modern social life translate into the lower birth rates that spark all those wider implications? Urbanization is one major factor. In a traditional agricultural society, children are put to work early. They also inherit family land, using its fruits to care for aging parents. In a modern urban economy, on the other hand, children represent a tremendous expense, and one increasingly unlikely to be returned to parents in the form of wealth or care. With the growth of a consumer economy, potential parents are increasingly presented with a zero-sum choice between children and more consumer goods and services for themselves. Along with urbanization, the other important factor depressing world fertility is the movement of women into the workforce -- and the technological changes that have made that movement possible. By the time many professional women have completed their educations, their prime childbearing years have passed. Thus, a woman's educational level is the best predictor of how many children she will have. As Wattenberg shows, worldwide, the correlation between falling female illiteracy and falling female fertility is nearly exact. And as work increasingly becomes an option for women, having a child means not only heavy new expenses, but also the loss of income that a mother might otherwise have gained through work. Technological change also stands behind the movement of women into the workforce. In a modern, knowledge-based economy, women suffer no physical disadvantage. The ability of women to work in turn depends upon the capacity of modern contraception, along with abortion, to control fertility efficiently. The sheer breadth and rapidity of world fertility decline implies that contraceptive technology has been a necessary condition of the change. Before fertility could be reliably controlled through medical technology, marriage and accompanying strictures against out-of-wedlock births were the key check on a society's birth rate. Economic decline meant delayed marriage, and thus lower fertility. But contraceptive technology now makes it possible to efficiently control fertility within marriage. This turns motherhood into a choice. And what demographic decline truly shows is that when childbearing has become a matter of sheer choice, it has become less frequent. The movement of population from tightly knit rural communities into cities, along with contraception, abortion, and the related entry of women into the workforce, explain many of the core cultural changes of the postmodern world. Secularism, individualism, and feminism are tied to a social system that discourages fertility. If a low-fertility world is unsustainable, then these cultural trends may be unsustainable as well. Alternatively, if these cultural trends cannot be modified or counterbalanced, human population appears on course to shrink ever more swiftly. New economics? et there are signs that the current balance of social forces is not sustainable and may well give way sooner rather than later. That, at any rate, is the view of Longman, Peterson, Kotlikoff and Burns. (Wattenberg is somewhat more sanguine about our ability to weather the coming challenge, although he does not directly address the more dystopic scenarios Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns float.) Broadly speaking, both the free market and the welfare state assume continual population growth. "Pay as you go" entitlements require ever-larger new generations to finance the retirement of previous generations. Longman argues that economic growth itself depends upon ever-increasing numbers of consumers and workers. Population growth, he argues, drove the Industrial Revolution, and there has never been economic growth under conditions of population decline. Thus, for example, he ascribes Japan's current economic troubles to its declining fertility. And though Longman doesn't point to Germany, it us interesting to note that this particular low-fertility country is also struggling economically to the point of revisiting the famously shorter European work week -- a phenomenon obviously related to the struggle to reduce the pensions promised to an aging population and premissed on more younger workers than actually came to exist. Both Longman and Wattenberg raise the question of whether markets need population growth in order to thrive. As Wattenberg puts the point, it hardly makes sense to invest in a business whose pool of potential customers is shrinking. That much might be true, even if entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare were fully funded. But Social Security and Medicare are not fully funded. On the contrary, America's massive unfunded entitlement programs have the potential to spark a serious social and economic crisis in the not too distant future. And the welfare state in the rest of the developed world is on even shakier economic ground. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the combined cost of Medicare and Medicaid alone will consume a larger share of the nation's income in 2050 than the entire federal budget does today. By 2050, the combined cost of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the national debt will rise to 47 percent of gross domestic product -- more than double the level of expected federal revenues at the time. Without reform, all federal spending would eventually go to seniors. Obviously, the system will correct before we reach that point. But how? Already, senior citizens vote at very high rates -- reacting sharply to any potential cuts in benefits. As the baby boomers retire, the political weight of senior citizens will be vastly greater than it already is. Proposed pension reforms brought down French and Italian governments in the 1990s. Even China has been forced by large-scale protests and riots to back off from attempts to reduce retirement benefits. In the absence of serious reform, we may be in for an economic "hard landing." Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns warn of a spiraling financial crisis that could even lead to worldwide depression. Former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker sees a 75 percent chance of an economic crisis of some sort within the next five years. What might such a "meltdown" look like? Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns spin out essentially the same scenario. The danger is that investors might at some point decide that the United States will never rein in its deficit. Once investors see America's deficits as out of control, they will assume their dollar-based securities will be eroded by inflation, higher interest rates, and a serious decline in the stock market. Should a loss of confidence cause leading investors to pull their money out of U.S. securities, it could set off a run on the dollar. That would create the very inflation, interest rate increases, and market decline that investors feared in the first place. Such has already happened in Argentina, which Kotlikoff and Burns use as a paradigm in which loss of investor confidence brought down the economy in a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. The danger is that the United States and the rest of the industrialized world may already have entered the sort of debt trap common among Third World nations. A rapidly aging Japan is even more vulnerable than America, say Kotlikoff and Burns. They add that, should investors looking at teetering modern welfare states and the long-term demographic crisis bring down any of the advanced economies, the contagion could spread to others. Are we really headed for a worldwide economic meltdown that will leave tens of millions of aging seniors languishing in substandard nursing homes while the rest of us suffer from long years of overtaxation, rising crime, and political instability? Kotlikoff and Burns say the prospect is all too real, and Peterson implies as much. Yet there are also critics of such disaster scenarios. They argue that growth rates in the new information-based economy will likely be somewhat higher than in the past. Higher rates of economic growth will bring in enough revenue to offset the rising costs of entitlements. Medical advances are keeping older workers healthy and productive. Raise the retirement age by a couple of years, say many, and the expanded workforce would boost government revenues enough to offset shrinkage in the number of younger workers. Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns say these fixes won't work. Despite increased life expectancy, older workers have generally been retiring earlier. It would be politically difficult to force them in the other direction. And according to Kotlikoff and Burns, delayed retirement produces negligible gains for the economy. When people work longer, they save less because they have fewer years of retirement to finance. The effects cancel out. Overall investment in the economy is reduced, as is the real wage base available for government taxation. Kotlikoff and Burns also argue that the apparent productivity gains of the late nineties were illusory. Peterson argues that, even if productivity gains prove real, the benefit for the deficit will be canceled out by increases in discretionary spending. The truth is, no one knows what future productivity will be. There's a chance rates will turn higher on into the future, yet it seems imprudent to rely on luck with the stakes so high. And as Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns point out, so long as Social Security is indexed to wages, revenue gains from higher productivity will be canceled out by increased benefits. Even an ideal growth scenario cannot solve the entitlement crisis unless Social Security is indexed to prices rather than wages. It would seem that politically difficult reform and significant de facto benefit cuts are inevitable even on the most optimistic of reckonings. And the optimistic scenarios themselves seem strained. What about the pessimistic scenarios? It would be foolish to predict with certainty an economic "hard landing," much less world-wide depression. Still, the case that these are at least real possibilities seems strong. Even without a "meltdown," long-term prospects for the economy and the welfare state in rapidly aging societies seem uncertain at best. How exactly will nations like Japan or Italy be able to function when more than 40 percent of their citizens are over 60? Hard landing or not, and the political power of the elderly notwithstanding, there seems a very real chance that America's entitlement programs will someday be substantially scaled back. But what sort of struggle between the old and the young will emerge in the meantime, and how will a massive and relatively impoverished older generation cope with the change? The Coming Generational Storm and Running On Empty are important books. Whether or not the reader is ultimately persuaded by these premonitions of economic peril, it's time the United States had a serious debate over entitlement reform. Nonetheless, there is also something problematic in the way that Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns place the lion's share of blame for our problems on our political leadership. True, both parties deserve to be chastised for running from the entitlement crisis. Yet even if Peterson, Burns, and Kotlikoff are right about that, they put too much blame on politicians for what broader cultural and demographic forces have wrought. Peterson nods to demography as the background condition for the deficit dilemma yet barely explores the link. Kotlikoff and Burns have much more to say about the demographic details yet treat our changed fertility patterns as irreversible and therefore irrelevant to policy. That is a questionable assumption. The growing expense of child-rearing, for example, plays a key role in holding birth rates down. Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns are quick to criticize the push for lower taxes, yet rising taxes arguably helped to deepen the population decline at the root of our economic dilemma. In 1955, at the height of the baby boom, a typical one-earner family paid 17.3 percent of its income in taxes. Today, a median family with one paycheck pays 37.6 percent of its income in taxes -- 39 percent if it's a two-earner couple. So the new demography has put us into an economic trap. High taxes depress birth rates, but low taxes expand demographically driven deficits still further. Precisely because we are at an unprecedented demographic watershed, politicians have no model for taking these factors into account. Political leaders in an earlier era could take it for granted that ever-growing populations would keep the welfare state solvent and the economy humming. It's not surprising that neither the public nor politicians have been able to adjust to the immense, unintended, and only gradually emerging social consequences of postmodern family life. With their eyes firmly fixed on the underlying demographic changes, Wattenberg and Longman are less disposed to browbeat politicians than are Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns. A new conservatism? n the matter of the new demography and its social consequences, the work of Ben Wattenberg holds a place of special honor. In 1987, 17 years before the publication of Fewer, Wattenberg wrote The Birth Dearth. That book was the first prominent public warning of a crisis of population decline. Yet many rejected its message. In an era when a "population explosion" was taken for granted, the message of The Birth Dearth flew squarely in the face of received wisdom. Subsequent events, however, have proved Wattenberg right. Despite that vindication, Wattenberg's own views have changed somewhat. Whereas The Birth Dearth advocated aggressive pro-natalist policies, today Wattenberg seems to have all but given up hope that fertility rates can be substantially increased. On the one hand, he thinks it unlikely that worldwide population can maintain a course of shrinkage without end. On the other hand, he sees no viable scenario by which this presumably unsustainable trend might be reversed. In The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman takes a different view. Longman believes that runaway population decline may be halted, yet he understands that this can be accomplished only by way of fundamental cultural change. The emerging demographic crisis will call a wide range of postmodern ideologies into question. Longman writes as a secular liberal looking for ways to stabilize the population short of the traditionalist, religious renewal he fears the new demography will bring in its wake. Given the roots of population decline in the core characteristics of postmodern life, Longman understands that the endless downward spiral cannot be reversed without a major social transformation. As he puts it, "If human population does not wither away in the future, it will be because of a mutation in human culture." Longman draws parallels to the Victorian era and other periods when fears of population decline, cultural decadence, and fraying social safety nets intensified family solidarity and stigmatized abortion and birth control. Longman also notes that movements of the 1960s, such as feminism, environmentalism, and the sexual revolution, were buttressed by fears of a population explosion. Once it becomes evident that our real problem is the failure to reproduce, these movements and attitudes could weaken. Longman's greatest fear is a revival of fundamentalism, which he defines broadly as any movement that relies on ancient myth and legend, whether religious or not, "to oppose modern, liberal, and commercial values." Religious traditionalists tend to have large families (relatively speaking). Secular modernists do not. Longman's fear is that, over time, Western secular liberals will shrink as a portion of world population while, at home and abroad, traditionalists will flourish. To counter this, and to solve the larger demographic-economic crisis, Longman offers some very thoughtful proposals for encouraging Americans to have more children. Substantial tax relief for parents is the foundation of his plan. Longman has thought this problem through very deeply. Yet, in some respects, his concerns seem odd and exaggerated. He lumps American evangelicals together with Nazis, racists, and Islamicists in the same supposed opposition to all things modern. This is more interesting as a specimen of liberal prejudice than as a balanced assessment of the relationship between Christianity and modernity. Moreover, the mere fact that religious conservatives have more children than secular liberals is no guarantee that those children will remain untouched by secular culture. Still, Longman rightly sees that population decline cannot be reversed in the absence of major cultural change, and the prospects of a significant religious revival must not be dismissed. In a future shadowed by vastly disproportionate numbers of poor elderly citizens, and younger workers struggling with impossible tax burdens, the fundamental tenets of postmodern life might be called into question. Some will surely argue from a religious perspective that mankind, having discarded God's injunctions to be fruitful and multiply, is suffering the consequences. Yet we needn't resort to disaster scenarios to see that our current demographic dilemma portends fundamental cultural change. Let us say that in the wake of the coming economic and demographic stresses, a serious secular, pronatalist program of the type proposed by Longman were to take hold and succeed. The result might not be "fundamentalism," yet it would almost certainly involve greater cultural conservatism. Married parents tend to be more conservative, politically and culturally. Predictions of future dominance for the Democratic Party are based on the increasing demographic prominence of single women. Delayed marriage lowers fertility rates and moves the culture leftward. Reverse that trend by stimulating married parenthood, and the country grows more conservative -- whether in a religious mode or not. But can the cultural engines of postmodernity really be thrown into reverse? After all, people don't decide to have children because they think it will help society. They act on their personal desires and interests. Will women stop wanting to be professionals? Is it conceivable that birth control might become significantly less available than it is today? It certainly seems unlikely that any free Western society would substantially restrict contraception, no matter how badly its population was dwindling. Yet it is important to keep in mind that decisions about whether and when to have children may someday take place in a markedly different social environment. As mentioned, children are valued in traditional societies because of the care they provide in old age. In the developed world, by contrast, old age is substantially provisioned by personal savings and the welfare state. But what will happen if the economy and the welfare state shrink significantly? Quite possibly, people will once again begin to look to family for security in old age -- and childbearing might commensurately appear more personally necessary. If a massive cohort of elderly citizens find themselves in a chronic state of crisis, the lesson for the young will be clear. Wattenberg notes that pro-natalist policies have failed wherever they've been tried. Yet in conditions of serious economic stress and demographic imbalance, sweeping pro-natalist plans like those offered by Longman may in fact become workable. That would usher in a series of deeper cultural changes, most of them pointing society in a more conservative direction. Then again, we may finesse the challenge of a rapidly aging society by some combination of increased productivity, entitlement reform, and delayed retirement. In that case, fertility will continue to fall, and world population will shrink at compounding speed. The end result could be crisis or change further down the road, or simply substantial and ongoing reductions in world population, with geostrategic consequences difficult to predict. One way or the other, it would seem that our social order is in motion. New eugenics? he emerging population implosion, then, may be taken in part as a challenge to Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis. As Fukuyama himself came to recognize in his 2002 book, Our Posthuman Future, the greatest challenge to the "end of history" idea is the prospect that biotechnology might work a fundamental change in human nature and society. In the form of modern contraception, it may already have done so. And contraception could be only the beginning. Like others who warn of the dangers of biotechnology, Fukuyama is most concerned about the prospect that genetic engineering could undermine the principles of liberty and equality. If children are genetically engineered for greater health, strength, or intellectual capacity, erstwhile liberal society could be plunged into a brave new world of genetically-based class hierarchy. That is a grave concern, yet there may still be others. The disruptive effects of biotechnology will play out in a depopulating world -- perhaps a world shadowed by economic and cultural crisis. So the immediate challenge of biotechnology to human history is the prospect that the family might be replaced by a bioengineered breeding system. Artificial wombs, not the production of supermen, may soon be the foremost social challenge posed by advancing science. Certainly, there is a danger that genetic engineering may someday lead to class distinctions. But the pressure on the bioengineers of the future will be to generate population. If and when the prospect of building "better" human beings becomes real, it will play out in the context of a world under radical population pressure. That population crunch will likely shape the new genetics at every turn. With talk of artificial wombs and the end of the family, we are a long way from the idea of a conservative religious revival. The truth is, the possibility of a population crisis simultaneously raises the prospect of conservative revival and eugenic nightmare. In his landmark book on Western family decline, Disturbing the Nest, sociologist David Popenoe traces out contrasting ideal-typical scenarios by which the Western family might be either strengthened or further eroded. Looking at these scenarios, it's evident that a population crisis could trigger either one. What could reverse the decline of the Western nuclear family? Anything that might counter the affluence, secularism, and individualism that led to family decline in the first place, says Popenoe. Economic decline could force people to depend on families instead of the state. A religious revival could restore traditional mores. And a revised calculation of rational interest in light of social chaos could call the benefits of extreme individualism into question. We've already seen that a demographic-economic crisis could invoke all three of these mechanisms. But what about the reverse scenario, in which the nuclear family would entirely disappear? According to Popenoe, the end of the nuclear family would come through a further development of our growing tendency to separate pair-bonding from sex and procreation. Especially in Europe, marriage is morphing into parental cohabitation. And in societies where parents commonly cohabit, the practice of "living alone together" is emerging. There unmarried parents remain "together" yet live in separate households, only one of them with a child. And of course, intentional single motherhood by older unmarried women -- Murphy Brown-style -- is another dramatic repudiation of the nuclear family. The next logical step in all this would be for single mothers to turn their children over to some other individual or group for rearing. That would spell the definitive end of the nuclear family. A prolonged economic crisis accompanied by widespread concern over depopulation would undoubtedly place feminism under pressure. Yet it's unlikely that postmodern attitudes toward women, work and family could be swept aside -- or even significantly modified -- without a major cultural struggle. A eugenic regime would be the logical way to safeguard feminist goals in a depopulating world, and there is ample precedent for an alliance between eugenics and feminism. After all, birth control pioneers like Margaret Sanger in the United States and Marie Stopes in England blended feminism and eugenics at the outset of the twentieth century. As birth control came into wide use, fertility sharply declined -- particularly among the upper classes, which had access to the technology. Alarmed by the relative decline of the elites, Teddy Roosevelt urged upper-class women to have more children. Even progressives began to question their commitment to women's rights. Margaret Sanger's response was to promote a eugenic regime of forced sterilization and birth control among the unfit. Instead of urging "the intelligent" to have more children, Sanger advocated the suppression of births among "the insane and the blemished." The women's movement of the 1960s forged still more links between feminism and eugenics. Shulamith Firestone's 1970 classic, The Dialectic of Sex, argued that women would truly be free only when released from the burden of reproduction. Today, as scientists work to engineer embryos in the laboratory, while others devise technology to save premature babies at ever earlier stages of development, the possibility that a viable artificial womb will someday be created has emerged. While feminists are divided on the issue, many look forward to the prospect. Thus, if faced with an ultimate choice between feminist hopes of workplace equality with men and society's simultaneous need for more children, it is not hard to imagine that some on the cultural left would opt for technological outsourcing -- surrogacy in various forms -- as a way out. To some extent, this phenomenon has already begun: Consider the small but growing numbers of older, usually career women who choose and pay younger women to carry babies for them. As with Sanger and Firestone, eugenics may be seen by some as the "logical" alternative to pressure to restore the traditional family. Christine Rosen, who has usefully thought through the prospects and implications of "ectogenesis," suggests that objections to the human exploitation inherent in surrogacy could actually propel a shift toward artificial wombs. Of course, that would only complete the commodification of childbirth itself -- weakening if not eliminating the parent-child bond. And if artificial wombs one day become "safer" than human gestation, insurers might begin to insist on our not giving birth the old-fashioned way. Such dark possibilities demand serious intellectual attention. Neither principled objections to tampering with human nature nor instinctive horror at the thought of it suffice to meet the challenge of the new eugenics. Philosophy and instinct must be welded to a compelling social vision. The course and consequences of world population decline offer just such a vision. In the end, philosophical principles and reflexive horror are guardians of the social order, yet without a lively vision of the social order they are protecting, these guardians cannot properly do their work. New choices ven in the celebrated image of the conservative who stands athwart history yelling "Stop!" there is a subtle admission of modernization's inevitability. Tocqueville saw history's trend toward ever greater individualism as an irresistible force. The most we could do, he thought, was to balance individualism with modern forms of religious, family, and civic association. Today, even Tocqueville's cherished counterweights to radical individualism are disappearing -- particularly in the sphere of the family. It is indeed tempting to believe that the fundamental social changes initiated in the 1960s have by now become irreversible. Widespread contraception, abortion, women in the workforce, marital decline, growing secularism and individualism -- all seem here to stay. Looked at from a longer view, however, the results are not really in. We haven't yet seen the passing of even the great demographic wave of the "baby boom." The latter half of the twentieth century may someday be seen not as ushering in the end of history, but as a transition out of modernity and into a new, prolonged, and culturally novel era of population shrinkage. The most interesting and unanticipated prospect of all would be a conservatism. Of our authors, only Longman has explored the potential ideological consequences of the new demography. In effect, Longman wrote his book to forestall a religiously-based conservatism precipitated by demographic and economic decline. Yet even Longman may underestimate the potential for conservative resurgence. It wouldn't take a full-scale economic meltdown, or even a relative disparity in births between fundamentalists and secularists, to change modernity's course. Chronic low-level economic stress in a rapidly aging world may be enough. There is good reason to worry about the fate of elderly boomers with fragile families, limited savings, and relatively few children to care for them. A younger generation of workers will soon feel the burden of paying for the care of this massive older generation. The nursing shortage, already acute, will undoubtedly worsen, possibly foreshadowing shortages in many other categories of workers. Real estate values could be threatened by population decline. And all these demographically tinged issues, and more, will likely become the media's daily fare. In such an atmosphere, a new set of social values could emerge along with a fundamentally new calculation of personal interest. Modernity itself may come in for criticism even as a new appreciation for the benefits of marriage and parenting might emerge. A successful pronatalist policy (if achieved by means of the conventional family rather than through surrogacy or artificial wombs) would only reinforce the conservative trend. In that case we will surely find that it is cultural radicals standing athwart history's new trend yelling "Stop!" Humankind faces three fundamental choices in the years ahead: at least a partial restoration of traditional social values, a radical new eugenics, or endless and compounding population decline. For a long time, this choice may not be an either/or. Divisions will likely emerge both within and between societies on how to proceed. Some regions may grow more traditional, others may experiment with radical new social forms, while still others may continue to shrink. And a great deal will depend upon an economic future that no one can predict with certainty. In any case, the social innovations of the modern world are still being tested, and the outcome is unresolved. Feedback? Email [10]polrev at hoover.stanford.edu. Or send us a From checker at panix.com Tue Feb 8 22:14:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 17:14:39 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Towards a truly clever Artificial Intelligence Message-ID: Towards a truly clever Artificial Intelligence http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/information_technology/report-39894.html The University of Reading 04.02.2005 Craig Hillsley [See you on Easter!] A pioneering new way of creating computer programs could be used in the future to design and build robots with minds that function like that of a human being, according to a leading researcher at The University of Reading. Dr James Anderson, of the Universitys Department of Computer Science, has developed for the first time the perspective simplex, or Perspex, which is a way of writing a computer program as a geometrical structure, rather than as a series of instructions. Not only does the invention of the Perspex make it theoretically possible for us to develop robots with minds that learn and develop, it also provides us with clues to answer the philosophical conundrum of how minds relate to bodies in living beings. A conventional computer program comprises of a list of instructions, and if one of those instructions goes missing or is damaged then the whole program crashes. However, with the Perspex, the program works rather like a neural network and is able to bridge gaps and continue running and developing even when it sustains considerable damage. "All computer programs can be written in terms of the Perspex. Essentially, it is a new, geometrical computer instruction that looks like an artificial neuron. Any existing computer program can be compiled into a network of these neurons". The Perspex links the geometry of the physical world with the structure of computations so, to the extent that mind is computable, the Perspex provides one solution to the centuries-old problem of how mind arises in physical bodies. "Perspexes exist in a mathematical space called perspex space. Perspex space can describe the ordinary space we live in, along with all of the physical bodies that make up our space, and all of the minds that arise from physical bodies. It provides a model that is accurate enough for a robot to use to describe its own mind and body". Perspex programs show the very human trait of periodic recovery and relapse when they are damaged; perhaps for the same reason. The Perspex tells us how mind can relate to body so the geometrical properties that govern a Perspex programs injury and recovery also apply to us because our bodies exist in space. We share a common geometry, and this has implications for our minds and bodies. For the first time, the Perspex makes computer programs prone to injury, illness, and recovery like a human being. And a computer program that continues developing despite damaged, erroneous, and lost data means that, in the future, we could have computers that are able to develop their own minds despite, or because of, the rigours of living in the world. The Perspex allows global reasoning to be attained with just one initial instruction. So a Perspex program can operate on the whole of a problem before it attends to the myriad of detail. This is very much like human strategic thinking. It arises from the geometry of the Perspex, not from the specific detail of the program that is being run. This tells us that strategic thinking can be a property of the way our brains are constructed and is not necessarily to do with the substance of what we happen to be thinking about. It might be that some people are better at strategic thinking than others because of the geometry of their brains." References 73. http://www.reading.ac.uk/ 76. http://www.innovations-report.com/reports/reports.php?typ=7&anzeige=0 77. http://www.alphagalileo.org/ 78. http://www.netzgut.de/ 79. http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/information_technology/inhalt_6.html From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Feb 9 04:05:40 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 20:05:40 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] skimming long articles on paleopsych In-Reply-To: <200502081931.j18JVgj24250@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050209040540.71794.qmail@web30807.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Does anyone else find the long postings here difficult to get through? Lately I find myself skimming the list, unable to give full attention to many posts because of the very long articles. Would it be possible to post a couple paragraphs with a link, instead of a multipage article? Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Feb 9 04:17:59 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 21:17:59 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] skimming long articles on paleopsych In-Reply-To: <20050209040540.71794.qmail@web30807.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050209040540.71794.qmail@web30807.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <42098EF7.8020305@solution-consulting.com> I don't read them all - I read the first paragraph and delete 90% but the 10% I keep are worth it! I have been supportive of Frank's contribution because of those pearls of great price among all the slimy stuff. Lynn Michael Christopher wrote: >Does anyone else find the long postings here difficult >to get through? Lately I find myself skimming the >list, unable to give full attention to many posts >because of the very long articles. Would it be >possible to post a couple paragraphs with a link, >instead of a multipage article? > >Michael > >__________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around >http://mail.yahoo.com >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Feb 9 04:20:49 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 20:20:49 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] skimming long articles on paleopsych References: <20050209040540.71794.qmail@web30807.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <03c201c50e5e$bd24fe00$7a06f604@S0027397558> Long postings lull me to sleep. Granted that there are some linguists in the group.....those who love their words and formations.....but, hey.....short and sweet is my cup of tea. Come to think of it....how can anyone post a very long discourse on his cellphone? To learn brevity is an art. Poetic too. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Christopher" To: Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2005 8:05 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] skimming long articles on paleopsych > > Does anyone else find the long postings here > difficult > to get through? Lately I find myself skimming the > list, unable to give full attention to many posts > because of the very long articles. Would it be > possible to post a couple paragraphs with a link, > instead of a multipage article? > > Michael > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam > protection around > http://mail.yahoo.com > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 9 16:12:53 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2005 08:12:53 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq Elections: Day 10 and no results Message-ID: <01C50E7F.27B8DFF0.shovland@mindspring.com> What would happen if the Bushies try to cheat the Shia? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 9 18:45:00 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2005 10:45:00 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Just deserts for a bad idea Message-ID: <01C50E94.687194F0.shovland@mindspring.com> Morning Edition , February 9, 2005 . "The board of directors of Hewlett-Packard calls for the resignation of chairman and chief executive Carly Fiorina. Fiorina made a mark as the first woman president, CEO and chairman of a major computer company, and steered HP through its merger with Compaq." Every time my HP computer boots up it says "Innovate." That's exactly what she didn't do. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Feb 10 03:40:12 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2005 19:40:12 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq: An Inconvenient Election Message-ID: <01C50EDF.2C967180.shovland@mindspring.com> Do you remember the orgy of happy talk that occurred in the days following the election in Iraq? One would have thought that Jesus Christ had returned to Earth and was performing miracles on a grand scale. The Golden Age of Democracy and Freedom had dawned, and the President's partisans were wallowing in deep vats of self-congratulation. And now a great fog of distraction has settled over us. Everything but the election is the moment by moment subject of the talking heads. A massive effort to promote tort deform, Social Insecurity, and Medicare Drug Fraud commands our attention. Meanwhile, the unelected but Elect election officials of Iraq continue to sift through the ballots like demented Alchemists eternally filtering their precious fluids in search of the true gold. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Feb 10 16:53:25 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 08:53:25 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Iraq Election Does Not Look Good Message-ID: <01C50F4D.FC48E020.shovland@mindspring.com> More than any administration I can remember, the Bushies live by the notion that the appearance is the reality. That being the case, the appearance is that something went wrong in the Iraqi elections, and the American public may accept that as the reality. And if something could go wrong there, why not here? If they are concerned about taking their time to get it right over there, why was there such a rush to declare the outcome over here? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Feb 10 19:05:10 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 11:05:10 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] inconvenient election Message-ID: <01C50F60.63E905E0.shovland@mindspring.com> Steve, this is bordering on incoherent. I am concerned about you. Do you remember the orgy of happy talk that occurred in the days following the election in Iraq? (Actually, there was plenty of "well, let's not get carried away" talk in the media. This paragraph makes little sense.) One would have thought that Jesus Christ had returned to Earth and was performing miracles on a grand scale. (No one I know thought that - this seems a bit delusional on your part, Steve) The Golden Age of Democracy and Freedom had dawned, and the President's partisans were wallowing in deep vats of self-congratulation. (No, there was some happiness the goal had been reached, but awareness it is just a first step. Many things can yet go wrong.) And now a great fog of distraction has settled over us. (Who specifically? I don't feel distracted!) Everything but the election is the moment by moment subject of the talking heads. (Old news? Old story! So what? Life moves on. When Iraq writes the constitution, it will be news again.) A massive effort to promote tort deform, Social Insecurity, and Medicare Drug Fraud commands our attention. (hate speech is not a sufficient substitute for careful thought, Steve. Surely you are smarter than what this use of mislabeling would imply. Dialog requires mutual respect; as I learned in the army, we must always respect our enemy. To fail to do so means we disrespect ourselves. ee cummings said something like, 'unbeing returns upon the unself, space being curved.' Hate speech will eventually rebound on yourself, and it will cause more suffering. Must you suffer?) Meanwhile, the unelected but Elect election officials of Iraq continue to sift through the ballots like demented Alchemists eternally filtering their precious fluids in search of the true gold. (Now you are completely incoherent. Steve, get a grip! You need to cultivate some compassion and peace. Since you are anti-christian, I would suggest Buddhism, an excellent religion that doesn't require you believe in any God. Please give it a try.) lj Steve Hovland From dsmith06 at maine.rr.com Thu Feb 10 23:34:36 2005 From: dsmith06 at maine.rr.com (David Smith) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 18:34:36 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] 4th Annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture: Daniel C. Dennett on Religion as a Natural Phenomenon Message-ID: <01f801c50fc9$1549ac00$0300a8c0@dad> New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology 4th Annual William D. Hamilton Memorial Lecture Religion as a Natural Phenomenon Daniel C. Dennett April 29, 2005 at 7:00 PM CHP Room, Parker Pavilion Westbrook College Campus University of New England, 716 Stevens Avenue, Portland, Maine. What kind of explanation can the natural sciences provide for the variety of religious practices and beliefs? One possibility, of course, is that it is simply the truth, and that all human groups discover this in the same way that they discover that food and water are necessary for survival, but there are other possible explanations that may shed light on the powerful influence of religion in all contemporary societies. Daniel C. Dennett is the author of Freedom Evolves (Viking Penguin, 2003) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon &Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998). He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over two hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, and the Jean Nicod lectures at Paris in 2001among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Feb 11 06:06:34 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 22:06:34 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] RE: An improvement - Message-ID: <01C50FBC.C9778A10.shovland@mindspring.com> I'm aware that you tend to be cerebral. Beware. A Limbic Warrior like me will use that to f*** up your head :-) I would refer you to the work on emotional intelligence for a survey of the power you are missing. There are at least 4 major areas where the right is not contributing anything, and where the left could take over if they wished: Budget Deficit, Trade Deficit, Health Care, and Energy Policy. I think that Iraq will prove to be a disaster and that the real national interests of the US will be badly damaged by that failure. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2005 8:39 PM To: Steve Hovland Subject: Re: An improvement - Certainly I would miss that. Not big on poetry anyway, except for pretty straightforward stuff, so it might go over my head. I like Waddie Mitchell. I am interested in Left thoughts, but I find them too emotional. There is an attempt to change 'liberal' to 'progressive' but, as Opinion Journal says, first they have to come up with something progressive. Digression. Well, what I am looking for is education, links, data, stuff that enlightens me. I am fond of the cerebral cortex, not the limbic system. I looked at Moveon.org a whle back, and found it barren of any actual exploration. Lacked data. I read townhall.com and find the arguments generally well reasoned, except that Ann Coulter who is mainly a humorist. Love Tom Sowell. At the University (adjunct prof), I find the liberals are generally incapable of thoughtful discourse, and I wonder if I am on to something general or if I am just unlucky. They get irrational. I almost lost a good friend recently when I confided that I was reasonably certain that Iraq will work out pretty well, and I thought the war was a good thing. He was practically shaking with emotion,a nd it took him 3 months to calm down. We had lunch two weeks ago, and he has calmed down, but the guy thinks that Bush is a devil. I mean, based on what? And he cannot lay out a reasoned train of thought. So perhaps I transfered my frustration with my friend onto you. I am seeking intelligent discourse. When the limbic system kicks into high gear, the blood flow to the frontal lobes diminishes, so functionally, high emotions equal loss of IQ points. I value intellect - data - science - reason - see it as 'man in god's image' and that. Steve Hovland wrote: >Have you considered the possibility that >I sometimes write crazy irrational things >to express my sense of a situation? > >More like poetry, perhaps? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > > > From unstasis at gmail.com Tue Feb 15 00:36:34 2005 From: unstasis at gmail.com (Stephen Lee) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 19:36:34 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] test again Message-ID: <951ad070502141636710c5903@mail.gmail.com> The domain got expired so that is why the messages have been bouncig the last couple days. If you can read this then the problem is fixed. -- -- If Nothing Is Then Nothing Was But something is everwhere Just because -- http://www.freewebs.com/rewander http://hopeisus.fateback.com/story.html From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 15 04:32:39 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 20:32:39 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Democratic Family Values Message-ID: <01C512D4.541FBCE0.shovland@mindspring.com> The budget should be balanced. Everyone person and organization that benefits from this nation should pay part of the cost of maintaining it. We should export more than we import. Everyone is entitled to basic health care. We must become less dependent on petroleum. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Feb 15 05:19:31 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 22:19:31 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <01C512D4.541FBCE0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C512D4.541FBCE0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <42118663.7050609@solution-consulting.com> Disclosure: Johnson in press release is not related to me. Lynn http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Feb05/r020105 Feb. 1, 2005 Positive emotions slash bias, help people see big picture details ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes many people think members of other races "all look alike," according to new University of Michigan research. "Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology researcher Kareem Johnson. "Negative emotions like fear or anger are useful for short-term survival when there's an immediate danger like being chased by a dangerous animal. Positive emotions like joy and happiness are for long-term survival and promote big picture thinking, make you more inclusive and notice more details, make you think in terms of 'us' instead of 'them.'" To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed photos of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects recognized members of their own race 75 percent of the time but only recognized members of another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. However, researchers found positive emotions boosted that recognition of cross-race faces about 10 to 20 percent, eliminating the gap. The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. Johnson, who is completing his PhD work in psychology, and Barbara Fredrickson, a U-M psychology professor and director of the Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory, specialize in the power of positive emotions. Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a comic to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a "neutral" video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 yearbook style photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 milliseconds. Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more "negative" emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked to push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. Those in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members of another race, while their ability to recognize members of their own race stayed the same. The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a "broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of the world around them. Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Feb 15 05:37:47 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 22:37:47 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Democratic Family Values In-Reply-To: <01C512D4.541FBCE0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C512D4.541FBCE0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <42118AAB.5090603@solution-consulting.com> These are excellent values, very conservative, and I can endorse the spirit behind them. I don't know how to achieve them because of structural challenges in our society. I wish I could see a way. Any help? Irony alert: I just posted the piece on how positive emotions make us intelligent, and yet I see these serious problems. I guess we should pass around some jokes and then brainstorm for solutions. BTW, Fast Company December issue: creativity is a function of positive emotions. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/creativity.html Steve Hovland wrote: >The budget should be balanced. > That may require eliminating most of our entitlement programs unless we cripple the economy with taxes. Should social security be means-tested? > >Everyone person and organization that benefits from this nation should pay part of the cost of maintaining it. > > I suppose so. Now the bottom rungs of society pay no tax, and in fact get many benefits. Most taxes come from the top earners. Perhaps even the bottom portions of our society should pay at least a nominal tax. >We should export more than we import. > There is no way I can see that happening for at least 50 years. China will continue to dominate the world's economy until an equilibrium point is reached, I would suppose. How could we do it? Building barriers to imports would cause a catastrophic trade war, I believe. And bankrupt Wal-Mart! (good idea). 70% of walmart merchandise comes from china. > >Everyone is entitled to basic health care. > Well, entitled is a dangerous word. We should work to provide for those in need. YET . . . I fear government enforcing this excellent idea, since I work in health care, and government in health care is always a disaster. Bureaucrats suck the life out of society. Look at HIPAA - every doctor I know hates it. > >We must become less dependent on petroleum. > > Total agreement. Bush is very short-sighted in this area. Yet, Clinton did nothing for eight years. We need private / public "Manhatten Projects" and they aren't happening. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > Steve, I would add: We must control our borders. There is collusion between government and business / agricultural interests to make illegal immigration easy. Serious enforcement of immigration laws is not a reality. I think that is a disaster in the making. Something should be done about exhorbitant compensation of CEOs. I fear government intervention, yet the CEO/lowest paid worker ratio is out of control and I believe that weakens our social contract. Any ideas? lynn From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Tue Feb 15 14:05:29 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 09:05:29 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Democratic Family Values In-Reply-To: <42118AAB.5090603@solution-consulting.com> References: <01C512D4.541FBCE0.shovland@mindspring.com> <42118AAB.5090603@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <421201A9.7030606@uconn.edu> Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote: > > Steve, I would add: We must control our borders. There is collusion > between government and business / agricultural interests to make illegal > immigration easy. Serious enforcement of immigration laws is not a > reality. I think that is a disaster in the making. I strongly disagree with this point. One of the problems that I see with the "liberalization" of economies that have been forced upon every country in the world is that there is no liberalization of labor movement. It is crucial for the balance of a liberal system that not only capital and goods flow universaly but that labor follow it. Let the workers move to where work is. The US won't let that happen because wages will drop enoumously, but hey! it's just what happens with the price beans when a country enters world markets, except is goes up...no one is complaining about that here. The European empire has adopted this rule for the closest colonies. > Something should be done about exhorbitant compensation of CEOs. I fear > government intervention, yet the CEO/lowest paid worker ratio is out of > control and I believe that weakens our social contract. Any ideas? Agreed. Progressive income tax. Another good solution is increased liability proportional to salary because so many CEOs make so much money and leave the company broken. Christian From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 15 14:19:21 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 06:19:21 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Message-ID: <01C51326.4A1D0CF0.shovland@mindspring.com> Do most of the positive emotions arise from the limbic? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 9:20 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Disclosure: Johnson in press release is not related to me. Lynn http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Feb05/r020105 Feb. 1, 2005 Positive emotions slash bias, help people see big picture details ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes many people think members of other races "all look alike," according to new University of Michigan research. "Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology researcher Kareem Johnson. "Negative emotions like fear or anger are useful for short-term survival when there's an immediate danger like being chased by a dangerous animal. Positive emotions like joy and happiness are for long-term survival and promote big picture thinking, make you more inclusive and notice more details, make you think in terms of 'us' instead of 'them.'" To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed photos of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects recognized members of their own race 75 percent of the time but only recognized members of another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. However, researchers found positive emotions boosted that recognition of cross-race faces about 10 to 20 percent, eliminating the gap. The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. Johnson, who is completing his PhD work in psychology, and Barbara Fredrickson, a U-M psychology professor and director of the Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory, specialize in the power of positive emotions. Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a comic to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a "neutral" video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 yearbook style photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 milliseconds. Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more "negative" emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked to push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. Those in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members of another race, while their ability to recognize members of their own race stayed the same. The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a "broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of the world around them. Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory << File: ATT00006.html >> << File: ATT00007.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 15 14:31:32 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 06:31:32 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Democratic Family Values Message-ID: <01C51327.FE0CEF40.shovland@mindspring.com> These are values, which means that we can assert them until they are heard. The budget was in surplus before the Bush tax cuts which mostly benefited the rich and which have not resulted in an economic boom. I have heard that there are many corporations which do not pay taxes, and many use off-shore registrations to avoid them. We can stop that. China has been booming because American companies have been moving factories there to get cheap labor. It is widely believed that taking measures to defend our economy would cause a trade war. We are already in a trade war, and our trade deficit is proof of that. The Great Depression of the 1930's was caused by a reduction in the money supply, not by trade measures. Spain provides basic health care to everyone for about $700 per capita per year, whereas we spend more than $4,000 per year per capita and have 40+ million uninsured. In the midwest, wind turbines are being installed very quickly, and there are many other possibilities. The main thing is to stop the active opposition which comes from Bush oil cronies. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 9:38 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Democratic Family Values These are excellent values, very conservative, and I can endorse the spirit behind them. I don't know how to achieve them because of structural challenges in our society. I wish I could see a way. Any help? Irony alert: I just posted the piece on how positive emotions make us intelligent, and yet I see these serious problems. I guess we should pass around some jokes and then brainstorm for solutions. BTW, Fast Company December issue: creativity is a function of positive emotions. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/creativity.html Steve Hovland wrote: >The budget should be balanced. > That may require eliminating most of our entitlement programs unless we cripple the economy with taxes. Should social security be means-tested? > >Everyone person and organization that benefits from this nation should pay part of the cost of maintaining it. > > I suppose so. Now the bottom rungs of society pay no tax, and in fact get many benefits. Most taxes come from the top earners. Perhaps even the bottom portions of our society should pay at least a nominal tax. >We should export more than we import. > There is no way I can see that happening for at least 50 years. China will continue to dominate the world's economy until an equilibrium point is reached, I would suppose. How could we do it? Building barriers to imports would cause a catastrophic trade war, I believe. And bankrupt Wal-Mart! (good idea). 70% of walmart merchandise comes from china. > >Everyone is entitled to basic health care. > Well, entitled is a dangerous word. We should work to provide for those in need. YET . . . I fear government enforcing this excellent idea, since I work in health care, and government in health care is always a disaster. Bureaucrats suck the life out of society. Look at HIPAA - every doctor I know hates it. > >We must become less dependent on petroleum. > > Total agreement. Bush is very short-sighted in this area. Yet, Clinton did nothing for eight years. We need private / public "Manhatten Projects" and they aren't happening. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > Steve, I would add: We must control our borders. There is collusion between government and business / agricultural interests to make illegal immigration easy. Serious enforcement of immigration laws is not a reality. I think that is a disaster in the making. Something should be done about exhorbitant compensation of CEOs. I fear government intervention, yet the CEO/lowest paid worker ratio is out of control and I believe that weakens our social contract. Any ideas? lynn _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Feb 15 14:49:30 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 07:49:30 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <01C51326.4A1D0CF0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C51326.4A1D0CF0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <42120BFA.5020305@solution-consulting.com> The limbic system plays a role in positive emotions, but they 'source' from the left prefrontal lobe. Meditators show much higher left prefrontal activity and test as happier. Activity in the right hemisphere is associated with more worry and dread emotions. Negative emotions are experienced in the limbic system, and during fear/anger/despair the frontal lobes are 'off line' so to speak, on the sidelines and consuming less oxygen. Steve Hovland wrote: >Do most of the positive emotions arise from the limbic? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 9:20 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy > >Disclosure: Johnson in press release is not related to me. >Lynn > >http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Feb05/r020105 >Feb. 1, 2005 > > > > > Positive emotions slash bias, help people see big picture details > >ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get >the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes >many people think members of other races "all look alike," according to >new University of Michigan research. > >"Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology >researcher Kareem Johnson. "Negative emotions like fear or anger are >useful for short-term survival when there's an immediate danger like >being chased by a dangerous animal. Positive emotions like joy and >happiness are for long-term survival and promote big picture thinking, >make you more inclusive and notice more details, make you think in terms >of 'us' instead of 'them.'" > >To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed >photos of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects >recognized members of their own race 75 percent of the time but only >recognized members of another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. >However, researchers found positive emotions boosted that recognition of >cross-race faces about 10 to 20 percent, eliminating the gap. > >The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal >Psychological Science. > >Johnson, who is completing his PhD work in psychology, and Barbara >Fredrickson, a U-M psychology professor and director of the Positive >Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory, specialize in the power of >positive emotions. > >Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a >comic to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a >"neutral" video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 >yearbook style photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 >milliseconds. > >Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive >emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more "negative" >emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked >to push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. >Those in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members >of another race, while their ability to recognize members of their own >race stayed the same. > >The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a >"broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of >the world around them. > > >Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory > > > > << File: ATT00006.html >> << File: ATT00007.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > From ross.buck at uconn.edu Tue Feb 15 15:15:36 2005 From: ross.buck at uconn.edu (Ross Buck) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 10:15:36 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <01C51326.4A1D0CF0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <200502151516.j1FFFoh02301@tick.javien.com> It is interesting that the stimulus for positive emotions here is a comedian. We need to know more about the subject of the humor. Often, the funniest comedians are quite aggressive in their humor, possibly fostering feelings of in-group bonding that are quite different from hearts-and-flowers happiness, and perhaps actually enhancing "us versus them" feelings. Could the enhanced recognition of different-race faces actually be a kind of vigilance? Cheers, Ross Ross Buck, Ph. D. Professor of Communication Sciences and Psychology Communication Sciences U-1085 University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06269-1085 860-486-4494 fax 860-486-5422 buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf Of Steve Hovland Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 9:19 AM To: 'The new improved paleopsych list' Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Do most of the positive emotions arise from the limbic? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 9:20 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Disclosure: Johnson in press release is not related to me. Lynn http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Feb05/r020105 Feb. 1, 2005 Positive emotions slash bias, help people see big picture details ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes many people think members of other races "all look alike," according to new University of Michigan research. "Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology researcher Kareem Johnson. "Negative emotions like fear or anger are useful for short-term survival when there's an immediate danger like being chased by a dangerous animal. Positive emotions like joy and happiness are for long-term survival and promote big picture thinking, make you more inclusive and notice more details, make you think in terms of 'us' instead of 'them.'" To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed photos of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects recognized members of their own race 75 percent of the time but only recognized members of another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. However, researchers found positive emotions boosted that recognition of cross-race faces about 10 to 20 percent, eliminating the gap. The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. Johnson, who is completing his PhD work in psychology, and Barbara Fredrickson, a U-M psychology professor and director of the Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory, specialize in the power of positive emotions. Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a comic to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a "neutral" video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 yearbook style photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 milliseconds. Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more "negative" emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked to push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. Those in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members of another race, while their ability to recognize members of their own race stayed the same. The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a "broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of the world around them. Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory << File: ATT00006.html >> << File: ATT00007.txt >> _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 15 15:19:43 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 07:19:43 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Message-ID: <01C5132E.B97B5C20.shovland@mindspring.com> Do you know of any exercises for increasing one's capacity for empathy? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 6:50 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy The limbic system plays a role in positive emotions, but they 'source' from the left prefrontal lobe. Meditators show much higher left prefrontal activity and test as happier. Activity in the right hemisphere is associated with more worry and dread emotions. Negative emotions are experienced in the limbic system, and during fear/anger/despair the frontal lobes are 'off line' so to speak, on the sidelines and consuming less oxygen. Steve Hovland wrote: >Do most of the positive emotions arise from the limbic? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 9:20 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy > >Disclosure: Johnson in press release is not related to me. >Lynn > >http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Feb05/r020105 >Feb. 1, 2005 > > > > > Positive emotions slash bias, help people see big picture details > >ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get >the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes >many people think members of other races "all look alike," according to >new University of Michigan research. > >"Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology >researcher Kareem Johnson. "Negative emotions like fear or anger are >useful for short-term survival when there's an immediate danger like >being chased by a dangerous animal. Positive emotions like joy and >happiness are for long-term survival and promote big picture thinking, >make you more inclusive and notice more details, make you think in terms >of 'us' instead of 'them.'" > >To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed >photos of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects >recognized members of their own race 75 percent of the time but only >recognized members of another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. >However, researchers found positive emotions boosted that recognition of >cross-race faces about 10 to 20 percent, eliminating the gap. > >The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal >Psychological Science. > >Johnson, who is completing his PhD work in psychology, and Barbara >Fredrickson, a U-M psychology professor and director of the Positive >Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory, specialize in the power of >positive emotions. > >Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a >comic to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a >"neutral" video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 >yearbook style photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 >milliseconds. > >Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive >emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more "negative" >emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked >to push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. >Those in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members >of another race, while their ability to recognize members of their own >race stayed the same. > >The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a >"broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of >the world around them. > > >Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory > > > > << File: ATT00006.html >> << File: ATT00007.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >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 Tue Feb 15 15:37:08 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 07:37:08 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Message-ID: <01C51331.281558A0.shovland@mindspring.com> If you check in on ThePoliticalSpinRoom on yahoo groups you will find that at the moment us lefties are making some very savage jokes about the Republicans' sex lives. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Ross Buck [SMTP:ross.buck at uconn.edu] Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 7:16 AM To: 'The new improved paleopsych list' Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy It is interesting that the stimulus for positive emotions here is a comedian. We need to know more about the subject of the humor. Often, the funniest comedians are quite aggressive in their humor, possibly fostering feelings of in-group bonding that are quite different from hearts-and-flowers happiness, and perhaps actually enhancing "us versus them" feelings. Could the enhanced recognition of different-race faces actually be a kind of vigilance? Cheers, Ross Ross Buck, Ph. D. Professor of Communication Sciences and Psychology Communication Sciences U-1085 University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06269-1085 860-486-4494 fax 860-486-5422 buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf Of Steve Hovland Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 9:19 AM To: 'The new improved paleopsych list' Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Do most of the positive emotions arise from the limbic? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 9:20 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Disclosure: Johnson in press release is not related to me. Lynn http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Feb05/r020105 Feb. 1, 2005 Positive emotions slash bias, help people see big picture details ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes many people think members of other races "all look alike," according to new University of Michigan research. "Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology researcher Kareem Johnson. "Negative emotions like fear or anger are useful for short-term survival when there's an immediate danger like being chased by a dangerous animal. Positive emotions like joy and happiness are for long-term survival and promote big picture thinking, make you more inclusive and notice more details, make you think in terms of 'us' instead of 'them.'" To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed photos of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects recognized members of their own race 75 percent of the time but only recognized members of another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. However, researchers found positive emotions boosted that recognition of cross-race faces about 10 to 20 percent, eliminating the gap. The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. Johnson, who is completing his PhD work in psychology, and Barbara Fredrickson, a U-M psychology professor and director of the Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory, specialize in the power of positive emotions. Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a comic to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a "neutral" video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 yearbook style photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 milliseconds. Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more "negative" emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked to push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. Those in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members of another race, while their ability to recognize members of their own race stayed the same. The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a "broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of the world around them. Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory << File: ATT00006.html >> << File: ATT00007.txt >> _______________________________________________ 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 Tue Feb 15 16:48:56 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 08:48:56 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] How to quickly restore order in Iraq Message-ID: <01C5133B.30288FD0.shovland@mindspring.com> Withdraw US forces. The presence of our army is the main motivator for the insurgency. Left to their own devices the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shias would create order in their own areas in a matter of days. Then they could negotiate a union, or disunion, of their own choice. Isn't that why we went there, to give them freedom of choice? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Feb 15 20:28:56 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 12:28:56 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] government/business in health care In-Reply-To: <200502151936.j1FJaSh00615@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050215202857.17607.qmail@web30805.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>I fear government enforcing this excellent idea, since I work in health care, and government in health care is always a disaster.<< --What alternatives do you recommend? I'm not convinced that business in health care is any less bureaucratic than government. Business culture, at least when a few large corporations dominate the market, seems to have some of the same problems as government culture. The assumption that the market is the friendlier force is often detached from an actual comparison between people's experiences with government and with business... those who have the money to pay for good service (money does talk) are often isolated from what others experience lower down on the ladder, and they don't always realize the consequences of making drastic changes in the system because they are insulated from the effects of those changes, beyond reducing their own taxes. For many of the wealthy, as long as their own tax rate goes down, everything's great. They don't always mingle on a daily basis with people who don't have the same resource, and it produces a lag time in the feedback network that makes a society capable of reaching balance. Ideally, those who make changes in a system will be tapped into all levels of that system, and respond to realtime feedback. Ideally, those who vote for changes should have at least some contact with people most affected. That isn't always the case. My wife, who is from Australia, keeps complaining that the large companies here don't put real people on the phone for customer help and give people the runaround. She feels Australia does better. She can be a little patriotic about Australia, but then my mom says the same thing and she's lived here all her life. Corporations are not always less bureaucratic and alienating than government, and there can be just as much red tape, from what I've seen. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From guavaberry at earthlink.net Tue Feb 15 20:44:08 2005 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 15:44:08 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <200502151516.j1FFFoh02301@tick.javien.com> References: <01C51326.4A1D0CF0.shovland@mindspring.com> <200502151516.j1FFFoh02301@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.0.20050215153804.038c5e50@mail.earthlink.net> You learn more because you are happy not scared. the mother lode :-) http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/play.asp Karen Ellis We need to know more about the subject of the humor. - Ross Buck, Ph. D. Do most of the positive emotions arise from the limbic? - Steve Hovland http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Feb05/r020105 - Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> 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 <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 15 21:21:54 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 13:21:54 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] government/business in health care Message-ID: <01C51361.522C0820.shovland@mindspring.com> Can you give specific examples of the way in which government in health care is a disaster? Problems are often indicators of the need for process improvement. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 12:29 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] government/business in health care >>I fear government enforcing this excellent idea, since I work in health care, and government in health care is always a disaster.<< --What alternatives do you recommend? I'm not convinced that business in health care is any less bureaucratic than government. Business culture, at least when a few large corporations dominate the market, seems to have some of the same problems as government culture. The assumption that the market is the friendlier force is often detached from an actual comparison between people's experiences with government and with business... those who have the money to pay for good service (money does talk) are often isolated from what others experience lower down on the ladder, and they don't always realize the consequences of making drastic changes in the system because they are insulated from the effects of those changes, beyond reducing their own taxes. For many of the wealthy, as long as their own tax rate goes down, everything's great. They don't always mingle on a daily basis with people who don't have the same resource, and it produces a lag time in the feedback network that makes a society capable of reaching balance. Ideally, those who make changes in a system will be tapped into all levels of that system, and respond to realtime feedback. Ideally, those who vote for changes should have at least some contact with people most affected. That isn't always the case. My wife, who is from Australia, keeps complaining that the large companies here don't put real people on the phone for customer help and give people the runaround. She feels Australia does better. She can be a little patriotic about Australia, but then my mom says the same thing and she's lived here all her life. Corporations are not always less bureaucratic and alienating than government, and there can be just as much red tape, from what I've seen. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. 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 Wed Feb 16 03:06:07 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 20:06:07 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <200502151516.j1FFFoh02301@tick.javien.com> References: <200502151516.j1FFFoh02301@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <4212B89F.5010703@solution-consulting.com> I emailed Kareem and asked him. I'll let you know if he answers. Lynn Ross Buck wrote: >It is interesting that the stimulus for positive emotions here is a >comedian. We need to know more about the subject of the humor. Often, the >funniest comedians are quite aggressive in their humor, possibly fostering >feelings of in-group bonding that are quite different from >hearts-and-flowers happiness, and perhaps actually enhancing "us versus >them" feelings. Could the enhanced recognition of different-race faces >actually be a kind of vigilance? > >Cheers, Ross > >Ross Buck, Ph. D. >Professor of Communication Sciences > and Psychology >Communication Sciences U-1085 >University of Connecticut >Storrs, CT 06269-1085 >860-486-4494 >fax 860-486-5422 >buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu >http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm > >-----Original Message----- >From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org >[mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf Of Steve Hovland >Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 9:19 AM >To: 'The new improved paleopsych list' >Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy > >Do most of the positive emotions arise from the limbic? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 9:20 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy > >Disclosure: Johnson in press release is not related to me. >Lynn > >http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Feb05/r020105 >Feb. 1, 2005 > > > > > Positive emotions slash bias, help people see big picture details > >ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get >the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes >many people think members of other races "all look alike," according to >new University of Michigan research. > >"Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology >researcher Kareem Johnson. "Negative emotions like fear or anger are >useful for short-term survival when there's an immediate danger like >being chased by a dangerous animal. Positive emotions like joy and >happiness are for long-term survival and promote big picture thinking, >make you more inclusive and notice more details, make you think in terms >of 'us' instead of 'them.'" > >To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed >photos of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects >recognized members of their own race 75 percent of the time but only >recognized members of another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. >However, researchers found positive emotions boosted that recognition of >cross-race faces about 10 to 20 percent, eliminating the gap. > >The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal >Psychological Science. > >Johnson, who is completing his PhD work in psychology, and Barbara >Fredrickson, a U-M psychology professor and director of the Positive >Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory, specialize in the power of >positive emotions. > >Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a >comic to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a >"neutral" video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 >yearbook style photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 >milliseconds. > >Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive >emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more "negative" >emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked >to push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. >Those in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members >of another race, while their ability to recognize members of their own >race stayed the same. > >The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a >"broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of >the world around them. > > >Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory > > > > << File: ATT00006.html >> << File: ATT00007.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >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 ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Feb 16 03:49:22 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 20:49:22 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <01C5132E.B97B5C20.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C5132E.B97B5C20.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <4212C2C2.3020207@solution-consulting.com> Steve, this is a challenging question. I strive for it but don't see myself as excellent. Children have to be taught empathy, most would say. Here is a link on current thinking: http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/sirs/7/cu13.html Buddhism and Christianity both have much interest in empathy. The last time I read through the New Testament, I was forceably struck by the number of times Jesus is described as having "compassion" which is (1) empathy - knowing how another feels, plus (2) a desire to alieviate suffering. Buddhism has many exercises on empathy. Generally, the Buddhist perspective is of a kind of detached empathy, where one feels compassion as a spiritual exercise. For example: We have seen that Bodhisattva Kannon of the twenty-fifth chapter, like Bodhisattva Yakuo in chapter twenty-three and Bodhisattva Myo'on in chapter twenty-four, manifests himself in various forms in order to save all living beings. In terms of our own practice, this suggests the need for developing empathy, insight and responsiveness with respect to others. By discerning the hopes and fears, the sufferings and the dreams, of the people around us, we can best encourage their faith in the Mystic Law. Unless we can discern what is truly on another's mind, we will have no convincing encourage-men to offer In this sense, the name "He Who Perceives the Sounds of the World" does not simply mean to hear physical sounds, but to discern human hearts. As mentioned earlier, this power of altruistic insight and response derives from the Buddha nature awakened through our faith in the Gohonzon. (http://etherbods.com/sutra/summaries/ls2526.htm) So the Buddhist concept is that empathy is our way of communicating compassion and salvation to all sentient beings.Only through empathy can we teach. Empathy is awakened by faith in our teachers and through specific meditational exercises. The Christian approach to empathy involves using Jesus as a model and praying for understanding and compassion. That approach is less inward than Buddhism; more outward. To the Buddhist, empathy is an experience, to the Christian is it an act. The book of James is the guide, i.e., James 2:14-17: "What doth it profit, my brethern, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those this which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. (KJV) The whole book is quite good with this kind of practical empathic religion. We have empathy by compassionate prayer and by works (see Matthew 25: 31 ff.) The psychological approach is to demonstrate empathy in interviews by statements about (1) cognitive content and (2) emotional state. If the empathy is accurate one should see an increase in self-exploration and self-disclosure in the client. Also, clients can be asked to rate the empathy. I developed an empathy rating scale for my students to give to clients. So empathy is empirically judged. Empathy develops through supervision and consultation, where one is taught to listen with an 'understanding heart' and infer the emotional state through minimal nonverbal cues as well as verbal content. Personally, I like to watch crowds of people and pretend each one is my sibling, lost and temporarily forgotten. I practice feeling warmth toward each one, and try to discern their emotional state by nonverbal cues. This only works if you like your sibs. This sort of exercise (or the Buddhist meditations) likely intensify the interconnections in the left prefrontal lobe. There is abundant evidence now of neoneurogenisis, or new nerve cell growth as the result of brain exercises. I would think that David Smith in this group will have some intelligent things to say about this; hope he jumps in. Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: >Do you know of any exercises for increasing >one's capacity for empathy? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 6:50 AM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy > >The limbic system plays a role in positive emotions, but they 'source' >from the left prefrontal lobe. Meditators show much higher left >prefrontal activity and test as happier. Activity in the right >hemisphere is associated with more worry and dread emotions. > >Negative emotions are experienced in the limbic system, and during >fear/anger/despair the frontal lobes are 'off line' so to speak, on the >sidelines and consuming less oxygen. > >Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >>Do most of the positive emotions arise from the limbic? >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >>Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 9:20 PM >>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy >> >>Disclosure: Johnson in press release is not related to me. >>Lynn >> >>http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Feb05/r020105 >>Feb. 1, 2005 >> >> >> >> >> Positive emotions slash bias, help people see big picture details >> >>ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get >>the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes >>many people think members of other races "all look alike," according to >>new University of Michigan research. >> >>"Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology >>researcher Kareem Johnson. "Negative emotions like fear or anger are >>useful for short-term survival when there's an immediate danger like >>being chased by a dangerous animal. Positive emotions like joy and >>happiness are for long-term survival and promote big picture thinking, >>make you more inclusive and notice more details, make you think in terms >>of 'us' instead of 'them.'" >> >>To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed >>photos of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects >>recognized members of their own race 75 percent of the time but only >>recognized members of another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. >>However, researchers found positive emotions boosted that recognition of >>cross-race faces about 10 to 20 percent, eliminating the gap. >> >>The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal >>Psychological Science. >> >>Johnson, who is completing his PhD work in psychology, and Barbara >>Fredrickson, a U-M psychology professor and director of the Positive >>Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory, specialize in the power of >>positive emotions. >> >>Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a >>comic to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a >>"neutral" video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 >>yearbook style photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 >>milliseconds. >> >>Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive >>emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more "negative" >>emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked >>to push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. >>Those in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members >>of another race, while their ability to recognize members of their own >>race stayed the same. >> >>The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a >>"broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of >>the world around them. >> >> >>Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory >> >> >> >><< File: ATT00006.html >> << File: ATT00007.txt >> >>_______________________________________________ >>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 > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Feb 16 04:00:22 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 21:00:22 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] government/business in health care In-Reply-To: <20050215202857.17607.qmail@web30805.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050215202857.17607.qmail@web30805.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4212C556.3070109@solution-consulting.com> Michael's question is good - what alternatives can one recommend? I have worked in mental health for 30 years and done most of my own billing and insurance work. I find government programs are always the worst to deal with, and the additional problem, Michael, is that they are a monopoly. Both Medicade and Medicare have this impossible quality, and I think that quality suffers when government meddles. I resigned from a local panel with about 40% of the local population because they were difficult to deal with. I cannot do that with Medicare. If I want to make my living by only working on panels that treat providers and clients with respect I can do that. Hence my fear of government monopoly. I recommend . . . (drum roll, please) Health savings accounts for all people. This means personal ownership. It is your money, and you can shopt around. A friend of mine did just that. She and her husband had high deductable insurance, and when he needed an appendectomy, she called a half dozen providers and chose the cheapest one. Guts! But it worked out well. The cheap provider was an older surgeon with less overhead and less need for materialistic phallic symbols. He did a good job on my friend. With the no-deductable plans today, there is no incentive to do that. HMOs and prepaid plans can be very good (Kaiser seems to be excellent) but if I had only one answer, I would say HSAs. Complete medical coverage has been a perverse incentive. It raises costs. Why should pharmaceutical companies compete when patients do NOT shop on the basis of cost? (Well, I always do, but most people don't). Hope that helps advance the dialog, Michael. Lynn Michael Christopher wrote: >>>I fear government enforcing this excellent idea, >>> >>> >since I work in health care, and government in health >care is always a disaster.<< > >--What alternatives do you recommend? I'm not >convinced that business in health care is any less >bureaucratic than government. Business culture, at >least when a few large corporations dominate the >market, seems to have some of the same problems as >government culture. The assumption that the market is >the friendlier force is often detached from an actual >comparison between people's experiences with >government and with business... those who have the >money to pay for good service (money does talk) are >often isolated from what others experience lower down >on the ladder, and they don't always realize the >consequences of making drastic changes in the system >because they are insulated from the effects of those >changes, beyond reducing their own taxes. For many of >the wealthy, as long as their own tax rate goes down, >everything's great. They don't always mingle on a >daily basis with people who don't have the same >resource, and it produces a lag time in the feedback >network that makes a society capable of reaching >balance. Ideally, those who make changes in a system >will be tapped into all levels of that system, and >respond to realtime feedback. Ideally, those who vote >for changes should have at least some contact with >people most affected. That isn't always the case. > >My wife, who is from Australia, keeps complaining that >the large companies here don't put real people on the >phone for customer help and give people the runaround. >She feels Australia does better. She can be a little >patriotic about Australia, but then my mom says the >same thing and she's lived here all her life. >Corporations are not always less bureaucratic and >alienating than government, and there can be just as >much red tape, from what I've seen. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. >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 shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 16 05:48:12 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 21:48:12 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Message-ID: <01C513A8.0C9D5C40.shovland@mindspring.com> This is very encouraging: "There is abundant evidence now of neoneurogenisis, or new nerve cell growth as the result of brain exercises." I have an exercise similar to yours that I do on the street: glancing at people and trying to decide what their emotional state is. I'm not sure it improves my empathy, but it does train me to pay attention to their states. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 7:49 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Steve, this is a challenging question. I strive for it but don't see myself as excellent. Children have to be taught empathy, most would say. Here is a link on current thinking: http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/sirs/7/cu13.html Buddhism and Christianity both have much interest in empathy. The last time I read through the New Testament, I was forceably struck by the number of times Jesus is described as having "compassion" which is (1) empathy - knowing how another feels, plus (2) a desire to alieviate suffering. Buddhism has many exercises on empathy. Generally, the Buddhist perspective is of a kind of detached empathy, where one feels compassion as a spiritual exercise. For example: We have seen that Bodhisattva Kannon of the twenty-fifth chapter, like Bodhisattva Yakuo in chapter twenty-three and Bodhisattva Myo'on in chapter twenty-four, manifests himself in various forms in order to save all living beings. In terms of our own practice, this suggests the need for developing empathy, insight and responsiveness with respect to others. By discerning the hopes and fears, the sufferings and the dreams, of the people around us, we can best encourage their faith in the Mystic Law. Unless we can discern what is truly on another's mind, we will have no convincing encourage-men to offer In this sense, the name "He Who Perceives the Sounds of the World" does not simply mean to hear physical sounds, but to discern human hearts. As mentioned earlier, this power of altruistic insight and response derives from the Buddha nature awakened through our faith in the Gohonzon. (http://etherbods.com/sutra/summaries/ls2526.htm) So the Buddhist concept is that empathy is our way of communicating compassion and salvation to all sentient beings.Only through empathy can we teach. Empathy is awakened by faith in our teachers and through specific meditational exercises. The Christian approach to empathy involves using Jesus as a model and praying for understanding and compassion. That approach is less inward than Buddhism; more outward. To the Buddhist, empathy is an experience, to the Christian is it an act. The book of James is the guide, i.e., James 2:14-17: "What doth it profit, my brethern, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those this which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. (KJV) The whole book is quite good with this kind of practical empathic religion. We have empathy by compassionate prayer and by works (see Matthew 25: 31 ff.) The psychological approach is to demonstrate empathy in interviews by statements about (1) cognitive content and (2) emotional state. If the empathy is accurate one should see an increase in self-exploration and self-disclosure in the client. Also, clients can be asked to rate the empathy. I developed an empathy rating scale for my students to give to clients. So empathy is empirically judged. Empathy develops through supervision and consultation, where one is taught to listen with an 'understanding heart' and infer the emotional state through minimal nonverbal cues as well as verbal content. Personally, I like to watch crowds of people and pretend each one is my sibling, lost and temporarily forgotten. I practice feeling warmth toward each one, and try to discern their emotional state by nonverbal cues. This only works if you like your sibs. This sort of exercise (or the Buddhist meditations) likely intensify the interconnections in the left prefrontal lobe. There is abundant evidence now of neoneurogenisis, or new nerve cell growth as the result of brain exercises. I would think that David Smith in this group will have some intelligent things to say about this; hope he jumps in. Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: >Do you know of any exercises for increasing >one's capacity for empathy? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 6:50 AM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy > >The limbic system plays a role in positive emotions, but they 'source' >from the left prefrontal lobe. Meditators show much higher left >prefrontal activity and test as happier. Activity in the right >hemisphere is associated with more worry and dread emotions. > >Negative emotions are experienced in the limbic system, and during >fear/anger/despair the frontal lobes are 'off line' so to speak, on the >sidelines and consuming less oxygen. > >Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >>Do most of the positive emotions arise from the limbic? >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >>Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 9:20 PM >>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>Subject: [Paleopsych] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy >> >>Disclosure: Johnson in press release is not related to me. >>Lynn >> >>http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Feb05/r020105 >>Feb. 1, 2005 >> >> >> >> >> Positive emotions slash bias, help people see big picture details >> >>ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get >>the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes >>many people think members of other races "all look alike," according to >>new University of Michigan research. >> >>"Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology >>researcher Kareem Johnson. "Negative emotions like fear or anger are >>useful for short-term survival when there's an immediate danger like >>being chased by a dangerous animal. Positive emotions like joy and >>happiness are for long-term survival and promote big picture thinking, >>make you more inclusive and notice more details, make you think in terms >>of 'us' instead of 'them.'" >> >>To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed >>photos of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects >>recognized members of their own race 75 percent of the time but only >>recognized members of another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. >>However, researchers found positive emotions boosted that recognition of >>cross-race faces about 10 to 20 percent, eliminating the gap. >> >>The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal >>Psychological Science. >> >>Johnson, who is completing his PhD work in psychology, and Barbara >>Fredrickson, a U-M psychology professor and director of the Positive >>Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory, specialize in the power of >>positive emotions. >> >>Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a >>comic to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a >>"neutral" video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 >>yearbook style photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 >>milliseconds. >> >>Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive >>emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more "negative" >>emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked >>to push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. >>Those in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members >>of another race, while their ability to recognize members of their own >>race stayed the same. >> >>The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a >>"broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of >>the world around them. >> >> >>Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory >> >> >> >><< File: ATT00006.html >> << File: ATT00007.txt >> >>_______________________________________________ >>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 > > > > << File: ATT00224.html >> << File: ATT00225.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 16 05:56:12 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 21:56:12 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) Message-ID: <01C513A9.2A8B4C20.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.fi.edu/brain/exercise.htm Intro Your brain is a thinking organ that learns and grows by interacting with the world through perception and action. Mental stimulation improves brain function and actually protects against cognitive decline, as does physical exercise. The human brain is able to continually adapt and rewire itself. Even in old age, it can grow new neurons. Severe mental decline is usually caused by disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory or motor skills simply result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. In other words, use it or lose it. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 16 05:59:55 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 21:59:55 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Neurogenesis in the Human Brain: Fact or Fiction (student paper) Message-ID: <01C513A9.AF6D64F0.shovland@mindspring.com> http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro00/web1/Wall.html Imagine a world where scientists could implant new brain cells into areas of the brain that are damaged by disease or accidents. Imagine replacing brain cells lost to aging, or even enhancing areas of the normal brain. Recent newspaper headlines, such as "A Decade of Discovery Yields a Shock About the Brain" (1) and "Brain May Grow New Cells Daily" (2) have indicated such advances may be in the near future. How far-fetched are such claims? In the past several years, evidence has emerged that challenges the longstanding belief that humans are born with all the brain cells, or neurons, they will ever have. Recent experiments on monkeys have shown that new neurons are continually added to the cerebral cortex throughout adulthood. Some believe that this finding will prove to be true in the human adult brain as well. One scientist compared such a change in view to a paradigm shift, described by Thomas Kuhn as occurring when one major scientific theory is replaced by another. (3) In this paper I examine recent research on neurogenesis in the brain and attempt to answer the question of whether such conclusions are merited. And I ask what would be the implications if the adult human brain could regenerate itself. From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 16 06:09:14 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 22:09:14 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] government/business in health care Message-ID: <01C513AA.FCE03F90.shovland@mindspring.com> I agree that first-dollar coverage is part of the problem. I think some combination of HSA's and major medical is practical. But there also needs to be some kind of system to make sure everyone gets a modicum of care. I definitely do not think any insurance program should be paying for heart transplants. I seem to recall that in the State of the Union message the President talked about putting some kind of clinic in every town and neighborhood. If they fund it that is the right kind of idea. Years ago I dated a woman who often vacationed in Mexico. One time she suffered an injury requiring stitches. She went to the little government clinic in the nearby village and was treated at no charge. No matter who the payer is, they need to have sound business processes in place. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 8:00 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] government/business in health care Michael's question is good - what alternatives can one recommend? I have worked in mental health for 30 years and done most of my own billing and insurance work. I find government programs are always the worst to deal with, and the additional problem, Michael, is that they are a monopoly. Both Medicade and Medicare have this impossible quality, and I think that quality suffers when government meddles. I resigned from a local panel with about 40% of the local population because they were difficult to deal with. I cannot do that with Medicare. If I want to make my living by only working on panels that treat providers and clients with respect I can do that. Hence my fear of government monopoly. I recommend . . . (drum roll, please) Health savings accounts for all people. This means personal ownership. It is your money, and you can shopt around. A friend of mine did just that. She and her husband had high deductable insurance, and when he needed an appendectomy, she called a half dozen providers and chose the cheapest one. Guts! But it worked out well. The cheap provider was an older surgeon with less overhead and less need for materialistic phallic symbols. He did a good job on my friend. With the no-deductable plans today, there is no incentive to do that. HMOs and prepaid plans can be very good (Kaiser seems to be excellent) but if I had only one answer, I would say HSAs. Complete medical coverage has been a perverse incentive. It raises costs. Why should pharmaceutical companies compete when patients do NOT shop on the basis of cost? (Well, I always do, but most people don't). Hope that helps advance the dialog, Michael. Lynn Michael Christopher wrote: >>>I fear government enforcing this excellent idea, >>> >>> >since I work in health care, and government in health >care is always a disaster.<< > >--What alternatives do you recommend? I'm not >convinced that business in health care is any less >bureaucratic than government. Business culture, at >least when a few large corporations dominate the >market, seems to have some of the same problems as >government culture. The assumption that the market is >the friendlier force is often detached from an actual >comparison between people's experiences with >government and with business... those who have the >money to pay for good service (money does talk) are >often isolated from what others experience lower down >on the ladder, and they don't always realize the >consequences of making drastic changes in the system >because they are insulated from the effects of those >changes, beyond reducing their own taxes. For many of >the wealthy, as long as their own tax rate goes down, >everything's great. They don't always mingle on a >daily basis with people who don't have the same >resource, and it produces a lag time in the feedback >network that makes a society capable of reaching >balance. Ideally, those who make changes in a system >will be tapped into all levels of that system, and >respond to realtime feedback. Ideally, those who vote >for changes should have at least some contact with >people most affected. That isn't always the case. > >My wife, who is from Australia, keeps complaining that >the large companies here don't put real people on the >phone for customer help and give people the runaround. >She feels Australia does better. She can be a little >patriotic about Australia, but then my mom says the >same thing and she's lived here all her life. >Corporations are not always less bureaucratic and >alienating than government, and there can be just as >much red tape, from what I've seen. > >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. >http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00226.html >> << File: ATT00227.txt >> From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Feb 16 13:36:49 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 06:36:49 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Re: perceptual accuracy study] Message-ID: <42134C71.50403@solution-consulting.com> He got right back, so, Ross, here is a thoughtful discussion. Lynn -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: perceptual accuracy study Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 22:41:54 -0500 From: Kareem Johnson To: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. References: <4212B883.1010907 at solution-consulting.com> Okay first things first. Who are you exactly? What is paleopsychology and why are you talking about my soon to be published study? As for your question. It's funny my co-author Barb Fredrickson is cautious of using comedians because some humor relies on ridicule and can be hostile or offensive. But I think that there is something special about laughter as a positive emotion. I set out to choose humor that would poke fun at common and shared experiences. The comedian was a Cacausian male comedian (Kevin James; he's in the move "Hitch" with Will Smith, star of "King of Queens"). It is hard to translate comedy material but the segment mentions topics such as dads that won't turn on air conditioning, long messages on answering machines, the rhythm of phone numbers, and waiting in elevators. The segments consistently rate high in reports of amusement, happiness, and joy and low in anger, fear, or disgust. Ratings of the positive emotions were positively correlated with cross-race recognition, and negative emotions like anger and anxiety were negatively correlated with cross-race recognition. As for vigilance, there were three emotion conditions; humor, fear, and neutral. If vigilance would enhance recognition you'd expect the fear condition to enhance recognition but it did not. Other studies shown stress (also vigilance) actual impairs cross-race recognition. The paper is in press at Psychological Science. It should be published sometime this summer. A sufficient answer? Now it is an open question whether using an offensive or "us versus them" comic would do. Perhaps comedy that makes fun of people that are different than us (ethnic jokes, gay jokes, jokes about the mentally retarded) would have a different effect on recognition. But across a college population sample the emotion reports would also reveal higher levels of negative emotions of the people offended. Then you get into the personality variables... so tell me again... how do you know about this study and why do you care? ;-) --kareem On Feb 15, 2005, at 10:05 PM, Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote: > Kareem, > A question came up on the paleopsychology list - what was the specific > content of the humor tape. The question was from Ross Buck: > > It is interesting that the stimulus for positive emotions here is a > comedian. We need to know more about the subject of the humor. > Often, the > funniest comedians are quite aggressive in their humor, possibly > fostering > feelings of in-group bonding that are quite different from > hearts-and-flowers happiness, and perhaps actually enhancing "us versus > them" feelings. Could the enhanced recognition of different-race faces > actually be a kind of vigilance? > Cheers, Ross > > Ross Buck, Ph. D. > Professor of Communication Sciences > and Psychology > Communication Sciences U-1085 > University of Connecticut > Storrs, CT 06269-1085 > 860-486-4494 > fax 860-486-5422 > buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu > > Any response to that? > Lynn > > > > ________________________________________________________ Kareem Johnson Department of Psychology Ph.D. candidate University of Michigan (734) 330-5131 (734) 936-0640 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Wed Feb 16 18:22:37 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 13:22:37 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] Message-ID: <42138F6D.803@uconn.edu> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:50:13 +0000 (UT) From: Medialens Media Alert Precis To: Christian Rauh MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media February 16, 2005 MEDIA ALERT: FEARS FOR A FINITE PLANET Rampant Corporate Globalisation And The Climate Crisis "Our continuing uneconomic growth makes us complicit in a process that is triggering an ecological catastrophe for our children and generations beyond them. They will justifiably sit in judgment on our failure to have prevented its devastating consequences knowing that we chose to look the other way." (Mayer Hillman, environmentalist and author) A Fat Cat Laments The audacity of corporate propaganda still has the capacity to make us gasp. Consider the astonishing attack on nongovernmental organisations launched at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by Sir Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of Business Industry. "The pendulum is swinging too far in favour of the NGOs", Jones claimed. "The World Economic Forum is caving in to them. Davos has been hijacked by those who want business to apologise for itself." According to Jones, business is the only route to cleaner water, better healthcare, better education and better roads. "Have I heard that in Davos? Have I hell. We have heard how we are greedy and how we pollute, and how we have got to help Africa. But a celebration of business? No." Jones is "fed up with business being characterised as greedy". He goes on: "Has anybody ever thought about the greed of the consumer? The consumer consistently wants more for less and business is expected to deliver it." (Larry Elliott 'CBI chief claims Davos hijacked by NGOs', The Guardian, January 31, 2005) For the World Economic Forum to be "caving in" under the onslaught of grassroots groups really must feel like the end of the world to those who like to shape the planet's affairs in their own narrow interests. But Jones's concern is misplaced. The legal obligation to shareholders to maximise profits in pursuit of endless economic growth, even as the finite planet groans, does face a real obstacle. Namely, that the wealth generated by global capitalism - shared ever more unequally in society - is rapidly being overtaken by the damage that the system itself is wreaking. If existing trends continue, the Global Commons Institute estimates that damages due to climate change will actually exceed global GDP by 2065. (http://www.gci.org.uk/papers/env_finance.pdf) Global capitalism has an inbuilt death wish that will likely take most of us with it - if we let it. To read the rest of this alert, please go to: http://www.medialens.org/blog/index.htm Best wishes The Editors To unsubscribe click on the link below: http://www.medialens.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/medialens/mailproc/register.cgi?em=christian.rauh at uconn.edu&act=un&at=9 From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 16 18:30:40 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 10:30:40 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] Message-ID: <01C51412.907DFD70.shovland@mindspring.com> Another front where the Limbics are starting to gain ground against the Reptilians :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Christian Rauh [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 10:23 AM To: Lista Paleopsych Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:50:13 +0000 (UT) From: Medialens Media Alert Precis To: Christian Rauh MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media February 16, 2005 MEDIA ALERT: FEARS FOR A FINITE PLANET Rampant Corporate Globalisation And The Climate Crisis "Our continuing uneconomic growth makes us complicit in a process that is triggering an ecological catastrophe for our children and generations beyond them. They will justifiably sit in judgment on our failure to have prevented its devastating consequences knowing that we chose to look the other way." (Mayer Hillman, environmentalist and author) A Fat Cat Laments The audacity of corporate propaganda still has the capacity to make us gasp. Consider the astonishing attack on nongovernmental organisations launched at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by Sir Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of Business Industry. "The pendulum is swinging too far in favour of the NGOs", Jones claimed. "The World Economic Forum is caving in to them. Davos has been hijacked by those who want business to apologise for itself." According to Jones, business is the only route to cleaner water, better healthcare, better education and better roads. "Have I heard that in Davos? Have I hell. We have heard how we are greedy and how we pollute, and how we have got to help Africa. But a celebration of business? No." Jones is "fed up with business being characterised as greedy". He goes on: "Has anybody ever thought about the greed of the consumer? The consumer consistently wants more for less and business is expected to deliver it." (Larry Elliott 'CBI chief claims Davos hijacked by NGOs', The Guardian, January 31, 2005) For the World Economic Forum to be "caving in" under the onslaught of grassroots groups really must feel like the end of the world to those who like to shape the planet's affairs in their own narrow interests. But Jones's concern is misplaced. The legal obligation to shareholders to maximise profits in pursuit of endless economic growth, even as the finite planet groans, does face a real obstacle. Namely, that the wealth generated by global capitalism - shared ever more unequally in society - is rapidly being overtaken by the damage that the system itself is wreaking. If existing trends continue, the Global Commons Institute estimates that damages due to climate change will actually exceed global GDP by 2065. (http://www.gci.org.uk/papers/env_finance.pdf) Global capitalism has an inbuilt death wish that will likely take most of us with it - if we let it. To read the rest of this alert, please go to: http://www.medialens.org/blog/index.htm Best wishes The Editors To unsubscribe click on the link below: http://www.medialens.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/medialens/mailproc/register.cgi?em=christian.rauh at uconn.edu&act=un&at=9 _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Wed Feb 16 18:46:39 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 13:46:39 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] In-Reply-To: <01C51412.907DFD70.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C51412.907DFD70.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <4213950F.2010504@uconn.edu> Well, when people give me a 2065 deadline for the cost to get over benefit then things start to get real in my mind. Is there any research on how far into the future a cost must be perceived for people to take actions? Maybe in the smoking cessation literature? Christian Steve Hovland wrote: > Another front where the Limbics are > starting to gain ground against the > Reptilians :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Christian Rauh [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 10:23 AM > To: Lista Paleopsych > Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] > > > > -------- Original Message -------- > Subject: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis > Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:50:13 +0000 (UT) > From: Medialens Media Alert Precis > To: Christian Rauh > > MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media > > February 16, 2005 > > > MEDIA ALERT: FEARS FOR A FINITE PLANET > > Rampant Corporate Globalisation And The Climate Crisis > > "Our continuing uneconomic growth makes us complicit in a process that > is triggering an ecological catastrophe for our children and generations > beyond them. They will justifiably sit in judgment on our failure to > have prevented its devastating consequences knowing that we chose to > look the other way." (Mayer Hillman, environmentalist and author) > > > A Fat Cat Laments > > The audacity of corporate propaganda still has the capacity to make us > gasp. Consider the astonishing attack on nongovernmental organisations > launched at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by > Sir Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of Business > Industry. "The pendulum is swinging too far in favour of the NGOs", > Jones claimed. "The World Economic Forum is caving in to them. Davos has > been hijacked by those who want business to apologise for itself." > > According to Jones, business is the only route to cleaner water, better > healthcare, better education and better roads. "Have I heard that in > Davos? Have I hell. We have heard how we are greedy and how we pollute, > and how we have got to help Africa. But a celebration of business? No." > > Jones is "fed up with business being characterised as greedy". He goes > on: "Has anybody ever thought about the greed of the consumer? The > consumer consistently wants more for less and business is expected to > deliver it." (Larry Elliott 'CBI chief claims Davos hijacked by NGOs', > The Guardian, January 31, 2005) > > For the World Economic Forum to be "caving in" under the onslaught of > grassroots groups really must feel like the end of the world to those > who like to shape the planet's affairs in their own narrow interests. > > But Jones's concern is misplaced. The legal obligation to shareholders > to maximise profits in pursuit of endless economic growth, even as the > finite planet groans, does face a real obstacle. Namely, that the wealth > generated by global capitalism - shared ever more unequally in society - > is rapidly being overtaken by the damage that the system itself is > wreaking. If existing trends continue, the Global Commons Institute > estimates that damages due to climate change will actually exceed global > GDP by 2065. (http://www.gci.org.uk/papers/env_finance.pdf) > > Global capitalism has an inbuilt death wish that will likely take most > of us with it - if we let it. > > To read the rest of this alert, please go to: > > http://www.medialens.org/blog/index.htm > > Best wishes > > The Editors > > > To unsubscribe click on the link below: > http://www.medialens.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/medialens/mailproc/register.cgi?em=christian.rauh at uconn.edu&act=un&at=9 > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Wed Feb 16 19:13:24 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:13:24 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] Message-ID: <01C51418.88A3BD50.shovland@mindspring.com> I suspect people need to see the cost as almost immediate. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Christian Rauh [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 10:47 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] Well, when people give me a 2065 deadline for the cost to get over benefit then things start to get real in my mind. Is there any research on how far into the future a cost must be perceived for people to take actions? Maybe in the smoking cessation literature? Christian Steve Hovland wrote: > Another front where the Limbics are > starting to gain ground against the > Reptilians :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Christian Rauh [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 10:23 AM > To: Lista Paleopsych > Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] > > > > -------- Original Message -------- > Subject: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis > Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:50:13 +0000 (UT) > From: Medialens Media Alert Precis > To: Christian Rauh > > MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media > > February 16, 2005 > > > MEDIA ALERT: FEARS FOR A FINITE PLANET > > Rampant Corporate Globalisation And The Climate Crisis > > "Our continuing uneconomic growth makes us complicit in a process that > is triggering an ecological catastrophe for our children and generations > beyond them. They will justifiably sit in judgment on our failure to > have prevented its devastating consequences knowing that we chose to > look the other way." (Mayer Hillman, environmentalist and author) > > > A Fat Cat Laments > > The audacity of corporate propaganda still has the capacity to make us > gasp. Consider the astonishing attack on nongovernmental organisations > launched at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by > Sir Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of Business > Industry. "The pendulum is swinging too far in favour of the NGOs", > Jones claimed. "The World Economic Forum is caving in to them. Davos has > been hijacked by those who want business to apologise for itself." > > According to Jones, business is the only route to cleaner water, better > healthcare, better education and better roads. "Have I heard that in > Davos? Have I hell. We have heard how we are greedy and how we pollute, > and how we have got to help Africa. But a celebration of business? No." > > Jones is "fed up with business being characterised as greedy". He goes > on: "Has anybody ever thought about the greed of the consumer? The > consumer consistently wants more for less and business is expected to > deliver it." (Larry Elliott 'CBI chief claims Davos hijacked by NGOs', > The Guardian, January 31, 2005) > > For the World Economic Forum to be "caving in" under the onslaught of > grassroots groups really must feel like the end of the world to those > who like to shape the planet's affairs in their own narrow interests. > > But Jones's concern is misplaced. The legal obligation to shareholders > to maximise profits in pursuit of endless economic growth, even as the > finite planet groans, does face a real obstacle. Namely, that the wealth > generated by global capitalism - shared ever more unequally in society - > is rapidly being overtaken by the damage that the system itself is > wreaking. If existing trends continue, the Global Commons Institute > estimates that damages due to climate change will actually exceed global > GDP by 2065. (http://www.gci.org.uk/papers/env_finance.pdf) > > Global capitalism has an inbuilt death wish that will likely take most > of us with it - if we let it. > > To read the rest of this alert, please go to: > > http://www.medialens.org/blog/index.htm > > Best wishes > > The Editors > > > To unsubscribe click on the link below: > http://www.medialens.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/medialens/mailproc/register.cgi?em=christian.rauh at uconn.edu&act=un&at=9 > > _______________________________________________ > 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 guavaberry at earthlink.net Wed Feb 16 19:35:16 2005 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 14:35:16 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <4212C2C2.3020207@solution-consulting.com> References: <01C5132E.B97B5C20.shovland@mindspring.com> <4212C2C2.3020207@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.0.20050216142930.038706b0@mail.earthlink.net> All animals have empathy Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html karen <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> 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 <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Wed Feb 16 19:48:59 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 14:48:59 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] In-Reply-To: <01C51418.88A3BD50.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C51418.88A3BD50.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <4213A3AB.5020103@uconn.edu> I always considered the ability to perceive time into the future and past as one of the evolving capacities of brains. It seems to me that we can plan/analyze things ahead and back thus not living only "in the moment". (An ability that sometimes is detrimental to the enjoyment of life, I must say.) And this planning/analyzing involves emotional and rational responses to imagined future events and past experiences. There is certainly an interplay between the time into the future or past and the intensity/type of emotion felt and motivation to act. If the event is ocurring right now, you have maximum emotional and rational involvement - immediate danger - and action is taken. However, if the event is in the future the involvement is lower and action might not be taken. That is, until the event reaches a treshold in future time (2065?) when action seems necessary. Business, which are made up of humans, are based on planning. And our economical system seems to be moving more and more towards prediction instead of past results. But how much can business plan ahead and be profitable? It seems that 2065 is not enough to make businesses consider those effects. 60 years is to much to go into business planing. But how much can business predict ahead? 5 years? 10 years? I think the longest government bonds are issued at 25 years. Could that be the treshold for business action? Am I making any sense? Christian Steve Hovland wrote: > I suspect people need to see the cost > as almost immediate. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Christian Rauh [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 10:47 AM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] > > Well, when people give me a 2065 deadline for the cost to get over > benefit then things start to get real in my mind. > > Is there any research on how far into the future a cost must be > perceived for people to take actions? Maybe in the smoking cessation > literature? > > Christian > > Steve Hovland wrote: > > >>Another front where the Limbics are >>starting to gain ground against the >>Reptilians :-) >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Christian Rauh [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] >>Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 10:23 AM >>To: Lista Paleopsych >>Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] >> >> >> >>-------- Original Message -------- >>Subject: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis >>Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:50:13 +0000 (UT) >>From: Medialens Media Alert Precis >>To: Christian Rauh >> >>MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media >> >>February 16, 2005 >> >> >>MEDIA ALERT: FEARS FOR A FINITE PLANET >> >>Rampant Corporate Globalisation And The Climate Crisis >> >>"Our continuing uneconomic growth makes us complicit in a process that >>is triggering an ecological catastrophe for our children and generations >>beyond them. They will justifiably sit in judgment on our failure to >>have prevented its devastating consequences knowing that we chose to >>look the other way." (Mayer Hillman, environmentalist and author) >> >> >>A Fat Cat Laments >> >>The audacity of corporate propaganda still has the capacity to make us >>gasp. Consider the astonishing attack on nongovernmental organisations >>launched at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by >>Sir Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of Business >>Industry. "The pendulum is swinging too far in favour of the NGOs", >>Jones claimed. "The World Economic Forum is caving in to them. Davos has >>been hijacked by those who want business to apologise for itself." >> >>According to Jones, business is the only route to cleaner water, better >>healthcare, better education and better roads. "Have I heard that in >>Davos? Have I hell. We have heard how we are greedy and how we pollute, >>and how we have got to help Africa. But a celebration of business? No." >> >>Jones is "fed up with business being characterised as greedy". He goes >>on: "Has anybody ever thought about the greed of the consumer? The >>consumer consistently wants more for less and business is expected to >>deliver it." (Larry Elliott 'CBI chief claims Davos hijacked by NGOs', >>The Guardian, January 31, 2005) >> >>For the World Economic Forum to be "caving in" under the onslaught of >>grassroots groups really must feel like the end of the world to those >>who like to shape the planet's affairs in their own narrow interests. >> >>But Jones's concern is misplaced. The legal obligation to shareholders >>to maximise profits in pursuit of endless economic growth, even as the >>finite planet groans, does face a real obstacle. Namely, that the wealth >>generated by global capitalism - shared ever more unequally in society - >>is rapidly being overtaken by the damage that the system itself is >>wreaking. If existing trends continue, the Global Commons Institute >>estimates that damages due to climate change will actually exceed global >>GDP by 2065. (http://www.gci.org.uk/papers/env_finance.pdf) >> >>Global capitalism has an inbuilt death wish that will likely take most >>of us with it - if we let it. >> >>To read the rest of this alert, please go to: >> >>http://www.medialens.org/blog/index.htm >> >>Best wishes >> >>The Editors >> >> >>To unsubscribe click on the link below: >>http://www.medialens.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/medialens/mailproc/register.cgi?em=christian.rauh at uconn.edu&act=un&at=9 >> >>_______________________________________________ >>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 anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Feb 16 19:50:07 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:50:07 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings In-Reply-To: <200502161916.j1GJGRh22298@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050216195007.25331.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings More than 200 Fish and Wildlife researchers cite cases where conclusions were reversed to weaken protections and favor business, a survey finds. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-scientists10feb10,0,4954654.story?coll=la-home-nation __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Feb 16 20:33:03 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 12:33:03 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) References: <01C513A9.2A8B4C20.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <017001c51466$b8279a30$3000f604@S0027397558> >>Severe mental decline is usually caused by disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory or motor skills simply result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. In other words, use it or lose it.>> Depends. No matter how often one engages in physical exercise, his body will show signs of aging. The same is true for mental exercise. Use it or lose it is only true up to a certain age. All skin wrinkles.... Gerry From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 16 20:50:09 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 12:50:09 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] Message-ID: <01C51426.0CCA1450.shovland@mindspring.com> Even though the maximum impact of something like global warming may be off in some hard to imagine future, things like that also manifest in the present. For example, in the midwest they have been having 60 degree days in Minnesota at a time of year when 20 degrees would be a nice warm day. This could be evidence of rapid climate change and the lack of snow could easily produce a famine next year in some part of the world. So that is one way to wake people up- to point out the current consequences of long range trends. Similarly, in the US the consequences of Bush's financial mismanagement are showing up as reduced fire and police protection in many cities, and the long term consequences will be more severe. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Christian Rauh [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 11:49 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] I always considered the ability to perceive time into the future and past as one of the evolving capacities of brains. It seems to me that we can plan/analyze things ahead and back thus not living only "in the moment". (An ability that sometimes is detrimental to the enjoyment of life, I must say.) And this planning/analyzing involves emotional and rational responses to imagined future events and past experiences. There is certainly an interplay between the time into the future or past and the intensity/type of emotion felt and motivation to act. If the event is ocurring right now, you have maximum emotional and rational involvement - immediate danger - and action is taken. However, if the event is in the future the involvement is lower and action might not be taken. That is, until the event reaches a treshold in future time (2065?) when action seems necessary. Business, which are made up of humans, are based on planning. And our economical system seems to be moving more and more towards prediction instead of past results. But how much can business plan ahead and be profitable? It seems that 2065 is not enough to make businesses consider those effects. 60 years is to much to go into business planing. But how much can business predict ahead? 5 years? 10 years? I think the longest government bonds are issued at 25 years. Could that be the treshold for business action? Am I making any sense? Christian Steve Hovland wrote: > I suspect people need to see the cost > as almost immediate. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Christian Rauh [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 10:47 AM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] > > Well, when people give me a 2065 deadline for the cost to get over > benefit then things start to get real in my mind. > > Is there any research on how far into the future a cost must be > perceived for people to take actions? Maybe in the smoking cessation > literature? > > Christian > > Steve Hovland wrote: > > >>Another front where the Limbics are >>starting to gain ground against the >>Reptilians :-) >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Christian Rauh [SMTP:christian.rauh at uconn.edu] >>Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 10:23 AM >>To: Lista Paleopsych >>Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis] >> >> >> >>-------- Original Message -------- >>Subject: Fears For A Finite Planet - The Climate Crisis >>Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:50:13 +0000 (UT) >>From: Medialens Media Alert Precis >>To: Christian Rauh >> >>MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media >> >>February 16, 2005 >> >> >>MEDIA ALERT: FEARS FOR A FINITE PLANET >> >>Rampant Corporate Globalisation And The Climate Crisis >> >>"Our continuing uneconomic growth makes us complicit in a process that >>is triggering an ecological catastrophe for our children and generations >>beyond them. They will justifiably sit in judgment on our failure to >>have prevented its devastating consequences knowing that we chose to >>look the other way." (Mayer Hillman, environmentalist and author) >> >> >>A Fat Cat Laments >> >>The audacity of corporate propaganda still has the capacity to make us >>gasp. Consider the astonishing attack on nongovernmental organisations >>launched at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by >>Sir Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of Business >>Industry. "The pendulum is swinging too far in favour of the NGOs", >>Jones claimed. "The World Economic Forum is caving in to them. Davos has >>been hijacked by those who want business to apologise for itself." >> >>According to Jones, business is the only route to cleaner water, better >>healthcare, better education and better roads. "Have I heard that in >>Davos? Have I hell. We have heard how we are greedy and how we pollute, >>and how we have got to help Africa. But a celebration of business? No." >> >>Jones is "fed up with business being characterised as greedy". He goes >>on: "Has anybody ever thought about the greed of the consumer? The >>consumer consistently wants more for less and business is expected to >>deliver it." (Larry Elliott 'CBI chief claims Davos hijacked by NGOs', >>The Guardian, January 31, 2005) >> >>For the World Economic Forum to be "caving in" under the onslaught of >>grassroots groups really must feel like the end of the world to those >>who like to shape the planet's affairs in their own narrow interests. >> >>But Jones's concern is misplaced. The legal obligation to shareholders >>to maximise profits in pursuit of endless economic growth, even as the >>finite planet groans, does face a real obstacle. Namely, that the wealth >>generated by global capitalism - shared ever more unequally in society - >>is rapidly being overtaken by the damage that the system itself is >>wreaking. If existing trends continue, the Global Commons Institute >>estimates that damages due to climate change will actually exceed global >>GDP by 2065. (http://www.gci.org.uk/papers/env_finance.pdf) >> >>Global capitalism has an inbuilt death wish that will likely take most >>of us with it - if we let it. >> >>To read the rest of this alert, please go to: >> >>http://www.medialens.org/blog/index.htm >> >>Best wishes >> >>The Editors >> >> >>To unsubscribe click on the link below: >>http://www.medialens.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/medialens/mailproc/register.cgi?em=christian.rauh at uconn.edu&act=un&at=9 >> >>_______________________________________________ >>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 checker at panix.com Wed Feb 16 21:09:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 16:09:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings In-Reply-To: <20050216195007.25331.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050216195007.25331.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: This is pretty alarming. I have long realized that certain facts will be ignored (like innate racial differences in intelligence at the U.S. Dept. of Education). I've realized that opposing viewpoints will not be listened to (the unwinnability of the Viet Nam war). But to have facts altered is something else. It's further alarming, since I'm a free marketeer and look favorably upon big business as being triumphs, a la Ayn Rand. I don't think of business vs. the exploited workers and consumers. I'm not interested in equality and do not care if CEOs make 10 or 1000 times what the workers make. I have little sense of envy. I do not want to take from the productive and give to the non-productive. I do not want to bilk tobacco companies for the follies of smokers. All these sorts of things. But this is more. What we're seeing is an extreme us-vs-them mentality, where the businessmen now take this us-vs-them mentality into politics. What THIS list needs to do is not to be alarmed or to groan or to argue one side or the other but to EXPLAIN the widening polarity. Tomorrow, in a different mood, I'm sure I can come up with an argument that polarity is a good thing, that it has high entertainment value or something such. At a personal level, here at the U.S. Department of Education, it's a big disappointment. Last week, I went to a talk by the Director of the Office of Technology. She gave an excellent presentation. During the question period I said that distinguishing good from bogus information on the Net would be the singly most important skill to have in the world of 2025, when the current crop of kids in school are out of school. The problem is that the most important skill of all is very hard to measure. I urged that when the No Child Left Behind Act gets extended to high school that the law be made more flexible to take this difficulty of measurement into account. She answered by saying that a two-day conference could be held on this very topic and that I asked a great question. However, she thought that schools that could be teaching this kind of skill need not fear running afoul of NCLB. I spent 10-15 minutes talking with her after the meeting, too. I followed up with some e-mails of highly relevant articles and further thoughts of my own. But since then: nothing. I think she got cold feet when she realized that I might be dangerously independent (no, I'm not about to bring up race differences) and would not tow the party line. I suspect that she, too, wants to find out what the party line and then tow it, rather than even hint that the party line needs clarification. No, I don't mean that she really wants to do this--she clearly liked talking to me--but that she has no choice. It is the case, in my experience anyhow, that Democrats are more open-minded than Republicans. I say this even though I prefer Republican policies, as least when there was a substantial difference. I think it's because Democrats are much more goo-goo (good government) types and want to improve something that they approve of, while Republicans want to reduce or get rid of programs. I sense a divisiveness that has grown beyond this, though, and it's a theory about the rise and fall of divisiveness that I'd like to explore on this list, NOT about "this is what I want the world to be." On 2005-02-16, Michael Christopher opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:50:07 -0800 (PST) > From: Michael Christopher > Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: [Paleopsych] U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings > > > U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings > > More than 200 Fish and Wildlife researchers cite cases > where conclusions were reversed to weaken protections > and favor business, a survey finds. > > http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-scientists10feb10,0,4954654.story?coll=la-home-nation From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Feb 17 05:13:16 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 22:13:16 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <6.2.1.2.0.20050216142930.038706b0@mail.earthlink.net> References: <01C5132E.B97B5C20.shovland@mindspring.com> <4212C2C2.3020207@solution-consulting.com> <6.2.1.2.0.20050216142930.038706b0@mail.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <421427EC.3020805@solution-consulting.com> Well, many mammals seem to have empathy. I do not think that reptiles have empathy nor fish. I have not seen empathy in cows, but some in horses. My Lab retriever has empathy for our cat, and the cat hates the dog. I have not seen empathy in cats. No offense intended, you cat lovers. Your examples are mostly chimps, and certainly they have empathy. The bird studies show intelligence but I don't see the empathy. Our bird has no empathy for anyone except the lovely bird behind the mirror. Empathy is likely a limbic / neocortex combination, bigger cortex, more empathy???. I suspect that animals living in groups would tend to develop empathy. Lynn K.E. wrote: > All animals have empathy > > Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, > Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language > http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html > > > karen > > <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> > 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 > <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Feb 17 05:15:14 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 22:15:14 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) In-Reply-To: <017001c51466$b8279a30$3000f604@S0027397558> References: <01C513A9.2A8B4C20.shovland@mindspring.com> <017001c51466$b8279a30$3000f604@S0027397558> Message-ID: <42142862.7020100@solution-consulting.com> Old folks who take up aerobics do increase brain size and intelligence measures. We deteriorate, but physical exercise does protect us against brain atrophy. :Lynn G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: >>> Severe mental decline is usually caused by >> > disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory or motor skills simply > result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. In > other words, use it or lose it.>> > > Depends. No matter how often one engages in physical exercise, his > body will show signs of aging. The same is true for mental exercise. > Use it or lose it is only true up to a certain age. All skin > wrinkles.... > > Gerry > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Feb 17 05:35:13 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 22:35:13 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: perceptual accuracy study In-Reply-To: <5b340392565d32d802447c58252355ed@umich.edu> References: <4212B883.1010907@solution-consulting.com> <5b340392565d32d802447c58252355ed@umich.edu> Message-ID: <42142D11.20407@solution-consulting.com> Who are we? A secret government agency, we have one black helicopter but it is in the shop right now and we get around in Ford Probes. You have been Probed. All seriousness aside: Paleopsych is a listserv of fans of Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. It is a group of scientists, academics, some clinicians like me, and a motley crew of unclassified people. Howard's website: http://www.howardbloom.net/ I'm a clinical psychologist practicing in Salt Lake City. I picked up on your study from another Listserv, the Appreciative Inquiry list. There was a reference to a press release from UM. I read the press release and passed it on to Paleopsych. AI website: http://appreciativeinquiry.cwru.edu/ Human potential is an occasional thread, and I come from the positive psychology area, solution-focused psychotherapy, and appreciative inquiry. Background in emotional intelligence. I liked the study because I have read a lot of the current pos psych stuff and Fredrickson's articles and pass them on. Tomorrow I speak to a group of businessmen about positive psych (they have all taken Seligman's ASQ and we are going to discuss optimism) and I will probably print out the UM press release, pass it out, and discuss it. When we are happy we are smarter, will be my theme. They don't all believe it. One is quite critical of my ideas. One is enthusiastic. Some have glazed eyes. We will discuss how your study shows an increase in a kind of quick intelligence from cheerfulness. So your name will be taken, possibly in vain. Thanks for replying so promptly, I passed your reply on to the listserv. If there is more discussion, I will let you know. thanks again, Lynn Johnson no relation to Kareem Kareem Johnson wrote: > Okay first things first. > Who are you exactly? What is paleopsychology and why are you talking > about my soon to be published study? > > As for your question. It's funny my co-author Barb Fredrickson is > cautious of using comedians because some humor relies on ridicule and > can be hostile or offensive. But I think that there is something > special about laughter as a positive emotion. I set out to choose > humor that would poke fun at common and shared experiences. > > The comedian was a Cacausian male comedian (Kevin James; he's in the > move "Hitch" with Will Smith, star of "King of Queens"). It is hard > to translate comedy material but the segment mentions topics such as > dads that won't turn on air conditioning, long messages on answering > machines, the rhythm of phone numbers, and waiting in elevators. The > segments consistently rate high in reports of amusement, happiness, > and joy and low in anger, fear, or disgust. Ratings of the positive > emotions were positively correlated with cross-race recognition, and > negative emotions like anger and anxiety were negatively correlated > with cross-race recognition. > > As for vigilance, there were three emotion conditions; humor, fear, > and neutral. If vigilance would enhance recognition you'd expect the > fear condition to enhance recognition but it did not. Other studies > shown stress (also vigilance) actual impairs cross-race recognition. > > The paper is in press at Psychological Science. It should be > published sometime this summer. > > A sufficient answer? > > Now it is an open question whether using an offensive or "us versus > them" comic would do. Perhaps comedy that makes fun of people that > are different than us (ethnic jokes, gay jokes, jokes about the > mentally retarded) would have a different effect on recognition. But > across a college population sample the emotion reports would also > reveal higher levels of negative emotions of the people offended. > Then you get into the personality variables... so tell me again... how > do you know about this study and why do you care? ;-) > > --kareem > > On Feb 15, 2005, at 10:05 PM, Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote: > >> Kareem, >> A question came up on the paleopsychology list - what was the >> specific content of the humor tape. The question was from Ross Buck: >> >> It is interesting that the stimulus for positive emotions here is a >> comedian. We need to know more about the subject of the humor. >> Often, the >> funniest comedians are quite aggressive in their humor, possibly >> fostering >> feelings of in-group bonding that are quite different from >> hearts-and-flowers happiness, and perhaps actually enhancing "us versus >> them" feelings. Could the enhanced recognition of different-race faces >> actually be a kind of vigilance? >> Cheers, Ross >> >> Ross Buck, Ph. D. >> Professor of Communication Sciences >> and Psychology >> Communication Sciences U-1085 >> University of Connecticut >> Storrs, CT 06269-1085 >> 860-486-4494 >> fax 860-486-5422 >> buck at uconnvm.uconn.edu >> >> Any response to that? >> Lynn >> >> >> >> > ________________________________________________________ > Kareem Johnson Department of Psychology > Ph.D. candidate University of Michigan > (734) 330-5131 (734) 936-0640 > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Feb 17 13:23:02 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 06:23:02 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] more on perceptual accuracy study Message-ID: <42149AB6.304@solution-consulting.com> \This is Kareem's reply to me Thanks for your amusing reply. I was caught a bit off guard by your initial e-mail since the study is not yet published. The PR folks at Michigan never told me when the press release came out. I am curious about your group, I will follow the links you provided. I wanted to offer some words of wisdom. It is not as simple as being happy makes us smarter. In fact there is quite a good chunk of data that suggests the exact opposite. Those that are highly versed in some the of social psych literature may know of studies finding positive moods associated with the use of more heuristics (mental shortcuts) and stereotypes. That perspective suggests that people want to maintain positive feelings and become "cognitively lazy". There is even a paper by Norbert Schwarz entitled "Happy = mindless, sad = smart". A very different perspective than positive emotions broaden and build. I eventually would like to write a review paper that will show these different perspectives aren't incommensurate. But... the happy = mindless perspective is slowly being debunked. For instance, when subjects think a task is relevant (either personally or because their decisions may have an actual outcome) positive moods no longer increase the use of heuristics and stereotypes. I can give you references if you like. The stuff we've done in the Fredrickson lab supports positive emotions as evolutionarily adaptive... broadening visual attention, promoting inclusive social thinking, and facilitating coping mechanisms is conceptually quite different from the judgement and decision tasks that were used in the above studies. ... but that leads to a lengthy discussion Point is.. a review of the literature would not support the idea that happy means smarter, but there may be specific domains when it is true. I think some the most exciting stuff we do is how positive emotions change how we interact with the social world.. for instance expanding the self-concept or eliminating recognition biases, we've been calling it social broadening, In essence a state when we more readily see our similarities and connection to others. --kareem -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: file:///C|/DOCUME%7E1/ADMINI%7E1/LOCALS%7E1/TEMP/nsmail-12.tmp Type: text/enriched Size: 7675 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Feb 17 14:14:31 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 06:14:31 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Message-ID: <01C514B7.F21DFF30.shovland@mindspring.com> I know my cats have emotions, but they are also cold-blooded killers of birds and mice (they bring their kills to show us.) Since they have emotions and wills but not much language I try to use empathy in dealing with them. For example, the older cat just jumped up on my keyboard but she was there for food, not affection. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:13 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Well, many mammals seem to have empathy. I do not think that reptiles have empathy nor fish. I have not seen empathy in cows, but some in horses. My Lab retriever has empathy for our cat, and the cat hates the dog. I have not seen empathy in cats. No offense intended, you cat lovers. Your examples are mostly chimps, and certainly they have empathy. The bird studies show intelligence but I don't see the empathy. Our bird has no empathy for anyone except the lovely bird behind the mirror. Empathy is likely a limbic / neocortex combination, bigger cortex, more empathy???. I suspect that animals living in groups would tend to develop empathy. Lynn K.E. wrote: > All animals have empathy > > Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, > Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language > http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html > > > karen > > <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> > 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 > <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> > _______________________________________________ > 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 Thu Feb 17 14:15:33 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 06:15:33 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) Message-ID: <01C514B8.177BBB50.shovland@mindspring.com> And many men die a relatively short time after they retire, which points out the need for challenge and meaningful activity. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:15 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) Old folks who take up aerobics do increase brain size and intelligence measures. We deteriorate, but physical exercise does protect us against brain atrophy. :Lynn G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: >>> Severe mental decline is usually caused by >> > disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory or motor skills simply > result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. In > other words, use it or lose it.>> > > Depends. No matter how often one engages in physical exercise, his > body will show signs of aging. The same is true for mental exercise. > Use it or lose it is only true up to a certain age. All skin > wrinkles.... > > Gerry > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Thu Feb 17 15:03:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 10:03:51 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) In-Reply-To: <01C514B8.177BBB50.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C514B8.177BBB50.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: I'd love to get data on this, Steve. On 2005-02-17, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 06:15:33 -0800 > From: Steve Hovland > Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list > To: 'The new improved paleopsych list' > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain > exercises) > > And many men die a relatively short time after > they retire, which points out the need for > challenge and meaningful activity. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:15 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) > > Old folks who take up aerobics do increase brain size and intelligence > measures. We deteriorate, but physical exercise does protect us against > brain atrophy. > :Lynn > > G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: > >>>> Severe mental decline is usually caused by >>> >> disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory or motor skills simply >> result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. In >> other words, use it or lose it.>> >> >> Depends. No matter how often one engages in physical exercise, his >> body will show signs of aging. The same is true for mental exercise. >> Use it or lose it is only true up to a certain age. All skin >> wrinkles.... >> >> Gerry >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 guavaberry at earthlink.net Thu Feb 17 15:02:41 2005 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 10:02:41 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <421427EC.3020805@solution-consulting.com> References: <01C5132E.B97B5C20.shovland@mindspring.com> <4212C2C2.3020207@solution-consulting.com> <6.2.1.2.0.20050216142930.038706b0@mail.earthlink.net> <421427EC.3020805@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.0.20050217095656.038f3828@mail.earthlink.net> I don't want to offend, I do want to say that empathy is felt. If you don't see it then fine, I wouldn't expect that. If there are not scientific tests that allow you to see it, I wouldn't expect that either. Science - doesn't have the ability to test for everything - ALL animals is a pretty huge statement I agree, however we can't KNOW that they don't have it on some level. k (aka motley crew of - highly- unclassified people) At 12:13 AM 2/17/2005, you wrote: >Well, many mammals seem to have empathy. I do not think that reptiles have >empathy nor fish. I have not seen empathy in cows, but some in horses. My >Lab retriever has empathy for our cat, and the cat hates the dog. I have >not seen empathy in cats. No offense intended, you cat lovers. Your >examples are mostly chimps, and certainly they have empathy. The bird >studies show intelligence but I don't see the empathy. Our bird has no >empathy for anyone except the lovely bird behind the mirror. Empathy is >likely a limbic / neocortex combination, bigger cortex, more empathy???. I >suspect that animals living in groups would tend to develop empathy. >Lynn > >K.E. wrote: > >>All animals have empathy >> >>Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, >>Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language >>http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html >> >> >>karen >> >><>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >>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 >><>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> From ross.buck at uconn.edu Thu Feb 17 15:19:17 2005 From: ross.buck at uconn.edu (Ross Buck) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 10:19:17 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <421427EC.3020805@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <200502171519.j1HFJUh25439@tick.javien.com> Empathy can be defined in many ways--does a predator have empathy for its prey when it judges accurately which way it will escape?--but many consider nurturance and protectiveness to be important. To some extent, these are necessary behaviors in birds and mammals, although different species do display them to differing degrees. The differences between monogamous prairie vole and polygamous meadow voles are particularly instructive, as these tendencies are closely related to oxytocin and vasopressin systems. There is recent evidence that, incredibly, the ruggedly individualistic but philandering male meadow vole can be made to act like a sweet, sensitive, reliable male prairie vole by the alteration of a single gene. Lim et al. (2004) demonstrated that V1aR gene transfer into the ventral forebrain of male meadow voles substantially increased partner preference formation. The V1aR gene transfer increases vasopressin receptors in the ventral forebrain, and the authors suggest that this has the effect of increasing social memory of the partner's olfactory signature and also associating that social memory with dopamine-mediated reward. Don't try this at home. Cheers, Ross Reference: Lim, M. M., Wang, Z., Olazabal, D. E., Ren, X., Terwilliger, E. F., & Young, L. J. (2004) Enhanced partner preference in a promiscuous species by manipulating the expression of a single gene. Nature. 429. 754-757. -----Original Message----- From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org [mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org] On Behalf Of Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 12:13 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy Well, many mammals seem to have empathy. I do not think that reptiles have empathy nor fish. I have not seen empathy in cows, but some in horses. My Lab retriever has empathy for our cat, and the cat hates the dog. I have not seen empathy in cats. No offense intended, you cat lovers. Your examples are mostly chimps, and certainly they have empathy. The bird studies show intelligence but I don't see the empathy. Our bird has no empathy for anyone except the lovely bird behind the mirror. Empathy is likely a limbic / neocortex combination, bigger cortex, more empathy???. I suspect that animals living in groups would tend to develop empathy. Lynn K.E. wrote: > All animals have empathy > > Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, > Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language > http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html > > > karen > > <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> > 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 > <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> > _______________________________________________ > 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 Thu Feb 17 15:33:26 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 07:33:26 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Science confirms Akashic Record (Ervin Laslow) Message-ID: <01C514C2.F8C5CA10.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_laszlo.cfm The concept of mind In the on going co-evolution of matter with the vacuum's zero-point field, life emerges out of nonlife, and mind and consciousness emerge out of the higher domains of life. This evolutionary concept does not 'reduce' reality either to non-living matter (as materialism), or assimilate it to a nonmaterial mind (as idealism). Both are real but (unlike in dualism), neither is the original element in reality. Matter as well as mind evolved out of a common cosmic womb: the energy-field of the quantum vacuum. The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It 'opens' our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality. Now, however, the recognition of openness is returning to the natural sciences. Traffic between our consciousness and the rest of the world may be constant and flowing in both directions. Everything that goes on in our mind could leave its wave traces in the quantum vacuum, and everything could be received by those who know how to 'tune in' to the subtle patterns that propagate there. This assumption is borne out by the empirical findings of psychiatrists such as Stanislav Grof. They confirm the insight of Vaclav Havel: it is as if something like an antenna were picking up signals from a transmitter that contains the experience of the entire human race. Whitley Strieber interview at: http://www.unknowncountry.com/media/ Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Feb 17 16:08:20 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 08:08:20 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) Message-ID: <01C514C7.D8C4C9F0.shovland@mindspring.com> Try this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=men+die+soon+after+retirement "Some people look forward to retirement with enthusiasm while others regard it with dread. It is a sad fact that many men develop serious illness and die soon after retirement. It's different for women. The subject of retirement provokes varied reactions depending on whom you speak to. As life expectancy increases it is likely that the number of retired people will steadily increase over the coming decades. Is this country prepared for the major changes in the age profile of our population that will occur in the years ahead? It is also important to question if individuals have planned properly for the changes that occur when they finish working?" above paragraph from: http://www.irishhealth.com/?level=4&id=2114 Personally, I intend to always do something to make some money. I am perhaps lucky in having some artistic pursuits that I can continue with when I give up doing computer work. When I am too feeble to do something worthwhile, I may choose to die so I can move on to my next life :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 7:04 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) I'd love to get data on this, Steve. On 2005-02-17, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 06:15:33 -0800 > From: Steve Hovland > Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list > To: 'The new improved paleopsych list' > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain > exercises) > > And many men die a relatively short time after > they retire, which points out the need for > challenge and meaningful activity. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:15 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) > > Old folks who take up aerobics do increase brain size and intelligence > measures. We deteriorate, but physical exercise does protect us against > brain atrophy. > :Lynn > > G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: > >>>> Severe mental decline is usually caused by >>> >> disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory or motor skills simply >> result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. In >> other words, use it or lose it.>> >> >> Depends. No matter how often one engages in physical exercise, his >> body will show signs of aging. The same is true for mental exercise. >> Use it or lose it is only true up to a certain age. All skin >> wrinkles.... >> >> Gerry >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 waluk at earthlink.net Thu Feb 17 17:10:47 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 09:10:47 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) References: <01C514B8.177BBB50.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <010401c51513$a0874a30$8203f604@S0027397558> All old folks participating in aerobics classes do not immune themselves to Alzheimer's. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 6:15 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) > And many men die a relatively short time after > they retire, which points out the need for > challenge and meaningful activity. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. > [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:15 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on > Neurobics (brain exercises) > > Old folks who take up aerobics do increase brain size > and intelligence > measures. We deteriorate, but physical exercise does > protect us against > brain atrophy. > :Lynn > > G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: > >>>> Severe mental decline is usually caused by >>> >> disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory >> or motor skills simply >> result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise >> and stimulation. In >> other words, use it or lose it.>> >> >> Depends. No matter how often one engages in >> physical exercise, his >> body will show signs of aging. The same is true for >> mental exercise. >> Use it or lose it is only true up to a certain age. >> All skin >> wrinkles.... >> >> Gerry >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 kendulf at shaw.ca Thu Feb 17 18:43:18 2005 From: kendulf at shaw.ca (Val Geist) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 10:43:18 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) References: <01C514C7.D8C4C9F0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <000b01c51520$8c865dc0$03224346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> When I met my mentor two years after his mandatory retirement he was brimming with energy and happiness. "Had I only known what retirement is all about, I would have retired at he earliest opportunity!" he gushed, and that from a dean and university professor of considerable renown! Still, I took it as a hint with the telephone pole and retired soon after it was possible to do so, and am now 10 years down the road. My mentor, by the way is now 94 years of age - and going strong, two recent strokes not withstanding! Me? Groan! Don't retire. It's too much work! I published more books after retirement than before, won more literary awards than before, wish fervorently to either be cloned or the day be doubled to 48 hours - whichever is fastest! You think you might be bored to death? Forget it. You will be worked to death! Retirement is not for sissies - so the wisdom of another "retired" friend of mine. Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 8:08 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) > Try this: > > http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=men+die+soon+after+retirement > > "Some people look forward to retirement with enthusiasm while others > regard > it with dread. It is a sad fact that many men develop serious illness and > die soon after retirement. It's different for women. The subject of > retirement provokes varied reactions depending on whom you speak to. As > life expectancy increases it is likely that the number of retired people > will steadily increase over the coming decades. Is this country prepared > for the major changes in the age profile of our population that will occur > in the years ahead? It is also important to question if individuals have > planned properly for the changes that occur when they finish working?" > above paragraph from: http://www.irishhealth.com/?level=4&id=2114 > > Personally, I intend to always do something to make some money. > > I am perhaps lucky in having some artistic pursuits that I can continue > with when I give up doing computer work. > > When I am too feeble to do something worthwhile, I may choose to die > so I can move on to my next life :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 7:04 AM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain > exercises) > > I'd love to get data on this, Steve. > > On 2005-02-17, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 06:15:33 -0800 >> From: Steve Hovland >> Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list >> To: 'The new improved paleopsych list' >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain >> exercises) >> >> And many men die a relatively short time after >> they retire, which points out the need for >> challenge and meaningful activity. >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >> Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:15 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain > exercises) >> >> Old folks who take up aerobics do increase brain size and intelligence >> measures. We deteriorate, but physical exercise does protect us against >> brain atrophy. >> :Lynn >> >> G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: >> >>>>> Severe mental decline is usually caused by >>>> >>> disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory or motor skills > simply >>> result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. In >>> other words, use it or lose it.>> >>> >>> Depends. No matter how often one engages in physical exercise, his >>> body will show signs of aging. The same is true for mental exercise. >>> Use it or lose it is only true up to a certain age. All skin >>> wrinkles.... >>> >>> Gerry >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> 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 > > > -- > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 > -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 From kendulf at shaw.ca Thu Feb 17 18:46:35 2005 From: kendulf at shaw.ca (Val Geist) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 10:46:35 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptualaccuracy References: <01C514B7.F21DFF30.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <001301c51521$01819220$03224346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> My cat chooses in a cool fashion to interfere when I am really engaged on the computer. Then she begins the process of winding up on my shoulders and stretching her paw out to the keys. That rotten brain of his understands humor - I think! Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 6:14 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptualaccuracy >I know my cats have emotions, but they > are also cold-blooded killers of birds and > mice (they bring their kills to show us.) > > Since they have emotions and wills but > not much language I try to use empathy > in dealing with them. For example, the > older cat just jumped up on my keyboard > but she was there for food, not affection. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:13 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy > > Well, many mammals seem to have empathy. I do not think that reptiles > have empathy nor fish. I have not seen empathy in cows, but some in > horses. My Lab retriever has empathy for our cat, and the cat hates the > dog. I have not seen empathy in cats. No offense intended, you cat > lovers. Your examples are mostly chimps, and certainly they have > empathy. The bird studies show intelligence but I don't see the empathy. > Our bird has no empathy for anyone except the lovely bird behind the > mirror. Empathy is likely a limbic / neocortex combination, bigger > cortex, more empathy???. I suspect that animals living in groups would > tend to develop empathy. > Lynn > > K.E. wrote: > >> All animals have empathy >> >> Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, >> Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language >> http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html >> >> >> karen >> >> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >> 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 >> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 > > > -- > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 From kendulf at shaw.ca Thu Feb 17 19:23:25 2005 From: kendulf at shaw.ca (Val Geist) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 11:23:25 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) References: <01C514C7.D8C4C9F0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <005001c51526$26edb3e0$03224346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> Dear Steven, Here is a little follow up on my earlier note. It's an excerpt I sent to a friend. "I just got back from a busy trip to the US (four talks in four days, one radio interview, one 3 1/2 hour taping [the batteries ran out!] two field trips and interminable discussions at breakfast, lunch, supper - and in between). Add to that two days of travel with seven flights and it adds up to proper retirement activities. On top of it anxieties as in my absence the bloody turkeys decided on more adventures. So, upon return we diminished the flock by five of the young toms so full of "Wanderlust". A full day of plucking and drawing turkeys developed plus - sparing one - delivering it to a friend, where, after having one wing clipped, it promptly gobbled to get the attention of the one and only female remaining to my friend. There are still twenty turkeys left, and they still show some "wanderlust". Cheers, Val Geist PS. Have set aside some time for breathing, but consequently got way behind on accumulated mail, e-mail and otherwise. When you retire you loose your secretary. At least I did. Now that is a loss! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 8:08 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) > Try this: > > http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=men+die+soon+after+retirement > > "Some people look forward to retirement with enthusiasm while others > regard > it with dread. It is a sad fact that many men develop serious illness and > die soon after retirement. It's different for women. The subject of > retirement provokes varied reactions depending on whom you speak to. As > life expectancy increases it is likely that the number of retired people > will steadily increase over the coming decades. Is this country prepared > for the major changes in the age profile of our population that will occur > in the years ahead? It is also important to question if individuals have > planned properly for the changes that occur when they finish working?" > above paragraph from: http://www.irishhealth.com/?level=4&id=2114 > > Personally, I intend to always do something to make some money. > > I am perhaps lucky in having some artistic pursuits that I can continue > with when I give up doing computer work. > > When I am too feeble to do something worthwhile, I may choose to die > so I can move on to my next life :-) > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] > Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 7:04 AM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain > exercises) > > I'd love to get data on this, Steve. > > On 2005-02-17, Steve Hovland opined [message unchanged below]: > >> Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 06:15:33 -0800 >> From: Steve Hovland >> Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list >> To: 'The new improved paleopsych list' >> Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain >> exercises) >> >> And many men die a relatively short time after >> they retire, which points out the need for >> challenge and meaningful activity. >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >> Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:15 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain > exercises) >> >> Old folks who take up aerobics do increase brain size and intelligence >> measures. We deteriorate, but physical exercise does protect us against >> brain atrophy. >> :Lynn >> >> G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: >> >>>>> Severe mental decline is usually caused by >>>> >>> disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory or motor skills > simply >>> result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. In >>> other words, use it or lose it.>> >>> >>> Depends. No matter how often one engages in physical exercise, his >>> body will show signs of aging. The same is true for mental exercise. >>> Use it or lose it is only true up to a certain age. All skin >>> wrinkles.... >>> >>> Gerry >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> 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 > > > -- > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 > -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Feb 17 20:06:37 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 12:06:37 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) Message-ID: <01C514E9.222CE430.shovland@mindspring.com> Some people who do not have Alzheimers show the same brain shrinkage as people who do. Perhaps our bad-fat diet has something to do with it. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 9:11 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) All old folks participating in aerobics classes do not immune themselves to Alzheimer's. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 6:15 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on Neurobics (brain exercises) > And many men die a relatively short time after > they retire, which points out the need for > challenge and meaningful activity. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. > [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:15 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] The Franklin Institute on > Neurobics (brain exercises) > > Old folks who take up aerobics do increase brain size > and intelligence > measures. We deteriorate, but physical exercise does > protect us against > brain atrophy. > :Lynn > > G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: > >>>> Severe mental decline is usually caused by >>> >> disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory >> or motor skills simply >> result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise >> and stimulation. In >> other words, use it or lose it.>> >> >> Depends. No matter how often one engages in >> physical exercise, his >> body will show signs of aging. The same is true for >> mental exercise. >> Use it or lose it is only true up to a certain age. >> All skin >> wrinkles.... >> >> Gerry >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Feb 17 20:10:21 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 12:10:21 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] science and politics In-Reply-To: <200502171918.j1HJI1h26902@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050217201021.91032.qmail@web30807.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>What we're seeing is an extreme us-vs-them mentality, where the businessmen now take this us-vs-them mentality into politics. What THIS list needs to do is not to be alarmed or to groan or to argue one side or the other but to EXPLAIN the widening polarity.<< --If you look into PR companies and their techniques, you'll see that a HUGE amount of money has been put into rendering good environmental science in a dubious light. There is just more money in denying reality than in promoting it. The status quo, and whoever benefits from it, is ALWAYS pushing science back, because science by its very nature is progressive, it takes new information into account and overrides the old. Most people seem to believe what they see on TV, the way they used to believe anything they saw in print. Now, people don't read the papers, they watch whichever TV station is biased in their direction, while denouncing the other stations as biased. A dangerous game, given the inability of any TV network to focus deeply on issues, and the inevitable trend toward sensationalism and ad hominem politics, regardless of which way the bias leans. Whether it's Fox or CNN, the issues are going to be rendered in cartoonish terms with one side benefitting from fallacies held by the public and unchallenged by the anchors. And when attempts are made to show balance, false facts are unquestioned and regarded simply as "the other side of the story". Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! http://my.yahoo.com From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Feb 17 20:19:27 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 12:19:27 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotionsand perceptualaccuracy References: <01C514B7.F21DFF30.shovland@mindspring.com> <001301c51521$01819220$03224346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> Message-ID: <023d01c5152d$fc20d950$8203f604@S0027397558> Domesticated animals including cats, dogs, horses, even birds reflect the personality type of their particular breed. Each animal is unique and depending upon the way raised, reflects this personality to its owners and guests. Usually though a sourpuss owner doesn't raise a humerous cat. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: Val Geist To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 10:46 AM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotionsand perceptualaccuracy My cat chooses in a cool fashion to interfere when I am really engaged on the computer. Then she begins the process of winding up on my shoulders and stretching her paw out to the keys. That rotten brain of his understands humor - I think! Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 6:14 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptualaccuracy >I know my cats have emotions, but they > are also cold-blooded killers of birds and > mice (they bring their kills to show us.) > > Since they have emotions and wills but > not much language I try to use empathy > in dealing with them. For example, the > older cat just jumped up on my keyboard > but she was there for food, not affection. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:13 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy > > Well, many mammals seem to have empathy. I do not think that reptiles > have empathy nor fish. I have not seen empathy in cows, but some in > horses. My Lab retriever has empathy for our cat, and the cat hates the > dog. I have not seen empathy in cats. No offense intended, you cat > lovers. Your examples are mostly chimps, and certainly they have > empathy. The bird studies show intelligence but I don't see the empathy. > Our bird has no empathy for anyone except the lovely bird behind the > mirror. Empathy is likely a limbic / neocortex combination, bigger > cortex, more empathy???. I suspect that animals living in groups would > tend to develop empathy. > Lynn > > K.E. wrote: > >> All animals have empathy >> >> Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, >> Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language >> http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html >> >> >> karen >> >> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >> 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 >> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 > > > -- > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ 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 Thu Feb 17 20:46:11 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 12:46:11 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] science and politics Message-ID: <01C514EE.A98B2E50.shovland@mindspring.com> It's divide and conquer. Works both ways. We liberals can use fiscal responsibility to separate the true conservatives from the radical whackos. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 12:10 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] science and politics >>What we're seeing is an extreme us-vs-them mentality, where the businessmen now take this us-vs-them mentality into politics. What THIS list needs to do is not to be alarmed or to groan or to argue one side or the other but to EXPLAIN the widening polarity.<< --If you look into PR companies and their techniques, you'll see that a HUGE amount of money has been put into rendering good environmental science in a dubious light. There is just more money in denying reality than in promoting it. The status quo, and whoever benefits from it, is ALWAYS pushing science back, because science by its very nature is progressive, it takes new information into account and overrides the old. Most people seem to believe what they see on TV, the way they used to believe anything they saw in print. Now, people don't read the papers, they watch whichever TV station is biased in their direction, while denouncing the other stations as biased. A dangerous game, given the inability of any TV network to focus deeply on issues, and the inevitable trend toward sensationalism and ad hominem politics, regardless of which way the bias leans. Whether it's Fox or CNN, the issues are going to be rendered in cartoonish terms with one side benefitting from fallacies held by the public and unchallenged by the anchors. And when attempts are made to show balance, false facts are unquestioned and regarded simply as "the other side of the story". Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! http://my.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Feb 17 20:55:31 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 12:55:31 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotionsand perceptualaccuracy Message-ID: <01C514EF.F72762E0.shovland@mindspring.com> One of our cats was sent to the shelter at 11 months of age. She has huge abandonment issues... Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 12:19 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotionsand perceptualaccuracy Domesticated animals including cats, dogs, horses, even birds reflect the personality type of their particular breed. Each animal is unique and depending upon the way raised, reflects this personality to its owners and guests. Usually though a sourpuss owner doesn't raise a humerous cat. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: Val Geist To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 10:46 AM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotionsand perceptualaccuracy My cat chooses in a cool fashion to interfere when I am really engaged on the computer. Then she begins the process of winding up on my shoulders and stretching her paw out to the keys. That rotten brain of his understands humor - I think! Cheers, Val Geist ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 6:14 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptualaccuracy >I know my cats have emotions, but they > are also cold-blooded killers of birds and > mice (they bring their kills to show us.) > > Since they have emotions and wills but > not much language I try to use empathy > in dealing with them. For example, the > older cat just jumped up on my keyboard > but she was there for food, not affection. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:13 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy > > Well, many mammals seem to have empathy. I do not think that reptiles > have empathy nor fish. I have not seen empathy in cows, but some in > horses. My Lab retriever has empathy for our cat, and the cat hates the > dog. I have not seen empathy in cats. No offense intended, you cat > lovers. Your examples are mostly chimps, and certainly they have > empathy. The bird studies show intelligence but I don't see the empathy. > Our bird has no empathy for anyone except the lovely bird behind the > mirror. Empathy is likely a limbic / neocortex combination, bigger > cortex, more empathy???. I suspect that animals living in groups would > tend to develop empathy. > Lynn > > K.E. wrote: > >> All animals have empathy >> >> Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, >> Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language >> http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html >> >> >> karen >> >> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >> 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 >> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 > > > -- > No virus found in this incoming message. > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych << File: ATT00011.html >> << File: ATT00012.txt >> From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Feb 17 21:30:56 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 13:30:56 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotionsand perceptualaccuracy References: <01C514EF.F72762E0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <02b501c51537$f8aa1d90$8203f604@S0027397558> There's a runt in every litter. Some owners explain their actions towards pets in one way while others might have an opposite explanation. Truth lies in the eyes of the beholder. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 12:55 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotionsand perceptualaccuracy > One of our cats was sent to the shelter > at 11 months of age. She has huge > abandonment issues... > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 12:19 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive > emotionsand perceptualaccuracy > > > Domesticated animals including cats, dogs, horses, > even birds reflect the > personality type of their particular breed. Each > animal is unique and > depending upon the way raised, reflects this > personality to its owners and > guests. Usually though a sourpuss owner doesn't > raise a humerous cat. > > Gerry > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Val Geist > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 10:46 AM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive > emotionsand > perceptualaccuracy > > > My cat chooses in a cool fashion to interfere when I > am really engaged on > the computer. Then she begins the process of winding > up on my shoulders and > stretching her paw out to the keys. That rotten brain > of his understands > humor - I think! Cheers, Val Geist > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Steve Hovland" > To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" > > Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 6:14 AM > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive > emotions and > perceptualaccuracy > > >>I know my cats have emotions, but they >> are also cold-blooded killers of birds and >> mice (they bring their kills to show us.) >> >> Since they have emotions and wills but >> not much language I try to use empathy >> in dealing with them. For example, the >> older cat just jumped up on my keyboard >> but she was there for food, not affection. >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. >> [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >> Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:13 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive >> emotions and perceptual > accuracy >> >> Well, many mammals seem to have empathy. I do not >> think that reptiles >> have empathy nor fish. I have not seen empathy in >> cows, but some in >> horses. My Lab retriever has empathy for our cat, >> and the cat hates the >> dog. I have not seen empathy in cats. No offense >> intended, you cat >> lovers. Your examples are mostly chimps, and >> certainly they have >> empathy. The bird studies show intelligence but I >> don't see the empathy. >> Our bird has no empathy for anyone except the lovely >> bird behind the >> mirror. Empathy is likely a limbic / neocortex >> combination, bigger >> cortex, more empathy???. I suspect that animals >> living in groups would >> tend to develop empathy. >> Lynn >> >> K.E. wrote: >> >>> All animals have empathy >>> >>> Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, >>> Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language >>> http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html >>> >>> >>> karen >>> >>> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >>> 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 >>> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> 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 >> >> >> -- >> No virus found in this incoming message. >> Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. >> Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release >> Date: 2/14/2005 >> >> > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > -------- > > > No virus found in this outgoing message. > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release > Date: 2/14/2005 > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > -------- > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > << File: ATT00011.html >> << File: ATT00012.txt >> > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Feb 18 02:23:44 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 19:23:44 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <6.2.1.2.0.20050217095656.038f3828@mail.earthlink.net> References: <01C5132E.B97B5C20.shovland@mindspring.com> <4212C2C2.3020207@solution-consulting.com> <6.2.1.2.0.20050216142930.038706b0@mail.earthlink.net> <421427EC.3020805@solution-consulting.com> <6.2.1.2.0.20050217095656.038f3828@mail.earthlink.net> Message-ID: <421551B0.1020606@solution-consulting.com> No offense taken, Karen, you are a fascinating contributor to this listserv. Always interesting stuff. In a sense you are right. All creatures may have empathy. But to feel empathy in another sentient creature requires something I don't possess, psychic abilities. I actually believe they (psychic abilities) exist, because after my interviews of near death experiencers, I found some pretty anomolous data. Rupert Sheldrake lives! So I infer empathy from actions. Technically, what the dog feels for my cat is compassion. If the cat is outside and the weather turns bad, the dog will pace and whine until I let her out. She goes out, collects the cat, and herds her in. So I infer empathy/compassion. Never seen a cat do anything like that. MY cat seems to specialize in bugging me when I am trying to write an email. Total lack of empathy for me. I pet her anyway. I have empathy for her. Dumb cat. So what am I missing about feeling empathy in critters? Lynn motley Ph.D. K.E. wrote: > I don't want to offend, I do want to say that empathy is felt. If you > don't see it then fine, I wouldn't expect that. If there are not > scientific tests that allow you to see it, I wouldn't expect that either. > > Science - doesn't have the ability to test for everything - ALL > animals is a pretty huge statement I agree, however we can't KNOW that > they don't have it on some level. > > k > (aka motley crew of - highly- unclassified people) > > At 12:13 AM 2/17/2005, you wrote: > >> Well, many mammals seem to have empathy. I do not think that reptiles >> have empathy nor fish. I have not seen empathy in cows, but some in >> horses. My Lab retriever has empathy for our cat, and the cat hates >> the dog. I have not seen empathy in cats. No offense intended, you >> cat lovers. Your examples are mostly chimps, and certainly they have >> empathy. The bird studies show intelligence but I don't see the >> empathy. Our bird has no empathy for anyone except the lovely bird >> behind the mirror. Empathy is likely a limbic / neocortex >> combination, bigger cortex, more empathy???. I suspect that animals >> living in groups would tend to develop empathy. >> Lynn >> >> K.E. wrote: >> >>> All animals have empathy >>> >>> Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, >>> Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language >>> http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html >>> >>> >>> karen >>> >>> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >>> 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 >>> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >> > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Feb 18 13:32:29 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 06:32:29 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Politics of global warming Message-ID: <4215EE6D.1070603@solution-consulting.com> Interesting WSJ editorial today, apropos of recent discussion of the politics of science. By way of disclosure, I am highly skeptical of global warming but still open minded enough to dialog and learn. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006314 Hockey Stick on Ice Politicizing the science of global warming. Friday, February 18, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST On Wednesday National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman canceled the season, and we guess that's a loss. But this week also brought news of something else that's been put on ice. We're talking about the "hockey stick." Just so we're clear, this hockey stick isn't a sports implement; it's a scientific graph. Back in the late 1990s, American geoscientist Michael Mann published a chart that purported to show average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1,000 years. The chart showed relatively minor fluctuations in temperature over the first 900 years, then a sharp and continuous rise over the past century, giving it a hockey-stick shape. Mr. Mann's chart was both a scientific and political sensation. It contradicted a body of scientific work suggesting a warm period early in the second millennium, followed by a "Little Ice Age" starting in the 14th century. It also provided some visually arresting scientific support for the contention that fossil-fuel emissions were the cause of higher temperatures. Little wonder, then, that Mr. Mann's hockey stick appears five times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark 2001 report on global warming, which paved the way to this week's global ratification--sans the U.S., Australia and China--of the Kyoto Protocol. Yet there were doubts about Mr. Mann's methods and analysis from the start. In 1998, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a paper in the journal Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period. The result: Messrs. Soon and Baliunas were treated as heretics and six editors at Climate Research were made to resign. Still, questions persisted. In 2003, Stephen McIntyre, a Toronto minerals consultant and amateur mathematician, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at Canada's University of Guelph, jointly published a critique of the hockey stick analysis. Their conclusion: Mr. Mann's work was riddled with "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Once these were corrected, the Medieval warm period showed up again in the data. This should have produced a healthy scientific debate. Instead, as the Journal's Antonio Regalado reported Monday, Mr. Mann tried to shut down debate by refusing to disclose the mathematical algorithm by which he arrived at his conclusions. All the same, Mr. Mann was forced to publish a retraction of some of his initial data, and doubts about his statistical methods have since grown. Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada (a government agency) notes that Mr. Mann's method "preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data." Other reputable scientists such as Berkeley's Richard Muller and Hans von Storch of Germany's GKSS Center essentially agree. We realize this may all seem like so much academic nonsense. Yet if there really was a Medieval warm period (we draw no conclusions), it would cast some doubt on the contention that our SUVs and air conditioners, rather than natural causes, are to blame for apparent global warming. There is also the not-so-small matter of the politicization of science: If climate scientists feel their careers might be put at risk by questioning some orthodoxy, the inevitable result will be bad science. It says something that it took two non-climate scientists to bring Mr. Mann's errors to light. But the important point is this: The world is being lobbied to place a huge economic bet--as much as $150 billion a year--on the notion that man-made global warming is real. Businesses are gearing up, at considerable cost, to deal with a new regulatory environment; complex carbon-trading schemes are in the making. Shouldn't everyone look very carefully, and honestly, at the science before we jump off this particular cliff? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: storyend_dingbat.gif Type: image/gif Size: 155 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Feb 18 13:49:06 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 06:49:06 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Frank: Politics of science theme In-Reply-To: References: <20050216195007.25331.qmail@web30803.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4215F252.1010604@solution-consulting.com> Frank, et al., I once consulted with a pharmaceutical research firm. We found that scientists were NOT being clear and direct in communications with each other about research. A scientist would present current progress on a line of research, and some other researchers would walk out of the meeting saying, "Well, that is a pretty stupid direction to go" but they would not challenge each other. Divergent opinions are generally felt as threatening to the group, and it takes sustained effort to legitimize divergent opinions. We came up with "Robust Scientific Dialog" as a title for an organizational intervention that had some positive impact. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > This is pretty alarming. I have long realized that certain facts will > be ignored (like innate racial differences in intelligence at the U.S. > Dept. of Education). I've realized that opposing viewpoints will not > be listened to (the unwinnability of the Viet Nam war). But to have > facts altered is something else. > > It's further alarming, since I'm a free marketeer and look favorably > upon big business as being triumphs, a la Ayn Rand. I don't think of > business vs. the exploited workers and consumers. I'm not interested > in equality and do not care if CEOs make 10 or 1000 times what the > workers make. I have little sense of envy. I do not want to take from > the productive and give to the non-productive. I do not want to bilk > tobacco companies for the follies of smokers. All these sorts of things. > > But this is more. What we're seeing is an extreme us-vs-them > mentality, where the businessmen now take this us-vs-them mentality > into politics. What THIS list needs to do is not to be alarmed or to > groan or to argue one side or the other but to EXPLAIN the widening > polarity. > > Tomorrow, in a different mood, I'm sure I can come up with an argument > that polarity is a good thing, that it has high entertainment value or > something such. > > At a personal level, here at the U.S. Department of Education, it's a > big disappointment. Last week, I went to a talk by the Director of the > Office of Technology. She gave an excellent presentation. During the > question period I said that distinguishing good from bogus information > on the Net would be the singly most important skill to have in the > world of 2025, when the current crop of kids in school are out of > school. The problem is that the most important skill of all is very > hard to measure. I urged that when the No Child Left Behind Act gets > extended to high school that the law be made more flexible to take > this difficulty of measurement into account. > > She answered by saying that a two-day conference could be held on this > very topic and that I asked a great question. However, she thought > that schools that could be teaching this kind of skill need not fear > running afoul of NCLB. I spent 10-15 minutes talking with her after > the meeting, too. I followed up with some e-mails of highly relevant > articles and further thoughts of my own. > > But since then: nothing. I think she got cold feet when she realized > that I might be dangerously independent (no, I'm not about to bring up > race differences) and would not tow the party line. I suspect that > she, too, wants to find out what the party line and then tow it, > rather than even hint that the party line needs clarification. No, I > don't mean that she really wants to do this--she clearly liked talking > to me--but that she has no choice. > > It is the case, in my experience anyhow, that Democrats are more > open-minded than Republicans. I say this even though I prefer > Republican policies, as least when there was a substantial difference. > I think it's because Democrats are much more goo-goo (good government) > types and want to improve something that they approve of, while > Republicans want to reduce or get rid of programs. > > I sense a divisiveness that has grown beyond this, though, and it's a > theory about the rise and fall of divisiveness that I'd like to > explore on this list, NOT about "this is what I want the world to be." > > On 2005-02-16, Michael Christopher opined [message unchanged below]: > >> Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 11:50:07 -0800 (PST) >> From: Michael Christopher >> Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list >> To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> Subject: [Paleopsych] U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter >> Findings >> >> >> U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings >> >> More than 200 Fish and Wildlife researchers cite cases >> where conclusions were reversed to weaken protections >> and favor business, a survey finds. >> >> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-scientists10feb10,0,4954654.story?coll=la-home-nation >> > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Feb 18 13:59:38 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 06:59:38 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Frank's topic: divergent opinions in science Message-ID: <4215F4CA.9040907@solution-consulting.com> Here is another example, from my own interest in near death literature. Synopsis: Van Lommel did a prospective study of NDEs and published results in Lancet. Michael Shermer wrote a column in Scientific American suggesting that Van Lommel's results showed there is no extra-corporeal "spirit" but that NDEs were all artifacts of the death process. Actually, Shermer had totally distorted the Lancet article. When Van Lommel wrote a reply/ correction . . . wait for it . . . Scientific American refused to publish his reply. Deeply disturbing. We cannot question the party line. In this wonderful world of the internet, Van Lommel was able to publish his piece anyway, which I post below FYI. So, Michael and Frank, this very medium is already having a positive effect on the lack of scientific dialog and promoting more diversity, a healthy direction. A Reply to Shermer Medical Evidence for NDEs Pim van Lommel Article from Skeptical Investigations http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/whoswho/vanLommel.htm The Background In his "Skeptic" column in Scientific American in March, 2003, Michael Shermer cited a research study published in The Lancet, a leading medical journal, by Pim van Lommel and colleagues. He asserted this study "delivered a blow" to the idea that the mind and the brain could separate. Yet the researchers argued the exact opposite, and showed that conscious experience outside the body took place during a period of clinical death when the brain was flatlined. As Jay Ingram, of the Canadian Discovery Channel, commented: "His use of this study to bolster his point is bogus. He could have said, 'The authors think there's a mystery, but I choose to interpret their findings differently'. But he didn't. I find that very disappointing" (Toronto Star, March 16, 2003). Here, Pim van Lommel sets out the evidence that Shermer misrepresented. A Reply to Shermer Medical Evidence for NDEs Dr. Pim van Lommel Only recently someone showed me the "Skeptic" article* by Michael Shermer. From a well respected and, in my opinion, scientific journal like the Scientific American I always expect a well documented and scientific article, and I don't know how thoroughly peer-reviewed the article from Shermer was by the editorial staff before publication. My reaction to this article by Shermer is because I am the main author of the study published in The Lancet, December 2001, entitled: "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest; a prospective study in the Netherlands". About what he writes about the conclusions from our study, as well as from the effect of magnetic and electrical "stimulation" of the brain, forces me to write this paper, because I disagree with his theories as well as with his conclusions. We performed our prospective study in 344 survivors of cardiac arrest to study the frequency, the cause and the content of near-death experience (NDE). A near-death experience is the reported memory of all impressions during a special state of consciousness, including specific elements such as out-of-body experience, pleasant feelings, and seeing a tunnel, a light, deceased relatives, or a life review. In our study 282 patients (82%) did not have any memory of the period of unconsciousness, 62 patients (18%) however reported a NDE with all the "classical" elements. Between the two groups there was no difference in the duration of cardiac arrest or unconsciousness, intubation, medication, fear of death before cardiac arrest, gender, religion, education or foreknowledge about NDE. More frequent NDE was reported at age younger than 60 years, more than one cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) during hospital stay, and previous NDE. Patients with memory defects after lengthy and complicated CPR reported less frequent NDE. There are several theories that should explain the cause and content of NDE. The physiologic explanation: the NDE is experienced as a result of anoxia in the brain, possibly also caused by release of endomorphines, or NMDA receptor blockade. In our study all patients had a cardiac arrest, they were clinically dead, unconscious, caused by insufficient blood supply to the brain because of inadequate blood circulation, breathing, or both. If in this situation CPR is not started within 5-10 minutes, irreparable damage is done to the brain and the patient will die. According to this theory, all patients in our study should have had an NDE, they all were clinical dead due to anoxia of the brain caused by inadequate blood circulation to the brain, but only 18% reported NDE. The psychological explanation: NDE is caused by fear of death. But in our study only a very small percentage of patients said they had been afraid the seconds preceding the cardiac arrest, it happened too suddenly to realize what occurred to them. However, 18 % of the patients reported NDE. And also the given medication made no difference. We know that patients with cardiac arrest are unconscious within seconds, but how do we know that the electro-encephalogram (EEG) is flat-lined in those patients, and how can we study this? Complete cessation of cerebral circulation is found in cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation (VF) during threshold testing at implantation of internal defibrillators. This complete cerebral ischaemic model can be used to study the result of anoxia of the brain. In VF complete cardiac arrest occurs, with complete cessation of cerebral flow, and resulting in acute pancerebral anoxia. The Vmca, the middle cerebral artery blood flow, which is a reliable trend monitor of the cerebral blood flow, decreases to 0 cm/sec immediately after the induction of VF (2). Through many studies in human, as well as in animal models, cerebral function has been shown to be severely compromised during cardiac arrest and electric activity in both cerebral cortex and the deeper structures of the brain has been shown to be absent after a very short period of time. Monitoring of the electric activity of the cortex (EEG) has shown ischaemic changes consisting of a decrease of fast high amplitude waves and an increase of slow delta waves, and sometimes also an increase in amplitude of theta activity, progressively and ultimately declining to isoelectricity. More often initial slowing (attenuation) of the EEG waves is the first sign of cerebral ischaemia. The first ischaemic changes in the EEG are detected an average of 6.5 seconds after circulatory arrest. With prolongation of the cerebral ischaemia always a progress to an isoelectric (flat) line is monitored within 10 to 20 (mean 15) seconds from the onset of the cardiac arrest (3-6). In case of a prolonged cardiac arrest of more than 37 seconds the EEG activity may not return for many minutes to hours after cardiac arrest has been restored, depending of the duration of cardiac arrest, in spite of the maintenance of adequate blood pressure during the recovery phase. After defibrillation the middle cerebral artery flow velocity recurred rapidly within 1-5 seconds regardless the arrest duration. However, the EEG recovery takes more time, depending of the duration of cardiac arrest. EEG recovery underestimates metabolic recovery of the brain, and cerebral oxygen uptake may be depressed for a considerable time after restoration of circulation because the initial overshoot on reperfusion (hyperoxia) is followed by a significant decrease in cerebral blood flow. (7) Anoxia causes loss of function of our cell systems. However, in anoxia of only some minute's duration this loss may be transient, in prolonged anoxia cell death occurs with permanent functional loss. During an embolic event a small clot obstructs the blood flow in a small vessel of the cortex, resulting in anoxia of that part of the brain with loss of electrical activity. This results in a functional loss of the cortex like hemiplegia or aphasia. When the clot is resolved or broken down within several minutes the lost cortical function is restored. This is called a transient ischaemic attack (TIA). However, when the clot obstructs the cerebral vessel for minutes to hours it will result in neuronal cell death with a permanent loss of function of this part of the brain, with persistent hemiplegia or aphasia, and the diagnosis of cerebro vascular accident (CVA) is made. So transient anoxia results in transient loss of functions. In cardiac arrest global anoxia of the brain occurs within seconds. Timely and adequate CPR reverses this functional loss of the brain because definitive damage of the brain cells, resulting in cell death, has been prevented. Long lasting anoxia, caused by cessation of blood flow to the brain for more than 5-10 minutes, results in irreversable damage and extensive cell death in the brain. This is called brain death, and most patients will ultimately die. In acute myocardial infarction the duration of cardiac arrest (VF) on the CCU is usually 60-120 seconds, on the cardiac ward 2-5 minutes, and in out-of-hospital arrest it usually exceeds 5-10 minutes. Only during threshold testing of internal defibrillators or during electro physiologic stimulation studies will the duration of cardiac arrest hardly exceed 30-60 seconds. From these studies we know that in our prospective study of patients that have been clinically dead (VF on the ECG) no electric activity of the cortex of the brain (flat EEG) must have been possible, but also the abolition of brain stem activity like the loss of the corneareflex, fixed dilated pupils and the loss of the gag reflex is a clinical finding in those patients. However, patients with an NDE can report a clear consciousness, in which cognitive functioning, emotion, sense of identity, and memory from early childhood was possible, as well as perception from a position out and above their "dead" body. Because of the sometimes reported and verifiable out-of -body experiences, like the case of the dentures reported in our study, we know that the NDE must happen during the period of unconsciousness, and not in the first or last second of this period. So we have to conclude that NDE in our study was experienced during a transient functional loss of all functions of the cortex and of the brainstem. It is important to mention that there is a well documented report of a patient with constant registration of the EEG during cerebral surgery for an gigantic cerebral aneurysm at the base of the brain, operated with a body temperature between 10 and 15 degrees, she was put on the heart-lung machine, with VF, with all blood drained from her head, with a flat line EEG, with clicking devices in both ears, with eyes taped shut, and this patient experienced an NDE with an out-of-body experience, and all details she perceived and heard could later be verified. (8) There is also a theory that consciousness can be experienced independently from the normal body-linked waking consciousness. The current concept in medical science states that consciousness is the product of the brain. This concept, however, has never been scientifically proven. Research on NDE pushes us at the limits of our medical concepts of the range of human consciousness and the relationship between consciousness and memories with the brain. For decades, extensive research has been done to localize memories inside the brain, so far without success. In connection with the hypothesis that consciousness and memories are stored inside the brain the question also arises how a non-material activity such as concentrated attention or thinking can correspond with a visible (material) reaction in the form of a measurable electrical, magnetic and chemical activity at a certain place in the brain. Different mental activities give rise to changing patterns of activity in different parts of the brain. This has been shown in neurophysiology through EEG, magneto-encephalogram (MEG) and at present also through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET-scan). (9-11) Also an increase in cerebral blood flow is observed during such a non-material activity like thinking (12). It is also not well understood how it is to be explained that in a sensory experiment following a physical sensation the person involved in the test stated that he was aware (conscious) of the sensation a few thousands of a second following the stimulation, while the subject's brain showed that neuronal adequacy wasn't achieved until after a full 500 msec. following the sensation. This experiment has led to the so-called delay-and-antedating hypothesis (13). Most body cells, and especially all neurons, show an electrical potential across cell membranes, formed by the presence of a metabolic Na/K pump. Transportation of information along neurons happens by means of action potentials, differences in membrane potential caused by synaptic depolarisation (excitatory) and hyperpolarisation (inhibitory). The sum total of changes along neurons causes transient electric fields, and therefore also transient magnetic fields, along the synchronously activated dendrites. Not the number of neurons, the precise shape of the dendrites (dendritic tree), nor the accurate position of synapses, neither the firing of individual neurons is crucial, but the derivative, the fleeting electric and/or magnetic fields generated along the dendrites. These should be shaped as optimally as possible into short-lasting meaningful patterns, constantly changing in four-dimensional shape and intensity (self-organization), and constantly mutually interacting between all neurons. This process can be considered as a biological quantum coherence phenomenon. The influence of external localized magnetic and electric fields on these constant changing electric and/or magnetic fields during normal function of the brain should now be mentioned. Neurophysiological research is being performed using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in the course of which a localized magnetic field (photons) is produced. TMS can excite or inhibit different parts of the brain, depending of the amount of energy given, allowing functional mapping of cortical regions, and creation of transient functional lesions. It allows assessing the function in focal brain regions on a millisecond scale, and it can study the contribution of cortical networks to specific cognitive functions. TMS is a non-invasive research tool to study aspects of human brain physiology including motor function, vision, language, and the pathophysiology of brain disorders as well as mood disorders like depression, and it even may be useful for therapy. In studies TMS can interfere with visual and motion perception, it gives an interruption of cortical processing with an interval of 80-100 milliseconds. Intracortical inhibition and facilitation are obtained by paired-pulse studies with TMS, and reflect the activity of interneurons in the cortex. Also TMS can alter the functioning of the brain beyond the time of stimulation, but it does not appear to leave any lasting effect. (14). Interrupting the electrical fields of local neuronal networks in parts of the cortex also disturbs the normal function of the brain, because by localized electrical stimulation of the temporal and parietal lobe during surgery for epilepsy the neurosurgeon and Nobel prize winner W. Penfield could sometimes induce flashes of recollection of the past (never a complete life review), experiences of light, sound or music, and rarely a kind of out-of-body experience. These experiences did not produce any transformation.(15-16) After many years of research he finally reached the conclusion that it is not possible to localize memories inside the brain. Olaf Blanke also recently described in Nature a patient with induced OBE by inhibition of cortical activity caused by more intense external electrical stimulation of the gyrus angularis in a patient with epilepsy (17). The effect of the external magnetic or electrical stimulation is dependent of the amount of energy given. There may be no clinical effect or sometimes stimulation is seen when only a small amount of energy is given, for instance during stimulation of the motoric cortex. But during "stimulation" with higher energy inhibition of local cortical functions occurs by extinction of the electrical and magnetic fields resulting in inhibition of local neuronal networks (personal communication Blanke). Also in the patient described by Blanke in Nature stimulation with higher electric energy was given, resulting in inhibition of the function of the local neuronal networks in the gyrus angularis. And when for instance the occipital visual cortex is stimulated by TMS, this results not in a better sight, but instead it causes temporary blindness by inhibition of this part of the cortex. We have to conclude that localized artificial stimulation with real photons (electrical or magnetic energy) disturb and also inhibit the constant changing electrical and magnetic fields of our neuronal networks, and so influence and inhibit the normal function of our brain. In trying to understand this concept of mutual interaction between the "invisible and not measurable" consciousness, with its enormous amount of information, and our visible, material body it seems wise to compare it with modern worldwide communication. There is a continuous exchange of objective information by means of electromagnetic fields (real photons) for radio, TV, mobile telephone, or laptop computer. We are unaware of the innumerable amounts of electromagnetic fields that constantly, day and night, exist around us and through us as well as through structures like walls and buildings. We only become aware of these electromagnetic informational fields the moment we use our mobile telephone or by switching on our radio, TV or laptop. What we receive is not inside the instrument, nor in the components, but thanks to the receiver the information from the electromagnetic fields becomes observable to our senses and hence perception occurs in our consciousness. The voice we hear in our telephone is not inside the telephone. The concert we hear in our radio is transmitted to our radio. The images and music we hear and see on TV is transmitted to our TV set. The internet is not located inside our laptop. We can receive at about the same time what is transmitted with the speed of light from a distance of some hundreds or thousands of miles. And if we switch off the TV set, the reception disappears, but the transmission continues. The information transmitted remains present within the electromagnetic fields. The connection has been interrupted, but it has not vanished and can still be received elsewhere by using another TV set. Again, we do not realize us the thousands of telephone calls, the hundreds of radio and TV transmissions, as well as the internet, coded as electromagnetic fields, that exist around us and through us. Could our brain be compared with the TV set that electromagnetic waves (photons) receives and transforms into image and sound, as well as with the TV camera that image and sound transforms into electromagnetic waves (photons)? This electromagnetic radiation holds the essence of all information, but is only conceivable to our senses by suited instruments like camera and TV set. The informational fields of our consciousness and of our memories, both evaluating by our experiences and by the informational imput from our sense organs during our lifetime, are present around us as electrical and/or magnetic fields [possible virtual photons? (18)], and these fields only become available to our waking consciousness through our functioning brain and other cells of our body. So we need a functioning brain to receive our consciousness into our waking consciousness. And as soon as the function of brain has been lost, like in clinical death or in brain death, with iso-electricity on the EEG, memories and consciousness do still exist, but the reception ability is lost. People can experience their consciousness outside their body, with the possibility of perception out and above their body, with identity, and with heightened awareness, attention, well-structured thought processes, memories and emotions. And they also can experience their consciousness in a dimension where past, present and future exist at the same moment, without time and space, and can be experienced as soon as attention has been directed to it (life review and preview), and even sometimes they come in contact with the "fields of consciousness" of deceased relatives. And later they can experience their conscious return into their body. Michael Shermer states that, in reality, all experience is mediated and produced by the brain, and that so-called paranormal phenomena like out-of body experiences are nothing more than neuronal events. The study of patients with NDE, however, clearly shows us that consciousness with memories, cognition, with emotion, self-identity, and perception out and above a life-less body is experienced during a period of a non-functioning brain (transient pancerebral anoxia). And focal functional loss by inhibition of local cortical regions happens by "stimulation" of those regions with electricity (photons) or with magnetic fields (photons), resulting sometimes in out-of-body states. To quote Michael Shermer: it is the job of science to solve those puzzles with natural, rather than supernatural, explanations. But one has to be aware of the progress of science, and to study recent literature, to know what is going on in current science. For me science is asking questions with an open mind, and not being afraid to reconsider widely accepted but scientifically not proven concepts like the concept that consciousness and memories are a product of the brain. But also we should realize that we need a functioning brain to receive our consciousness into our waking consciousness. There are still a lot of mysteries to solve, but one has not to talk about paranormal, supernatural or pseudoscience to look for scientific answers on the intriguing relation between consciousness and memories with the brain. * Michael Shermer, 'Demon-Haunted Brain' Scientific American, page 25, March 2003. References 1 Van Lommel W., Van Wees R., Meyers V., Elfferich I. Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands. The Lancet 2001; 358: 2039-2045. 2 Gopalan KT, Lee J, Ikeda S, Burch CM. Cerebral blood flow velocity during repeatedly induced ventricular fibrillation. J. Clin. Anesth. 1999 Jun; 11 (4): 290-5. 3 De Vries JW, Bakker PFA, Visser GH, Diephuis JC, Van Huffelen AC Changes in cerebral oxygen uptake and cerebral electrical activity during defibrillation threshold testing. Anesth. Analg. 1998; 87: 16-20 4 Clute H, Levy WJ. Elecroencephalographic changes during brief cardiac arrest in humans. Anesthesiology 1990; 73 : 821-825 5 Losasso TJ, Muzzi DA, Meyer FB, Sharbrough FW. Electroencephalographic monitoring of cerebral function during asystole and successful cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Anesth. Analg. 1992; 75: 1021-4. 6 Parnia S, Fenwick P. Near death experiences in cardiac arrest: visions of a dying brain or visions of a new science of consciousness. Review article. Resuscitation 2002; 52: 5-11 7 Smith DS, Levy W, Maris M, Chance B Reperfusion hyperoxia in brain after circulatory arrest in humans . Anesthesiology 1990; 73 : 12-19 8 Sabom M.B. Light and Death: One Doctors Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences. "The Case of Pam Reynolds" in chapter 3: Death: the Final Frontier, (37-52). Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. 1998. 9 Desmedt J.E., Robertson D. Differential enhancement of early and late components of the cerebral somatosensory evoked potentials during forced-paced cognitive tasks in man. Journal of Physiology 1977; 271: 761-782. 10 Roland P.E., Friberg L. Localization in cortical areas activated by thinking. Journal of Neurophysiology 1985; 53: 1219-1243. 11 Eccles J.C. The effect of silent thinking on the cerebral cortex. Truth Journal, International Interdisciplinary Journal of Christian Thought. 1988; Vol 2. 12 Roland P.E. Somatotopical tuning of postcentral gyrus during focal attention in man. A regional cerebral blood flow study. Journal of Neurophysiology 1981; 46: 744-754. 13 Libet B. Subjective antedating of a sensory experience and mind-brain theories: Reply to Honderich (1984). Journal of Theoretical Biology 1985; 144: 563-570. 14 Hallett M. Transcranial magnetic stimulation and the human brain. Nature 2000; 406: 147-150. 15 Penfield W. The Excitable Cortex in Conscious Man. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1958. 16 Penfield W. The Mystery of the Mind. Princeton University Press, Princeton. 1975 17 Blanke O., Ortigue S., Landis Th., Seeck M. Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions. The part of the brain that can induce out-of-body experiences has been located. Nature 2002, 419: 269-270. 18 Romijn, H. Are virtual photons the elementary carriers of consciousness? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2002; 9: 61-81. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From HowlBloom at aol.com Fri Feb 18 19:19:27 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 14:19:27 EST Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: Eshel, Joel, and Eran--water phantoms Message-ID: Sent this originally during the two days the server was down. Trying to send it to paleopsych again by just forwarding. Contact Stephen at _sjlee at howardbloom.net_ (mailto:sjlee at howardbloom.net) if the graphics don't come through for some reason. ---------- 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 -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: HowlBloom at aol.com Subject: Re: Eshel, Joel, and Eran--water phantoms Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 02:20:29 EST Size: 788534 URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Feb 19 06:16:40 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 23:16:40 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] [Fwd: ScienceDaily News Release: Multiple Therapies Curb Declining Ability To Learn With Age] Message-ID: <4216D9C8.8050409@solution-consulting.com> We have been discussing methods of enhancing brain function. Here is an interesting piece. Lynn Source: University Of Toronto Date Posted: 2005-01-27 Web Address: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050126112156.htm MULTIPLE THERAPIES CURB DECLINING ABILITY TO LEARN WITH AGE A new study of beagles led by researchers at the University of Toronto at Scarborough underscores the importance of using a combination of diet and behaviour therapies to curb the progressive decline in the ability to learn that occurs with advanced aging. ?We were really surprised just how clear-cut the benefit is of using a combined therapy,? says lead investigator and psychology professor Bill Milgram of the U of T at Scarborough, who specializes in aging research. The results of the study, published in the January 2005 issue of Neurobiology of Aging, looked at the impact four combinations of behavioural enrichment and supplementation of diet with antioxidants had on a beagle?s ability to learn as the senior dog grew older. The first group had a regular diet and regular experience; the second received a regular diet and enriched experience; the third group a regular experience and an enriched diet; and the fourth group an enriched diet and an enriched experience. Whereas previous studies have looked at dogs of different ages all at once to identify age-related differences, this investigation followed four groups of dogs over a period of two years. As predicted, the researchers found a dog?s ability to learn declines with age. What they had not anticipated was seeing such a statistically-significant benefit of combining behavioral enrichment and the antioxidant supplementation compared to giving either alone. ?Since humans and dogs have many biological and behavioral parallels, I predict similar results would be attained in people,? notes Milgram. The study was funded by the National Institute of Aging and the U.S. Department of the Army. The following conflict of interest was declared by the authors with respect to publication of this paper: investigator Steven Zicker is an employee of Hill?s Pet Nutrition Inc., which has commercialized the antioxidant fortified food used in the study. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From guavaberry at earthlink.net Sun Feb 20 03:08:45 2005 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 22:08:45 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptualaccuracy In-Reply-To: <001301c51521$01819220$03224346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> References: <01C514B7.F21DFF30.shovland@mindspring.com> <001301c51521$01819220$03224346@yourjqn2mvdn7x> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.0.20050219215756.03845c90@mail.earthlink.net> Hey Val, yeah - cat jokes :-) 1 thing about my dog mollie and my cat guavaberry (siamese / crucian / pirate ship) they would keep us fed between the 2 of 'em nobody would starve around here it could be for dinner and keep us all alive (if i was granny on the beverly hillbillies ummmm possum stew) it's hot cat, hot dog love for sure & i feel the love they've brought it all home - to feed me best, karen my dog mollie can play a joke on me - she teases me with the ball LIKE she is really going to give it to me - she'll tork me up pretty good then kiss (lick) me At 01:46 PM 2/17/2005, you wrote: >My cat chooses in a cool fashion to interfere when I am really engaged on >the computer. Then she begins the process of winding up on my shoulders >and stretching her paw out to the keys. That rotten brain of his >understands humor - I think! Cheers, Val Geist >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Steve Hovland" ><shovland at mindspring.com> >To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" ><paleopsych at paleopsych.org> >Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 6:14 AM >Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and >perceptualaccuracy > > >I know my cats have emotions, but they > > are also cold-blooded killers of birds and > > mice (they bring their kills to show us.) > > > > Since they have emotions and wills but > > not much language I try to use empathy > > in dealing with them. For example, the > > older cat just jumped up on my keyboard > > but she was there for food, not affection. > > > > Steve Hovland > > www.stevehovland.net > > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] > > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:13 PM > > To: The new improved paleopsych list > > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and > perceptual accuracy > > > > Well, many mammals seem to have empathy. I do not think that reptiles > > have empathy nor fish. I have not seen empathy in cows, but some in > > horses. My Lab retriever has empathy for our cat, and the cat hates the > > dog. I have not seen empathy in cats. No offense intended, you cat > > lovers. Your examples are mostly chimps, and certainly they have > > empathy. The bird studies show intelligence but I don't see the empathy. > > Our bird has no empathy for anyone except the lovely bird behind the > > mirror. Empathy is likely a limbic / neocortex combination, bigger > > cortex, more empathy???. I suspect that animals living in groups would > > tend to develop empathy. > > Lynn > > > > K.E. wrote: > > > >> All animals have empathy > >> > >> Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, > >> Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language > >> > http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html > >> > >> > >> karen > >> > >> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> > >> 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 > >> <>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> > >> _______________________________________________ > >> 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 > > > > > > -- > > No virus found in this incoming message. > > Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. > > Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 > > > > >No virus found in this outgoing message. >Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. >Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.8.8 - Release Date: 2/14/2005 > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From guavaberry at earthlink.net Sun Feb 20 04:11:05 2005 From: guavaberry at earthlink.net (K.E.) Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 23:11:05 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] empathy [was] Positive emotions and perceptual accuracy In-Reply-To: <421551B0.1020606@solution-consulting.com> References: <01C5132E.B97B5C20.shovland@mindspring.com> <4212C2C2.3020207@solution-consulting.com> <6.2.1.2.0.20050216142930.038706b0@mail.earthlink.net> <421427EC.3020805@solution-consulting.com> <6.2.1.2.0.20050217095656.038f3828@mail.earthlink.net> <421551B0.1020606@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.0.20050219221320.01ef12a8@mail.earthlink.net> hey Lynn At 09:23 PM 2/17/2005, you wrote: >No offense taken, Karen, you are a fascinating contributor to this >listserv. Always interesting stuff. >In a sense you are right. All creatures may have empathy. yes it is in a "sense" - it is "to sense" some brains are wired in a way that gives them a more intense ability to sense - other energy - you'll have to just let it go - whatever we could discuss about energy is more than i want to type and in how may ways creatures are wired to sense energy . . .. so those animals knew (sensed) the tsunami was coming - they went to higher ground how'd they know - how are they wired to sense tsunami energy? indigenous people living close to the earth - who still have an oral tradition passing their righteous wisdom down thru the ages watch animals & they left for higher ground basically it's only the "Educated People" with all the technology and no oral tradition who have lost their senses - they died pfffffft i know i know - how can i say such things - it's ok, i don't really have to defend all that i've typed - it's just what i think >But to feel empathy in another sentient creature requires something I >don't possess, psychic abilities. I actually believe they (psychic >abilities) exist, because after my interviews of near death experiencers, >I found some pretty anomolous data. Rupert Sheldrake lives! So I infer >empathy from actions. Technically, what the dog feels for my cat is >compassion. If the cat is outside and the weather turns bad, the dog will >pace and whine until I let her out. She goes out, collects the cat, and >herds her in. So I infer empathy/compassion. Never seen a cat do anything >like that. MY cat seems to specialize in bugging me when I am trying to >write an email. Total lack of empathy for me. I pet her anyway. I have >empathy for her. Dumb cat. my smart cat guavaberry knew that i would protect her - she had her kittens in my bed next to me in the middle of the night. I was dreaming that she was having kittens (i saw her having the kittens in my dream) and i got so excited it woke me up to see this happening next to me. fact: i never knew anything about her being pregnant, my friend to told me she was, joking i flippantly said the due date - she had those kittens on that very day. I've got a lifetime of stories like that, creatures/ humans born or dyin'. It's not the only time i've seen it in my mind before it happens - how do i see it? is this being psychic? well okie dokie if you think so, but to me it's like green grass, a very ordinary thing. >So what am I missing about feeling empathy in critters? their pain So we have to conclude that NDE in our study was experienced during a transient functional loss of all functions of the cortex and of the brainstem. It is important to mention that there is a well documented report of a patient with constant registration of the EEG during cerebral surgery for an gigantic cerebral aneurysm at the base of the brain, operated with a body temperature between 10 and 15 degrees, she was put on the heart-lung machine, with VF, with all blood drained from her head, with a flat line EEG, with clicking devices in both ears, with eyes taped shut, and this patient experienced an NDE with an out-of-body experience, and all details she perceived and heard could later be verified. (8) Out of Body - please, humans do it all the time, it's a defense, it's natural it's ordinary science "knows very little & this is the best science can do at this point. You know how hard it is to get this eensy weensy teeny weeny thing published! "No One gets in to see the Wizard, Not no way, Not no how!" -- The Guard to Dorothy "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." -- The Wizard to Dorothy best to ya, karen >Lynn >motley Ph.D. > > >K.E. wrote: > >>I don't want to offend, I do want to say that empathy is felt. If you >>don't see it then fine, I wouldn't expect that. If there are not >>scientific tests that allow you to see it, I wouldn't expect that either. >> >>Science - doesn't have the ability to test for everything - ALL animals >>is a pretty huge statement I agree, however we can't KNOW that they don't >>have it on some level. >> >>k >>(aka motley crew of - highly- unclassified people) >> >>At 12:13 AM 2/17/2005, you wrote: >> >>>Well, many mammals seem to have empathy. I do not think that reptiles >>>have empathy nor fish. I have not seen empathy in cows, but some in >>>horses. My Lab retriever has empathy for our cat, and the cat hates the >>>dog. I have not seen empathy in cats. No offense intended, you cat >>>lovers. Your examples are mostly chimps, and certainly they have >>>empathy. The bird studies show intelligence but I don't see the empathy. >>>Our bird has no empathy for anyone except the lovely bird behind the >>>mirror. Empathy is likely a limbic / neocortex combination, bigger >>>cortex, more empathy???. I suspect that animals living in groups would >>>tend to develop empathy. >>>Lynn >>> >>>K.E. wrote: >>> >>>>All animals have empathy >>>> >>>>Non Human Animals Have Intelligence, >>>>Culture, Emotion, Compassion and Language >>>>http://www.wildlifeprotection.net/Cruelty/cruelty4.html >>>> >>>> >>>>karen >>>> >>>><>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> >>>>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 >>>><>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<>~~~~~<> From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Feb 20 18:10:44 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 10:10:44 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Cats who live in glass houses Message-ID: <01C51734.71710E20.shovland@mindspring.com> Isn't it time for a scientific study of the relationship between middle aged men and their cats? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 104760 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Feb 21 05:16:49 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 22:16:49 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robust scientific dialog In-Reply-To: <002e01c515c4$85312150$6401a8c0@ISV2> References: <002e01c515c4$85312150$6401a8c0@ISV2> Message-ID: <42196EC1.2050905@solution-consulting.com> David, Thank you for this inspiring question. I have been giving it some thought. My assumption is that we find true dialog threatening. Groups value stability. Stability comes from shared meanings, shared norms, shared values. We create meaning about the universe, and we are dismayed by data that undermines our creation. So we started that particular project with a focus on group culture. What is the norm about dialog? Clearly it had been to suppress debate. Back-channel communications were common. I used an Appreciative Inquiry / Solution-focused approach, looking for exceptions, times when dialog had worked. The idea behind that is that we can change a culture by seeking positive examples of what is desired. Fluctuations occur in all systems all the time. Even in a culture of defensiveness and non-sharing, I assume there will be examples of times when sharing did happen. If we discover those exceptions and talk about them, the group members begin to re-view their concepts of the group. New norms can be based on those exceptional times. Trust in the new norms is improved by further dialog about them, mroe examples. We asked scientists: "We all have experiences of direct, robust dialog, and we also have experiences when we do not talk directly to others. We want to study times when dialog was direct, to the point, and helpful. Please tell us a time when that happened. What was going on? Who was involved? What were you told? How did that help?" In retrospect, I should have trained three scientists to collect that data, and each of them training three more and so on. I did too much of the work. When the consultant does the interviews, it greatly reduces the impact on the system, since the consultant is an outsider. Insider collection of exceptional times is much more powerful. The senior scientist was quite pleased and felt that people were being more open. We didn't have any actual data, though. Not long after, the VP of HR became ill and eventually died. I have much more to say. I wonder whether we ought to say this on list? Would the paleo group be interested in this dialog between you and me? I will forward this on to the group and see if we get interest. In the mean time, David, please write back and tell me if this kind of story is what you have in mind. I am interested in keeping this going. Lynn W. David Schwaderer wrote: >>I once consulted with a pharmaceutical research firm. ... but they >>would not challenge each other. >> >>Divergent opinions are generally felt as threatening to the group, and >>it takes sustained effort to legitimize divergent opinions. We came up >>with "Robust Scientific Dialog" as a title for an organizational >>intervention that had some positive impact. >> >> > >Lynn, I am *extremely* interested in this phenomena - treatment of dissent >and divergent opinion. This is a key human behavior.... > >=> If you have *any* other thoughts on this please let me know what they >are. Please. > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Feb 21 15:05:33 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 08:05:33 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog In-Reply-To: <004d01c517dc$1e78e2d0$6401a8c0@ISV2> References: <002e01c515c4$85312150$6401a8c0@ISV2> <42196EC1.2050905@solution-consulting.com> <004d01c517dc$1e78e2d0$6401a8c0@ISV2> Message-ID: <4219F8BD.40009@solution-consulting.com> David, These are fascinating references. I look forward to reading them. One piece I didn't mention is the key is the CEO, the leader of the group. I started with him, interviewed him, and videotaped the interview. I then selected portions to show to the rest of the organization, emphasizing that the CEO was instigating this, was supportive, and so on. So if one is to make a change, one must start at the top. Since change is too often seen as a threat (your quote from "Stupidity" illustrates that), by using Appreciative Inquiry, we accomplish two things: 1. Find exceptions and talk about them. This makes the upcoming change seem a part of the history of the group. We do this in family therapy, when we move the family toward talking about times when the Identified Patient has behaved in strong positive ways. This changes the views of the IP and thus changes the future. (The assumption is that the future is determined by what we expect; that is a recursive statement, the future is created by our vision of the future.) 2. We make the change seem positive and exciting. The old notion was that pain had to drive organizational change. But this notion is that change is more about a positive expectation, a hope. We create that hope based on discovery of what has been our best past behavior. More of That. I also have the idea that people have four stages of change, based on Solution-focused therapy (deShazer) and on Prochaska's work on change. My four stages are: - Bystander / Visitor - Complainant - Shopper - Customer I have a handout on that if you would like to see more. Anyway, the theory here that a colleague and I have been working on is that organizations go through the same four stages. I have a talk on that on audiotape I can send you if you'd like, where I apply the four stages to organizational change. Well, off to work Lynn W. David Schwaderer wrote: > Also, in "Cult of the Mouse" pg. 107 a discussion, > > 4. Cults enforce Strict rules of Behavior that stamp out Individuality > and Dissent. > > http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1580086330/qid=1108965895/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-4450274-6343938?v=glance&s=books > > > and, in "In Search of Stupidity", footnote at page 220: > > I was later informed that many in the audience had actually found my > negative attitude discouraging and I collected very few business cards > (well, none actually). This experience drove home to me the > realization that a herd of lemmings in the act of flinging themselves > over a cliff are primed to discuss the importance of teamwork, the > need to stay focused on the task at hand, and the necessity of > maintaining positive attitude. > > http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1590591046/qid=1108966311/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-4450274-6343938?v=glance&s=books > > > => Different contextual flavors with the same outcome..... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Schwaderer_Lists at comcast.net Mon Feb 21 15:34:56 2005 From: Schwaderer_Lists at comcast.net (W. David Schwaderer) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 07:34:56 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog References: <002e01c515c4$85312150$6401a8c0@ISV2><42196EC1.2050905@solution-consulting.com><004d01c517dc$1e78e2d0$6401a8c0@ISV2> <4219F8BD.40009@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <002401c5182a$e53efa50$6401a8c0@ISV2> These are fascinating references. I look forward to reading them. => I have many more - I have studied resistance to change for about eight years now...any thoughts you have on why people are resistant to change I would enjoy hearing. Group solidarity is certainly one reason. One piece I didn't mention is the key is the CEO, the leader of the group. ... => Yep, the designated leader can be critical. It's even better if you get the leader to introduce you around early on. It sends a very clear message.....which may or may not be vetoed by subordinates. Since change is too often seen as a threat ... 1. Find exceptions and talk about them. .. 2. We make the change seem positive and exciting. => Very interesting. But you need to establish excitement on a very broad scale all at once since old behavior patterns are very resilient.....and peer-group exposure can erase any interest.....person by person. I also have the idea that people have four stages of change, based on Solution-focused therapy (deShazer) and on Prochaska's work on change. My four stages are: - Bystander / Visitor - Complainant - Shopper - Customer I have a handout on that if you would like to see more. Anyway, the theory here that a colleague and I have been working on is that organizations go through the same four stages. I have a talk on that on audiotape I can send you if you'd like, where I apply the four stages to organizational change. => I would love to see/hear these materials and understand them in entirity. There is an expression which I cannot remember = "There is no such thing as an innocent bystander,....." I can't remember the other two... => Please do not post my address: David Schwaderer, 13165 Paseo Presada, Saratoga, CA 95070 <= Thanks for all considerations, David Schwaderer -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Feb 21 15:38:56 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 07:38:56 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robust scientific dialog Message-ID: <01C517E8.674BF590.shovland@mindspring.com> "You get what you inspect" may also apply here. Rudy Giuliani dramatically changed the output of many agencies in New York by measuring progress toward the results he wanted. He probably didn't change the culture, which is very difficult, but he got a different result, which was enough. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2005 9:17 PM To: W. David Schwaderer; The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] Robust scientific dialog David, Thank you for this inspiring question. I have been giving it some thought. My assumption is that we find true dialog threatening. Groups value stability. Stability comes from shared meanings, shared norms, shared values. We create meaning about the universe, and we are dismayed by data that undermines our creation. So we started that particular project with a focus on group culture. What is the norm about dialog? Clearly it had been to suppress debate. Back-channel communications were common. I used an Appreciative Inquiry / Solution-focused approach, looking for exceptions, times when dialog had worked. The idea behind that is that we can change a culture by seeking positive examples of what is desired. Fluctuations occur in all systems all the time. Even in a culture of defensiveness and non-sharing, I assume there will be examples of times when sharing did happen. If we discover those exceptions and talk about them, the group members begin to re-view their concepts of the group. New norms can be based on those exceptional times. Trust in the new norms is improved by further dialog about them, mroe examples. We asked scientists: "We all have experiences of direct, robust dialog, and we also have experiences when we do not talk directly to others. We want to study times when dialog was direct, to the point, and helpful. Please tell us a time when that happened. What was going on? Who was involved? What were you told? How did that help?" In retrospect, I should have trained three scientists to collect that data, and each of them training three more and so on. I did too much of the work. When the consultant does the interviews, it greatly reduces the impact on the system, since the consultant is an outsider. Insider collection of exceptional times is much more powerful. The senior scientist was quite pleased and felt that people were being more open. We didn't have any actual data, though. Not long after, the VP of HR became ill and eventually died. I have much more to say. I wonder whether we ought to say this on list? Would the paleo group be interested in this dialog between you and me? I will forward this on to the group and see if we get interest. In the mean time, David, please write back and tell me if this kind of story is what you have in mind. I am interested in keeping this going. Lynn W. David Schwaderer wrote: >>I once consulted with a pharmaceutical research firm. ... but they >>would not challenge each other. >> >>Divergent opinions are generally felt as threatening to the group, and >>it takes sustained effort to legitimize divergent opinions. We came up >>with "Robust Scientific Dialog" as a title for an organizational >>intervention that had some positive impact. >> >> > >Lynn, I am *extremely* interested in this phenomena - treatment of dissent >and divergent opinion. This is a key human behavior.... > >=> If you have *any* other thoughts on this please let me know what they >are. Please. > > > > > << File: ATT00005.html >> << File: ATT00006.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Feb 21 17:27:50 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 09:27:50 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog Message-ID: <01C517F7.9DDDFFE0.shovland@mindspring.com> A corporate culture also includes beliefs, which are very resistant to change. I sent out an article awhile ago about this. A belief is a mental structure that tends to have survival value, so any proposed to changing beliefs will tend to threaten people severely. Leaders are critical. They get what they are, so if they don't like what they are getting, they need to change themselves before their organization will respond. Those of us who have had successful therapy knows that it changes the way we present to the world, and therefore changes the way the world manifest to us. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: W. David Schwaderer [SMTP:Schwaderer_Lists at comcast.net] Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 7:35 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog These are fascinating references. I look forward to reading them. => I have many more - I have studied resistance to change for about eight years now...any thoughts you have on why people are resistant to change I would enjoy hearing. Group solidarity is certainly one reason. One piece I didn't mention is the key is the CEO, the leader of the group. ... => Yep, the designated leader can be critical. It's even better if you get the leader to introduce you around early on. It sends a very clear message.....which may or may not be vetoed by subordinates. Since change is too often seen as a threat ... 1. Find exceptions and talk about them. .. 2. We make the change seem positive and exciting. => Very interesting. But you need to establish excitement on a very broad scale all at once since old behavior patterns are very resilient.....and peer-group exposure can erase any interest.....person by person. I also have the idea that people have four stages of change, based on Solution-focused therapy (deShazer) and on Prochaska's work on change. My four stages are: - Bystander / Visitor - Complainant - Shopper - Customer I have a handout on that if you would like to see more. Anyway, the theory here that a colleague and I have been working on is that organizations go through the same four stages. I have a talk on that on audiotape I can send you if you'd like, where I apply the four stages to organizational change. => I would love to see/hear these materials and understand them in entirity. There is an expression which I cannot remember = "There is no such thing as an innocent bystander,....." I can't remember the other two... => Please do not post my address: David Schwaderer, 13165 Paseo Presada, Saratoga, CA 95070 <= Thanks for all considerations, David Schwaderer << File: ATT00017.html >> << File: ATT00018.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Feb 21 17:35:05 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 09:35:05 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robust scientific dialog Message-ID: <01C517F8.A0CDFE70.shovland@mindspring.com> Carly Fiorino's tenure was also flawed because she was a manager, not a leader. All she did was to call in the consultants and go with their standard recommendation to make a large acquisition. All the genius in HP's patents was essentially discarded. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: ldj [SMTP:ldj at mail.sisna.com] Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:23 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Cc: Steve Hovland Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Robust scientific dialog Steve, thanks for this reminder. Of course, you are right. At the same time, the dilemma is why didn't mayors before Guilani do that? They were not leaders, they were managers. It comes down to vision and leadership. What the Mouse Cult book seems to argue (based on my reading of the reviews on Amazon) is that Eisner's leadership is fatally flawed. Eisner lacks the vision that Walt Disney had. Instead, he wants to simply maximize profit. So what he inspects is the wrong thing, namely how can we mazimize our profit? Walt seemed to have a vision of entertainng people, educating them via his nature films, entrancing them. So a vital problem that David is raising is what about leadership? Someone once said that it is not that power corrupts, it is that power attracts corruptable people. Too often our organizations are run by people who simply want power for its own sake, that is, for the sake of their own ego, and not because they actually have a worthy vision that serves the customer/stakeholder/citizen. I ordered the In Search of Stupidity this mornng from Abebooks.com so I may speak too early, but it appears that the failures he documents originate from the top leadership, lack of vision. This message goes to you because I am at work and I don't know how to make this mail program use my list name, ljohnson at solution-consulting.com. So paleo will bounce it. If you forward it, you have my appreciation. Lynn working to celebrate presidents ---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: Steve Hovland Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 07:38:56 -0800 >"You get what you inspect" may also apply here. > >Rudy Giuliani dramatically changed the output >of many agencies in New York by measuring >progress toward the results he wanted. > >He probably didn't change the culture, which is >very difficult, but he got a different result, which >was enough. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2005 9:17 PM >To: W. David Schwaderer; The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: [Paleopsych] Robust scientific dialog > >David, >Thank you for this inspiring question. I have been giving it some thought. > >My assumption is that we find true dialog threatening. Groups value >stability. Stability comes from shared meanings, shared norms, shared >values. We create meaning about the universe, and we are dismayed by >data that undermines our creation. > >So we started that particular project with a focus on group culture. >What is the norm about dialog? Clearly it had been to suppress debate. >Back-channel communications were common. > >I used an Appreciative Inquiry / Solution-focused approach, looking for >exceptions, times when dialog had worked. The idea behind that is that >we can change a culture by seeking positive examples of what is desired. >Fluctuations occur in all systems all the time. Even in a culture of >defensiveness and non-sharing, I assume there will be examples of times >when sharing did happen. If we discover those exceptions and talk about >them, the group members begin to re-view their concepts of the group. >New norms can be based on those exceptional times. Trust in the new >norms is improved by further dialog about them, mroe examples. > >We asked scientists: >"We all have experiences of direct, robust dialog, and we also have >experiences when we do not talk directly to others. We want to study >times when dialog was direct, to the point, and helpful. Please tell us >a time when that happened. What was going on? Who was involved? What >were you told? How did that help?" > >In retrospect, I should have trained three scientists to collect that >data, and each of them training three more and so on. I did too much of >the work. When the consultant does the interviews, it greatly reduces >the impact on the system, since the consultant is an outsider. Insider >collection of exceptional times is much more powerful. > >The senior scientist was quite pleased and felt that people were being >more open. We didn't have any actual data, though. Not long after, the >VP of HR became ill and eventually died. > >I have much more to say. I wonder whether we ought to say this on list? >Would the paleo group be interested in this dialog between you and me? I >will forward this on to the group and see if we get interest. In the >mean time, David, please write back and tell me if this kind of story is >what you have in mind. I am interested in keeping this going. > >Lynn > >W. David Schwaderer wrote: > >>>I once consulted with a pharmaceutical research firm. ... but they >>>would not challenge each other. >>> >>>Divergent opinions are generally felt as threatening to the group, and >>>it takes sustained effort to legitimize divergent opinions. We came up >>>with "Robust Scientific Dialog" as a title for an organizational >>>intervention that had some positive impact. >>> >>> >> >>Lynn, I am *extremely* interested in this phenomena - treatment of dissent >>and divergent opinion. This is a key human behavior.... >> >>=> If you have *any* other thoughts on this please let me know what they >>are. Please. >> >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00005.html >> << File: ATT00006.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >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 schwaderer_lists at comcast.net Mon Feb 21 20:29:10 2005 From: schwaderer_lists at comcast.net (schwaderer_lists at comcast.net) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 20:29:10 +0000 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog Message-ID: <022120052029.15369.421A4496000122EF00003C0922058860149C9B9C0704A19D0A9D0A0B0E99080C9C@comcast.net> -------------- Original message -------------- > A corporate culture also includes beliefs, > which are very resistant to change. > > I sent out an article awhile ago about this. Steve, which article was this? Was it this one?... http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-11/beliefs.html Thanks..... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Feb 21 23:19:00 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 15:19:00 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 In-Reply-To: <200502211901.j1LJ1Qh26758@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050221231900.57618.qmail@web30808.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Lynn says: >>My assumption is that we find true dialog threatening. Groups value stability. Stability comes from shared meanings, shared norms, shared values.<< --Very true. There is often the perception that anyone who can bridge the values of two groups is a traitor to both sides. Someone beyond the liberal/conservative dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, a threat to shared assumptions that define a group against another. It's common in a polar system dominated by two opposing parties for each to drift away from its own values simply because it's using difference from the other party or dominance over it as the only feedback that matters. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Feb 21 23:19:10 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 15:19:10 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Robust scientific dialog References: <01C517F8.A0CDFE70.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <028701c5186b$c1008050$d003f604@S0027397558> Managers direct while leaders inspire. Both Hewlett and Packard were hands on kinda guys who were always roaming the plant in rolled up shirt sleeves. Fiorino chose to sashay her way in spiked heels....she is now in oblivion. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: Cc: "paleopsych at paleopsych. org (E-mail)" Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:35 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Robust scientific dialog > Carly Fiorino's tenure was also flawed because > she was a manager, not a leader. > > All she did was to call in the consultants and > go with their standard recommendation to make > a large acquisition. > > All the genius in HP's patents was essentially > discarded. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: ldj [SMTP:ldj at mail.sisna.com] > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:23 AM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Cc: Steve Hovland > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Robust scientific dialog > > Steve, > thanks for this reminder. Of course, you are right. > > At the same time, the dilemma is why didn't mayors > before Guilani do that? > They were not leaders, they were managers. It comes > down to vision and > leadership. What the Mouse Cult book seems to argue > (based on my reading of > the reviews on Amazon) is that Eisner's leadership is > fatally flawed. > Eisner lacks the vision that Walt Disney had. > Instead, he wants to simply > maximize profit. So what he inspects is the wrong > thing, namely how can we > mazimize our profit? Walt seemed to have a vision of > entertainng people, > educating them via his nature films, entrancing them. > > So a vital problem that David is raising is what > about leadership? Someone > once said that it is not that power corrupts, it is > that power attracts > corruptable people. Too often our organizations are > run by people who > simply want power for its own sake, that is, for the > sake of their own ego, > and not because they actually have a worthy vision > that serves the > customer/stakeholder/citizen. I ordered the In Search > of Stupidity this > mornng from Abebooks.com so I may speak too early, > but it appears that the > failures he documents originate from the top > leadership, lack of vision. > > This message goes to you because I am at work and I > don't know how to make > this mail program use my list name, > ljohnson at solution-consulting.com. So > paleo will bounce it. If you forward it, you have my > appreciation. > Lynn > working to celebrate presidents > > > ---------- Original > Message ---------------------------------- > From: Steve Hovland > Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list > > Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 07:38:56 -0800 > >>"You get what you inspect" may also apply here. >> >>Rudy Giuliani dramatically changed the output >>of many agencies in New York by measuring >>progress toward the results he wanted. >> >>He probably didn't change the culture, which is >>very difficult, but he got a different result, which >>was enough. >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. >>[SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >>Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2005 9:17 PM >>To: W. David Schwaderer; The new improved paleopsych >>list >>Subject: [Paleopsych] Robust scientific dialog >> >>David, >>Thank you for this inspiring question. I have been >>giving it some thought. >> >>My assumption is that we find true dialog >>threatening. Groups value >>stability. Stability comes from shared meanings, >>shared norms, shared >>values. We create meaning about the universe, and we >>are dismayed by >>data that undermines our creation. >> >>So we started that particular project with a focus on >>group culture. >>What is the norm about dialog? Clearly it had been to >>suppress debate. >>Back-channel communications were common. >> >>I used an Appreciative Inquiry / Solution-focused >>approach, looking for >>exceptions, times when dialog had worked. The idea >>behind that is that >>we can change a culture by seeking positive examples >>of what is desired. >>Fluctuations occur in all systems all the time. Even >>in a culture of >>defensiveness and non-sharing, I assume there will be >>examples of times >>when sharing did happen. If we discover those >>exceptions and talk about >>them, the group members begin to re-view their >>concepts of the group. >>New norms can be based on those exceptional times. >>Trust in the new >>norms is improved by further dialog about them, mroe >>examples. >> >>We asked scientists: >>"We all have experiences of direct, robust dialog, >>and we also have >>experiences when we do not talk directly to others. >>We want to study >>times when dialog was direct, to the point, and >>helpful. Please tell us >>a time when that happened. What was going on? Who was >>involved? What >>were you told? How did that help?" >> >>In retrospect, I should have trained three scientists >>to collect that >>data, and each of them training three more and so on. >>I did too much of >>the work. When the consultant does the interviews, it >>greatly reduces >>the impact on the system, since the consultant is an >>outsider. Insider >>collection of exceptional times is much more >>powerful. >> >>The senior scientist was quite pleased and felt that >>people were being >>more open. We didn't have any actual data, though. >>Not long after, the >>VP of HR became ill and eventually died. >> >>I have much more to say. I wonder whether we ought to >>say this on list? >>Would the paleo group be interested in this dialog >>between you and me? I >>will forward this on to the group and see if we get >>interest. In the >>mean time, David, please write back and tell me if >>this kind of story is >>what you have in mind. I am interested in keeping >>this going. >> >>Lynn >> >>W. David Schwaderer wrote: >> >>>>I once consulted with a pharmaceutical research >>>>firm. ... but they >>>>would not challenge each other. >>>> >>>>Divergent opinions are generally felt as >>>>threatening to the group, and >>>>it takes sustained effort to legitimize divergent >>>>opinions. We came up >>>>with "Robust Scientific Dialog" as a title for an >>>>organizational >>>>intervention that had some positive impact. >>>> >>>> >>> >>>Lynn, I am *extremely* interested in this >>>phenomena - treatment of > dissent >>>and divergent opinion. This is a key human >>>behavior.... >>> >>>=> If you have *any* other thoughts on this please >>>let me know what they >>>are. Please. >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >> << File: ATT00005.html >> << File: ATT00006.txt >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> > > > _________________________________ > SISNA...more service, less money. > http://www.sisna.com/exclusive/ > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From schwaderer_lists at comcast.net Mon Feb 21 23:59:24 2005 From: schwaderer_lists at comcast.net (schwaderer_lists at comcast.net) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 23:59:24 +0000 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Message-ID: <022120052359.13107.421A75DC0006D22C0000333322070032019C9B9C0704A19D0A9D0A0B0E99080C9C@comcast.net> > --Very true. There is often the perception that anyone > who can bridge the values of two groups is a traitor > to both sides. Very interesting.....like cross-over singers who alienate the original group of fans..... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 22 00:31:47 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:31:47 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] RE: redistricting in CA Message-ID: <01C51832.D74D5C90.shovland@mindspring.com> My stipulation that we would remove the human element from the process. Arnold's solution of a board of retired judges is just as prone to corruption as anything involving people. A pure grid system composed of 1 mile squares would be OK. With that grid laid over the map of a state, we would count the population and then apportion representatives according to the standard formula of so many per thousand constituents. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: ldj [SMTP:ldj at mail.sisna.com] Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:47 AM To: Steve Hovland Subject: redistricting in CA Steve, give me the liberal take on this: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jeffjacoby/jj20050221.shtml It seems to me this could be an area we can agree on, left and right? Perhaps the underlying value is power for its own sake (incumbents) vs. real representative government (insurgents)??? Incumbents (in Utah, religious conservatives, in CA, institutionalized democrats) are rigging districts to keep power. Lynn _________________________________ SISNA...more service, less money. http://www.sisna.com/exclusive/ From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 22 00:35:26 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:35:26 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog Message-ID: <01C51833.5A062CC0.shovland@mindspring.com> Yes. That article really turned on a light for me. I think it's important to coldly regard beliefs as mere mental structures. They aren't worth dying for, and they should not be enshrined to such a degree that it is hard to dispose of them when they no longer have survival value. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: schwaderer_lists at comcast.net [SMTP:schwaderer_lists at comcast.net] Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 12:29 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog -------------- Original message -------------- > A corporate culture also includes beliefs, > which are very resistant to change. > > I sent out an article awhile ago about this. Steve, which article was this? Was it this one?... http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-11/beliefs.html Thanks..... << File: ATT00004.html >> << File: ATT00005.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 22 00:42:14 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:42:14 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Message-ID: <01C51834.4CB69F90.shovland@mindspring.com> Like other forms of group competition, politics probably has a full spectrum of belief that is normally distributed. Is America a Liberal country or a Conservative country. The answer is yes :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: schwaderer_lists at comcast.net [SMTP:schwaderer_lists at comcast.net] Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 3:59 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > --Very true. There is often the perception that anyone > who can bridge the values of two groups is a traitor > to both sides. Very interesting.....like cross-over singers who alienate the original group of fans..... << File: ATT00012.html >> << File: ATT00013.txt >> From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Feb 22 02:48:03 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 18:48:03 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog References: <01C51833.5A062CC0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <032101c51888$ef3230f0$d003f604@S0027397558> When anyone regards beliefs as "mere mental structures" is when their entire system of socio-political assurance dissolves. These are our founding father's beliefs and believe it or not it's what they decided to die for. Oh, yeh, they certainly have a survival value. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 4:35 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog > Yes. That article really turned on a light for me. > > I think it's important to coldly regard beliefs > as mere mental structures. > > They aren't worth dying for, and they should not > be enshrined to such a degree that it is hard to > dispose of them when they no longer have > survival value. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: schwaderer_lists at comcast.net > [SMTP:schwaderer_lists at comcast.net] > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 12:29 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific > dialog > > > > -------------- Original message -------------- > >> A corporate culture also includes beliefs, >> which are very resistant to change. >> >> I sent out an article awhile ago about this. > > Steve, which article was this? Was it this one?... > http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-11/beliefs.html > > Thanks..... << File: ATT00004.html >> << File: > ATT00005.txt >> > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Feb 22 02:55:47 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 18:55:47 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 References: <20050221231900.57618.qmail@web30808.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <035701c5188a$03639ae0$d003f604@S0027397558> >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, a threat to shared assumptions that define a group against another. This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you feel is apparent. This I need to hear! Gerry From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Feb 22 03:35:25 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 19:35:25 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog Message-ID: <01C5184C.7E3E9960.shovland@mindspring.com> Many of our founding fathers beliefs still have survival value. Within many religions we find beliefs that I think have little survival value, but which continue to have vast influence because we tend to value beliefs more than facts. How many times have you seen someone reject a physical fact because it conflicted with one of their beliefs about reality? The God of someone who is deeply steeped in science is much different from that of a typical Bible thumper. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 6:48 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog When anyone regards beliefs as "mere mental structures" is when their entire system of socio-political assurance dissolves. These are our founding father's beliefs and believe it or not it's what they decided to die for. Oh, yeh, they certainly have a survival value. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 4:35 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog > Yes. That article really turned on a light for me. > > I think it's important to coldly regard beliefs > as mere mental structures. > > They aren't worth dying for, and they should not > be enshrined to such a degree that it is hard to > dispose of them when they no longer have > survival value. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: schwaderer_lists at comcast.net > [SMTP:schwaderer_lists at comcast.net] > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 12:29 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific > dialog > > > > -------------- Original message -------------- > >> A corporate culture also includes beliefs, >> which are very resistant to change. >> >> I sent out an article awhile ago about this. > > Steve, which article was this? Was it this one?... > http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-11/beliefs.html > > Thanks..... << File: ATT00004.html >> << File: > ATT00005.txt >> > _______________________________________________ > 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 andrewsa at newpaltz.edu Tue Feb 22 04:30:53 2005 From: andrewsa at newpaltz.edu (Alice Andrews) Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 23:30:53 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 References: <20050221231900.57618.qmail@web30808.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <035701c5188a$03639ae0$d003f604@S0027397558> Message-ID: <03a501c51897$4eefbdb0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> Hi Gerry, Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His 'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' doesn't know this either! Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer your question... All best! Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, a threat to shared assumptions that define a group against another. This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you feel is apparent. This I need to hear! Gerry _______________________________________________ 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 Tue Feb 22 11:36:31 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 03:36:31 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Message-ID: <01C5188F.B3EC6090.shovland@mindspring.com> This also touches on the issue of black-and-white versus shades-of-gray mentalities. The conservative mentality tends to be black-and-white while the liberal mentality is more shades-of-gray. Both sides have problems when carried to the extreme. A conservative can be unbending at a time when it is actually in his self-interest to be flexible, and a liberal can be unable to commit to a course of action when that is required. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Alice Andrews [SMTP:andrewsa at newpaltz.edu] Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:31 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Hi Gerry, Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His 'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' doesn't know this either! Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer your question... All best! Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, a threat to shared assumptions that define a group against another. This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you feel is apparent. This I need to hear! Gerry _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych << File: ATT00002.html >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Feb 22 16:25:16 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 08:25:16 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog References: <01C5184C.7E3E9960.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <001501c518fb$193f6490$e300f604@S0027397558> I would suspect that many of our founding fathers were quite religious and not the least atheistic. The Salem witch trials were not based on reality but on belief that witches walked amongst the people of Salem, Massachusetts. One of the main differences between then and now is that some of us presently are so steeped in scientism that in some instances it functions as a religion. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 7:35 PM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific dialog > Many of our founding fathers beliefs still have > survival value. > > Within many religions we find beliefs that I think > have > little survival value, but which continue to have > vast > influence because we tend to value beliefs more than > facts. > > How many times have you seen someone reject a > physical > fact because it conflicted with one of their beliefs > about reality? > > The God of someone who is deeply steeped in science > is > much different from that of a typical Bible thumper. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 6:48 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: Robust scientific > dialog > > > When anyone regards beliefs as "mere mental > structures" > is when their entire system of socio-political > assurance dissolves. These are our founding > father's > beliefs and believe it or not it's what they decided > to > die for. Oh, yeh, they certainly have a survival > value. > > Gerry From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Feb 22 16:50:58 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 08:50:58 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 References: <20050221231900.57618.qmail@web30808.mail.mud.yahoo.com><035701c5188a$03639ae0$d003f604@S0027397558> <03a501c51897$4eefbdb0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> Message-ID: <003101c518fe$aff81c80$e300f604@S0027397558> Hi Alice, Thanks for the rec re: Nesse's "Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment". Although I still haven't read it I'm familiar with its contents. The issue of 'commitment' especially for young people is something that definitely needs addressing and maybe requiring our youth to make a firm political commitment to a particular party will carry over to their demonstrating less risky behavior with drugs, sex, employment, family or whatever. Yet isn't our youth already politically brainwashed into political awareness or have they flicked away that duty as well? I no longer hang out with our country's young but when I did I found that very few had their head screwed on correctly and many were adrift; from what I hear now they still continue on their aimless flow. When I wrote my original answer my thoughts were on "my generation", not the others. Thanks for your post. I'll add the book to my list. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: Alice Andrews To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:30 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Hi Gerry, Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His 'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' doesn't know this either! Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer your question... All best! Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, a threat to shared assumptions that define a group against another. This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you feel is apparent. This I need to hear! Gerry _______________________________________________ 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 anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Feb 22 20:03:20 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 12:03:20 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] bias and categories In-Reply-To: <200502221937.j1MJaph30154@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050222200321.56368.qmail@web30805.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal or conservative camp?<< --Because people don't like to be fooled. And when there is a huge amount of information to sift through and all sources carry some bias, it reduces the work involved significantly if one takes a side and views the other side as biased, deliberately misleading, or corrupt. One side's half-truths, distortions and out of context interpretations of events can be swallowed whole as long as the other side is seen as biased and its perspective rejected out of hand. If we can dismiss everything from liberal sources as sour grapes, or everything from conservative sources as power-mongering, it's a lot easier to feel certain and secure in one's assessment of the political scene. Much harder to stand between two groups that are chronically suspicious and resentful of each other, and take truth from whichever side has more of it at the moment. Much harder to sift through all the information, tracking sources and sorting half-truths from distortion, putting everything in context, etc. That's all painstaking work, and even most journalists will categorize information simplistically in order to stick with the two-party dichotomy. If people can't categorize you, you're like the singer another poster mentioned who tries to cross over into a different style, alienating their original audience. It makes ideas and people harder to categories, and that causes uncertainty and even feelings of betrayal. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Feb 22 21:42:32 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 13:42:32 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 References: <01C5188F.B3EC6090.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <01d301c51927$6b8822b0$e300f604@S0027397558> Of interest is that many older people have grave concerns about their children having difficulty making long-term commitments (see Alice's post below). If what Steve says (below) is correct, by advising our youths to make political and social commitments, we are in effect brainwashing them into grabbing a conservative mentality. I wonder if it also follows that those without any commitment are those with liberal mentality. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'Alice Andrews'" ; "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 3:36 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > This also touches on the issue of black-and-white > versus shades-of-gray mentalities. > > The conservative mentality tends to be > black-and-white > while the liberal mentality is more shades-of-gray. > > Both sides have problems when carried to the extreme. > > A conservative can be unbending at a time when it is > actually in his self-interest to be flexible, and a > liberal > can be unable to commit to a course of action when > that is required. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Alice Andrews [SMTP:andrewsa at newpaltz.edu] > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:31 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol > 9, Issue 20 > > Hi Gerry, > Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the > Capacity for > Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you > don't. (His > 'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) > Anyway, I think the > book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' > itself addresses the > question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting > commitment and for > detecting possible defection in others. People who > tow the party line, etc. > are considered committed. We seek out such people > because it is proximately > and ultimately adaptive to do so. Befriending, > supporting, trusting, etc. > the uncommitted would have been-- and still is, a > risk (or threat). Such > risks could have been very costly over our > evolutionary history and can be > still today. Of course, sometimes such risks (siding > with someone who seems > to be sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can > be to one's > advantage. But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and > probably > 'statistics-brain' doesn't know this either! > Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book > and might answer your > question... > All best! > Alice > ----- Original Message ----- > From: G. Reinhart-Waller > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol > 9, Issue 20 > > > >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative > dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a > nuisance, > a threat to shared assumptions that define a group > against another. > > This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience > reject someone who cannot plop into either the > liberal > or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you > feel is apparent. This I need to hear! > > Gerry > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > << File: > ATT00002.html >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Feb 22 21:43:33 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 13:43:33 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] bias and categories References: <20050222200321.56368.qmail@web30805.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <01d401c51927$8fd81850$e300f604@S0027397558> > --Because people don't like to be fooled. And when > there is a huge amount of information to sift through > and all sources carry some bias, it reduces the work > involved significantly if one takes a side and views. Even more amazing! But you are absolutely correct. And it isn't only politics in which this occurs. The worst scenario is when it happens on campus. In my undergraduate days in college I pledged a sorority and chose one I thought was unlike the rest in that the young women couldn't be typed as they could in the others houses. However, when it came time to select a new pledge class I watch in disbelief how "slippers" made it into the house and women with a sense of unique persona became controversial and ended up being "blackballed". The more mundane a person was the greater chance she had in being accepted by the group. Back to politics.....I tend to think that an either/or choice only takes place in a two party dominated political system. Totalitarian rule certainly eliminates this choice as should a multi-party system similar to what can be found in many European countries. > Much harder to stand between two groups that are > chronically suspicious and resentful of each other, > and take truth from whichever side has more of it at > the moment. Much harder to sift through all the > information, tracking sources and sorting half-truths > from distortion, putting everything in context, etc. > That's all painstaking work, and even most > journalists > will categorize information simplistically in order > to > stick with the two-party dichotomy. If people can't > categorize you, you're like the singer another poster > mentioned who tries to cross over into a different > style, alienating their original audience. It makes > ideas and people harder to categories, and that > causes > uncertainty and even feelings of betrayal. Most academics follow the flow that you describe yet there are some who do not. These unbelievers are the unique individuals who have discovered that truth is relative, lies within the eyes of the beholder, and is constantly changing. These people are the scourge of their fellow peers and in many instances attract only a handful of students because they, like truth, continue to change. Yet these are the scholars whose work will stand up to the test of time, especially if they can figure out how to create an alternate personna which fits into one camp or the other. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar http://www.home.earthlink.net/~waluk From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 23 02:32:31 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:32:31 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Message-ID: <01C5190C.DFACC170.shovland@mindspring.com> I hear the divorce rate in the red states is higher than the blue states :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 1:43 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Of interest is that many older people have grave concerns about their children having difficulty making long-term commitments (see Alice's post below). If what Steve says (below) is correct, by advising our youths to make political and social commitments, we are in effect brainwashing them into grabbing a conservative mentality. I wonder if it also follows that those without any commitment are those with liberal mentality. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Hovland" To: "'Alice Andrews'" ; "'The new improved paleopsych list'" Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 3:36 AM Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > This also touches on the issue of black-and-white > versus shades-of-gray mentalities. > > The conservative mentality tends to be > black-and-white > while the liberal mentality is more shades-of-gray. > > Both sides have problems when carried to the extreme. > > A conservative can be unbending at a time when it is > actually in his self-interest to be flexible, and a > liberal > can be unable to commit to a course of action when > that is required. > > Steve Hovland > www.stevehovland.net > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Alice Andrews [SMTP:andrewsa at newpaltz.edu] > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:31 PM > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol > 9, Issue 20 > > Hi Gerry, > Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the > Capacity for > Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you > don't. (His > 'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) > Anyway, I think the > book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' > itself addresses the > question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting > commitment and for > detecting possible defection in others. People who > tow the party line, etc. > are considered committed. We seek out such people > because it is proximately > and ultimately adaptive to do so. Befriending, > supporting, trusting, etc. > the uncommitted would have been-- and still is, a > risk (or threat). Such > risks could have been very costly over our > evolutionary history and can be > still today. Of course, sometimes such risks (siding > with someone who seems > to be sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can > be to one's > advantage. But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and > probably > 'statistics-brain' doesn't know this either! > Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book > and might answer your > question... > All best! > Alice > ----- Original Message ----- > From: G. Reinhart-Waller > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol > 9, Issue 20 > > > >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative > dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a > nuisance, > a threat to shared assumptions that define a group > against another. > > This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience > reject someone who cannot plop into either the > liberal > or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you > feel is apparent. This I need to hear! > > Gerry > > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > << File: > ATT00002.html >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> > _______________________________________________ > 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 ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Feb 23 04:14:10 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 21:14:10 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 In-Reply-To: <01C5190C.DFACC170.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C5190C.DFACC170.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <421C0312.3060302@solution-consulting.com> Misstatement - more people are _married_ in red states; in blu states they just live together, so 'divorces' aren't recorded. Steve Hovland wrote: >I hear the divorce rate in the red states is >higher than the blue states :-) > > > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] >Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 1:43 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > > >Of interest is that many older people have grave >concerns about their children having difficulty making >long-term commitments (see Alice's post below). If >what Steve says (below) is correct, by advising our >youths to make political and social commitments, we are >in effect brainwashing them into grabbing a >conservative mentality. I wonder if it also follows >that those without any commitment are those with >liberal mentality. > >Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Steve Hovland" >To: "'Alice Andrews'" ; "'The >new improved paleopsych list'" > >Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 3:36 AM >Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, >Issue 20 > > > > >>This also touches on the issue of black-and-white >>versus shades-of-gray mentalities. >> >>The conservative mentality tends to be >>black-and-white >>while the liberal mentality is more shades-of-gray. >> >>Both sides have problems when carried to the extreme. >> >>A conservative can be unbending at a time when it is >>actually in his self-interest to be flexible, and a >>liberal >>can be unable to commit to a course of action when >>that is required. >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Alice Andrews [SMTP:andrewsa at newpaltz.edu] >>Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:31 PM >>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol >>9, Issue 20 >> >>Hi Gerry, >>Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the >>Capacity for >>Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you >>don't. (His >>'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) >>Anyway, I think the >>book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' >>itself addresses the >>question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting >>commitment and for >>detecting possible defection in others. People who >>tow the party line, etc. >>are considered committed. We seek out such people >>because it is proximately >>and ultimately adaptive to do so. Befriending, >>supporting, trusting, etc. >>the uncommitted would have been-- and still is, a >>risk (or threat). Such >>risks could have been very costly over our >>evolutionary history and can be >>still today. Of course, sometimes such risks (siding >>with someone who seems >>to be sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can >>be to one's >>advantage. But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and >>probably >>'statistics-brain' doesn't know this either! >>Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book >>and might answer your >>question... >>All best! >>Alice >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: G. Reinhart-Waller >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol >>9, Issue 20 >> >> >> >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative >> dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a >>nuisance, >> a threat to shared assumptions that define a group >> against another. >> >> This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience >> reject someone who cannot plop into either the >>liberal >> or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you >> feel is apparent. This I need to hear! >> >> Gerry >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >><< File: >>ATT00002.html >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> >>_______________________________________________ >>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 > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Feb 23 04:37:52 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 20:37:52 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Message-ID: <01C5191E.61F3AD40.shovland@mindspring.com> I remember when "Red" used to mean "Commie." How things change :-) Who knows, maybe the Republicans are just a front for the Communists. Strange bedfellows! Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 8:14 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Misstatement - more people are _married_ in red states; in blu states they just live together, so 'divorces' aren't recorded. Steve Hovland wrote: >I hear the divorce rate in the red states is >higher than the blue states :-) > > > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] >Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 1:43 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > > >Of interest is that many older people have grave >concerns about their children having difficulty making >long-term commitments (see Alice's post below). If >what Steve says (below) is correct, by advising our >youths to make political and social commitments, we are >in effect brainwashing them into grabbing a >conservative mentality. I wonder if it also follows >that those without any commitment are those with >liberal mentality. > >Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Steve Hovland" >To: "'Alice Andrews'" ; "'The >new improved paleopsych list'" > >Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 3:36 AM >Subject: RE: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, >Issue 20 > > > > >>This also touches on the issue of black-and-white >>versus shades-of-gray mentalities. >> >>The conservative mentality tends to be >>black-and-white >>while the liberal mentality is more shades-of-gray. >> >>Both sides have problems when carried to the extreme. >> >>A conservative can be unbending at a time when it is >>actually in his self-interest to be flexible, and a >>liberal >>can be unable to commit to a course of action when >>that is required. >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Alice Andrews [SMTP:andrewsa at newpaltz.edu] >>Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:31 PM >>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol >>9, Issue 20 >> >>Hi Gerry, >>Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the >>Capacity for >>Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you >>don't. (His >>'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) >>Anyway, I think the >>book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' >>itself addresses the >>question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting >>commitment and for >>detecting possible defection in others. People who >>tow the party line, etc. >>are considered committed. We seek out such people >>because it is proximately >>and ultimately adaptive to do so. Befriending, >>supporting, trusting, etc. >>the uncommitted would have been-- and still is, a >>risk (or threat). Such >>risks could have been very costly over our >>evolutionary history and can be >>still today. Of course, sometimes such risks (siding >>with someone who seems >>to be sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can >>be to one's >>advantage. But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and >>probably >>'statistics-brain' doesn't know this either! >>Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book >>and might answer your >>question... >>All best! >>Alice >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: G. Reinhart-Waller >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol >>9, Issue 20 >> >> >> >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative >> dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a >>nuisance, >> a threat to shared assumptions that define a group >> against another. >> >> This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience >> reject someone who cannot plop into either the >>liberal >> or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you >> feel is apparent. This I need to hear! >> >> Gerry >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >><< File: >>ATT00002.html >> << File: ATT00003.txt >> >>_______________________________________________ >>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 > > > > << File: ATT00001.html >> << File: ATT00002.txt >> From seamensa at yahoo.com Wed Feb 23 04:59:51 2005 From: seamensa at yahoo.com (SEAMUS) Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 20:59:51 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] HELLO ALICE RE Paleopsych List In-Reply-To: <03a501c51897$4eefbdb0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> Message-ID: <20050223045951.38775.qmail@web54408.mail.yahoo.com> Hello Alice and by the way, I have read that book quite recently. I have been in Dublin Ireland at Trinity College, and have not had much time for the list discussions lately. I am also wondering. Are you at New Paltz SUNY? one of my alma maters from some time ago actually,,, I still love the Shawangunks very much. Well anyway, THANK YOU AGAIN, and perhaps if you like, when I am in NEW York again, I would like to hear more of what you have to say. I hear there is a Starbucks in New Paltz nowadays/// Yours Seamus --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andrewsa at newpaltz.edu Wed Feb 23 13:48:57 2005 From: andrewsa at newpaltz.edu (Alice Andrews) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 08:48:57 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 References: <01C51833.5A062CC0.shovland@mindspring.com> <032101c51888$ef3230f0$d003f604@S0027397558> Message-ID: <031e01c519ae$6d1984c0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> Hi Gerry, Thanks for the note... There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe Frank sent it in?--about teenagers and the possiblity that what they were missing was 'religion' or 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning beyond them.' Do you remember reading that on paleo some time ago? I can't find it...But it seems apropos to your missive. (If anyone knows it and can send out again, I'd appreciate!) Thanks and cheers, Alice Hi Alice, Thanks for the rec re: Nesse's "Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment". Although I still haven't read it I'm familiar with its contents. The issue of 'commitment' especially for young people is something that definitely needs addressing and maybe requiring our youth to make a firm political commitment to a particular party will carry over to their demonstrating less risky behavior with drugs, sex, employment, family or whatever. Yet isn't our youth already politically brainwashed into political awareness or have they flicked away that duty as well? I no longer hang out with our country's young but when I did I found that very few had their head screwed on correctly and many were adrift; from what I hear now they still continue on their aimless flow. When I wrote my original answer my thoughts were on "my generation", not the others. Thanks for your post. I'll add the book to my list. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: Alice Andrews To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:30 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Hi Gerry, Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His 'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' doesn't know this either! Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer your question... All best! Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, a threat to shared assumptions that define a group against another. This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you feel is apparent. This I need to hear! Gerry _______________________________________________ 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 Wed Feb 23 15:50:45 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 08:50:45 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 In-Reply-To: <031e01c519ae$6d1984c0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> References: <01C51833.5A062CC0.shovland@mindspring.com> <032101c51888$ef3230f0$d003f604@S0027397558> <031e01c519ae$6d1984c0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> Message-ID: <421CA655.8060400@solution-consulting.com> Marty Seligman (learned helplessness theorist, Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness, former APA president) - an atheist - mentions that as a key to true happiness. He reviews literature that religious people are generally happier and more fulfilled, more resilient. Czentmyhali (spelling!) at U Chicago finds that kids involved in something greater than themselves are much more likely to experience "flow" and periods of greater happiness. Religion is clearly an adaptive force. BTW, I don't want to hear arguments that religion is behind most wars. That is a pretty tired argument that was thoroughly debunked by the 20th Century. Lynn Alice Andrews wrote: > Hi Gerry, > Thanks for the note... > There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe Frank sent it > in?--about teenagers and the possiblity that what they were missing > was 'religion' or 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning > beyond them.' Do you remember reading that on paleo some time ago? I > can't find it...But it seems apropos to your missive. (If anyone knows > it and can send out again, I'd appreciate!) > Thanks and cheers, > Alice > > Hi Alice, > > Thanks for the rec re: Nesse's "Evolution and the Capacity for > Commitment". Although I still haven't read it I'm familiar with its > contents. The issue of 'commitment' especially for young people is > something that definitely needs addressing and maybe requiring our > youth to make a firm political commitment to a particular party will > carry over to their demonstrating less risky behavior with drugs, sex, > employment, family or whatever. Yet isn't our youth already > politically brainwashed into political awareness or have they flicked > away that duty as well? I no longer hang out with our country's young > but when I did I found that very few had their head screwed on > correctly and many were adrift; from what I hear now they still > continue on their aimless flow. When I wrote my original answer my > thoughts were on "my generation", not the others. Thanks for your post. > > I'll add the book to my list. > > Gerry > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Alice Andrews > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:30 PM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > > Hi Gerry, > Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for > Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His > 'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think > the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself > addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting > commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who > tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such > people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. > Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have > been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been > very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of > course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be > sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. > But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' > doesn't know this either! > Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer > your question... > All best! > Alice > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: G. Reinhart-Waller > To: The new improved paleopsych list > > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > > >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative > dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, > a threat to shared assumptions that define a group > against another. > > This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience > reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal > or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you > feel is apparent. This I need to hear! > > Gerry > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Wed Feb 23 16:19:36 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 11:19:36 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] True happiness. In-Reply-To: <421CA655.8060400@solution-consulting.com> References: <01C51833.5A062CC0.shovland@mindspring.com> <032101c51888$ef3230f0$d003f604@S0027397558> <031e01c519ae$6d1984c0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> <421CA655.8060400@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <421CAD18.3040109@uconn.edu> Is religion *true* hapiness? I know many people who are oblivious to world events and are definetely more happy than the ones who follow what is going on. Are these people *truly* happy? Is the spouse who doesn't know of their partner's affair *truly* happy? Should we create an artifical environment of happiness? This has been a long debate in philosophy. Christian Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. wrote: > Marty Seligman (learned helplessness theorist, /Learned Optimism, > Authentic Happiness/, former APA president) - an atheist - mentions that > as a key to true happiness. He reviews literature that religious people > are generally happier and more fulfilled, more resilient. Czentmyhali > (spelling!) at U Chicago finds that kids involved in something greater > than themselves are much more likely to experience "flow" and periods of > greater happiness. Religion is clearly an adaptive force. BTW, I don't > want to hear arguments that religion is behind most wars. That is a > pretty tired argument that was thoroughly debunked by the 20th Century. > Lynn > > Alice Andrews wrote: > >> Hi Gerry, >> Thanks for the note... >> There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe Frank sent it >> in?--about teenagers and the possiblity that what they were missing >> was 'religion' or 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning >> beyond them.' Do you remember reading that on paleo some time ago? I >> can't find it...But it seems apropos to your missive. (If anyone knows >> it and can send out again, I'd appreciate!) >> Thanks and cheers, >> Alice >> >> Hi Alice, >> >> Thanks for the rec re: Nesse's "Evolution and the Capacity for >> Commitment". Although I still haven't read it I'm familiar with its >> contents. The issue of 'commitment' especially for young people is >> something that definitely needs addressing and maybe requiring our >> youth to make a firm political commitment to a particular party will >> carry over to their demonstrating less risky behavior with drugs, sex, >> employment, family or whatever. Yet isn't our youth already >> politically brainwashed into political awareness or have they flicked >> away that duty as well? I no longer hang out with our country's young >> but when I did I found that very few had their head screwed on >> correctly and many were adrift; from what I hear now they still >> continue on their aimless flow. When I wrote my original answer my >> thoughts were on "my generation", not the others. Thanks for your post. >> >> I'll add the book to my list. >> >> Gerry >> >> >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> *From:* Alice Andrews >> *To:* The new improved paleopsych list >> *Sent:* Monday, February 21, 2005 8:30 PM >> *Subject:* Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> >> Hi Gerry, >> Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for >> Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His >> 'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think >> the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself >> addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting >> commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who >> tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such >> people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. >> Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have >> been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been >> very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of >> course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be >> sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. >> But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' >> doesn't know this either! >> Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer >> your question... >> All best! >> Alice >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> *From:* G. Reinhart-Waller >> *To:* The new improved paleopsych list >> >> *Sent:* Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM >> *Subject:* Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> >> >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative >> dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, >> a threat to shared assumptions that define a group >> against another. >> >> This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience >> reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal >> or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you >> feel is apparent. This I need to hear! >> >> Gerry >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? "The gravest danger to freedom lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology." - President Bush June 1, 2002, West Point, NY "we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of selfdefense by acting preemptively [...] we recognize that our best defense is a good offense" - The National Security Strategy of The United States of America _____________________________________________________________________ ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? From andrewsa at newpaltz.edu Wed Feb 23 18:07:08 2005 From: andrewsa at newpaltz.edu (Alice Andrews) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 13:07:08 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: HELLO ALICE RE Paleopsych List References: <20050223045951.38775.qmail@web54408.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <084e01c519d2$7f3a7050$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> Hiya Seamus, Good to know you read 'Commitment"...I happen to love the way Randy Nesse writes--complex and brilliant ideas written so clearly...What could be better? Yes, I'm at SUNY New Paltz...And yes, the 'Gunks are very wonderful. Still appreciate them after all these 5 1/2 years of living here...! BTW, I have not forgotten your submission from a while ago and will be getting back to people before March 31....I've gotten a lot of stuff, actually! It's exciting... Well, I'll be writing back soon, All best, Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: SEAMUS To: Alice Andrews ; The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 11:59 PM Subject: HELLO ALICE RE Paleopsych List Hello Alice and by the way, I have read that book quite recently. I have been in Dublin Ireland at Trinity College, and have not had much time for the list discussions lately. I am also wondering. Are you at New Paltz SUNY? one of my alma maters from some time ago actually,,, I still love the Shawangunks very much. Well anyway, THANK YOU AGAIN, and perhaps if you like, when I am in NEW York again, I would like to hear more of what you have to say. I hear there is a Starbucks in New Paltz nowadays/// Yours Seamus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andrewsa at newpaltz.edu Wed Feb 23 18:17:50 2005 From: andrewsa at newpaltz.edu (Alice Andrews) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 13:17:50 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Message-ID: <087a01c519d3$fc8c8ab0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> Hi Lynn, Yes, thanks for reminding me re both of those guys in relation to the question (I like both of them!): I'll do a search for them and see if i can find that particular article! Also...a while ago I was reading "The Age of Bifurcation: Understanding the Changing World" by Ervin Laszlo, and he had a wonderful few pages on how to be a materialist and spiritual at the same time. He's speaking at a place in MA--and seems to be connected to WIE?--the place that Howard seems to be connected to...I wish I could go... cheerys, Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. To: Alice Andrews ; The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 10:50 AM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Marty Seligman (learned helplessness theorist, Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness, former APA president) - an atheist - mentions that as a key to true happiness. He reviews literature that religious people are generally happier and more fulfilled, more resilient. Czentmyhali (spelling!) at U Chicago finds that kids involved in something greater than themselves are much more likely to experience "flow" and periods of greater happiness. Religion is clearly an adaptive force. BTW, I don't want to hear arguments that religion is behind most wars. That is a pretty tired argument that was thoroughly debunked by the 20th Century. Lynn Alice Andrews wrote: Hi Gerry, Thanks for the note... There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe Frank sent it in?--about teenagers and the possiblity that what they were missing was 'religion' or 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning beyond them.' Do you remember reading that on paleo some time ago? I can't find it...But it seems apropos to your missive. (If anyone knows it and can send out again, I'd appreciate!) Thanks and cheers, Alice Hi Alice, Thanks for the rec re: Nesse's "Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment". Although I still haven't read it I'm familiar with its contents. The issue of 'commitment' especially for young people is something that definitely needs addressing and maybe requiring our youth to make a firm political commitment to a particular party will carry over to their demonstrating less risky behavior with drugs, sex, employment, family or whatever. Yet isn't our youth already politically brainwashed into political awareness or have they flicked away that duty as well? I no longer hang out with our country's young but when I did I found that very few had their head screwed on correctly and many were adrift; from what I hear now they still continue on their aimless flow. When I wrote my original answer my thoughts were on "my generation", not the others. Thanks for your post. I'll add the book to my list. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: Alice Andrews To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:30 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Hi Gerry, Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His 'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' doesn't know this either! Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer your question... All best! Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, a threat to shared assumptions that define a group against another. This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you feel is apparent. This I need to hear! Gerry _______________________________________________ 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Feb 23 19:35:33 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 11:35:33 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 References: <01C51833.5A062CC0.shovland@mindspring.com> <032101c51888$ef3230f0$d003f604@S0027397558> <031e01c519ae$6d1984c0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> Message-ID: <024201c519de$d8c04300$d203f604@S0027397558> Hi Alice, Many teens need a formal spirituality especially if they are without a purposeful meaning to their life. Others find this purpose through their work, or study, or family. No, I'm not familiar with Frank's post. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: Alice Andrews To: G. Reinhart-Waller ; The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 5:48 AM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Hi Gerry, Thanks for the note... There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe Frank sent it in?--about teenagers and the possiblity that what they were missing was 'religion' or 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning beyond them.' Do you remember reading that on paleo some time ago? I can't find it...But it seems apropos to your missive. (If anyone knows it and can send out again, I'd appreciate!) Thanks and cheers, Alice Hi Alice, Thanks for the rec re: Nesse's "Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment". Although I still haven't read it I'm familiar with its contents. The issue of 'commitment' especially for young people is something that definitely needs addressing and maybe requiring our youth to make a firm political commitment to a particular party will carry over to their demonstrating less risky behavior with drugs, sex, employment, family or whatever. Yet isn't our youth already politically brainwashed into political awareness or have they flicked away that duty as well? I no longer hang out with our country's young but when I did I found that very few had their head screwed on correctly and many were adrift; from what I hear now they still continue on their aimless flow. When I wrote my original answer my thoughts were on "my generation", not the others. Thanks for your post. I'll add the book to my list. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: Alice Andrews To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:30 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Hi Gerry, Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His 'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' doesn't know this either! Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer your question... All best! Alice ----- Original Message ----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller To: The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, a threat to shared assumptions that define a group against another. This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you feel is apparent. This I need to hear! Gerry _______________________________________________ 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 waluk at earthlink.net Wed Feb 23 19:53:15 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 11:53:15 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 References: <01C51833.5A062CC0.shovland@mindspring.com> <032101c51888$ef3230f0$d003f604@S0027397558><031e01c519ae$6d1984c0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> <421CA655.8060400@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <026501c519e1$5190d770$d203f604@S0027397558> Optimism is always key to a happier disposition than is the proverbial glum of a sour puss. Yet it needs to be balanced between too strong a dose that resembles Pollyanna Anna and not enough. Like seasoning of food, too much salt renders the dish inedible. Kids need involvement in something but I certainly wouldn't want to advocate suicide bombing as a way of supporting an ideology. Religion IS behind most wars.....possibly the reason you make the statement you do is because 20th century wars were given tags that substituted for religious zeal...."nationalism" and "technological supremacy" are two such labels. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. To: Alice Andrews ; The new improved paleopsych list Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 7:50 AM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Marty Seligman (learned helplessness theorist, Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness, former APA president) - an atheist - mentions that as a key to true happiness. He reviews literature that religious people are generally happier and more fulfilled, more resilient. Czentmyhali (spelling!) at U Chicago finds that kids involved in something greater than themselves are much more likely to experience "flow" and periods of greater happiness. Religion is clearly an adaptive force. BTW, I don't want to hear arguments that religion is behind most wars. That is a pretty tired argument that was thoroughly debunked by the 20th Century. Lynn -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Feb 23 20:02:06 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 12:02:06 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] True happiness. References: <01C51833.5A062CC0.shovland@mindspring.com><032101c51888$ef3230f0$d003f604@S0027397558><031e01c519ae$6d1984c0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios><421CA655.8060400@solution-consulting.com> <421CAD18.3040109@uconn.edu> Message-ID: <027c01c519e2$8e28f7c0$d203f604@S0027397558> Happiness like most other emotions is truly in the eyes of the beholder. Many psychiatrists have discovered the secret for creating an operable world for their patients and it consists of the new brands of Happy Drugs. Prosaic has become standardized in America just like Apple Pie. If the patient responds favorably, both psychologically and physically, then I'd say prescribe Prosaic. But not all individuals have the same reaction to drugs nor do they have the same psychological problems. Every tub on its own bottom. Gerry Reinhart-Waller ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christian Rauh" To: "The new improved paleopsych list" Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 8:19 AM Subject: [Paleopsych] True happiness. > Is religion *true* hapiness? > > I know many people who are oblivious to world events > and are definetely more happy than the ones who > follow what is going on. Are these people *truly* > happy? > > Is the spouse who doesn't know of their partner's > affair *truly* happy? > > Should we create an artifical environment of > happiness? > > This has been a long debate in philosophy. > > Christian From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Feb 23 20:47:46 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 12:47:46 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] omnology and commitment In-Reply-To: <200502231925.j1NJPKh02701@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050223204746.31988.qmail@web30805.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Gerry says: >>Of interest is that many older people have grave concerns about their children having difficulty making long-term commitments (see Alice's post below).<< --Interestingly, the long-term commitments we ask them to make are often bad risks, or fail to address the real concerns of those who are not yet indoctrinated into a habitual lifestyle. Those who see more options are also more aware of risk, and many kids are "perfectionistic slackers" whose anxiety or indecision is covered by overt apathy. They don't feel secure to make a decision and have it stick. They see how things could go wrong, and if their parents are on dead-end paths that won't work for future generations, kids are more likely to see it. There's also the "apocalypse" effect. If the culture as a whole cannot visualize a livable future, without anxiety over catastrophic wars or ecological collapse, the kids feel that too. >>If what Steve says (below) is correct, by advising our youths to make political and social commitments, we are in effect brainwashing them into grabbing a conservative mentality. I wonder if it also follows that those without any commitment are those with liberal mentality.<< --Whether we're indoctrinating them politically depends on which contexts we pick to apply pressure. Are we pressuring them to make money rather than follow their souls? Or are we pressuring them to develop confidence in their ability to adapt? What rewards/punishments are used? Do we punish them for being undisciplined, or for choosing fields we don't want them to be disciplined in? Liberals may be able to see many possible futures as opposed to one in which everything is set and certain. In times of confusion, that would give the conservative mindset an edge, but when conservative policies fail, liberals are better able to adapt. I think one can be a Leftist without having a liberal mindset, or a Right-winger without having a genuine conservative attitude. An omnologist would, presumably, want to be disciplined in many fields, and free to venture into new fields, explore unusual hypotheses, and follow hunches. The combination of self-discipline and wide-ranging interest is probably not cultivated in any efficient way in the school system (it's been a while so I don't know what schools are like these days). Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Feb 24 02:49:31 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:49:31 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Message-ID: <01C519D8.6955D3F0.shovland@mindspring.com> Lynn, are you familiar with the cult aspects of Naziism? Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 7:51 AM To: Alice Andrews; The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Marty Seligman (learned helplessness theorist, Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness, former APA president) - an atheist - mentions that as a key to true happiness. He reviews literature that religious people are generally happier and more fulfilled, more resilient. Czentmyhali (spelling!) at U Chicago finds that kids involved in something greater than themselves are much more likely to experience "flow" and periods of greater happiness. Religion is clearly an adaptive force. BTW, I don't want to hear arguments that religion is behind most wars. That is a pretty tired argument that was thoroughly debunked by the 20th Century. Lynn Alice Andrews wrote: > Hi Gerry, > Thanks for the note... > There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe Frank sent it > in?--about teenagers and the possiblity that what they were missing > was 'religion' or 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning > beyond them.' Do you remember reading that on paleo some time ago? I > can't find it...But it seems apropos to your missive. (If anyone knows > it and can send out again, I'd appreciate!) > Thanks and cheers, > Alice > > Hi Alice, > > Thanks for the rec re: Nesse's "Evolution and the Capacity for > Commitment". Although I still haven't read it I'm familiar with its > contents. The issue of 'commitment' especially for young people is > something that definitely needs addressing and maybe requiring our > youth to make a firm political commitment to a particular party will > carry over to their demonstrating less risky behavior with drugs, sex, > employment, family or whatever. Yet isn't our youth already > politically brainwashed into political awareness or have they flicked > away that duty as well? I no longer hang out with our country's young > but when I did I found that very few had their head screwed on > correctly and many were adrift; from what I hear now they still > continue on their aimless flow. When I wrote my original answer my > thoughts were on "my generation", not the others. Thanks for your post. > > I'll add the book to my list. > > Gerry > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Alice Andrews > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:30 PM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > > Hi Gerry, > Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for > Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His > 'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think > the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself > addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting > commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who > tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such > people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. > Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have > been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been > very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of > course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be > sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. > But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' > doesn't know this either! > Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer > your question... > All best! > Alice > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: G. Reinhart-Waller > To: The new improved paleopsych list > > Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > > >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative > dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, > a threat to shared assumptions that define a group > against another. > > This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience > reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal > or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you > feel is apparent. This I need to hear! > > Gerry > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 > > << File: ATT00025.html >> << File: ATT00026.txt >> From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Feb 24 03:54:59 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 19:54:59 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] True happiness. References: <01C51833.5A062CC0.shovland@mindspring.com> <032101c51888$ef3230f0$d003f604@S0027397558> <031e01c519ae$6d1984c0$1af9ae44@CallaStudios> <421CA655.8060400@solution-consulting.com> <421CAD18.3040109@uconn.edu> <027c01c519e2$8e28f7c0$d203f604@S0027397558> <421CFAF4.4050600@uconn.edu> Message-ID: <05d801c51a24$9ddc4310$d203f604@S0027397558> I honestly doubt it. I think that people who need a happiness pill don't give a hoot....happiness is happiness in whatever dosage be it pharmelogical or religious. I'm so pleased I'm not a happiness freak. Gerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christian Rauh" To: "G. Reinhart-Waller" Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 1:51 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] True happiness. > But is there a difference between types of hapiness > such that people will diferentiate between, for > example, the pharmacological hapiness and religious > hapiness? > > And is there one which can be called true? > Can they be compared at all? > > Christian > > G. Reinhart-Waller wrote: > >> >> Happiness like most other emotions is truly in the >> eyes of the beholder. Many psychiatrists have >> discovered the secret for creating an operable world >> for their patients and it consists of the new brands >> of Happy Drugs. Prosaic has become standardized in >> America just like Apple Pie. If the patient >> responds favorably, both psychologically and >> physically, then I'd say prescribe Prosaic. But not >> all individuals have the same reaction to drugs nor >> do they have the same psychological problems. Every >> tub on its own bottom. >> >> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >> >> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christian Rauh" >> >> To: "The new improved paleopsych list" >> >> Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 8:19 AM >> Subject: [Paleopsych] True happiness. >> >> >>> Is religion *true* hapiness? >>> >>> I know many people who are oblivious to world >>> events and are definetely more happy than the ones >>> who follow what is going on. Are these people >>> *truly* happy? >>> >>> Is the spouse who doesn't know of their partner's >>> affair *truly* happy? >>> >>> Should we create an artifical environment of >>> happiness? >>> >>> This has been a long debate in philosophy. >>> >>> Christian >> >> >> > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Thu Feb 24 05:40:24 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 22:40:24 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 In-Reply-To: <01C519D8.6955D3F0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C519D8.6955D3F0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <421D68C8.70401@solution-consulting.com> Yes, it is clear that Nazism tried to undermine legitimate religions and was positively hostile toward religious figures. Recall the famous quote by Niemoeller, and observe that it was often religiously committed people who opposed Nazism (Niemoeller was far too rough on himself; he was an early opponent of Nazism, as were many other pastors.) http://www.christianethicstoday.com/Issue/009/First%20They%20Came%20for%20the%20Jews%20By%20Franklin%20H%20Littell_009_29_.htm The cult was, IMHO, a maneuver to reduce religiousity, to replace Christianity with something that could be induced to support irreligiousity. Have you read The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom? She points out that there was a terrible erosion of religious devotion in Germany in the late 1920s. Her brother, studying in Germany, wrote extensively to her about it. The dialog she reports between herself and the Nazi lieutenent is breathtaking. One cannot be truely educated about the 20th Century without digesting that book. BTW, the story behind the family that hid the piano player (that movie) was that they were committed Catholics who saved him from the Nazis at the risk of their own lives. The movie hid that vital bit of data. Thank you, anti-religious fanatics of Hollywood. Finally, a young Mormon lad named Huebner was beheaded by the gestapo for publishing anti-nazi tracts (he secretly used the church duplicating machine - remember those old things you hand cranked with a special carbon-like master?). Religiousity played an oppositional role in Nazi Germany, and the loss of religiousity caused people to lose their bearings. Corrie Ten Boom and her sister clearly did not lose theirs; Huebner did not lose his, and Martin Niemoeller certainly did not lose his. Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: >Lynn, are you familiar with the cult aspects >of Naziism? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 7:51 AM >To: Alice Andrews; The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > >Marty Seligman (learned helplessness theorist, Learned Optimism, >Authentic Happiness, former APA president) - an atheist - mentions that >as a key to true happiness. He reviews literature that religious people >are generally happier and more fulfilled, more resilient. Czentmyhali >(spelling!) at U Chicago finds that kids involved in something greater >than themselves are much more likely to experience "flow" and periods of >greater happiness. Religion is clearly an adaptive force. BTW, I don't >want to hear arguments that religion is behind most wars. That is a >pretty tired argument that was thoroughly debunked by the 20th Century. >Lynn > >Alice Andrews wrote: > > > >>Hi Gerry, >>Thanks for the note... >>There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe Frank sent it >>in?--about teenagers and the possiblity that what they were missing >>was 'religion' or 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning >>beyond them.' Do you remember reading that on paleo some time ago? I >>can't find it...But it seems apropos to your missive. (If anyone knows >>it and can send out again, I'd appreciate!) >>Thanks and cheers, >>Alice >> >>Hi Alice, >> >>Thanks for the rec re: Nesse's "Evolution and the Capacity for >>Commitment". Although I still haven't read it I'm familiar with its >>contents. The issue of 'commitment' especially for young people is >>something that definitely needs addressing and maybe requiring our >>youth to make a firm political commitment to a particular party will >>carry over to their demonstrating less risky behavior with drugs, sex, >>employment, family or whatever. Yet isn't our youth already >>politically brainwashed into political awareness or have they flicked >>away that duty as well? I no longer hang out with our country's young >>but when I did I found that very few had their head screwed on >>correctly and many were adrift; from what I hear now they still >>continue on their aimless flow. When I wrote my original answer my >>thoughts were on "my generation", not the others. Thanks for your post. >> >>I'll add the book to my list. >> >>Gerry >> >> >> >>----- Original Message ----- >>From: Alice Andrews >>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:30 PM >>Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> >>Hi Gerry, >>Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for >>Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His >>'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think >>the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself >>addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting >>commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who >>tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such >>people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. >>Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have >>been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been >>very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of >>course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be >>sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. >>But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' >>doesn't know this either! >>Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer >>your question... >>All best! >>Alice >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: G. Reinhart-Waller >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> >> Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> >> >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative >> dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, >> a threat to shared assumptions that define a group >> against another. >> >> This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience >> reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal >> or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you >> feel is apparent. This I need to hear! >> >> Gerry >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00025.html >> << File: ATT00026.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >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 Thu Feb 24 14:45:54 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 07:45:54 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Experienced Physicians not better Message-ID: <421DE8A2.3030309@solution-consulting.com> Interesting piece from Medscape, since we sometimes discuss aging and functional loss. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/499664 More Experienced Physicians May Provide Lower Quality of Care Cathy Tokarski Feb. 17, 2005 ? Conventional wisdom about physician expertise generally holds that the longer a physician has been in practice, the better honed his or her clinical skills become. But a new study turns that adage on its head with its conclusion that physicians who have been in practice longer may, in fact, provide lower quality of care. The problem is not that more experienced physicians are not intelligent, well-trained or competent, and the findings "should not be used to put the blame on older physicians," said study lead author Niteesh K. Choudhry, MD, an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Instead, "the problem is that we've been relying on methods that may not be very effective in requiring that physicians keep up to date." To address that gap, the traditional methods of keeping physicians' knowledge and clinical practice current need to be reexamined and altered, according to the study. "Over the past 15 or 20 years, there has been a body of literature generated that helps to identify what techniques work and don't work," Dr. Choudhry told Medscape in an interview. "We should refocus our efforts for recertification and relicensing on that." The study linking physician years in practice to quality of care, published in the Feb. 15 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, was based on a Medline review of 59 articles from 1996 through 2004 that reported data on 62 groups of outcomes. Studies were included if they were original reports that provided empirical results; measured knowledge, guideline adherence, mortality, or some other type of quality-of-care process; and included years since graduation from medical school, years since certification, or physician age as a potential variable influencing results. The studies were then categorized into four groups on the basis of whether they evaluated knowledge (such as knowledge of indications for blood transfusions); adherence to standards of care for diagnosis, screening, or prevention (for example, following preventive care guidelines); adherence to standards of care for therapy (such as appropriate prescribing); or health outcomes (mortality, for example). Results were then classified into six groups on the basis of the association between the length of time a physician had been in practice and his or her performance: consistently negative, partially negative, no effect, mixed effect, partially positive, and consistently positive. Overall, more than half (52%) of the 62 evaluations captured in the studies showed a negative association between increasing experience and performance for all outcomes assessed, and an additional 21% showed a negative association for some outcomes and none for others. The study also found that only two evaluations (3%) reported that performance initially increased with longer experience, peaked, then decreased, while 21% found no association. One evaluation (2%) reported increased performance with longer experience in practice for some outcomes, but no association for others, and only one evaluation (2%) found increased performance with more years in practice for all outcomes. In the area of assessing the knowledge of practicing physicians, for example, all of the 12 studies used reported a negative association between knowledge and increased experience, the study found. For example, after adjusting for specialty and other variables, physicians younger than 40 years were more likely to believe in the value of established therapies that improve survival rates for acute myocardial infarction (AMI), such as thrombolytic agents, aspirin, and beta-blockers, and less likely to believe in the value of therapies that have been disproved, such as prophylactic lidocaine, the study found. The methodology used in the AMI study was "particularly well done," said Dr. Choudhry, controlling for variables that often can skew a theory about experience and competence. "What this study did was it controlled for a series of patient and physician factors that would have confounded the relationship," he said. "It's hard to dismiss the results out of hand." The study results call into question the benefit of relying exclusively on continuing medical activities, such as attending lectures or reading journal articles, as a way to remain current in knowledge and practice, Dr. Choudry said. Such methods require only a "passive participation in acquiring knowledge." What is needed instead are activities in which "physicians are interacting with other physicians or using information technology" to measure or build on their clinical skills, he said. So-called "academic detailing," in which physicians or pharmacists visit physicians' offices to discuss appropriate treatments has proven successful in areas where it has been tested in Canada, Dr. Choudhry said. "One of the big messages of the literature about behavior change is that we need to use more than one thing." An accompanying editorial cautions, "The profession cannot ignore this striking finding and its implications: Practice does not make perfect, but it must be accompanied by an ongoing effort to maintain competence and quality of care." To that end, the editorialists representing the American College of Physicians and the American Board of Internal Medicine recommend that professional development apply to a physician's entire career, not just to those in the early professional years. In addition, the editorial called on physicians to support the concept behind the American Board of Medical Specialties' "maintenance of certification," which replaces one-time certification for life with ongoing performance measurement. "This model of professional development provides a way to identify gaps between current and ideal practice, which is the first step toward acquiring needed new knowledge, skills, and processes of care," the editorialists write. Ann Intern Med. 2005:142:260-273, 302-303 Reviewed by Gary D. Vogin, MD From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Feb 24 16:49:37 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 08:49:37 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] omnology and commitment References: <20050223204746.31988.qmail@web30805.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <008101c51a90$d4d2ba40$2003f604@S0027397558> Michael offers: > I > think one can be a Leftist without having a liberal > mindset, or a Right-winger without having a genuine > conservative attitude. I'm not all that clear what you mean here. Is it that you think Leftists can have a conservative streak and Right-wingers are able to think in liberal tones? If that were true then USA would be one party system. Actually I do think you're onto something. Care to explain further? Gerry Reinhart-Waller From waluk at earthlink.net Thu Feb 24 16:56:05 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 08:56:05 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 References: <01C519D8.6955D3F0.shovland@mindspring.com> <421D68C8.70401@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <009601c51a91$bc0fa850$2003f604@S0027397558> Lynn writes: >>BTW, the story behind the family that hid the piano player (that movie) was that they were committed Catholics who saved him from the Nazis at the risk of their own lives. The movie hid that vital bit of data. Thank you, anti-religious fanatics of Hollywood.>> That's the story my family tells about their relatives in Poland. Only we who were raised Catholic might have been of Jewish ancestry. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Feb 24 20:05:33 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 12:05:33 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] teen spirit In-Reply-To: <200502241916.j1OJGlh21937@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050224200533.30607.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Alice says: >>There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe Frank sent it in?--about teenagers and the possiblity that what they were missing was 'religion' or 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning beyond them.'<< --I think that's true in a way. Unfortunately, the only alternatives kids can see are traditional religion, drugs or "boot camp" and team-oriented programs which tend to be too authoritarian to meet spiritual needs. What's needed is a place where kids can be creative, make music, play with multimedia. Something that involves teamwork without coercion, enables kids to develop a voice in the world and be heard. Our culture has become swamped with conformity and with knee-jerk rebelliousness (which has its own rules of conformity), neither of which enables kids to develop a genuine, individual creative voice. Most people, including adults, use romantic relationships as their next best outlet, which puts too much pressure on relationships. Spiritual blocks and creative blocks are basically the same problem: overediting, overfiltering and excessive worry or confusion about how messages are received. Give kids a place they can fully express their visions, where they aren't torn down for coloring outside the lines, and you'll change the culture for the better. The current trend toward greater structure and conformity won't work, although it may pave the way for more evolved forms of teamwork later on. Discipline isn't a bad thing, but when it's based on fear of disappointing a group or an authority, a compensating tendency toward individuality is inevitable. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Thu Feb 24 20:19:55 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 12:19:55 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] religion In-Reply-To: <200502241916.j1OJGlh21937@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050224201955.55678.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Lynn says: >>Religion is clearly an adaptive force.<< --Probably true. But what makes it so? The ability to feel certain, to override doubt, to avoid the paralysis of indecision? The feeling of being part of a group dedicated to a common goal? I'm sure both would change the biochemical habits of the brains involved. I'm not sure I'd classify an isolated mystic in the same category as a "team player" whose religion is deeply enmeshed with group morality and conformity. They may both have a religious belief, but their behavior may be vastly different. Can patriotism be considered a kind of religion, with a flag as its deity and military/economic/social/religious authorities as prophets? Some have called Soviet-style Communism a "religion". For dictionary purposes, religion may involve a deity, invisible forces and so on, but we've seen that the religious FEELING, the behavior attached to faith, can be found in groups lacking a deity but using some "sacred" symbol as its focus. Is religion inherently "politically correct", based on conformity to one belief? Does it lose its power when free inquiry and interpretation are encouraged? Or is belief only a flag added to an already moving force, the synchronization of bodies, beneath the level of language? For anthropological purposes, it might make some sense to classify religious and nonreligious groups by the particular forms of entrainment, role modeling, and conformity enforcement found in them. Under that kind of classification, a religious group that is very diverse and individualistic would be qualitatively different from a religious group that enforces conformity and engages in "spiritual battle" against impurity. An atheist group which does the latter would be classified with the religious group, while an atheist group populated by diversity generators would be grouped with liberal religious groups. This might undermine the traditional "religious vs. nonreligious" polarity, but it makes more sense to me from a behavioral standpoint. Any thoughts? >>BTW, I don't want to hear arguments that religion is behind most wars. That is a pretty tired argument that was thoroughly debunked by the 20th Century.<< --No doubt, religious belief isn't necessary in order for a group to see another group as evil and worthy of extermination. It might help a little, however, if you believe your group is endorsed by a deity who hates your enemy as much as you do. But, as I mentioned, that deity can be replaced by the spirit of the group, if that spirit is unquestioned and has its own momentum. Perhaps that's what a deity really is, the hidden face of the power of the group. Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From paul.werbos at verizon.net Thu Feb 24 21:29:20 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 16:29:20 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] religion In-Reply-To: <20050224201955.55678.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <200502241916.j1OJGlh21937@tick.javien.com> <20050224201955.55678.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050224162209.05c79c20@incoming.verizon.net> We can agree reasonably far on what defines religion -- i.e. how we decide what is or is not a "religion" in common language in English. We can do so, at least by example. And Webster and the Oxford dictionary have gone about as far as we can reasonably do with that aspect of "what is religion?" On the other hand, it is much harder for us even to discuss what the significance of the phenomenon is, or even how it interacts dynamically with human minds and human societies, if we make very different assumptions about the spiritual aspects of life. In a debate between the formalistic "people of the books," who see religion as some kind of obedience to authority or commitment to a particular pile of words -- versus modern secular humanism... is there any hope of connecting to reality from either perspective? Or is it like the logical thrashing of a kind of expert system which does not have any inductive, sensory or semiotic component? Whatever... From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Feb 25 00:30:53 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 16:30:53 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Message-ID: <01C51A8E.36152200.shovland@mindspring.com> If you can find it, an old book called "The Morning of the Magicians" had quite a lot about Nazi occultism- the Thule stuff, expeditions to Tibet. Just before he was executed one SS man muttered some kind of strange prayer and went to his death placidly. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 9:40 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Yes, it is clear that Nazism tried to undermine legitimate religions and was positively hostile toward religious figures. Recall the famous quote by Niemoeller, and observe that it was often religiously committed people who opposed Nazism (Niemoeller was far too rough on himself; he was an early opponent of Nazism, as were many other pastors.) http://www.christianethicstoday.com/Issue/009/First%20They%20Came%20for%20the%20Jews%20By%20Franklin%20H%20Littell_009_29_.htm The cult was, IMHO, a maneuver to reduce religiousity, to replace Christianity with something that could be induced to support irreligiousity. Have you read The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom? She points out that there was a terrible erosion of religious devotion in Germany in the late 1920s. Her brother, studying in Germany, wrote extensively to her about it. The dialog she reports between herself and the Nazi lieutenent is breathtaking. One cannot be truely educated about the 20th Century without digesting that book. BTW, the story behind the family that hid the piano player (that movie) was that they were committed Catholics who saved him from the Nazis at the risk of their own lives. The movie hid that vital bit of data. Thank you, anti-religious fanatics of Hollywood. Finally, a young Mormon lad named Huebner was beheaded by the gestapo for publishing anti-nazi tracts (he secretly used the church duplicating machine - remember those old things you hand cranked with a special carbon-like master?). Religiousity played an oppositional role in Nazi Germany, and the loss of religiousity caused people to lose their bearings. Corrie Ten Boom and her sister clearly did not lose theirs; Huebner did not lose his, and Martin Niemoeller certainly did not lose his. Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: >Lynn, are you familiar with the cult aspects >of Naziism? > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 7:51 AM >To: Alice Andrews; The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > >Marty Seligman (learned helplessness theorist, Learned Optimism, >Authentic Happiness, former APA president) - an atheist - mentions that >as a key to true happiness. He reviews literature that religious people >are generally happier and more fulfilled, more resilient. Czentmyhali >(spelling!) at U Chicago finds that kids involved in something greater >than themselves are much more likely to experience "flow" and periods of >greater happiness. Religion is clearly an adaptive force. BTW, I don't >want to hear arguments that religion is behind most wars. That is a >pretty tired argument that was thoroughly debunked by the 20th Century. >Lynn > >Alice Andrews wrote: > > > >>Hi Gerry, >>Thanks for the note... >>There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe Frank sent it >>in?--about teenagers and the possiblity that what they were missing >>was 'religion' or 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning >>beyond them.' Do you remember reading that on paleo some time ago? I >>can't find it...But it seems apropos to your missive. (If anyone knows >>it and can send out again, I'd appreciate!) >>Thanks and cheers, >>Alice >> >>Hi Alice, >> >>Thanks for the rec re: Nesse's "Evolution and the Capacity for >>Commitment". Although I still haven't read it I'm familiar with its >>contents. The issue of 'commitment' especially for young people is >>something that definitely needs addressing and maybe requiring our >>youth to make a firm political commitment to a particular party will >>carry over to their demonstrating less risky behavior with drugs, sex, >>employment, family or whatever. Yet isn't our youth already >>politically brainwashed into political awareness or have they flicked >>away that duty as well? I no longer hang out with our country's young >>but when I did I found that very few had their head screwed on >>correctly and many were adrift; from what I hear now they still >>continue on their aimless flow. When I wrote my original answer my >>thoughts were on "my generation", not the others. Thanks for your post. >> >>I'll add the book to my list. >> >>Gerry >> >> >> >>----- Original Message ----- >>From: Alice Andrews >>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:30 PM >>Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> >>Hi Gerry, >>Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for >>Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His >>'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think >>the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself >>addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting >>commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who >>tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such >>people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. >>Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have >>been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been >>very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of >>course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be >>sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. >>But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' >>doesn't know this either! >>Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer >>your question... >>All best! >>Alice >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: G. Reinhart-Waller >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> >> Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> >> >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative >> dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, >> a threat to shared assumptions that define a group >> against another. >> >> This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience >> reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal >> or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you >> feel is apparent. This I need to hear! >> >> Gerry >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00025.html >> << File: ATT00026.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Feb 25 00:58:36 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 16:58:36 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] omnology and commitment Message-ID: <01C51A92.15B9E960.shovland@mindspring.com> At the extremes of both the left and right you will probably find black and white thinking. In the middle of the distribution you will moderate conservatives and moderate liberals who are more relaxed. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 8:50 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] omnology and commitment Michael offers: > I > think one can be a Leftist without having a liberal > mindset, or a Right-winger without having a genuine > conservative attitude. I'm not all that clear what you mean here. Is it that you think Leftists can have a conservative streak and Right-wingers are able to think in liberal tones? If that were true then USA would be one party system. Actually I do think you're onto something. Care to explain further? Gerry Reinhart-Waller _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Feb 25 00:59:54 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 16:59:54 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] religion Message-ID: <01C51A92.44383990.shovland@mindspring.com> I think it is useful to separate religious technology such as prayer from the encrustations of sectarian belief systems. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Paul J. Werbos, Dr. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 1:29 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list; paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] religion We can agree reasonably far on what defines religion -- i.e. how we decide what is or is not a "religion" in common language in English. We can do so, at least by example. And Webster and the Oxford dictionary have gone about as far as we can reasonably do with that aspect of "what is religion?" On the other hand, it is much harder for us even to discuss what the significance of the phenomenon is, or even how it interacts dynamically with human minds and human societies, if we make very different assumptions about the spiritual aspects of life. In a debate between the formalistic "people of the books," who see religion as some kind of obedience to authority or commitment to a particular pile of words -- versus modern secular humanism... is there any hope of connecting to reality from either perspective? Or is it like the logical thrashing of a kind of expert system which does not have any inductive, sensory or semiotic component? Whatever... _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Feb 25 01:12:41 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 17:12:41 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Warning From the Markets (NY Times editorial) Message-ID: <01C51A94.0D297570.shovland@mindspring.com> Warning From the Markets When a seemingly innocuous remark from the central bank of South Korea makes the dollar tank, as happened on Tuesday, all is not well with the United States' position in the world economy. The dollar has been on a downward trajectory for three years, thanks in part to the Bush administration's decision to try to use a cheap dollar to shrink the nation's enormous trade deficit. (A weak dollar makes exports cheaper and imports costlier, a combination that theoretically should narrow the trade gap.) To be truly effective, however, a weak dollar must be combined with a lower federal budget deficit - or even a budget surplus, something the administration clearly hasn't delivered. So predictably, the weak-dollar ploy hasn't worked. The United States' trade deficit has mushroomed to record levels, as has the United States' need to borrow from abroad - some $2 billion a day - just to balance its books. Enter South Korea. On Monday, its central bank reported that it intended to diversify into other currencies and away from dollar-based assets. And why not? It holds about $69 billion in United States Treasury securities, or 4 percent of the total foreign Treasury holdings. Such dollar-based investments lose value as the dollar weakens, leading to losses that any cautious banker would want to avoid. But as the Korean comment ping-ponged around the world, all hell broke loose, with currency traders selling dollars for fear that the central banks of Japan and China, which hold immense dollar reserves - a combined $900 billion, or 46 percent of foreign Treasury holdings - might follow suit. That would be the United States' worst economic nightmare. If it appeared that the flow of investment from abroad was not enough to cover the nation's gargantuan deficits, interest rates would rise sharply, the dollar would plunge further, and the economy would stall. A fiscal crisis would result. Tuesday's sell-off of dollars did not precipitate a meltdown. But it sure gave a taste of one. The dollar suffered its worst single-day decline in two months against the yen and the euro. Stock markets in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt dropped, and gold and oil prices, which tend to go up when the dollar goes down, spiked. Luckily, the markets calmed down yesterday, as Asian central banks said they they did not intend to shun dollars. While such damage control is welcome, it's no fix. Tuesday's market episode has its roots in American structural imbalances that will be corrected only by new policies, not more of the same tax-cut-and-weak-dollar deficit-bloating ploys. If Mr. Bush were half the capitalist he claims he is, he would listen to what the markets are telling him. From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Fri Feb 25 03:12:08 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 20:12:08 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] religion In-Reply-To: <20050224201955.55678.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050224201955.55678.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <421E9788.1020903@solution-consulting.com> A few comments . . . Michael Christopher wrote: >Lynn says: > > >>>Religion is clearly an adaptive force.<< >>> >>> > >--Probably true. But what makes it so? The ability to >feel certain, to override doubt, to avoid the >paralysis of indecision? The feeling of being part of >a group dedicated to a common goal? I'm sure both >would change the biochemical habits of the brains >involved. > The piece about being in a group is very important, that shows up in some studies as vital. When we meet face-to-face each week, there is something intrinsic about that which gives a sense of belonging and security and confidence in the future. The group is with you. Prayer and an internal spiritual life (or, meditation in Buddhism) helps a great deal. Adherents "see answers to prayers" and there is a positive loop established which gives one a sense of mastery of diffuse forces, as well as a way of feeling attuned to outcomes one doesn't like (see C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed.) A religion that emphasizes peace, forgiveness, and compassion has some vital pieces, namely raising immune markers, DHEA, lowering cortisol, etc. There are large-scale studies on forgiveness, for example, which demonstrate powerful pro-health benefits. > >I'm not sure I'd classify an isolated mystic in the >same category as a "team player" whose religion is >deeply enmeshed with group morality and conformity. > The conformity piece is probably over-emphasized by people who haven't been a sustaining part of a faith-based community. That is something that most adherents do not experience as an issue. >They may both have a religious belief, but their >behavior may be vastly different. Can patriotism be >considered a kind of religion, with a flag as its >deity and military/economic/social/religious >authorities as prophets? > Likely, good point. But patriotism doesn't have the face-to-face weekly group experience that a faith community typically does. It is more removed, and it is less of a personal challenge. In faith communities one strives to conform one's behavior, NOT BECAUSE OF CONFORMITY, please, but because of an over-riding vision of what a "good life" consists of. >Some have called Soviet-style >Communism a "religion". > Yes, but detrimental to people, there is no question of that. No emphasis on individual accountability, on compassion, forgiveness, peace . . . it was / is an "evil empire" in every sense. >For dictionary purposes, >religion may involve a deity, invisible forces and so >on, but we've seen that the religious FEELING, the >behavior attached to faith, can be found in groups >lacking a deity but using some "sacred" symbol as its >focus. > > Ummm??? For example? Flag? I am patriotic and religious, and the two are very different experiences. >Is religion inherently "politically correct", based on >conformity to one belief? Does it lose its power when >free inquiry and interpretation are encouraged? Or is >belief only a flag added to an already moving force, >the synchronization of bodies, beneath the level of >language? > Look at a site like Adherents.com and notice the dialog. Conformity is never the key, and inquiry and interpretation are ubiquitous. Belief, not conformity is the common element. There are old saws about get two Jews together and you get three opinions. Mormons are the same way. The internal, mental life of a believer is active and vital, and there is much soul searching and deep reflection. Within religious groups there is much diversity. > >For anthropological purposes, it might make some sense >to classify religious and nonreligious groups by the >particular forms of entrainment, role modeling, and >conformity enforcement found in them. Under that kind >of classification, a religious group that is very >diverse and individualistic would be qualitatively >different from a religious group that enforces >conformity and engages in "spiritual battle" against >impurity. An atheist group which does the latter would >be classified with the religious group, while an >atheist group populated by diversity generators would >be grouped with liberal religious groups. This might >undermine the traditional "religious vs. nonreligious" >polarity, but it makes more sense to me from a >behavioral standpoint. Any thoughts? > > > >>>BTW, I don't want to hear arguments that religion is >>> >>> >behind most wars. That is a pretty tired argument that >was thoroughly debunked by the 20th Century.<< > >--No doubt, religious belief isn't necessary in order >for a group to see another group as evil and worthy of >extermination. It might help a little, however, if you >believe your group is endorsed by a deity who hates >your enemy as much as you do. But, as I mentioned, >that deity can be replaced by the spirit of the group, >if that spirit is unquestioned and has its own >momentum. Perhaps that's what a deity really is, the >hidden face of the power of the group. > Well, that lacks the therapeutic qualities of group interaction, faith, compassion . . . > >Michael > > > >__________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around >http://mail.yahoo.com >_______________________________________________ >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 Fri Feb 25 03:34:07 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 20:34:07 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 In-Reply-To: <01C51A8E.36152200.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C51A8E.36152200.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <421E9CAF.2080401@solution-consulting.com> I found this: http://www.cafes.net/ditch/motm1.htm I am doubtful about the veracity of the book, based on that essay. It sounds like the author, Pauwels, was a provocative and speculative writer, not an historian. I did find this: http://www.sumeria.net/politics/nazioccult.html and I recall that Hitler did have great fascination with the occult. That article supports that. I am not certain what role occultism played, in spite of that website. There is ambiguous evidence, even on that site. (Nice emphasis on how 'science' causes wars . . . eugenics!) I haven't read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich since I was in 8th grade, and so I don't remember what Shirer says about that. Anyone else want to elucidate? Lynn PS: both sites seem to be characterized by special pleading, and that is generally a bad sign. Steve Hovland wrote: >If you can find it, an old book called "The Morning of the Magicians" >had quite a lot about Nazi occultism- the Thule stuff, expeditions >to Tibet. Just before he was executed one SS man muttered >some kind of strange prayer and went to his death placidly. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 9:40 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > >Yes, it is clear that Nazism tried to undermine legitimate religions and >was positively hostile toward religious figures. Recall the famous quote >by Niemoeller, and observe that it was often religiously committed >people who opposed Nazism (Niemoeller was far too rough on himself; he >was an early opponent of Nazism, as were many other pastors.) >http://www.christianethicstoday.com/Issue/009/First%20They%20Came%20for%20the%20Jews%20By%20Franklin%20H%20Littell_009_29_.htm > >The cult was, IMHO, a maneuver to reduce religiousity, to replace >Christianity with something that could be induced to support >irreligiousity. Have you read The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom? She >points out that there was a terrible erosion of religious devotion in >Germany in the late 1920s. Her brother, studying in Germany, wrote >extensively to her about it. The dialog she reports between herself and >the Nazi lieutenent is breathtaking. One cannot be truely educated about >the 20th Century without digesting that book. > >BTW, the story behind the family that hid the piano player (that movie) >was that they were committed Catholics who saved him from the Nazis at >the risk of their own lives. The movie hid that vital bit of data. Thank >you, anti-religious fanatics of Hollywood. > >Finally, a young Mormon lad named Huebner was beheaded by the gestapo >for publishing anti-nazi tracts (he secretly used the church duplicating >machine - remember those old things you hand cranked with a special >carbon-like master?). Religiousity played an oppositional role in Nazi >Germany, and the loss of religiousity caused people to lose their >bearings. Corrie Ten Boom and her sister clearly did not lose theirs; >Huebner did not lose his, and Martin Niemoeller certainly did not lose his. >Lynn > > >Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >>Lynn, are you familiar with the cult aspects >>of Naziism? >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >>Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 7:51 AM >>To: Alice Andrews; The new improved paleopsych list >>Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> >>Marty Seligman (learned helplessness theorist, Learned Optimism, >>Authentic Happiness, former APA president) - an atheist - mentions that >>as a key to true happiness. He reviews literature that religious people >>are generally happier and more fulfilled, more resilient. Czentmyhali >>(spelling!) at U Chicago finds that kids involved in something greater >>than themselves are much more likely to experience "flow" and periods of >>greater happiness. Religion is clearly an adaptive force. BTW, I don't >>want to hear arguments that religion is behind most wars. That is a >>pretty tired argument that was thoroughly debunked by the 20th Century. >>Lynn >> >>Alice Andrews wrote: >> >> >> >> >> >>>Hi Gerry, >>>Thanks for the note... >>>There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe Frank sent it >>>in?--about teenagers and the possiblity that what they were missing >>>was 'religion' or 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning >>>beyond them.' Do you remember reading that on paleo some time ago? I >>>can't find it...But it seems apropos to your missive. (If anyone knows >>>it and can send out again, I'd appreciate!) >>>Thanks and cheers, >>>Alice >>> >>>Hi Alice, >>> >>>Thanks for the rec re: Nesse's "Evolution and the Capacity for >>>Commitment". Although I still haven't read it I'm familiar with its >>>contents. The issue of 'commitment' especially for young people is >>>something that definitely needs addressing and maybe requiring our >>>youth to make a firm political commitment to a particular party will >>>carry over to their demonstrating less risky behavior with drugs, sex, >>>employment, family or whatever. Yet isn't our youth already >>>politically brainwashed into political awareness or have they flicked >>>away that duty as well? I no longer hang out with our country's young >>>but when I did I found that very few had their head screwed on >>>correctly and many were adrift; from what I hear now they still >>>continue on their aimless flow. When I wrote my original answer my >>>thoughts were on "my generation", not the others. Thanks for your post. >>> >>>I'll add the book to my list. >>> >>>Gerry >>> >>> >>> >>>----- Original Message ----- >>>From: Alice Andrews >>>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>>Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:30 PM >>>Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >>> >>>Hi Gerry, >>>Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for >>>Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His >>>'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think >>>the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself >>>addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting >>>commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who >>>tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such >>>people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. >>>Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have >>>been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been >>>very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of >>>course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be >>>sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. >>>But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' >>>doesn't know this either! >>>Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer >>>your question... >>>All best! >>>Alice >>> >>> ----- Original Message ----- >>> From: G. Reinhart-Waller >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> >>> Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM >>> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >>> >>> >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative >>> dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, >>> a threat to shared assumptions that define a group >>> against another. >>> >>> This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience >>> reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal >>> or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you >>> feel is apparent. This I need to hear! >>> >>> Gerry >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> 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 >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >><< File: ATT00025.html >> << File: ATT00026.txt >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >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 Feb 25 05:39:53 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 21:39:53 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 Message-ID: <01C51AB9.60420AE0.shovland@mindspring.com> I think the motivations of the Reich were mostly economic. Some Nazi's admitted that they targeted the Jews because they had a lot of money. The killing of mental and physical defectives as well as homosexuals and gypsies says something about social ideals, but not religion. Most of the pseudo- religious stuff seems to be associated with the inner circle of the SS. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 7:34 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 I found this: http://www.cafes.net/ditch/motm1.htm I am doubtful about the veracity of the book, based on that essay. It sounds like the author, Pauwels, was a provocative and speculative writer, not an historian. I did find this: http://www.sumeria.net/politics/nazioccult.html and I recall that Hitler did have great fascination with the occult. That article supports that. I am not certain what role occultism played, in spite of that website. There is ambiguous evidence, even on that site. (Nice emphasis on how 'science' causes wars . . . eugenics!) I haven't read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich since I was in 8th grade, and so I don't remember what Shirer says about that. Anyone else want to elucidate? Lynn PS: both sites seem to be characterized by special pleading, and that is generally a bad sign. Steve Hovland wrote: >If you can find it, an old book called "The Morning of the Magicians" >had quite a lot about Nazi occultism- the Thule stuff, expeditions >to Tibet. Just before he was executed one SS man muttered >some kind of strange prayer and went to his death placidly. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 9:40 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 > >Yes, it is clear that Nazism tried to undermine legitimate religions and >was positively hostile toward religious figures. Recall the famous quote >by Niemoeller, and observe that it was often religiously committed >people who opposed Nazism (Niemoeller was far too rough on himself; he >was an early opponent of Nazism, as were many other pastors.) >http://www.christianethicstoday.com/Issue/009/First%20They%20Came%20for%20the%20Jews%20By%20Franklin%20H%20Littell_009_29_.htm > >The cult was, IMHO, a maneuver to reduce religiousity, to replace >Christianity with something that could be induced to support >irreligiousity. Have you read The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom? She >points out that there was a terrible erosion of religious devotion in >Germany in the late 1920s. Her brother, studying in Germany, wrote >extensively to her about it. The dialog she reports between herself and >the Nazi lieutenent is breathtaking. One cannot be truely educated about >the 20th Century without digesting that book. > >BTW, the story behind the family that hid the piano player (that movie) >was that they were committed Catholics who saved him from the Nazis at >the risk of their own lives. The movie hid that vital bit of data. Thank >you, anti-religious fanatics of Hollywood. > >Finally, a young Mormon lad named Huebner was beheaded by the gestapo >for publishing anti-nazi tracts (he secretly used the church duplicating >machine - remember those old things you hand cranked with a special >carbon-like master?). Religiousity played an oppositional role in Nazi >Germany, and the loss of religiousity caused people to lose their >bearings. Corrie Ten Boom and her sister clearly did not lose theirs; >Huebner did not lose his, and Martin Niemoeller certainly did not lose his. >Lynn > > >Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >>Lynn, are you familiar with the cult aspects >>of Naziism? >> >>Steve Hovland >>www.stevehovland.net >> >> >>-----Original Message----- >>From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >>Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 7:51 AM >>To: Alice Andrews; The new improved paleopsych list >>Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >> >>Marty Seligman (learned helplessness theorist, Learned Optimism, >>Authentic Happiness, former APA president) - an atheist - mentions that >>as a key to true happiness. He reviews literature that religious people >>are generally happier and more fulfilled, more resilient. Czentmyhali >>(spelling!) at U Chicago finds that kids involved in something greater >>than themselves are much more likely to experience "flow" and periods of >>greater happiness. Religion is clearly an adaptive force. BTW, I don't >>want to hear arguments that religion is behind most wars. That is a >>pretty tired argument that was thoroughly debunked by the 20th Century. >>Lynn >> >>Alice Andrews wrote: >> >> >> >> >> >>>Hi Gerry, >>>Thanks for the note... >>>There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe Frank sent it >>>in?--about teenagers and the possiblity that what they were missing >>>was 'religion' or 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning >>>beyond them.' Do you remember reading that on paleo some time ago? I >>>can't find it...But it seems apropos to your missive. (If anyone knows >>>it and can send out again, I'd appreciate!) >>>Thanks and cheers, >>>Alice >>> >>>Hi Alice, >>> >>>Thanks for the rec re: Nesse's "Evolution and the Capacity for >>>Commitment". Although I still haven't read it I'm familiar with its >>>contents. The issue of 'commitment' especially for young people is >>>something that definitely needs addressing and maybe requiring our >>>youth to make a firm political commitment to a particular party will >>>carry over to their demonstrating less risky behavior with drugs, sex, >>>employment, family or whatever. Yet isn't our youth already >>>politically brainwashed into political awareness or have they flicked >>>away that duty as well? I no longer hang out with our country's young >>>but when I did I found that very few had their head screwed on >>>correctly and many were adrift; from what I hear now they still >>>continue on their aimless flow. When I wrote my original answer my >>>thoughts were on "my generation", not the others. Thanks for your post. >>> >>>I'll add the book to my list. >>> >>>Gerry >>> >>> >>> >>>----- Original Message ----- >>>From: Alice Andrews >>>To: The new improved paleopsych list >>>Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:30 PM >>>Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >>> >>>Hi Gerry, >>>Randy Nesse edited a book called "Evolution and the Capacity for >>>Commitment"; do you know it? It's wonderful... if you don't. (His >>>'Commitment in the Clinic' chapter is superb, btw.) Anyway, I think >>>the book addresses your question. The word 'commitment' itself >>>addresses the question. We have evolved mechanisms for detecting >>>commitment and for detecting possible defection in others. People who >>>tow the party line, etc. are considered committed. We seek out such >>>people because it is proximately and ultimately adaptive to do so. >>>Befriending, supporting, trusting, etc. the uncommitted would have >>>been-- and still is, a risk (or threat). Such risks could have been >>>very costly over our evolutionary history and can be still today. Of >>>course, sometimes such risks (siding with someone who seems to be >>>sitting on the fence, uncommitted, a rebel) can be to one's advantage. >>>But 'ancient-brain' doesn't know this--and probably 'statistics-brain' >>>doesn't know this either! >>>Anyway, enough late-night babbling! It's a good book and might answer >>>your question... >>>All best! >>>Alice >>> >>> ----- Original Message ----- >>> From: G. Reinhart-Waller >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> >>> Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 9:55 PM >>> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] Re: paleopsych Digest, Vol 9, Issue 20 >>> >>> >> Someone beyond the liberal/conservative >>> dichotomy may be rejected by both sides as a nuisance, >>> a threat to shared assumptions that define a group >>> against another. >>> >>> This is absolutely amazing! Why would any audience >>> reject someone who cannot plop into either the liberal >>> or conservative camp? Please explain the threat you >>> feel is apparent. This I need to hear! >>> >>> Gerry >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> 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 >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >><< File: ATT00025.html >> << File: ATT00026.txt >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> >> >> > << File: ATT00000.html >> << File: ATT00001.txt >> >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > << File: ATT00005.html >> << File: ATT00006.txt >> From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Fri Feb 25 15:00:22 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 10:00:22 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] teen spirit In-Reply-To: <20050224200533.30607.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050224200533.30607.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <421F3D86.5060307@uconn.edu> Tha't why I played role-playing games as a kid. No limits to creativity and not adults involved. ;-) Christian Michael Christopher wrote: > Alice says: > >>>There was an interesting article somewhere--maybe > > Frank sent it in?--about teenagers and the possiblity > that what they were missing was 'religion' or > 'spirituality' or a 'sense of purpose and meaning > beyond them.'<< > > --I think that's true in a way. Unfortunately, the > only alternatives kids can see are traditional > religion, drugs or "boot camp" and team-oriented > programs which tend to be too authoritarian to meet > spiritual needs. What's needed is a place where kids > can be creative, make music, play with multimedia. > Something that involves teamwork without coercion, > enables kids to develop a voice in the world and be > heard. Our culture has become swamped with conformity > and with knee-jerk rebelliousness (which has its own > rules of conformity), neither of which enables kids to > develop a genuine, individual creative voice. Most > people, including adults, use romantic relationships > as their next best outlet, which puts too much > pressure on relationships. Spiritual blocks and > creative blocks are basically the same problem: > overediting, overfiltering and excessive worry or > confusion about how messages are received. Give kids a > place they can fully express their visions, where they > aren't torn down for coloring outside the lines, and > you'll change the culture for the better. The current > trend toward greater structure and conformity won't > work, although it may pave the way for more evolved > forms of teamwork later on. Discipline isn't a bad > thing, but when it's based on fear of disappointing a > group or an authority, a compensating tendency toward > individuality is inevitable. > > Michael > > > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. > http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? "The gravest danger to freedom lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology." - President Bush June 1, 2002, West Point, NY "we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of selfdefense by acting preemptively [...] we recognize that our best defense is a good offense" - The National Security Strategy of The United States of America _____________________________________________________________________ ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? From checker at panix.com Fri Feb 25 16:24:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 11:24:35 -0500 (EST) Subject: [Paleopsych] Possible evidence for immortal bacteria! (And why not?) Message-ID: This should be of particular interest to Howard. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 08:41:59 +0100 From: Eugen Leitl Reply-To: transhumantech at yahoogroups.com To: transhumantech at yahoogroups.com Subject: [>Htech] Re: [GRG] Possible evidence for immortal bacteria! (And why not?) (fwd from ag24 at gen.cam.ac.uk) ----- Forwarded message from Aubrey de Grey ----- From: Aubrey de Grey Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 18:17:33 +0000 To: grg at lists.ucla.edu Subject: Re: [GRG] Possible evidence for immortal bacteria! (And why not?) Reply-To: Gerontology Research Group > This was the very study to which I was referring in my reply to Bob! It's probably the most talked-about scientific publication of the month, in fact. It's certainly very exciting, but various details need to be kept in mind at this stage: 1) The experiment was done for eight generations and showed a linear decline in the growth rate with increasing numbers of generations in which the old pole was inherited. This is in contrast to the standard pattern in aging where the functional decline accelerates with age. It is thus very important to extend this study to 20 or 30 generations to see whether the trend eventually accelerates or levels off. Of course the entire lineage does not need to be followed -- one just needs some cells at each point in the virtual lineage. 2) The authors measured "growth rate", and they really do mean rate of increase in the size of the cells. However, they note that new-pole daughters are larger on average than old-pole ones, and additionally that the new-pole daughter tends to divide first. The latter is to be expected, since increase of size is generally limiting for generation time for bacteria in rich medium. This merits a lot more discussion (for example there is nothing about whether multi-generation-old-pole cells are especially small), because the whole result may be because smaller cells grow more slowly at first (not that that wouldn't be interesting, of course). The authors describe the above results as showing that there is no "juvenile phase" whereby the new cell needs to go through some initial maturation process before it gets going, but they forget that it may be the daughter with the old pole that is going through such a phase. 3) The authors allude in the discussion to the phenomenon constituting a 2% "cost" of the aging process at the population level. They don't elaborate, but I think the meaning must be that the colony would grow 2% faster if all cells grew as fast as the new-pole ones. But this is not the right calculation if one wants to determine cost, because if the divisions were precisely symmetrical then the old-pole cell would grow faster but the new-pole cell would grow more slowly. I haven't done the maths but I strongly suspect that asymmetrical division (and hence asymmetrical dilution of damage) can for some examples of the function linking growth rate to damage levels confer a higher colony growth rate than symmetrical division. 4) Possibly the main reason the above points matter so much, especially the last one, is because of the effect on the validity of concluding that the observed phenomenon is universal, inescapable etc. There are numerous circumstances in which an organism's optimum metabolic tactics vary non-linearly with stress: for example the increase of maintenance at the expense of reproduction in caloric restriction, or the fusion response of mitochondria to high stress, or the senescence response of cells to over-frequent double-strand breaks. I suspect that under a variety of alternative, reasonable assumptions, the colony growth rate would switch from being best with symmetrical division to being best with asymmetrical division depending on whether stress (e.g. oxidative) and hence rate of damage accumulation was above or below some threshold. If so, repeating this experiment under low oxygen might give different results. Aubrey de Grey _______________________________________________ GRG mailing list GRG at lists.ucla.edu http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grg From waluk at earthlink.net Fri Feb 25 16:40:13 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 08:40:13 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] religion References: <20050224201955.55678.qmail@web30809.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <005901c51b58$af004670$9200f604@S0027397558> Michael writes: > --No doubt, religious belief isn't necessary in order > for a group to see another group as evil and worthy > of > extermination. It might help a little, however, if > you > believe your group is endorsed by a deity who hates > your enemy as much as you do. But, as I mentioned, > that deity can be replaced by the spirit of the > group, > if that spirit is unquestioned and has its own > momentum. Perhaps that's what a deity really is, the > hidden face of the power of the group. Many religions hold other groups in disfavor and could foster the hatred and disrespect one group feels for the enemy. Yet I'm given to thinking that the spirit of the group, the esprit de corps, is what energizes and sustains group fervor in rabblerousing against the other. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Feb 26 01:24:51 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:24:51 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] flag/religion In-Reply-To: <200502251937.j1PJb7h17580@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050226012451.17552.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Lynn says: >>Ummm??? For example? Flag? I am patriotic and religious, and the two are very different experiences.<< --In what particular ways are they very different? In what ways are they similar? Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Feb 26 16:32:35 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 09:32:35 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] flag/religion In-Reply-To: <20050226012451.17552.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050226012451.17552.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4220A4A3.8000603@solution-consulting.com> NOTE: If you receive this as a BCC copy (your address isn't attached, and you aren't on the Paleopsycho list), it is because I liked this answer to Michael and want to solicit your response. Michael Christopher wrote: Lynn says: >>Ummm??? For example? Flag? I am patriotic and >> >> religious, and the two are very different experiences.<< --In what particular ways are they very different? In what ways are they similar? Michael Michael, I heard the psychologist Alan Bergin characterize two types of religiosity - horizontal and vertical. In published reports, Bergin called those intrinsic and extrinsic. The extrinsically religious person experiences little or do difference between patriotism and religion - both good things, based on a positive emotional commitment. Both can influence behavior. But the influence is limited. Patriotic persons can do evil things. Bergin has shown that extrinsic religiosity is correlated with behavioral problems and anxiety; intrinsic religiosity is correlated with better mental health and better long-term health. Intrinsic religiosity: In the series Lost, two of the characters - Sayid and Sawyer - have heard whispering in the forest. Both have taken human life, and the implication is that is why they hear the whispers. The sounds come from either their own conscience or from the actual spirits of those whose lives they have taken. Each of them tries to deny or rationalize what they have heard. Sawyer asks Sayid if he heard anything when he was in the forest - Sayid almost admits, then recants and asks what Sawyer heard. Sawyer almost says, then recants and says he heard nothing. The two antagonists share something inexpressible. For the intrinsically religious person, that is sort of what religion is like. There is a very quiet, subtle experience of God tapping on one's shoulder, a kind of reminder, "You promised to remember Me." If you have read Surprised by Joy you can understand the experience. It feels like it clearly comes from outside one's self. The actual trappings of the religion - for the intrinsically religious person - seem of little importance, and the personal experience is the core. It is not so much, "I believe in God" as "God believes in me, and I know He does." So patriotism swells the heart, inspires great deeds, gives one a feeling of belonging to a worthy community, all positive things. It can also inspire evil deeds and alienation between us (the good guys) and the French . . . well, anyone who seems strange and unworthy. This is a limbic system activity. Intrinsic religiosity gives one a sense of one's relationship with God and with others. It is clearly a right temporal lobe mediated function, and very different from loyalty and patriotism. I was in San Francisco, Ghirdelli Square one night with a friend who looks rather like me, only 30# lighter. A young black boy was sitting on a railing, watching us. "Hey," he said, "you guys brothers?" "Yes," I replied, "we are brothers, and you are our brother too." "I ain't your brother," he replied scornfully. "Yes, you are," I said. "You have just forgotten us." Lynn PS: Abstracts of three of Bergin's I/E religiosity articles: PsycINFO: Citation and Abstract Printer-friendly version Title Religiousness and mental health reconsidered: A study of an intrinsically religious sample. Abstract Despite the existence of strong viewpoints, the relation between religiousness and mental health is not yet clearly understood. The Religious Orientation Scale has provided researchers with a valuable tool for differentiating between intrinsic (I) and extrinsic (E) religious orientations, thereby clarifying some of the confusion in this area. In the present study we assessed correlations between these two scales and anxiety, personality traits, self-control, irrational beliefs, and depression. Results generally indicated that I is negatively correlated with anxiety and positively correlated with self-control and "better" personality functioning, whereas the opposite is true of E. Correlations were generally not found with irrational beliefs or depression. By dividing subjects into a fourfold typology, we discovered that 98.6% of the present sample of religious students were "intrinsics." When their personality scores were compared with those of other normal populations, trends slightly favoring this intrinsic sample were observed. Thus, these results indicated that I is related to "normality" and that religiousness is not necessarily indicative of emotional disturbance. Some implications for counseling are suggested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved) Authors Bergin, Allen E.; Masters, Kevin S.; Richards, P. Scott Affiliations Bergin, Allen E.: Brigham Young U, UT Source Journal of Counseling Psychology. 34(2), Apr 1987, 197-204. PsycINFO: Citation and Abstract Printer-friendly version Title Religious life-styles and mental health: An exploratory study. Abstract Conducted an intensive, case-by-case assessment of life-styles of a sample of religious students. We identified differing styles of religiousness and made comparisons by means of tests and interviews between subgroups whose subjects manifested differing religious life-styles. Those subjects with continuous religious development and mild religious experiences appeared to be healthier than those with discontinuous development and intense religious experiences; however, intense religious experiences tended to enhance the adjustment of those who experienced them. There was no evidence in the group as a whole for an overall negative or positive correlation between religiousness and mental health, but some modes of religious involvement appeared to be related to disturbance, whereas other modes appeared to be related to enhanced stability and resilience. Because causality in these relations remains uncertain, we generate hypotheses concerning further studies of life-styles and adjustment. We also discuss implications for student counseling and development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved) Authors Bergin, Allen E.; Stinchfield, Randy D.; Gaskin, Thomas A.; Masters, Kevin S.; et al Affiliations Bergin, Allen E.: Brigham Young U, Provo, UT, US Source Journal of Counseling Psychology. 35(1), Jan 1988, 91-98. PsycINFO: Citation and Abstract Printer-friendly version Title Values and religious issues in psychotherapy and mental health. Abstract A decade of work by A. E. Bergin and others is reviewed and synthesized concerning 2 broad issues: (a) the role of values in psychotherapy and (b) the relation of religion to mental health. Trends have changed, and there is now more professional support for addressing values issues in treatment. There is also more openness to the healthy potentialities of religious involvement, and therapists themselves manifest a new level of personal interest in such matters. Cautions and guidelines for dealing with such issues are considered in both empirical and clinical terms. The multifactorial nature of religion is documented, and healthy and unhealthy ways of being religious are described. Suggestions are given for including education in values and religious issues in the training of clinicians so that the vast population of religious clientele may be better served. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved) Authors Bergin, Allen E. Affiliations Bergin, Allen E.: Brigham Young U, Provo, UT, US Source American Psychologist. 46(4), Apr 1991, 394-403. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: icon_printer.gif Type: image/gif Size: 891 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: separator-dots-total.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1084 bytes Desc: not available URL: From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sat Feb 26 16:52:28 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 11:52:28 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] flag/religion - a different world In-Reply-To: <4220A4A3.8000603@solution-consulting.com> References: <20050226012451.17552.qmail@web30801.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <4220A4A3.8000603@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050226114414.01dfead8@incoming.verizon.net> We do seem to be living in different worlds here. Yet, the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin, I would argue that we aree only making real progress if we have some sense of how the worlds come together... turn out to be "one elephant...". ======= So here is one view of the elephant, per a plenary talk I will be giving soon in China: --------------------- Neural Networks and Adaptive Dynamic Programming: the New Path to Building and Understanding Brain-Style Intelligence Neural networks provide new tools, new questions and new foundations for solving practical problems in prediction, modeling, decision and control, state estimation, pattern recognition, data mining, etc. Traditional statistics tries to collect a huge library of different methods for different tasks, but the brain is living proof that one system can do it all, if there is data. It proves that a system can manage many millions of variables without being confused (usually, when we really use our brain). Neural-type learning implemented on distributed elements like neurons allows use of new general chips like CNN, with many thousand times more throughput than older chip types. Adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) is a type of learning related to the Bellman equation, which is as important to the general adaptive optimal value-based management of complex systems (like energy systems) as Maxwell's Laws and the Dirac equation are to electronics. New advances, designs and applications of ADP on neural networks show some big improvements in performance and stability over older methods, and a new functional way to understand the brain and mind themselves. Still, this new hyper-rational way to understand the mind is very synergistic with practical ways to understand the mind rooted in personal experience which have evolved in wise folk traditions like Freud, Jung, Taoism, Confucianism and even some types of Buddhism. ================== It is curious to hear the phrase "religious technology, like prayer." I do not have time right now to discuss all the many directions that suggests to me. But it reminds me of the old struggle between empirically-based approaches and the lost-in-symbolic-space worlds of superstring theory, Aquinas, ideological correctness (left or right) and obsession with hermeneutics and such. A key aspect that my abstract doesn't address (initially, directly) is the need to approach issues like spirituality in a less "technological" way - a failing that some Chinese would attribute to teh two equally-dirty-crazy barbarians of fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity. Is "regios technology" -- all authentic experience -- to b reduced to trying to order hamburgers from god's macdonalds in the sky? When an earthquake or two or three hits Iran, do we really blame it all on Wendy's? And -- re Iraq -- when the Sunni dominant group asks for a "definite timetable for withdrawal" as the one thing they want, could we reconsier the "redunadnt" step of the kind of Act I was proposing? How much are we lost in our own heads unable to respect the reality in other minds we share this world with? Best of luck to us all, and sorry for the time constraint... Paul From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Sat Feb 26 19:50:59 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 11:50:59 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] religion In-Reply-To: <200502261915.j1QJEuh22459@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050226195059.40785.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Lynn says: >>For the intrinsically religious person, that is sort of what religion is like. There is a very quiet, subtle experience of God tapping on one's shoulder, a kind of reminder, "You promised to remember Me."<< --That's a good distinction. Is there intrinsic patriotism, a quiet, subtle voice reminding you that you're part of a larger group, a larger world? What would happen if one's political identity, one's allegiance to a particular group or ideological movement in a particular nation, conflicted with an impulse toward patriotism to some larger body that may be multinational and not associated with any political party? Christianity and Islam seem to involve that kind of conflict. The Body of Christ has no country, and the Ummah of Islam is supposed to be beyond borders. How is that conflict resolved in various groups? Another question: what happens if intrinsic religion gets tangled up with extrinsic religion? As in the person who has an inner spiritual experience involving Jesus, who on remembering and retelling the experience re-coats it with dogmas derived from his social group about Biblical infallibility, religious politics, and so on? Would such a person experience an intolerable conflict, given that the thing deep inside which provides a genuine spiritual connection to something greater is distorted by ideas derived from culture? I ask that latter question because in my own spiritual experiences I've come across Jesus once or twice, and he never said anything about gay marriage destroying civilization. But if I'd had the same religious experiences, which you would call intrinsic, while a member of a Christian group, I might have ended up coating what Jesus really was to me, deep down, with some extra layers of dogma about what Jesus wants. Biblical infallibility and literalism seem like a huge stumbling block, and when politics is added, even more so. These days, Christians who interpret the Bible "wrongly" (for example, if they reconcile the New Testament with gay marriage the way many Christians forego the admonishments in the NT for women to cover their heads, or if they reconcile evolution with Genesis) are treated not just as theological heretics but as political heretics as well. I've had numerous right wing Christians tell me that evolution is a "lie". Not just criticizing the theory, but claiming that everyone who supports it is deliberately deceptive. And a roughly equal number of Christians have told me that it's impossible to reconcile gay marriage with the Bible. What does one do if one has a genuine spiritual experience involving Jesus, but cannot conform that vision to the "political correctness" of scriptural literalism and infallibility? Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Feb 26 20:06:21 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 12:06:21 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] flag/religion - a different world Message-ID: <01C51BFB.96C8F220.shovland@mindspring.com> We live in an infinity of parallel universes :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Paul J. Werbos, Dr. [SMTP:paul.werbos at verizon.net] Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2005 8:52 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list; The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] flag/religion - a different world We do seem to be living in different worlds here. Yet, the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin, I would argue that we aree only making real progress if we have some sense of how the worlds come together... turn out to be "one elephant...". ======= So here is one view of the elephant, per a plenary talk I will be giving soon in China: --------------------- Neural Networks and Adaptive Dynamic Programming: the New Path to Building and Understanding Brain-Style Intelligence Neural networks provide new tools, new questions and new foundations for solving practical problems in prediction, modeling, decision and control, state estimation, pattern recognition, data mining, etc. Traditional statistics tries to collect a huge library of different methods for different tasks, but the brain is living proof that one system can do it all, if there is data. It proves that a system can manage many millions of variables without being confused (usually, when we really use our brain). Neural-type learning implemented on distributed elements like neurons allows use of new general chips like CNN, with many thousand times more throughput than older chip types. Adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) is a type of learning related to the Bellman equation, which is as important to the general adaptive optimal value-based management of complex systems (like energy systems) as Maxwell's Laws and the Dirac equation are to electronics. New advances, designs and applications of ADP on neural networks show some big improvements in performance and stability over older methods, and a new functional way to understand the brain and mind themselves. Still, this new hyper-rational way to understand the mind is very synergistic with practical ways to understand the mind rooted in personal experience which have evolved in wise folk traditions like Freud, Jung, Taoism, Confucianism and even some types of Buddhism. ================== It is curious to hear the phrase "religious technology, like prayer." I do not have time right now to discuss all the many directions that suggests to me. But it reminds me of the old struggle between empirically-based approaches and the lost-in-symbolic-space worlds of superstring theory, Aquinas, ideological correctness (left or right) and obsession with hermeneutics and such. A key aspect that my abstract doesn't address (initially, directly) is the need to approach issues like spirituality in a less "technological" way - a failing that some Chinese would attribute to teh two equally-dirty-crazy barbarians of fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity. Is "regios technology" -- all authentic experience -- to b reduced to trying to order hamburgers from god's macdonalds in the sky? When an earthquake or two or three hits Iran, do we really blame it all on Wendy's? And -- re Iraq -- when the Sunni dominant group asks for a "definite timetable for withdrawal" as the one thing they want, could we reconsier the "redunadnt" step of the kind of Act I was proposing? How much are we lost in our own heads unable to respect the reality in other minds we share this world with? Best of luck to us all, and sorry for the time constraint... Paul _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Feb 26 20:08:51 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 12:08:51 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] religion Message-ID: <01C51BFB.F00D4570.shovland@mindspring.com> It would seem to me that intrinsic patriotism is noticeably absent from the current regime, which includes all of the incumbent politicians in both parties. They serve those who bribe them with campaign contributions, not the interest of the country as a whole. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Christopher [SMTP:anonymous_animus at yahoo.com] Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2005 11:51 AM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] religion Lynn says: >>For the intrinsically religious person, that is sort of what religion is like. There is a very quiet, subtle experience of God tapping on one's shoulder, a kind of reminder, "You promised to remember Me."<< --That's a good distinction. Is there intrinsic patriotism, a quiet, subtle voice reminding you that you're part of a larger group, a larger world? What would happen if one's political identity, one's allegiance to a particular group or ideological movement in a particular nation, conflicted with an impulse toward patriotism to some larger body that may be multinational and not associated with any political party? Christianity and Islam seem to involve that kind of conflict. The Body of Christ has no country, and the Ummah of Islam is supposed to be beyond borders. How is that conflict resolved in various groups? Another question: what happens if intrinsic religion gets tangled up with extrinsic religion? As in the person who has an inner spiritual experience involving Jesus, who on remembering and retelling the experience re-coats it with dogmas derived from his social group about Biblical infallibility, religious politics, and so on? Would such a person experience an intolerable conflict, given that the thing deep inside which provides a genuine spiritual connection to something greater is distorted by ideas derived from culture? I ask that latter question because in my own spiritual experiences I've come across Jesus once or twice, and he never said anything about gay marriage destroying civilization. But if I'd had the same religious experiences, which you would call intrinsic, while a member of a Christian group, I might have ended up coating what Jesus really was to me, deep down, with some extra layers of dogma about what Jesus wants. Biblical infallibility and literalism seem like a huge stumbling block, and when politics is added, even more so. These days, Christians who interpret the Bible "wrongly" (for example, if they reconcile the New Testament with gay marriage the way many Christians forego the admonishments in the NT for women to cover their heads, or if they reconcile evolution with Genesis) are treated not just as theological heretics but as political heretics as well. I've had numerous right wing Christians tell me that evolution is a "lie". Not just criticizing the theory, but claiming that everyone who supports it is deliberately deceptive. And a roughly equal number of Christians have told me that it's impossible to reconcile gay marriage with the Bible. What does one do if one has a genuine spiritual experience involving Jesus, but cannot conform that vision to the "political correctness" of scriptural literalism and infallibility? Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Feb 27 01:34:21 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 18:34:21 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] religion In-Reply-To: <20050226195059.40785.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050226195059.40785.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4221239D.90609@solution-consulting.com> Great questions /observations. I agree, it is hard to seperate our socialization from the actual experience. One or two humble comments interspersed. Michael Christopher wrote: >Lynn says: > > >>>For the intrinsically religious person, that is >>> >>> >sort of what religion is like. There is a very quiet, >subtle experience of God tapping on one's shoulder, a >kind of reminder, "You promised to remember Me."<< > >--That's a good distinction. Is there intrinsic >patriotism, a quiet, subtle voice reminding you that >you're part of a larger group, a larger world? What >would happen if one's political identity, one's >allegiance to a particular group or ideological >movement in a particular nation, conflicted with an >impulse toward patriotism to some larger body that may >be multinational and not associated with any political >party? Christianity and Islam seem to involve that >kind of conflict. The Body of Christ has no country, >and the Ummah of Islam is supposed to be beyond >borders. How is that conflict resolved in various >groups? > Only a religion that emphasizes the brotherhood piece can do that. The sense of "all are one" is frequently an aspect of spiritual experiences. The external / extrinsic part often excludes that, as the jihaddists seem to do today. > >Another question: what happens if intrinsic religion >gets tangled up with extrinsic religion? As in the >person who has an inner spiritual experience involving >Jesus, who on remembering and retelling the experience >re-coats it with dogmas derived from his social group >about Biblical infallibility, religious politics, and >so on? Would such a person experience an intolerable >conflict, given that the thing deep inside which >provides a genuine spiritual connection to something >greater is distorted by ideas derived from culture? > >I ask that latter question because in my own spiritual >experiences I've come across Jesus once or twice, > powerful experience, I am in awe. >and >he never said anything about gay marriage destroying >civilization. But if I'd had the same religious >experiences, which you would call intrinsic, while a >member of a Christian group, I might have ended up >coating what Jesus really was to me, deep down, with >some extra layers of dogma about what Jesus wants. >Biblical infallibility and literalism seem like a huge >stumbling block, and when politics is added, even more >so. These days, Christians who interpret the Bible >"wrongly" (for example, if they reconcile the New >Testament with gay marriage the way many Christians >forego the admonishments in the NT for women to cover >their heads, or if they reconcile evolution with >Genesis) are treated not just as theological heretics >but as political heretics as well. I've had numerous >right wing Christians tell me that evolution is a >"lie". Not just criticizing the theory, but claiming >that everyone who supports it is deliberately >deceptive. And a roughly equal number of Christians >have told me that it's impossible to reconcile gay >marriage with the Bible. What does one do if one has a >genuine spiritual experience involving Jesus, but >cannot conform that vision to the "political >correctness" of scriptural literalism and >infallibility? > > Good point. An experience doesn't answer all questions; in some ways it complicates one's life alarmingly. Then one must hammer out pieces of the meaning on the anvil of one's own experience. Mythical story (ie, you need not believe in the literal story that follows): In 1984, I did a survey of near -death experiencers. One, Patricia, had attempted suicide at the age of 17 by drinking a poison. Her mother - an alcoholic schizophrenic - rushed her to the hospital. Patricia saw her body on the gurney. She was told: "You were sent to earth to learn, and if you don't learn this way you will have to learn in another way, much more painful. We don't want you to go through that pain." Lynn: What did they mean, "another way"? Patricia: I don't know, they didn't explain. Maybe you go to hell. I think it is reincarnation, you come back in an even worse life. But I don't really know. Patricia's humility "I don't know, I wasn't told" is refreshing and she is unusual in that she acknowledged the limits of her experience and the unanswered questions. Too often we confabulate meaning where the experience has gaps. Religion is a messy business, not as tidy as we would like to believe. The universe is strange. >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. >http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From paul.werbos at verizon.net Sun Feb 27 02:39:15 2005 From: paul.werbos at verizon.net (Paul J. Werbos, Dr.) Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 21:39:15 -0500 Subject: [Paleopsych] religion In-Reply-To: <20050226195059.40785.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <200502261915.j1QJEuh22459@tick.javien.com> <20050226195059.40785.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.0.20050226210731.01dabe00@incoming.verizon.net> At 02:50 PM 2/26/2005, Michael Christopher wrote: >I ask that latter question because in my own spiritual >experiences I've come across Jesus once or twice, and >he never said anything about gay marriage destroying >civilization. But if I'd had the same religious >experiences, which you would call intrinsic, while a >member of a Christian group, I might have ended up >coating what Jesus really was to me, deep down, with >some extra layers of dogma about what Jesus wants. This does move in an important direction. Personally I think that any truly serious study of the psychology of religion should cite the classic study by Greeley.... But I don't have the citation at home... in the New York Times weekly magazine, circa 1972... the article "Are We a Nation of Mystics?" After a very lengthy, large and careful study of the deep values of Americans (funded by NSF)... they had some results which seemed very counterintuitive at first. In a pretest, they asked the question "have you ever had a religion-mystical experience?", 30 percent said "yes." The survey-takers laughed, assume people didn't know what a "mystical experience" was supposed to be, and rephrased the question to make it more concrete, clear and even shocking, something like -- "Did you ever have an experience in which a great spiritual force descended upon you, and pulled you up out of your body, revealing..." And then, when they asked it that way in the full survey, sent to thousands... 40 percent said yes. The statistics showed a higher "yes" rate with more education, clear on up to PhD, and social status, and so on. The really entertaining part came when the results came back, and the university review committee tried to make sense of it. One guy says:"There must be a gross error here. this is impossible. If this ANOVA formula is right, 70 percent of the people in THIS room right now would say yes to THAT question. And we certainly know THAT can't be true." After silence, another guy says:"OK, you put me in a very awkward situation. This is a confidential proceeding, right? In the interest of science, and of not demeaning this survey we have all worked so hard on, I must confess.." And then another, and another, until it was 70 percent. And then they did a kind of informal follow-on "survey" (no names) on the twelve "yes." ALL of them felt both grateful and scared. They all became more loyal to WHATEVER religion they happened to belong to, as if to say:"PLease, God, I'll be a good boy, whatever you want, just don't do THAT again, I'm really not ready." I remember having very similar reactions myself during prep school, at a time when I was a truly committed Amazing-Randi type skeptic... and the ghost my mother warned me about did put me off guard... such an inner turmoil... I don't believe .. but please don't take it as an insult... how can I sleep?... I certainly am not ready for this... But years passed, and I gradually realized that one is more secure with eyes open than with eyes shut, in the light rather than in the darkness, even if one starts out seeing only fog. And... years later... I remember the young woman from rural Korea telling me about their regular family procedures, trying to use a "ghost-calling bell" and other meditative techniques to TRY to call the spirits of their ancestors to communicate with them, to stay in touch... It is a more natural attitude than fear, I think, and it is weird how our officious textbooks brand those people as "just another nation of soulless atheists..." and the like. But then again, OUR attitude of really wanting to understand what is going on here, and avoid being fuzzy and to maintain a scientific attitude... well... we do have our own special angle for viewing the elephant, and it is useful too. -------------------------------------- There is also another aspect to your email. I think Freud said a lot about how our "subconscious mind" often communicates "to us" via whatever symbol system we happen to have gotten ingrained. Thus there are aspects of such experience which need to be interpreted very carefully, in much the same way as one interprets dreams. This is no small matter. And it is a challenge to try to evolve one's inner symbol system so as to facilitate more exact communication, less dependent on metaphorical colorings. >Biblical infallibility and literalism seem like a huge >stumbling block, and when politics is added, even more >so. These days, Christians who interpret the Bible >"wrongly" (for example, if they reconcile the New >Testament with gay marriage the way many Christians >forego the admonishments in the NT for women to cover >their heads, or if they reconcile evolution with >Genesis) are treated not just as theological heretics >but as political heretics as well. I've had numerous Indeed. Organized religions often do more to oppress and weaken and ultimately kill the soul than to facilitate its growth and health. But... I have often been reminded lately of an old saying... "I don't belong to any organized religion. I am a Quaker..." >right wing Christians tell me that evolution is a >"lie". Not just criticizing the theory, but claiming >that everyone who supports it is deliberately >deceptive. And a roughly equal number of Christians >have told me that it's impossible to reconcile gay >marriage with the Bible. What does one do if one has a >genuine spiritual experience involving Jesus, but >cannot conform that vision to the "political >correctness" of scriptural literalism and >infallibility? In a case like this, thinking for oneself is only a beginning, though an important one. I have sometimes wonder what life would be like, if the 70 percent did not feel compelled to lock up their real thoughts within themselves, due to fear of gestapos both of the Amazing Randis and of the TV preacher pharisee types? But then again... if our 70 percent do not really desire to see more... well, it really is a question what we are ready for... and opening Pandora's Box can have its perils, depending on how it is approached. Best, Paul >Michael > > > >__________________________________ >Do you Yahoo!? >Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. >http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sun Feb 27 15:21:20 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 08:21:20 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] religion In-Reply-To: <6.2.0.14.0.20050226210731.01dabe00@incoming.verizon.net> References: <200502261915.j1QJEuh22459@tick.javien.com> <20050226195059.40785.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <6.2.0.14.0.20050226210731.01dabe00@incoming.verizon.net> Message-ID: <4221E570.7080809@solution-consulting.com> Paul, this is a wonderful reminder. I did some searching on it, and it seems that this 1975 study has held up well. We certainly have the capacity for mystical experiences; I recall last year a study where a researcher in Britain had constructed a helmut that produced some weak rotating magnetic fields over the right temporal lobe; people felt ineffible, mystical sensations. Except, of course, Richard Dawkins, who put the helmut on and said, in essence, "Nope, I don't feel a thing." the researcher commented that Dawkin's right temporal lobe seemed underdeveloped. LOL. Lynn Paul J. Werbos, Dr. wrote: > At 02:50 PM 2/26/2005, Michael Christopher wrote: > > >> I ask that latter question because in my own spiritual >> experiences I've come across Jesus once or twice, and >> he never said anything about gay marriage destroying >> civilization. But if I'd had the same religious >> experiences, which you would call intrinsic, while a >> member of a Christian group, I might have ended up >> coating what Jesus really was to me, deep down, with >> some extra layers of dogma about what Jesus wants. > > > This does move in an important direction. > > Personally I think that any truly serious > study of the psychology of religion should cite the classic study by > Greeley.... But I don't have the citation at home... in the New York > Times > weekly magazine, circa 1972... the article "Are We a Nation of Mystics?" > After a very lengthy, large and careful study of the deep values of > Americans (funded by NSF)... > they had some results which seemed very counterintuitive at first. > In a pretest, they asked the question "have you ever had a > religion-mystical experience?", > 30 percent said "yes." The survey-takers laughed, assume people didn't > know what > a "mystical experience" was supposed to be, and rephrased the question > to make it > more concrete, clear and even shocking, something like -- "Did you > ever have an experience > in which a great spiritual force descended upon you, and pulled you up > out of your body, revealing..." > And then, when they asked it that way in the full survey, sent to > thousands... 40 percent said yes. > The statistics showed a higher "yes" rate with more education, clear > on up to PhD, and > social status, and so on. The really entertaining part came when the > results came back, > and the university review committee tried to make sense of it. One guy > says:"There must be a gross > error here. this is impossible. If this ANOVA formula is right, 70 > percent of the people in THIS room > right now would say yes to THAT question. And we certainly know THAT > can't be true." > After silence, another guy says:"OK, you put me in a very awkward > situation. > This is a confidential proceeding, right? In the interest of science, > and of not demeaning > this survey we have all worked so hard on, I must confess.." And then > another, and another, until it was > 70 percent. And then they did a kind of informal follow-on "survey" > (no names) on the twelve "yes." > > ALL of them felt both grateful and scared. They all became more loyal > to WHATEVER > religion they happened to belong to, as if to say:"PLease, God, I'll > be a good boy, whatever you > want, just don't do THAT again, I'm really not ready." > > I remember having very similar reactions myself during prep school, at > a time when I was > a truly committed Amazing-Randi type skeptic... and the ghost my mother > warned me about did put me off guard... such an inner turmoil... I > don't believe .. > but please don't take it as an insult... how can I sleep?... > I certainly am not ready for this... > > But years passed, and I gradually realized that one is more secure > with eyes > open than with eyes shut, in the light rather than in the darkness, > even if one starts out seeing > only fog. > > And... years later... I remember the young woman from rural Korea > telling me about their regular > family procedures, trying to use a "ghost-calling bell" and other > meditative techniques to TRY > to call the spirits of their ancestors to communicate with them, to > stay in touch... > It is a more natural attitude than fear, I think, and it is weird how > our officious textbooks > brand those people as "just another nation of soulless atheists..." > and the like. > > But then again, OUR attitude of really wanting to understand what is > going on here, > and avoid being fuzzy and to maintain a scientific attitude... well... > we do have our own special angle for viewing the elephant, and it is > useful too. > > -------------------------------------- > > There is also another aspect to your email. > I think Freud said a lot about how our "subconscious mind" > often communicates "to us" via whatever symbol system we happen > to have gotten ingrained. Thus there are aspects of such experience which > need to be interpreted very carefully, in much the same way as one > interprets dreams. > This is no small matter. And it is a challenge to try to > evolve one's inner symbol system so as to facilitate more exact > communication, less dependent on metaphorical colorings. > > >> Biblical infallibility and literalism seem like a huge >> stumbling block, and when politics is added, even more >> so. These days, Christians who interpret the Bible >> "wrongly" (for example, if they reconcile the New >> Testament with gay marriage the way many Christians >> forego the admonishments in the NT for women to cover >> their heads, or if they reconcile evolution with >> Genesis) are treated not just as theological heretics >> but as political heretics as well. I've had numerous > > > Indeed. Organized religions often do more to oppress and > weaken and ultimately kill the soul than to facilitate its growth > and health. > > But... I have often been reminded lately of an old saying... > > "I don't belong to any organized religion. I am a Quaker..." > > >> right wing Christians tell me that evolution is a >> "lie". Not just criticizing the theory, but claiming >> that everyone who supports it is deliberately >> deceptive. And a roughly equal number of Christians >> have told me that it's impossible to reconcile gay >> marriage with the Bible. What does one do if one has a >> genuine spiritual experience involving Jesus, but >> cannot conform that vision to the "political >> correctness" of scriptural literalism and >> infallibility? > > > In a case like this, thinking for oneself is only a beginning, though > an important one. > > I have sometimes wonder what life would be like, if the 70 percent > did not feel compelled to lock up their real thoughts within themselves, > due to fear of gestapos both of the Amazing Randis and of the > TV preacher pharisee types? > > But then again... if our 70 percent do not really desire to see more... > well, it really is a question what we are ready for... > and opening Pandora's Box can have its perils, depending on how > it is approached. > > Best, > > Paul > > > >> Michael >> >> >> >> __________________________________ >> Do you Yahoo!? >> Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search. >> http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 Feb 27 16:54:31 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 08:54:31 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Nanotech: a next big thing Message-ID: <01C51CA9.F491E520.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.zyvex.com/nano/ Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how those atoms are arranged. If we rearrange the atoms in coal we can make diamond. If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a few other trace elements) we can make computer chips. If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we can make potatoes. Todays manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It's like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can't really snap them together the way you'd like. In the future, nanotechnology will let us take off the boxing gloves. We'll be able to snap together the fundamental building blocks of nature easily, inexpensively and in most of the ways permitted by the laws of physics. This will be essential if we are to continue the revolution in computer hardware beyond about the next decade, and will also let us fabricate an entire new generation of products that are cleaner, stronger, lighter, and more precise. It's worth pointing out that the word "nanotechnology" has become very popular and is used to describe many types of research where the characteristic dimensions are less than about 1,000 nanometers. For example, continued improvements in lithography have resulted in line widths that are less than one micron: this work is often called "nanotechnology." Sub-micron lithography is clearly very valuable (ask anyone who uses a computer!) but it is equally clear that conventional lithography will not let us build semiconductor devices in which individual dopant atoms are located at specific lattice sites. Many of the exponentially improving trends in computer hardware capability have remained steady for the last 50 years. There is fairly widespread belief that these trends are likely to continue for at least another several years, but then conventional lithography starts to reach its limits. If we are to continue these trends we will have to develop a new manufacturing technology which will let us inexpensively build computer systems with mole quantities of logic elements that are molecular in both size and precision and are interconnected in complex and highly idiosyncratic patterns. Nanotechnology will let us do this. When it's unclear from the context whether we're using the specific definition of "nanotechnology" (given here) or the broader and more inclusive definition (often used in the literature), we'll use the terms "molecular nanotechnology" or "molecular manufacturing." Whatever we call it, it should let us Get essentially every atom in the right place. Make almost any structure consistent with the laws of physics that we can specify in molecular detail. Have manufacturing costs not greatly exceeding the cost of the required raw materials and energy. From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Feb 27 23:52:51 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 15:52:51 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] Screen saver from San Francisco Orchid Show Message-ID: <01C51CE4.64AE4170.shovland@mindspring.com> Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 126225 bytes Desc: not available URL: From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Feb 28 02:53:45 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 18:53:45 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] religious experiences In-Reply-To: <200502271920.j1RJKhh30292@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050228025345.98006.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Lynn says: >>Only a religion that emphasizes the brotherhood piece can do that. The sense of "all are one" is frequently an aspect of spiritual experiences. The external / extrinsic part often excludes that, as the jihaddists seem to do today.<< --I agree the "all are one" experience is one of the basic building blocks of spirituality. That leads me to ask this question: are Jihaadists, witch hunters and other "purifiers" reacting allergically to that sense that all are one? Perhaps a suicide bomber's final act is a simultanous denial and reinforcement of the feeling of connectedness with what he hates. In death, he seeks purification, while mixing his blood with that of his victims in a most intimate way. Michael __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Mon Feb 28 02:59:46 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 18:59:46 -0800 (PST) Subject: [Paleopsych] spirituality and dogma In-Reply-To: <200502271920.j1RJKhh30292@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050228025946.44633.qmail@web30807.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Paul says: >>ALL of them felt both grateful and scared. They all became more loyal to WHATEVER religion they happened to belong to, as if to say:"PLease, God, I'll be a good boy, whatever you want, just don't do THAT again, I'm really not ready."<< --I had that kind of experience in my early 20's on LSD, without any religious training. There was no dogma attached, only the sense that I was connected to everything and everyone in the world and that it was my denial of that connection that had put me in hell. I felt intimately connected with the starving in Africa, with the restlessness in the Middle East (this was pre-911) and with the alienation and chaos in my own culture. It was all tied up with my life, and all my attempts at achieving personal happiness were a denial, a temporary refuge at best. It felt as if I had thrown away the story of my generation, ignored something terribly important, and that my refusal to engage the world with genuine empathy had damaged the world as well as myself. I can only imagine what someone who HAD had religious training would make of the experience afterward. It would be rather easy for a preacher to hook into that guilt and fear and attach whatever dogma he wanted. Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From n.j.c.bannan at reading.ac.uk Mon Feb 28 15:53:32 2005 From: n.j.c.bannan at reading.ac.uk (Nicholas Bannan) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:53:32 -0000 Subject: [Paleopsych] Mozart Effect Message-ID: <011801c51dad$a7ae68a0$6882e186@.rdg.ac.uk> Stanford Report, February 2, 2005 Dubious 'Mozart Effect' remains music to many Americans' ears BY MARINA KRAKOVSKY Scientists have discredited claims that listening to classical music enhances intelligence, yet this so-called "Mozart Effect" has actually exploded in popularity over the years. So says Chip Heath, an associate professor of organizational behavior who has systematically tracked the evolution of this scientific legend. What's more, Heath and his colleague, Swiss psychologist Adrian Bangerter, found that the Mozart Effect received the most newspaper mentions in those U.S. states with the weakest educational systems-giving tentative support to the previously untested notion that rumors and legends grow in response to public anxiety. "When we traced the Mozart Effect back to the source [the 1993 Nature journal report titled 'Music and Spatial Task Performance'], we found this idea achieved astounding success," says Heath. The researchers found far more newspaper articles about that study than about any other Nature report published around the same time. And as the finding spread through lay culture over the years, it got watered down and grossly distorted. "People were less and less likely to talk about the Mozart Effect in the context of college students who were the participants in the original study, and they were more likely to talk about it with respect to babies-even though there's no scientific research linking music and intelligence in infants," says Heath, who analyzed hundreds of relevant newspaper articles published between 1993 and 2001. Not only had babies never been studied, but the original 1993 experiment had found only a modest and temporary IQ increase in college students performing a specific kind of task while listening to a Mozart sonata. And even that finding was proved suspect after a 1999 review showed that over a dozen subsequent studies failed to verify the 1993 result. While many newspapers did report this blow to the Mozart Effect, the legend continued to spread-overgeneralizations and all. For example, Heath cites a 2001 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that refers to "numerous studies on the Mozart Effect and how it helps elementary students, high school students, and even infants increase mental performance." In truth, none of these groups had been studied, says Heath. So why did the Mozart Effect take such a powerful hold in popular culture, particularly in reference to babies and children? Heath and Bangerter surmised that the purported effect tapped into a particularly American anxiety about early childhood education. (Bangerter, who was doing research in Stanford's psychology department during the study, had been struck by Americans' obsession with their kids' education. For example, he saw that a preschool near the Stanford campus had the purposeful name "Knowledge Beginnings," whereas a preschool near a university in Switzerland was called "Vanilla-Strawberry." The latter made no lofty claims about its educational goals.) Concern about education was so great, in fact, that several U.S. states actually passed laws requiring state-subsidized childcare centers to play classical music or giving all new mothers a classical music CD in the hospital. To test their hypothesis that the legend of the Mozart Effect grew in response to anxiety about children's education, Heath and Bangerter compared different U.S. states' levels of media interest in the Mozart Effect with each state's educational problems (as measured by test scores and teacher salaries). Sure enough, they found that in states with the most problematic educational systems (such as Georgia and Florida), newspapers gave the most coverage to the Mozart Effect. "Problems attract solutions," explains Heath, and people grappling with complex problems tend to grasp for solutions, even ones that aren't necessarily credible. "They can be highly distorted, bogus things like the Mozart Effect," says Heath, adding that similar patterns occur in our culture's fixation on fad diets and facile business frameworks. Heath's analysis also found that spikes in media interest generally corresponded to events outside of science-particularly state legislation and two pop psychology books, The Mozart Effect and The Mozart Effect for Children. Lest Heath's own findings spawn overgeneralizations, he's quick to point out that the Mozart Effect is a particular type of legend. "The Mozart Effect points out a solution, whereas urban legends point out a problem." The prevailing but untested thinking about urban legends holds that they spread by tapping into public anxiety. But Heath says that even if the Mozart Effect succeeded by suggesting a solution to an anxiety, it's not clear why legends that create anxiety would spread. Why, for example, would people circulate stories about rat meat in KFC meals or about the perils of flashing your headlights at motorists driving without their lights on. "I'm still skeptical about the anxiety approach to urban legends," he cautions. The anxiety explanation seems simple and convenient on the surface, but as the history of the Mozart Effect shows, a convenient answer may well be completely false. As Heath puts it, "We've got to look for a realistic way out instead of an easy way out." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Feb 28 19:26:49 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 11:26:49 -0800 Subject: [Paleopsych] religious experiences References: <20050228025345.98006.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <01a101c51dcb$7460e180$2206f604@S0027397558> Michael writes: > --I agree the "all are one" experience is one of the > basic building blocks of spirituality. That leads me > to ask this question: are Jihaadists, witch hunters > and other "purifiers" reacting allergically to that > sense that all are one? Perhaps a suicide bomber's > final act is a simultanous denial and reinforcement > of > the feeling of connectedness with what he hates. In > death, he seeks purification, while mixing his blood > with that of his victims in a most intimate way. Jihaadists, witch hunters, and other purifiers are certainly acting according to what they perceive as an "all for one" experience except the task they wish to perform is offensive to those they wish to harm. A thief may steal a loaf of bread to feed his family but at the same time this act of stealing is clearly against civil and religious law. If one can examine an issue in the multi-faceted views it offers, one can conclude that all instances present both a harmful AND beneficial scenario. It all depends upon which option you side with. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Independent Scholar